The Secret Chord

“Because of my work, he will live. And not just as a legend lives, a safe tale for the fireside, fit for the ears of the young. Nothing about him ever was safe. Because of me, he will live in death as he did in life: a man who dwelt in the searing glance of the divine, but who sweated and stank, rutted without restraint, butchered the innocent, betrayed those most loyal to him. Who loved hugely, and was kind; who listened to brutal truth and honored the truth teller; who flayed himself for his wrongdoing; who built a nation, made music that pleased heaven and left poems in our mouths that will be spoken by people yet unborn.”

Natan ponders the complexity of the human person and the difficulty of recording in history their true character. The use of two parallel sentences to list David’s good and bad characteristics works through antithesis to assert the impossibility of making a simple judgment of a person. It also works as foreshadowing, trying to build the reader’s curiosity about whom David will betray, whom he truly loved, and what brutal truths he embraced.

“The sweet singer of Israel. So the people called him, long before he was king. I had heard that singer’s voice fill a hall, and bring tears to the cheeks of seasoned warriors. But I had heard it also on the battlefield, fierce and wild, carrying over the clash of arms and the cries of the dying.”

Music is a central motif of The Secret Chord. It reveals truths about people. In this early passage about David’s great musical gift, it reveals why different kinds of people loved him, but more importantly sets up the tension between peace and war. David can use his gifts for either. His character arc is about which goal to embrace.

“I felt the metal grating against the bone of his rib, and then I mustered enough force to thrust the tip sharply upward, the blade’s full length inside him, in the direction of his heart. I felt the warm wetness of his insides closing about my fist. It was intimate as a rape.”

This first description of battle centers on Natan’s experience of killing. It makes clear that this book will not be a glorious celebration of David’s victories. Instead, describing killing with the simile of rape leaves no doubt that war, for Geraldine Brooks, is a fundamental violation of the human person.

“It was as if the harp was a loom, the notes he drew from it a bright thread forming a splendid pattern. He played this way often, even interrupting meetings with his generals. He said that the music—its order and precision—helped him find the patterns in things—the way through the confusion of events and opinions to direction, to order, and beyond, to inspiration.”

Brooks makes abundant use of similes and metaphors in her writing, but most especially with music, as in this simile of the harp as a loom. David’s relationship with music is complex and abstract, and the image of a loom weaving a tapestry—a complex pattern, comprised of many elements in harmony, telling a story—helps the reader to understand what music means to him. David’s gift for strategy ensures his success in politics and the battlefield, and here that gift is linked to his creative genius: the same thing makes him a uniquely capable figure for promoting violence and for promoting peace.

“Whatever it takes. What was necessary. These words might well have been the graven motto of his house. What was necessary, and no more.”

The phrase “what was necessary” is a recurring lexical motif throughout the book that asks whether violence is justified if it achieves a worthwhile goal. This first appearance of the phrase emphasizes David’s restraint in doing no more than is necessary. It is ironic since later appeals to what is necessary will show more and more excess.

“But the stories that grow up around a king are strong vines with a fierce grip. They pull life from whatever surfaces they cling to, while the roots, maybe, wither and rot until you cannot find the place from which the seed of the vine has truly sprung.”

Brooks criticizes history that covers up the truth of who a person was. The metaphor of the parasitic vines emphasizes how legendary stories destroy what was most central to a person’s life.

“If only vision had led me to the roof, to where he stood in the soft air under the luminous moon, what sin, what folly and pain, might then have been prevented. And yet, if the vision had led me there, what greatness might have remained unmade, a design unrealized, a future lost. Decades have passed now, and still I do not know how to fashion my thought on this matter.”

This vague description of a future sin is typical of Brooks’s use of foreshadowing to build suspense. The parallel “what if” statements emphasize Natan’s uncertainty concerning whether so much suffering was necessary to create Shlomo’s peaceful kingdom, and whether necessity justifies that suffering.

“I liked the subtlety of the women’s way with one another, the veiled indirection of their talk. Most men, you needed only to look into their faces to know their mood and generally their speech would be the first thought that came into their minds uttered out of their mouths. Women, whose very lives, sometimes, might depend upon concealing their true feelings, spoke a more artful language, more difficult to understand.”

Natan contrasts here the brashness of men and the subtlety of women in their speech. His explanation for this difference brings attention to the power gap between genders, one of the major themes of the book.

“It is a hard lesson, to accept refuge in the home of those you have been raised to despise. Yet the family I lodged with was kindly, and the other single men grudgingly admitted the same. Though they could have no cause to welcome us—unkempt strangers—they showed us no ill will. In time, I became ashamed of the baseless hatred I had harbored for these people.”

