The Banished Immortal: a life of Li Bai by Ha Jin

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 The Banished Immortal: a life of Li Bai by Ha Jin

Li Bai is a solitary figure in Chinese poetry, like a blazing star whose light also comes from a deep indifference to the world below.

Ha Jin, The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai, Patheon, 2019.

sources: 

https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/the­banished­immortal­a­life­of­li­bai­by­ ha­jin/

https://supchina.com/2019/01/09/book­review­ha­jin­the­banished­immortal­li­bai/

Li Bai is a household name in China. He is considered as one of the greatest poets in Chinese history. Students learn his poems at school and recite his poems by heart.

However, people know very little about the details of his life.

Ha Jin, a novalist and professor at Boston University, published a birography about this beloved Chinese poet in 2019. The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai is his first work of nonfiction.

At the very beginning, Ha Jin remind us when we talk about Li Bai, we should keep in mind that there are three of him: the actual Li Bai, the selfcreated Li Bai, and the Li Bai produced by historical and cultural imagination. Ideally, our ambition here should be to present the actual Li Bai as much as we can while also trying to understand the motivations and consequences of his selfcreation. But we should also bear in mind that such an ambition is necessarily tempered by the relative scarcity of verifiable information on Li Bai’s life.

Ha Jin takes an wideranging approach to literary biography. He uses every available source, both historical and literary, and essentially comes up with an adventure story where the poems form part of the subject’s development and admirably flesh out the biographer’s text.

Birth and death of Li Bai

Li Bai was born in 701 AD and died in 762 AD.

“When giving birth to Li Bai, his mother dreamed of the star Venus, so he was named Taibai (Venus).” Li Bai has many names. In the West, people call him Li Po, as most of his poems translated into English bear that name. Sometimes it is also spelled Li Bo. But in China, he is known as Li Bai. During his lifetime, he had other names-Li Taibai, Green Lotus Scholar, Li Twelve. The last one is a kind of familial term of endearment, as Bai was twelfth among his brothers and male cousins on the paternal side. It was often used by his friends and fellow poets when they addressed him—some even dedicated poems to him titled “For Li Twelve.” By the time of his death, he had become known as a great poet and was called zhexian, or Banished Immortal, by his admirers. Such a moniker implies that he had been sent down to earth as punishment for his misbehavior in heaven. Over the twelve centuries since his death, he has been revered as shixian, Poet Immortal. Because he was an excessive drinker, he was also called jiuxian, Wine Immortal. Today it is still common for devotees of his poetry to trek hundreds of miles, following some of the routes of his wanderings as a kind of pilgrimage.

Li Bai also has several deaths ascribed to him. In one version, he died of alcohol poisoning;this was in keeping with his lifelong indulgence in drink. Another claims that he died of an illness known as chronic thoracic suppuration-pus penetrating his chest and lungs. Although there is no way we can verify this claim, it sounds credible-such a chest problem could have been caused by his abuse of alcohol. In his final years, Li Bai’s drinking and poverty would have aggravated his pulmonary condition. But the third version of his death is far more fantastic: in this version, he drowns while drunkenly chasing the moon’s reflection on a river, jumping from a boat to catch the evershifting orb.

Your fame that’s to last ten thousand years will become a quiet affair after you are gone.

Family origin of Li Bai

In his writings, Li Bai almost never mentions his parents or siblings. Strikingly, he doesn’t say a word about his mother. It is believed that ethnically she was not a Han Chinese but from a minority tribe, probably a Turk. Mixed marriages were common in the farflung land of China’s western frontier, where the Li family lived for two or three generations, and from where they later migrated back inland to Sichuan.

Although Bai never speaks of her directly, it’s safe to say that his mother was a remarkably strong woman, full of vitality and endurance. She gave her husband several children, and Bai, despite having numerous older brothers ahead of him, was wild with energy and spirit.

Li Bai’s father is called Li Ke, a name that to Chinese ears sounds unusual and exotic. Ke in Chinese means “guest,” and very few people of that time and place would have gone by a name that connoted “stranger”and “outsider.” In fact, we are not even sure if his family name, Li, was genuine. It has been argued that such a surname might have been invented by Bai’s father when he came back inland. Self-invented surnames were common at that time-people often associated themselves with powerful clans as a way of selfpromotion and protection. Throughout his life, Li Bai asserted that he belonged to the royal clan, because the emperors and princes had the same family name.

