Longer Views (39 page)

It was at that time I first heard of Sammy, as we all called him, through a friend [George Halprin] who was giving music lessons to some other member of the Greenberg family [i.e., Daniel Greenberg, Samuel's oldest brother]. Arriving at the flat on Delancey Street one evening, my friend was much surprised to hear fragments of Chopin's 2nd Ballad imperfectly yet sensitively played by someone in the inner room. Knowing his pupil had no such delicacy, either of feeling or of touch, my friend inquired who was at the piano, and he was told it was “only Sammy.” My friend entered the twilight room, and distinguished a tall thin figure upon the stool. The boy seemed dull, could not or would not say anything, except, in answer to questions, that he could not read music, that he played by ear only. Upon this my friend offered to teach him, and tried to do so, but made little progress, as the boy found difficulty in focusing his attention, and seemed unable to grasp the more conscious mathematics involved. Nevertheless my friend was much impressed by the boy, and came to tell me about him, and said he would bring him to see me, adding:

“He is uncanny and inarticulate, but there is something wonderful about him.”

And so it proved. When Sammy came to see me he volunteered nothing except that Mr. George Halprin had sent him. But he used his eyes well—took in everything, and waited. I examined him curiously: tall and thin of figure, with a small face framed in wavy, gold-brown hair, a high forehead, two wonderfully nice brown eyes, a rather large wide nose, and a full red mouth which made his chin seem smaller than it actually was. His manner was quiet and his voice gentle. I tried to converse with him, but to no purpose. I then asked if I could help him in any way. His glance immediately fell upon my table.

“You have books?” he questioned.

“Yes,” I replied, “would you like some?”

“You have good books—classics? I have only a little time.”

At that moment I did not realize the significance of his saying he “had only a little time,” but I humored his demand for classics and gave him Carlyle's
Heroes and Hero-Worship
, Emerson's
Essays
, and an anthology of English verse. I inquired what he had been reading, and was astonished to hear him say:

“The Dictionary.”

And a few months later he brought me a handful of poems—some of which are among the best he has done. I encouraged him to write, and from that time on (until his breakdown some two and a half years later) I saw much of him. His gentle, ingenuous personality exercised a great charm over all who met him, and his early diffident silence gave way to an elliptical, rather
epigrammatic style of conversation which was continually surprising his friends by reason of its direct and simple wisdom.

After a further pair of paragraphs on art, the average man, and the civilization that obtrudes between them—and the rare individuals, like Greenberg, who see “both beyond and through” them—Fisher concludes:

Samuel Bernhard Greenberg is of this company, is as frank and mysterious as a child. He is much younger than his years, and much wiser than his knowledge,—for he is of the few rare, child-like spirits which never become sophisticated, yet through mystic penetration surprise our deepest truths with simple ease. Born with a look of Wonder in his eyes, he has never lost sight of the Beauty of the world, nor of the Divinity of its inhabitants: though painfully aware that they themselves have.

Seated one evening in the house of a friend, where a few had gathered to speak of Music, Art and Song, he exclaimed (after one present had read a poem exemplifying the feeling of poetry from the trammels of versification):

“Ah! Delancey Street needs that!”

Now, although we knew he lived down there, we did not at once see the connection. But his next remark was quietly eloquent of his whole attitude:

“I should like to walk nude with a girl through Delancey Street.”

And we who knew him immediately understood that he craved to feel the presence in all the world (of which Delancey Street was but a symbol) of a guilelessness which could see nakedness and be unashamed, of a simplicity of thought and action which should be pure, artless, and brotherly.

For such he is: and yet, as I have suggested, possessed of a mystic wisdom which quite disarms and sets as naught our dear-bought worldly Knowledge.

In this account there are a few inaccuracies—young Greenberg attended school for quite a bit more than the “few months” Fisher allots to him. Similarly, he worked in his brother Adolf's leather bag shop a good deal longer than Fisher suggests—on and off from his tenth year through his eighteenth. But the young man's general affect is certainly there in Fisher's recollections.

Back in 1915, Greenberg, who had been making fair copies of his poems for some months now, approached Fisher about the possibility of publication. On April 22 of that year, Fisher wrote to Greenberg:

I am happy to hear that you propose to publish some of your poems, and I shall be glad to aid you in any manner possible. But first, as I have your best interests at heart, I feel I should warn you that a careful selection should be made, and that some of the poems will have to be slightly changed—a word or an expression.