When Natan lives in exile with the Plishtim, he discovers the error of stereotyping others. Brooks uses this moment to connect her theme of The Hidden Complexity of Character with a larger social concern of bias against those from a different culture.

“To my surprise, I found myself strangely moved by their rituals. Are we not all of us thankful for the soft, soaking rains that bring the harvest, and for the golden ears of ripening grain? We all fear the power of the lightning that rends the heavens. If they call these things Dagon or Baal, what of it? Elohim hayyim, our one living God, who knows all, must know that the thanks and the awe belong to him.”

His Jewish faith plays a strong role in guiding Natan. Brooks, writing from the perspective of someone in a modern, multicultural society, creates a way in which Natan could have adopted this relativistic strand of modern belief while still retaining his Jewish identity.

“I want you to set it down: ‘Mikhal was in love with David.’ Nobody ever writes that about a woman. It’s always the man whose love is thought worthy of recording. Have you noticed that? In all the chronicles they state it so. Well, you write down that it was I. I was the one who loved.”

Mikhal’s first words to Natan subvert the first impression given by her appearance as a bitter old woman. She is more a complex and sympathetic character than Natan expects. Her claim about the chronicles also draws attention to the limits of the written word in capturing reality, especially when corrupted by pervasive patriarchy.

“I felt a stab of longing for the apricot-colored earth of those vineyards, for my father, rubbing it in his coarse hands, tasting it, assessing as it crumbled, not too sticky nor too fine, but just the correct tilth to support the roots and sustain the vines. All that skill, lost with the plunge of metal. His blood, soaking into the soil. Even in death, nourishing that earth he had loved and tended. Had his death really been necessary, as David had asserted, and I, a child, had so readily accepted?”

This moment of reflection by Natan humanizes his father, who previously appeared aloof and prideful. He now is revealed to be complicated and lovable despite his flaws. This also becomes the moment that Natan truly begins to face the trauma of his youth and to question whether appeals to necessity justify the violence around him.

“It is hard to describe a sound without likening it to another sound, and yet the timbre of David’s voice was a thing apart. It had the urgency of the shofar, and yet was not shrill. It could engender awe, as a high wind howling dangerously through the mighty branches, or bring delight, as an unexpected trill of sweet birdsong. It could satisfy, as the sound of running water rinses and slakes a thirsty spirit, or it could bring unease, like a wild beast howling in the distant hills. To describe the sound, I find myself turning to other senses—sight and touch. The fall of fine silk through the hand; the rich warmth of enveloping fur. Or a goldsmith beating out a foil, at the moment when he lifts and turns the leaf; the sudden gleam, as if sunlight itself had been captured.”

Brooks most lyrical description of David’s music comes as he mourns Yonatan’s death, thus emphasizing the depth of David’s feeling for his deceased lover. Brooks explicitly plays with the idea of simile, warning that no comparison fully captures the reality of David’s music. She begins with complete sentences and careful parallels, and then allows the cascade of metaphors to descend into a more ungrammatical stream of conscience that allows a kind of synesthesia as different sentences begin to blend into one kaleidoscopic impression of the richness of David’s music.

“I looked at the red, wrinkled, squalling infant, and tried to see what David saw, to feel what he felt. But it was no use. Those emotions were opaque to me. This, I thought, is what real love must be, and I will never feel it.”

Natan’s impression of David with his first baby is an important moment in his character development, as he realizes the way in which he needs to grow (even if he still despairs of doing so). This passage is deeply ironic in light of future events. David’s children will rise against him and bring him immense suffering, while Natan will find a fulfilling love raising Shlomo.

“He composed some of his best music at this time, training choirs to praise the Name in musical rites that drew great crowds to worship. He would join with the choirs at such times, his soaring voice carrying the melody, enriching the harmony, his face lifted up to the heavens and lit by the bond with the divine. As word spread, musicians and singers—men and women both—flocked to his service. You could not walk the lanes without hearing delightful sounds issues from nearly every casement: lutenists and flute players, singers and drummers. The life of the city moved to the rhythms and melodies of an every-changing musical score.”

Music reveals the truth about people in this book. In this case, it shows that David, in the moment of his triumph in Jerusalem, had the capacity to create God’s kingdom of peace and joy. In fact, he is forming it, and the average person embraces it. This heightens the drama of David’s choice in the next chapter to indulge in his tragic flaws of pride and lust with Batsheva and Uriah.