Li Ke was an astute and calculating man. According to Li Bai’s own account in a preface to a poem, his father was well learned (most likely selftaught) and familiar with the classics,which he taught to his children. Li Ke told others that his family had lost its genealogy book on their journey back inland, but that they were nonetheless descended from the great general Li Guang (184-119 BC), who had been garrisoned in the western lands more than eight centuries before. Li Ke’s claim of blood relation with the renowned forebear, as one of the sixteenth generation of Li Guang’s line, could not be refuted.

Li Bai was five years old when his father uprooted the family from Suyab and moved them back inland. They crossed a chain of the Tianshan Mountains and then deserts, and reached Sichuan more than half a year later. Li Bai must have remembered the arduous trek, as his poetry often displays an immense wilderness uniquely his own.”The Mountain Moon,” one of his most celebrated frontier poems, begins with a description of such a vast landscape:

The moon rises from Tianshan Mountain,

 Sailing in an ocean of clouds.

The wind, tens of thousands of miles long,

 Is blowing through the Yumen Pass.

Why would Li Ke relocate his family to such a distant village? Surely this would not have been convenient for his business or wholesome for his children’s upbringing. The answer remains a mystery. Some scholars speculate that the move might have been a way to avoid dangerous fallout from a feud or some serious trouble with local officials.Jiangyou was the starting point of the Silk Road, so Li Ke must have been to this area before on his business travels and would have been familiar with its surroundings and the local people. In other words, his choice of location-faroff but still connected with the outside world-seems to have been carefully made.

Li Ke and his sons resumed trading in Sichuan and along the Yangtze. He continued to prosper and gradually became a local power of sorts. Several sons of Li Ke joined him in the trade down the river, but Li Ke wanted Bai to become a government official-the boy had an energetic mind and a powerful memory and could excel in an official career. To achieve that goal, Li Bai needed to study books and acquire extensive schooling.

As a merchant’s son, Li Bai was not allowed to enter for the exam. Businesspeople were viewed as dishonorable elements of society, so their sons were not eligible for civil service.Because Li Bai could not pursue the civilservice examination, the next practical step for him to take was ganye-meeting with officials for patronage and opportunities. Li Ke gave Li Bai generous allowances and Li Bai were off one the road.

Life on the road

Li Bai lived most of his life during the peak of the Tang Dynasty, an era known for its openness, commerce, and thriving literary scene, and his travels included a string of meetings with state officials. Li was convinced after each of these meetings that he’d soon launch his political career. But what made him a poet might have ruined him as a politician. He lived unconventionally-drinking wine into the night, wandering around after curfew, mingling with people from all walks of life. He was always deemed too freespirited to be a safe candidate for office. In times of disappointment, his faith kept him afloat. He wrote, “Heaven begot a talent like me and must put me to good use / And a thousand cash in gold, squandered, will come again.” Sometimes his confidence seems close to egomaniacal: when a summons from the imperial court came, he gloated, “laughing out aloud with my head thrown back, / I walk out the front gate. How can a man / Like myself stay in the weeds for too long?”

Li Bai began a life of roaming-hiking up mountains to Daoist sites, meeting men of letters all over the country, and leaving behind hundreds of poems about his travels, his solitude, his friends, the moon, and the pleasures of drinking wine. In the centuries since, Li’s verse, by turns playful and profound, has made him China’s most beloved poet.

Sometimes loud, arrogant and overbearing, but capable of loyal friendship, he was a soldier, traveler and parttime Daoist monk, a man who sought permanent employment in the civil service all his life, yet sometimes rejecting it when it was within his grasp. He was politically active towards the end of his life, but found himself on the wrong side as a rebel, ending up in prison, where he stayed until 757, after which the Emperor banished him to the far southwest. Li Bai was pardoned before he reached his destination and died in the Dangtu area, now in Anhui province.

Li Bai lived an astonishingly restless life, moving from city to city, desperately networking to find himself a job as a civil servant. He did a lot of selfdestructive things during his life (exacerbated by his love of drinking), which make for interesting reading and certainly indicate why his pursuit of conventional employment bore little fruit. He was always a square peg trying to insert himself into a round hole, and he knew it:

How could I drop my eyes and bow To the rich and powerful

Not letting myself smile and laugh at will?

