Comfort

On Wednesday, I made meatloaf and green peas for dinner, and my wife came home and said, “Ah, comfort food.” I hadn’t thought of the meal that way but she was right, and not just because certain dishes remind us of our paradisiacal childhoods. My mother was a dangerously incompetent cook, so such associations are lost on me. Some food pleases and nourishes, in every sense, at a pre-rational level. I brooded on that and it occurred to me that if we find reliable comfort in certain foods, why not in books or writers? The late poet Karl Shapiro is my comfort food, in part because he was probably the first “grownup” poet I seriously read, after Robert Frost. I discovered him in an anthology edited by the indefatigable anthologist Oscar Williams, a Washington Square Press paperback with oval portraits of the poets on the inside covers.

Shapiro’s distinctly American choice of subject matter attracted me. He wrote about car wrecks, drugstores, getting a haircut, honkytonks, Thomas Jefferson and a waitress, as well as combat in the South Pacific. In Essay on Rime, writing about his great influence W.H. Auden but in fact formulating his own poetic practice, Shapiro said:

"For the first time the radio,
The car, the sofa and the new highway
Came into focus in a poem as things,
Not symbols of the things. The scenery changed
To absolute present and the curtain rose
On the actual place, not Crane's demonic city
Nor Eliot's weird unreal metropolis,
But that pedestrian London with which prose
Alone had previously dealt."

An early, smoothly sexy poem titled “Buick” opens like this:

“As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine
And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans,
Leaning and laughing, my warm-hearted beauty, you ride, you ride,
You tack on the curves with parabola speed and a kiss of goodbye,
Like a thoroughbred sloop, my new high-spirited spirit, my kiss.”

There’s much 1940s period detail in Shapiro’s poems, as there is in the novels of Raymond Chandler. Of course, Shapiro is best known for writing about combat in the South Pacific during World War II. His first three books were published while Shapiro was still in the Army. How many American poets have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and a Bronze Star?

Shapiro was great at opening lines. Here’s the first stanza of “The Fly”:

“O hideous little bat, the size of snot,
With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes,
To populate the stinking cat you walk
The promontory of the dead man’s nose,
Climb with the fine leg of the Duncan-Phyfe
The smoking mountains of my food
And in a comic mood
In mid-air take to bed a wife.”

Note the traditional rhymes and metrics, vulgar matter elegantly fashioned and, again, the American subjects (the “Duncan-Phyfe”/”wife” rhyme is priceless). “Elegy for Two Banjos” sounds like Kipling in New Guinea:

“Haul up the flag, you mourners,
Not half-mast but all the way;
The funeral is done and disbanded;
The devil’s had the final say.”

Three years ago, Joseph Epstein, in The Weekly Standard, reviewed a selection of Shapiro’s poems made by John Updike. Epstein, who drew the title of a short story collection, Fabulous Small Jews, from Shapiro’s poem “Hospital,” had this to say:

“One of the first things to be said about Shapiro's poetry is that, various though it is, it is never gloomy. A pleasure in life, in its richness, variety, and oddity, informs many of his poems, even those that verge on the dark, such as `Auto Wreck,’ a poem about coming upon an auto crash as a young man on his way home after leaving the bed of a lady friend.”

Epstein nails it. Throughout his work, even in his later, crankier, slacker, less accomplished poems, Shapiro has an enormous appetite for life, and wants to share it with us. In no banal sense is Shapiro’s poetry uplifting or inspirational, but his enthusiasms and sympathies are contagious. He actually enjoys the world outside of Karl Shapiro, which would make him a prodigy among today’s self-referential poets. Life-changing trouble started for this Jewish-American wunderkind in 1949, when Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos was nominated for the first Bollingen Prize in Poetry. Shapiro was on the jury. Initially, he voted for Pound. After “wrestling with his soul,” Shapiro switched his vote to William Carlos Williams’ Paterson II, saying Pound’s “moral and political philosophy ultimately vitiated the Cantos and lowered the literary quality of the work.” Shapiro’s reasoning seems flawless, but he lost a lot of friends and became marginal to what passes for literary culture in the United States.

No question, Shapiro was a provocateur. He published collections of essays titled In Defense of Ignorance and To Abolish Children. Some of his poems – “The Nigger,” “Mongolian Idiot,” “Red Indian,” among others – would fail the litmus test of political correctness, and some would find his raucous, randy sense of humor offensive. On that question, I would refer you to Ted Cohen, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. In 1999, he published Jokes, a slender volume that carries the broad subtitle Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. It’s a thoughtful, funny examination of what makes us laugh – traditionally, a mirthless subject (see Freud and Bergson) – and it’s filled with great jokes. Cohen’s defense of offensive, tasteless joke applies, I think, to some of Shapiro’s poems:

“Wish that there were no mean jokes. Try remaking the world so that such jokes will have no place, will not arise. But do not deny that they are funny. That denial is a pretense that will help nothing. And it is at least possible, sometimes, that the jokes themselves do help something. Perhaps they help us to bear unbearable affronts like crude racism and stubborn prejudice by letting us laugh while we take a breather.”

Shapiro does much more than make us laugh. He was one of the first writers to show me that life and books are mortally bound, and that crafting language might be a worthwhile calling. He remains on my shortlist of writers I return to regularly, for pleasure, nourishment and comfort, like good meatloaf and green peas.