Airmail (13 page)

To comfort myself in my own melancholy I’ve been translating yours. Stanza 2 is the problematic one. What does “wooden rail” mean. What does “slip off” mean. Does the crown slide off the chest/coffin or does it sneak away? I’m satisfied with stanza 4—sounds very convincing in Swedish.

What I actually wanted to do was wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. It seems I never get around to sending out my greetings in the snowstorm! I’m standing here waving a lantern.

Together with me 2 spoiled children and one

heroic wife send their best greetings    

Your friend

   Tomas T.

27 Dec, ’67

Dear Tomas,

Forgive the silence! I spent almost all of Nov. in California, giving readings to make enough money to get the Neruda and Jiménez books away from their respective printers, who (wisely) refuse to send me a single book until they have the soiled American dollars in their inky hands. The trip was hectic and exhausting. Then on Dec. 5th, I went to N.Y. for the demonstrations at the Induction Center there. Galway Kinnell, Mitch Goodman (Denise Levertov’s husband) and I were hauled away with Dr. Spock. We went with Spock first under the barricades (no good) over (no good) around—that worked—and we were all hauled off to jail in the same wagon. Once at the Criminal Courts Building, we were processed, etc. and then tossed in a cell—who should be there but Allen Ginsberg! There were 10 or 12 18 and 19 year old kids in the cell too. When Galway and I came in, they said, Now all the poets are here! Let’s have a poetry reading! So we did, and sang mantras with Allen for a while, Allen had brought his Hindu bells to jail with him, and we all had a great time, singing and chanting.

I’m sending on a newspaper clipping showing your American translator there at 6:30 AM, just before we started to go under the barricades.

I’ve also enclosed copies of some letters published in the
New York Review of Books
last week. The whole issue is causing a lot of stir and uneasiness—I was the first writer to turn down a govt grant, and it had the effect of throwing the problem out for public discussion. I’m getting attacked by the right wing for being “ungrateful for the blessings he has enjoyed as an American,” and it’s interesting.

Also a copy of my play—just typed up, and probably very bad. I’m serious, it’s probably awful.

I haven’t heard from Bonniers! Wonderful idea! I’m all for it! I can’t judge the resonances in a Swedish translation, but I hereby give you my Swedish power-of-literary-attorney, I appoint you my Swedish agent, translator, and father-in-law (as you are already my brother), and
you
decide about the translations—whatever you decide will be fine—will be law!—with me. Take as many or as few of Sonnevi’s translations as you like.

I have two new poems on the Vietnam War which I’ll send you from

N.Y. I got an apartment in N.Y. for my wife and children in Jan & Feb, and we’re leaving tomorrow! So in January & Feb. our address will be

126 East 36th St.

New York, New York

On March 1st, if I have enough money, we plan to jump on a boat and go to Europe. We’ll be in England (at Thaxted) March, April & May, then go up by my relatives in Norway June, July & August. So you must come to see us, or I’ll come to see you! ! ! ! ! ! !

You asked about reviews of
The Light
—it’s being attacked from all sides so far! The mingling of “inward life” and political or social poetry has really infuriated the reviewers so far. They insist one of the two sides or areas must be false, “affected”—possibly
both!
They’re willing to accept either of these two sorts of thought in its own book, specialized, etc, but not
together,
as if there were some connection. I’ll send you some clippings later on.

“Melancholi” is lovely in Swedish! I’m very glad you chose that one. On your questions:

Strophe 2 takes place entirely at a funeral service in a country church. The “wooden rail” is the varnished and polished altar rail, behind which in the old fashioned immigrant churches, the minister stands when he reads the Gospel or preaches, or gives communion. There is a gleam from this polished rail, a reflection from the overhead church lights. I was thinking of a funeral service for an old farmer who had lived on the farm next to ours when my brother and I were children. He was warm and wonderful. At the services in the country, the minister at some point, while the casket is standing in front of the church, will go to the pulpit and read off the date of birth of the dead man, the year he got married, and to whom, and then, strangely, they describe where his life
took place.
“In 1927 he moved with his wife and children from Brown County to Lac Qui Parle County, where he resided until 1948 when he moved to Yellow Medicine County, etc.” It would be something like “flytta” in Norwegian.

During the reading of those dates I imagine the dark funeral wreath suddenly slipping off the shiny coffin and falling to the floor.