Indeed, a large part of him liked it that way, which explains the nonstop drinking, fighting and womanizing which characterized his erratic journey through life. “Bai,” Ha Jin tells us, “had a strong sense of class,” and felt so proud of belonging to the royal clan despite the fact that, obscure and disadvantaged, he had to continue to hunt for office. There was simply no other outlet for his energy and gift.

He married twice and had children, but he could never settle down in one place and be a “regular”father, bringing home a salary and helping to raise his family, any more than he could have settled down and become a civil servant. “So long as the host can make me drunk,” he declared, “I’ll have no idea where my hometown is.” In a way, we can say that his home was the road and the essence of his being existed in his endless wanderings. He would set out time and again in spite of his wife’s objections, as though he was doomed to remain a guest in this world.

Yet he deeply loved his family;of his daughter Pingyang, who would die at about sixteen, he wrote on one of his numerous travels that she picks flowers next to the peachtree. As she goes, she cannot find her dad And her tears flow like a spring.

His poetry reflects all these contradictions and more;Li Bai can be lyrical or descriptive, wildly celebratory or somberly selfrevelatory, and this range of emotions is what made him popular in his own times and what makes him popular now. As a biographical subject, he’s a real joy, because he completely destroys the stereotype some Western readers have of the Chinese poet sitting quietly in his study, cerebrally contemplating the state of his circumscribed world.

Ha Jin wisely gives readers a very liberal sprinkling of Li Bai’s poetry during the course of the biography. Many of his poems are quite short, which means that we can have them complete, and, as noted above, they highlight the complex personality of the man who wrote them.

The meeting of the two stars: Li Bai and Du Fu

Li Bai's legendary friendship with the other great poet of the age, Du Fu, had a profound effect on both of them. Du Fu, like Li Bai, was unsuccessful in his pursuit of a civil servant’s job, and, again like him, was often quite poor. Du Fu, unlike the Daoist Li Bai, was a conventional Confucian, whose”imagination and moral vision,” Ha Jin tells us, “were confined within the social and dynastic order, his mind occupied by the empire and history.”

Li Bai’s poetry came straight from his heart, while Du Fu worked hard to get it just right, and each seems to have appreciated the other’s methodology. “After drafting a new poem,” Du Fu confessed in verse, “I must keep humming it.If the lines don’t surprise, I will revise them as long as I’m alive.”

Du Fu was one among many poets with whom Li Bai came into contact during his peregrinations, but he held a special place in the older poet’s affections. It was these connections, along with his extended family ties, which probably helped Li Bai through the various vicissitudes of his turbulent life.

The few months he had spent with Bai affected Du Fu profoundly-it was an unforgettable time in his life, which he would recall fondly time and again. Even in his last years he would dream of Li Bai, who had died by then, and would compose poems about him as if the light shed by Bai had never left him. Their friendship did not affect Bai as deeply;Du Fu seemed to leave his thoughts once they had parted company.

Happily we chat, completely relaxed And raise our cups now and again.

And when we’re done, stars turn sparse.

The host grows more delighted, seeing me drunk

Together we have forgotten this world.

Because they shared one quilt, some have surmised there might have been a homosexual relationship between them. The American poet Carolyn Kizer even dramatizes this episode in a poem she wrote in the voice of Du Fu:

My lord, how beautifully you write! May I sleep with you tonight?

Till I flag, or when you wilt,

We’ll roll up drunken in one quilt. In our poems, we forbear

To write of kleenex or long hair

And how the one may fuck the other. We’re serious artists, aren’t we, brother?

“TU FU TO LI PO”

In fact, it is unlikely that there was any erotic element to their relationship. Up until recent decades, it was common for Chinese friends of the same sex to share a bed and a quilt without any carnal inclination, especially in cold weather when it was better to sleep together to keep warm.

The final song

We don’t know when and how Li Bai died. His son buried him in a shabby grave, the public unaware of the disappearance of this great genius. Like a star in the sky, he burned out and vanished soundlessly. But we do know that during his final days he often chanted this poem, which was his last song:

The great roc has been soaring all over the sky,

 But it breaks a wing midflight.

Its spirit will inspire a thousand generations,

Though the divine tree in heaven catches its left wing.

People in the future will spread this story,

Yet all saints are dead—who will shed tears for me?

“THE FINAL SONG”

In spite of his gregariousness, Li Bai was at his core a loner, a solitary figure in Chinese poetry, like a blazing star whose light also comes from a deep indifference to the world below.

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