“Whatever it takes. What was necessary. But this—the killing of Uriah, and the good men who fell beside him—these deaths had not been necessary to gain a kingdom or secure it. These deaths had not been necessary to anything other than David’s own ungirt appetite. It was simply abuse of power.”

Brooks brings back the recurring motto of necessity and for the first time Natan definitively rejects it. He links it to The Patriarchal Abuse of Power. He faces a crossroad in his character development: will he continue to simply follow David, knowing now that he would be supporting something evil, or will he abandon his passive role to take responsibility and challenge David, knowing that David is a very dangerous person to oppose? In the end, he will choose the latter.

“What had I done with my life, to give I into the service of this evil? I had seen myself as a man in the hand of the Name‚ serving the king chosen to lead his people in this Land. But what kind of god could will this baseness, this treachery? What kind of nation could rise under such a leader? If David was a man after this god’s own heart, as my inner voice had told me often and again, what kind of black-hearted deity held me in his grip?”

Brooks portrays the depths of Natan’s inner crisis after Uriah’s murder by showing him for the first and only time in the book questioning God. The diction emphasizes this doubt. Throughout the book, Natan has (in accord with Jewish tradition) reverently refused to speak God’s name and instead uses respectful titles or simply “the Name.” The transition to “god” here, with a lowercase “g,” signals the crisis of faith Natan is experiencing.

“But I saw that I would have a child of the spirit, mine in heart and soul. That I would serve him, as I served his father, until he grew so great in wisdom that he would not need my counsel, and I could live out my waning days in peace, free from the visions and the pain that attended them.”

In this passage, Brooks points to the resolution of the conflict between violence and peace in David’s character and kingdom. Natan’s assertion that he can retire from his task once Shlomo is on the throne is an assertion that this conflict will indeed be resolved with a perfect man as king.

“But I can’t see anything except what he has taken from me. My child. My husband. My own body. Everything, except my life. Because he can. He can do whatever he wants.”

Batsheva’s courageous and anguished statement to Natan is a turning point in interpreting the climatic crime of David’s career. David is not just guilty of murder and adultery; he is guilty of rape. The Patriarchal Abuse of Power continues to shape his relationship with Batsheva, and his repentance (though genuine) has not fundamentally changed his ability to do whatever he wants.

“I wasn’t thinking about love. No one talked of that. I wasn’t raised to expect it. I was a child when my father promised me, and I was sent to Uriah’s bed soon after I bled the first time. He was a good match. That’s what my father said, and I was raised not to question what my father said. I was proud to be known as the wife of Uriah. He never mistreated me. I mourn his death. Is that love?”

When Natan asks Batsheva if she loved Uriah, she responds that she accepted male power and Uriah didn’t abused that power badly. She doesn’t know what an equal love between a man and woman would even look or feel like. That is how deeply patriarchy and its poisonous effects are embedded in her society.

“All wars end, and then that which is broken must be remade. It’s a waste, I think. All our best men strive to be captains and generals, because their leaders reward those skills. But perhaps there are other skills, other men, who can think of ways not to fight. Perhaps a real leader would find those men, and train them, just like an army trains…”

Shlomo’s musings in this passage show the possibility of transforming a society based on violence to one based on peace. His youthful wisdom underlines his suitability to create the kingdom of which Natan and God dream, as well as showing his attention to practical detail in forging it.

“She possessed a quick mind and a sharp intuition. There was also a pragmatic resilience that had allowed her, once she ceased to be consumed by fear for her son, to begin to repair the rotten foundations of her marriage. She was wise enough to know that her own relationship with the king would color his dealings with her son, and that if she had to set aside certain unsavory facts and bitter memories in order to further that, then she would do so.”

Brooks celebrates the resilience of sexual assault survivors in Natan’s portrait of Batsheva. Batsheva has found the true measure of her strength that had previously lain hidden. In this society, with rampant abuse of male power, however, she still has to accept bitter compromises.

“‘You will. If you love your son. You will do what is necessary.’ I heard the words come out of my mouth. David’s words. What is necessary. How often had I despised those words—the utilitarian willingness they signified, that anything may be done in the quest for power. Now I, too, was after power, and I, too, would do what was necessary to secure it.”

Natan uses the appeal to necessity to convince Batsheva to join him in lying to David to bring Shlomo to the throne. He tells Batsheva that they need to do this out of love for another person, but then also acknowledges that he will gain power through it. By having Natan accept “necessity” at the book’s resolution (even if he does so reluctantly and with self-hatred), Brooks avoids an easy resolution to the theme of whether necessity can justify doing wrong.