Latest Readings (12 page)

Richard Wilbur’s Precept

DURING THE LONG
and taxing business of preparing the text of my
Poetry Notebook
for publication, I deliberately did not look at the great American poet Richard Wilbur’s book of critical prose, which I have been reading, off and on, ever since it came out in 1976. I was too afraid of echoing his tone, and of seeming servile if I did so. But I couldn’t fail to remember his knack for laying out his knowledge in an easy-seeming sweep of conversational English. (How did literary theory get started? Because the theorists couldn’t write.) Several of my touchstone poets—Larkin, Auden, and Eliot would be other examples—had the gift of talking with a passionate detachment about the art they practiced, but I always thought that Wilbur was the kingpin. Now I can safely read his prose again; and find that his chapter “Poetry’s Debt to Poetry” still strikes me as the ideal lesson, for beginning students,
in how to think about the way the poetic heritage is handed down through the generations. Without a conscious display of erudition, but with a wealth of solid knowledge learned by heart, he gives you the sense that all the poets who have ever mattered always knew about any poet who mattered before them, even if they did not approve. (If the question had been raised of how Dante could have made Homer king of all the poets without being able to read him, Wilbur would have had the answer: Dante could not read Homer, but he trusted Virgil’s opinion.) It was in this essay that Wilbur crystallized the formulation that has stayed with me so usefully ever since: in poetry, all the revolutions are palace revolutions.

That being said, ignorance can have, within strict limits, a creative power of its own. With all my critical writing about poetry done and dusted, I really didn’t want to discover any new poets, so I was almost glad to know nothing about Richard Howard. But only almost. Having now discovered him—through his rich collection
Inner Voices
—I am impressed by his long lifetime of work in verse. Born in 1929, he has ten years on me and has always used his time to lyrical and learned effect, even when writing criticism; so how can I, of all people, have not known he was
there? Like the leading pair of my other formalist Americans, Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, he has the gift of working a mind-ful of memories and impressions into an apprehensible shape.

Had I encountered Richard Howard early on, I might even have been affected in my own poetry by the sheer delight he takes in spreading his erudition through a stanza. To take only one example, his poem “Venetian Interior, 1889,” might be subtitled “All you need to know about what happened to Robert Browning’s son.” It is a sumptuous piece of work, a boutique with the range of a supermarket. But it also runs on. Brevity is not in his gift, or anyway not among his interests: he presumes his readers have the time. In my own work I have always assumed that the readers have no time at all, and need their attention snared from moment to moment, even when I am translating the
Divine Comedy
. But on that point, reassurance comes from Dante himself: in the
Inferno
he always has a new event waiting around every corner, and in his
Paradiso
there is another light show every ten minutes. Still, Richard Howard’s relaxed approach has its virtues.

Above all, he has a better reason for writing than merely to be recognized. In that regard, it would be conceited on
my part to think that he ever needed my approval. Such a conceit is a
déformation professionnelle
for critics: after an initial period of relative sanity, they tend to think that nothing—not even the career of, say, Horace—ever happened without their interest in it. At its worst, the madness reaches the point where the critic behaves as if his new book about Shakespeare will save Shakespeare from oblivion. One way of praising Richard Howard would be to say that his mentality is the exact opposite: the note of nonpossessive appreciation is one that he strikes with every sentence he writes, and when it shows up in a poem it has a bewitching effect, even when the poem is ten times longer than the complete works of Samuel Menashe.

So, come to think of it, I am doubly glad that I didn’t find Richard Howard earlier, but found him only now, when the pleasure of discovery can no longer pose any difficult choices. Wilbur might have added one further thought to his famous precept: all the revolutions are palace revolutions, but there is the occasional klutz who never figures out what’s going on until it’s all over.