Publication did not come, however, till after Greenberg's death.

Here is the text of the fourth of the poems Fisher printed after his appreciation—“Serenade in Grey”—first as I transcribed it (line numbers are added) from Greenberg's fair copy, now in the Fales Collection at New York University, followed by Fisher's
Plowshare
version.

SBG 1914

Now, Fisher's
Plowshare
version—with Fisher's “slight” changes of “a word or an expression”:

(The McManis and Holden version of 1947 is somewhere in between my transcription and Fisher's emendation, though it does not alter any of Greenberg's actual words—only punctuation marks.) The sort of “fix-up” Fisher imposes (if not McManis and Holden) is out of favor today—though Emily Dickinson suffered similar “corrections” practically until the three-volume variorum edition of her complete poems in 1955. What is notable about Fisher's emendations is that, while here and there a comma may, indeed, clarify Greenberg's initial intentions, the general thrust of his changes is to take the highlight off the word as rhetorical object and to foreground, rather, coherent meaning.

All poetry—good and bad—tends to exist within the tensional field created by two historic propositions:

As Michael Riffaterre expresses the one, on the first page of his 1978 study
The Semiotics of Poetry:
“The language of poetry differs from common linguistic usage—this much the most unsophisticated reader senses instinctively . . . poetry often employs words excluded from common usage and has its own special grammar, even a grammar not valid beyond the narrow compass of a given poem . . .”

The opposing principle for poetry has seldom been better put than by Wordsworth, writing of his own project in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Pastoral, and Other Poems” in the 1802 edition of
Lyrical Ballads:
“. . . to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as possible, in a selection of language really used by men . . .”

Now, in the very same sentence in which he upholds the difference between poetic and ordinary language, Riffaterre goes on to remind us
that “. . . it may also happen that poetry uses the same words and the same grammar as everyday language.” And on the other side of a semicolon, in the same sentence in which he extols the “language really used by men,” Wordsworth reminds us that poetry tries, for its goal, “at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way . . .” Presumably this secondary task is accomplished by
unusual
language.

The question then is not which is right and which is wrong, but which is primary and which is secondary—and
how
primary and
how
secondary. At various times over the last two hundred years the perceived relation between them has changed. The ministrations of a Fisher (in the case of Greenberg) during the late teens of the century currently ending, or of a Higginson (an early editor of Dickinson) during the '90s of the previous century, merely document where the tensions between them had stabilized at a given moment.

The archaic forms, the inversions, as well as the specialized vocabulary were, in the first third of the twentieth century, simply part of poetry's
specialized
language. And although they would be almost wholly abandoned by poets during the twentieth century's second half, even a high modernist such as Pound was using them as late as
The Pizan Cantos
(1948): “What though lov'st well remains.” “Pull down thy vanity!”—though, after that, even in the
Cantos
, they pretty much vanish.

As written, Greenberg's “Serenade” gives the effect of an observation so exact that, now and again, because of his strict fidelity to the observation process,
we
cannot tell
what
is being observed; this effect is as much a result of the poem's incoherencies—where we cannot follow the word to its referent—as it is of those places where the conjunction of word
with
referent seems striking. In Fisher's revision, things run much more smoothly—and, I suspect for most modern readers, much less interestingly. Violences at both the level of the signifier (e.g., “mine eyes feel dim and scorched from grey”) and of the signified (e.g., the rotting blood) are repressed—and with them, the sense of rigor cleaving to whatever writing process produced the poem. Both Fisher and Holden/McManis strive to clear up the ambiguity of the antecedent of “though parted thus”—though, under sway of Empson (
Seven Types of Ambiguity
, 1935), the modern reader is likely to count that ambiguity among the poem's precise pleasures: Is it the shadows of light and shadows in shade that are parted . . . or the eyes? Greenberg's undoctored text (or
less
doctored text: even letter-by-letter, point-by-point transcription involves judgments; and who can say what doctoring Greenberg himself would have approved had he been able to see his poems through the ordinary channels of copy-editing and galley correction usually preceding print)
generates a sense that, for all the strained rhymes and inversions, that process is one of intense energy, rigor, and commitment. This vanishes—or at least becomes much less forceful—after Fisher's changes.