In strophe 3—we are someplace like Italy or Spain—an entirely different kind of church. Catholic, run by the rich—the poor outside are sitting around the outer walls of the cathedral, with their knees drawn up,

They are leaning
more onto
their knees, out of hunger, than the man I’ve drawn here but that is the idea.

I don’t find any changes at all to suggest in “Direktorens död,” “De som äts av Amerika,” or “Förtryckt av världen”—they all sound wonderful.

I know in “Smothered by the World” the “death outside the death” is not very clear. But for the purposes of the poem, physical death is regarded as almost comforting compared to the other death, that takes place in life, with the executives and others being shoved out of inner life, and forced to live on the
other side
of the wall, in the cold, in the outer world. So the hairy tail that howls should give a true feeling of anguish that the executives feel, who know of their own spiritual death, and are not
numb,
but howl with anguish.

Write us in New York! Love to your sweet wife and children

Robert

1. And slow—replies come at 14-day intervals in papers in both Sweden & Finland.
   

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2. A result of the England trip.
   

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3. Do you have log driving in the U.S.A.?
   

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Västerås 2-19-67 [1968]

Dear Robert, defender of the barricades,

I must pull myself together now and write to you, whom I think of so often. Monica and I ABSOLUTELY WANT TO SEE YOU THIS SUMMER—it’s one of the few good pieces of information from the world, that you’re coming to Scandinavia. Please try to stay out of jail! Here comes another bit of news (which by now is a month old): Bonniers will publish the book with your poems in translations by me, Sonnevi and Lasse Söderberg. It will probably be out this fall—we being speedier than other, larger countries, once we get rolling. You ought to write the foreword yourself. We can look through the whole thing together one last time if you come here early in the summer. (I’ll drive to Norway and pick you up!) Shall we all have a big children’s party?

Thanks for the play! I am shaken. It’s such a horrifically inspired thing. Whether it’s “good” or not I can’t tell. I hope it’s good! At any rate there’s poetry in it that’s as strong as poems of a similar sort in
The Light
... I have one reservation. It concerns the idea of people in different colors. They can’t change their color, they are like that from beginning to end. I’ve become hypersensitive to such things of late. There’s a totalitarian streak in that kind of coloration, though it’s fine from a dramatic point of view.

I think your book can also mean something positive for the poor Swedish poets, who lead a withering existence. The climate here is completely different from the one that seems to hold sway in the U.S. When I read your attacks on THE NEW CRITICISM etc. it’s like a message from another planet. Here it’s the other way round—what’s wanted is political poetry, which doesn’t mean that poetry should take political reality as its subject but that poetry, no matter what it’s about, should speak a language of political cliché. Just now the always-latent contempt for poetry is booming right along. When you appear before students these days you’re always accused of “taking up a reactionary attitude” if you read a poem with some animals or blades of grass in it. And if you write a poem that touches on politics, that’s wrong too, because you haven’t used the correct political clichés. Some of the most influential debaters in Sweden sound—when they make their declarations—like prosecutors in the Sinyavsky trial—it’s completely grotesque. At the same time the whole country is becoming more and more bourgeois! Intellectual life is getting to be a sort of totalitarian reserve. The moral motivation is of course the Vietnam war and let us lay on top of all LBJ’s other—and significantly grosser—crimes this little one that he has made the air hard to breathe for someone who wants to work through sensibility, imagination, and self-knowledge in poetry. I hate this damned war with all my heart but I haven’t therefore begun to declare myself a fighting Marxist or begged forgiveness for writing about blades of grass and animals. I haven’t given any money for weapons to the NLF either, only to humanitarian or peace movements, which the real NLF-warriors despise. Of course I believe that the Vietnamese people prefer the NLF to the marionette generals of the Saigon government many times over, and of course I want the U.S.A. to withdraw from the country. But to join an NLF group here in Sweden means that one doesn’t primarily desire peace but victory—never mind how many people are exterminated, or that one is affiliating oneself with a program that wants “more Vietnams worldwide”—the program of the Havana Conference, in other words. It also means that one condemns all compromise and approves in advance the bloodbath of the opposition that can follow a total NLF victory. What I believe in, would like to fight for, is a coalition solution where the NLF plays a large but not a total role (that’s actually the NLF’s own recent official line). But that sort of standpoint is considered “lukewarm.” In this climate it’s all or nothing. Anybody not 100% for is “self-evidently” 100% against. Have I given you a little picture of the climate? All you can do is follow your own crooked conscience, wait for the moment of truth and hope you won’t need to be ashamed one day of how you lived through these years. God
damn
it, how I long to see you by the way! Let me hear from you as soon as possible—I’ll write soon again but want to get this off in time to catch you before you leave for Thaxted. Monica and the kids are fine—I hope your family is the same. And write poems!