And goddam it, I have just found another accomplished and erudite American poet, in the books section of the
Oxfam shop near Magdalene bridge: Lawrence Joseph. His collection
Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos
is full of quotable lines. I deduce from his Wikipedia entry (his book’s biographical note is coy about this information, as if he were a female film star) that he was born nine years after me, so where have I been all his life? And Stephen Edgar, in a letter, has only just now mentioned the name of the late Edgar Bowers, who turns out to have been an American formalist poet who not only came out of World War II like Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht but wrote poems intricate and precise enough to be considered along with theirs. I’m supposed to rest content with a comprehensive viewpoint marinated in experience, not to be jolted out of my bed-socks every five minutes by the belated discovery of someone who has been toiling away impeccably for decades writing exactly the sort of thing I have so often proclaimed indispensable. Further evidence, here, for a bittersweet truth: any overview of the cultural world, like any system of mathematics, can’t be complete without being false. We can legitimately preen ourselves on being brighter than the next literary critic down the corridor, but we had better not imagine that we are brighter than Gödel.
But I must put Lawrence Joseph aside, because I have a new poem on the way, and it is always fatal, I have found, when you have something of your own to write, to get too close to someone else’s music. It gets into your lungs like secondary smoking.

When Creation Is Perverse

AS THE BRITISH PRISONS
continue to fill up with veteran showbiz luminaries who have been busted for some sexual perversion with which they created emotional havoc in the days of their physical strength, I give thanks that my own compulsions were legal. An artist’s work is harder to like when it turns out that his sexual proclivities were criminal. Nevertheless, on the principle that fine art is usually the work of flawed people, one strives to maintain one’s appreciation. Eric Gill’s work I don’t much care about, so there is no problem in wishing it all to the devil along with him. But Adolf Loos designed perfect coffeehouses, and Peter Altenberg wrote perfect paragraphs: I find it hard to imagine the texture of a Vienna without their work. Balthus remains a real problem, because so many of his pictures haunt the memory, although it should have been obvious at the moment the memories got
started that the pictures were perverse. For a long while I thought Basil Bunting was no problem at all: his taste for barely pubescent girls showed up in his poetry, but his poetry had nothing else in it. Lately, however, I have been reading his
Collected Poems
of 1970 (an Oxfam discovery), and I find that I was wrong all along. Whole stretches of his strangely crowded, clotted, and jagged verse are quite marvelous. Some of his notorious echoes of Ezra Pound are better than the originals. (If Bunting’s phrase “stork’s stilts cleaving sun-disk” had appeared in Pound’s
Cantos
, academics would have written articles about it.) Yet this inventive and dedicated man was every father’s nightmare. The best one can say for him is that he will live on, if he does, in the same category as Balthus: producers of images that you are glad to have in your head, even though their own heads were nests of vipers. The provenance of art can never be as morally elementary as we wish it. Art grows from the world, and the world, as Louis MacNeice said, is incorrigibly plural. This cruel but consoling fact really shows up when you start the slide to nowhere. The air is lit by a shimmering tangle of all the reasons you are sad to go and all the reasons you are glad to leave. It’s the glow of life: apparently simple, yet complex beyond analysis.
Nevertheless, morality continues to send its strong interior signal that it is either absolute or it is nothing. Bill Cosby’s jokes used to make me laugh so much that years later I would laugh again when I remembered them. Today the laughter comes less easily. If he turns out to be guilty, how will we take back our appreciation? Ours is a minor problem, however, when compared with his.

Conrad’s Greatest Victory

STARTING IN THE
infusion suite at the hospital, and continuing as I Ambulate up and down my kitchen, I have been reading Conrad’s
Victory;
and I feel that my recent years of reading have come to a kind of culmination. First published in 1915, the novel perfects Conrad’s signature themes. The hero, Heyst, is a Lord Jim figure without the guilt. Heyst has managed to get beyond the bounds of civilization, and even of capitalism: the coal company that he helped to found in the islands has fallen into ruins, but he himself has survived. In the dance hall of the despicable hotelier Schomberg, Heyst encounters the ideal girl, Alma, who is the helpless prisoner of the tatty Zangiacomo Orchestra and has nowhere to turn as Schomberg odiously threatens her with his attentions. Heyst bears her away to Samburan, a magic kingdom like Patusan and Sulaco. There, seemingly in control of events, he calls her
Lena, princess of Samburan. They are like Adam and Eve, needing only each other. Or so it seems: but it soon emerges that they need a knowledge of evil, too, because it is heading toward them in the chilling form of “plain Mr. Jones,” one of Conrad’s most profound studies in terror. As the collision between bliss and destruction gets closer, the reader will spend at least a hundred pages praying that Heyst has a gun hidden away somewhere. The first big slaughterhouse battles of the Great War had already been fought while Conrad was publishing the novel, but there is not a hint of pacifism. Conrad knew that unarmed goodwill is useless against armed malice. It was to be a lesson that the coming century would teach over and over, and so on into the present century: peace is not a principle, it is only a desirable state of affairs, and can’t be obtained without a capacity for violence at least equal to the violence of the threat. Conrad didn’t want to reach this conclusion any more than we do, but his artistic instincts were proof against the slightest tinge of mystical spiritual solace, and so should ours be. Our age of massacres has also been an age of the intellectual charlatan, when people claiming to interpret events can barely be relied upon to give a straightforward account of what actually happened.
Conrad was the writer who reached political adulthood before any of the other writers of his time, and when they did, they reached only to his knee.