Your friend         Tomas T.

Västerås 4-19-68

Dear Robert,

I sent a super-urgent message to you in New York a fortnight ago and also wrote then that I would send one to England at the same time in case you should be there. The problem is that you have disappeared, like Livingstone. I never got around to sending anything to England—here it comes instead. Let’s hear from you! Write to Bonniers
¹
and say where you are! Write to Göran S. and tell him how the Vietnamese children’s fund will work! Write to me—above all—and tell me how you’re doing! Enough for now, it feels pointless to write more when I don’t know whether you will ever get these messages in bottles, urgent letters, emergency flares, tootings in the fog. We won’t talk about the world, way too much has happened. But we’re finally past the NADIR, I think. It feels like that anyway.

Your friend         Tomas T.

23 April, ’68

Dear Tomas,

Your letters just came, both in the same day! After two months of talk in New York, I lapsed into hermitical silence, not even replying to fences or puppies. But I’m going to start writing letters again, today! So I’ll write to you first. We are in Thaxted, in a little cottage across from a flock of geese! They talk all night themselves, in low and hoarse voices, like New York divorcées. I have been reading Taoist books, which give off pure and clear sounds, like flutes. My voice is—alas—half way between.

I’m looking foward to seeing you and your sweet women folk this summer! It will definitely come to pass! But when I’m not sure yet. We have some uncertainty about
when
we can be in
this
house, etc.

How wonderful that Bonniers is going ahead with the book! I’ll write them today, as soon as I finish this! The poems I’m sure are better in translation than in the original, and I’m entering the country under false pretenses. I’ll have to get a forged passport too! Thank you for encouraging this book! I’ll never criticize Sweden again.

We’re all happy here, in this odd and un-American country. But the happiest day we had was the day Johnson
QUIT
! How fantastic! It meant that the peace movement had won! It was already impossible for him to give speeches anywhere except at military bases, and the planners of the Democratic Convention in Chicago had already decided they could not bring him to the hall through the streets—the hippies would have covered his car with urine and calf blood—he was to have been brought to the roof by helicopter. Even that was not entirely safe.

I tossed my private grenade at the National Book Awards ceremony. What a scene! A huge elegant hall with chandeliers, panelling and speeches guaranteed to be of the most impeccable boredom, politeness and obsequiousness. Each of the 6 winners had 500 words they were allowed to say. George Kennan’s, just before me, was polite and standard. When I got about ten sentences into mine, I literally saw faces full of shock and disbelief—the first time I’ve ever seen it. The mink-coated crowd went wild with rage. The rest, about ⅔ of the audience, enjoyed it to the tips of their toes, or so they told me. At the end, I called up a young man from Resistance out of the audience, gave him the $1000 check, and then repeated Spock’s crime, urging him not to enter the U.S. army, ever, etc. Mayor Lindsay was on stage—he had opened the proceedings—and this put him in a spot. A public official must leave the stage if a law is broken in his presence, or he is condoning the [breaking of the] law. But if Lindsay had left the stage, he would have gotten booed by the crowd; in any case, he stayed—I’m sending along some extra clippings etc people have sent. You needn’t return them. Also a copy of the speech.

This speech might be published at the end of the selected poems if you think it’s a good idea. Harpers is thinking of doing it, but it probably has more meaning to the U.S. literary community than to Europeans. See what you think.

Do you still want some sort of preface from me? What should it say? “Unaccustomed as I am to speaking in Swedish, gulp, cough.”

Thank you for the clipping with the review of
Ord om Vietnam.
Your description of the climate in Sweden—“either write political verse or we’ll turn you into a grasshopper”—is eerie—it is a stage we haven’t gotten to yet. But the Swedes move faster in such things because the war means
less
to them. The English are the same. Their riots are unreal, and their support of the NLF is so much oatmeal.

The European failing is always the drive to
polarize
everything—utter good or utter evil. Only the Taoists know clearly how dumb that is!

The two ends meet! So making poles—allt or intet—is trying to stop the world. As the Taoists say, “If you do that, you’ll be lucky if you don’t cut your hand!”

I’ll stop jabbering now. Write me right away, and I’ll write back. My love to your family—forgive my thick-tonguedness—

Robert

Västerås 6-9-68

Dear Roberto,

I’m finally sitting here, writing to you on my old black office typewriter. I’ve found a house for you! It’s in downtown Västerås, an old part of the city. Usually the writer Clas Engström lives there with his wife (who is a sculptor) + a son and a little adopted Indian girl. They will be away all of July and Clas has put the house at my disposal. You won’t need to pay any rent but you can of course leave them your two poetry collections when you move out. But we shouldn’t hang around Västerås, just have it as a base for various outings in different directions. The land right around here is depicted in the enclosed poem—destruction of nature is ongoing—farther north you’re in the woods.

I’ve just come back from a trip to my old haunts—Östergötland in other words—I had a psychology assignment there and seized the opportunity at the same time to take a few days off for writing. But the whole thing was wrecked by Kennedy’s murder. Right after things like that I’m so full of rage and resignation that poetry becomes impossible—working at my job goes well, however—the job is a kind of escape from reality! But to write is to go into reality itself, where the gunsmoke still lingers. Otherwise I was rather skeptical about Robert Kennedy, terribly split. I’ll never know what he really stood for. Maybe he was very good. But I’ve put all my eggs, my American eggs, in McCarthy’s basket. Maybe I should also let Lindsay take an egg. After all, he belonged to the part of your audience that put up with what you said (so damned well) and it shouldn’t be held against him too much that he called in sick the next day.

The prospect of this evening has put me in a bad mood. What’s happening is that a journalist from the local paper is coming here to finish an interview with me. He has previously managed to misunderstand, or maybe not misunderstand but caricature, my reasoning and viewpoints to such a degree that I don’t recognize them any more. So that the interview will finally be finished I’ve chosen to invite him to dinner, I thought it would all go a little easier that way. He has let it be known that he is a teetotaler, so I will try to soften him up with food instead. Nearly all the people who write in the newspapers about culture in Sweden these days resemble wolves that lie in Grandma’s clothing, waiting for Red Riding Hood. Some years ago they were like Santa Claus coming with presents. In both cases representatives of the pseudo-world. I myself want to be a MOLE that digs itself out of all this, right through illusion and into reality. He needn’t have golden wings, though that’s fine too, it’s enough that he’s alive and can dig.

Write soon. I want to hear about your address in Norway, travel plans etc. We send greetings and long to see you!

Your friend

   Tomas T.

7 July, ’68

Dear Tomas,

Thank you for your letter, and the enclosed letters, which just arrived! The thing that amuses me is that the FBI is unable to open and read my mail over here! That is a terrible frustration to them—they’re falling behind on various plots.

The Sixties
is being printed in N.Y. now—I’ve sent page proofs back—and so will be out
sometime
!

I just read a book—prose poems—of Jan Erik Vold, who visited you. [------]

We’re leaving here the 14th of July, and will be in Oslo the 15th. But my host there has stuck me with a lecture on “modernisk Amerikansk poesi” at the Oslo Summer School on the 16th, so that we probably won’t get to Sweden until the 18th or 19th.

But it seems to me you said that you had your vacation until the 20th, so I’m worried that we’re bringing you back from Runmarö sooner than you would have come if I had not poked my nose into Sweden. It would be very easy for us to stay a day or two longer in Oslo, and arrive in Västerås on the 20th or 21st, so that you and your family could be in Runmarö for the time you had planned! Please write me in Oslo about that! Our address there will be c/o Skardal, Sørkedalsveien 229, Oslo 7. Telephone 24-58-68.

We’ll arrive in Oslo night of 15th, then the 16th I’ll be at the University during the morning and part of the afternoon, and on the 17th among relatives, probably at the Sørkedalsveien house.

I don’t know how far it is from Oslo to Västerås, but it’s probably more than a day’s drive! So it would be easy for us to drive on the 20th. Please let us know—looking forward very much to seeing all of you again!

Yours, Robert

Runmarö 7-12-68

Dear Robert,

I’ve come back to Runmarö now after having left Mamma in the hospital in Stockholm. In other words, for the next few days things are under control. When I came out here your most recent letter was waiting. It’s a good plan to come on the 19th or 20th! I’ll call Sørkedalsveien sometime on the 17th and we’ll fix the details. I hope my sad and stress-fraught note from Stockholm didn’t scare you off!