That being said, however, it must be admitted that Heyst’s upright stupidity grows tedious in the final scenes. Conrad should have made his heroes as intelligent as himself, the better to illustrate his thematic concern with how the historic forces that crush the naïve will do the same to the wise, if they do not prepare to fight back. Finally, he tends to reinforce our wishful thought that cultivation—gained, for example, from reading the novels of Joseph Conrad—might be enough to ward off barbarism. But barbarism doesn’t care if we are cultivated or not.

Coda

I HAVE BEEN READING
two biographies at once. One, Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s
The Pike
, which is the life story of Gabriele d’Annunzio, deals with an almost entirely worthless individual: he wrote some resounding poetry, but otherwise he was good for nothing except whipping crowds into protofascist hysteria and proving that a galloping case of halitosis was no hindrance to his uncanny success with women. He must have had something, or so distinguished a woman as Eleonora Duse would not have gone to bed with him: but on the whole the only reason you would want to raise the raving twerp from his grave would be so that you could slap his face. The other biography is Mark Bostridge’s
Florence Nightingale
, the story of one of the most worthwhile individuals in the world. I am trying to do my duty to justice by finding her more interesting than him. On the plane of brute fact, nothing could
be more interesting than how D’Annunzio, after the Paris premiere of Diaghilev’s
Cleopatra
, insinuated himself into Ida Rubinstein’s crowded dressing room and crammed his face between her legs. In sharp contrast, the only scandal generated by Florence Nightingale was the kind of brain-dead press concoction familiar to us today: in the hospital at Scutari, she watched amputations to learn how the process could be made less traumatic, and the press took the opportunity of calling her a sadist.

She was, of course, exactly the opposite thing. Mercy was her vocation. That being said, her preoccupation was to take the practical steps that would transform nursing into an act of public benevolence, with a set of procedures to be universally instilled. The inertia that she had to overcome being nearly as powerful as a whole society, she had no time for mere fine feelings.

From Bostridge’s exemplary book, a heartening impression emerges of how Nightingale could think on a vast scale while never shifting her attention from the importance of detail. Much of her reforming zeal was prescient. A germ theory of disease was still a quarter of a century in the future, but she somehow realized the vital role that could be played by cleanliness. Thus she transformed
the Scutari hospital from a hellhole into a refuge. Her distinction of mind marks every chapter of her story, even those chapters which occurred before she saw what her true role was. She was greatly gifted in languages, in statistics, in conversation, in music, in learning, and in all the arts of civilization. She was full of fun. In the thinking of the day—it was still the thinking only yesterday—she would have made some brilliant man the perfect wife. But she guessed, correctly, that she was cut out for something more. Richard Monckton Milnes was a clever and charming man, but she turned him down. In the movie, starring Jaclyn Smith (fresh from her triumphs as one of
Charlie’s Angels
),
he
turns
her
down. But the movie isn’t as silly as you might think, because to portray Florence Nightingale as a beauty was not all that implausible. She was very attractive, and was well capable of being attracted to the right man. But she was even more attracted to a life lived on her own account, in service to a principle. It was a life that helped give us the hospital systems that we know today, and to give nurses the respect they deserve.