A reader in British Columbia informs me that AbeBbooks is selling “The Herbert Morris Collection,” the personal library of the American poet who died in 2001. My Canadian friend writes:
“There is something sad in the dismantling of a library, but even more so when the library belonged to an individual deserving of recognition and study. Ideally, this library would have remained intact.
“The remaining questions about Herbert Morris's life are many: Why did he wait so long to publish his first collection?; How did he support himself?; Why was his library dismantled after his death? I suspect many of these questions will have to remain unanswered. As you pointed out in your email to me, he may have just wanted it that way.”
Browsing the online catalog, I, too, felt sad, as well as avaricious and a little ghoulish. Morris has been among my favorite poets since I discovered his work, belatedly, in 2000, when Counterpoint published What Was Lost. Born in 1928, he was 55 when his first book with a major publisher, Peru, came out in 1983. His career in poetry (a phrase I suspect he would have abhorred) was brief and largely unheralded. I check for his name in books of and about recent American poetry, and never find it.
Among the volumes for sale are five by Morris – Little Voices of the Pears (1989), Dream Palace (1986, the same paperback first edition I have, priced at $90), two copies of Afghanistan (1984) and one of Nine Iridescent Figures on a Vase (1978). The latter two titles are new to me. Both had small press runs with small presses. Nineteen titles by James Merrill, to whom Morris dedicated Dream Palace and who died in 1995, show up in the library. Merrill’s The Inner Room (1988) is inscribed “For Herb from James with love always,” and Recitative (1986) is signed “Christmas in November but love all year round to Herb from James 1986.” This is unspeakably sad.
Among other writers in the collection, Henry James has 18 titles; Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf, 15; James Joyce, nine; John Berryman, eight; Anthony Hecht, five; Auden, one. Many of the books include reviews and stories, mostly clipped from the New York Times. When a writer’s public identity is so sketchy and obscure, and his artistic identity so indelible, I scavenge for clues. I first saw Morris’ name around the time What Was Lost came out, probably online. I ordered it and looked unsuccessfully in libraries for the earlier titles. In a messy, haphazard second-hand book store in Troy, N.Y., I found Dream Palace. The cover price is $8.95. I paid $1.49. The second poem in the collection, “Boardwalk,” is among Morris' finest, a speculative memory of his parents.
I associate Morris with Joseph Cornell, another wayward artist obsessed with the past. The painter Fairfield Porter wrote an essay about Cornell in 1966, in which he quotes Albert Beguin on Gérard de Nerval, one of Cornell’s Romantic heroes. I will quote Porter quoting Beguin on Nerval to describe Cornell, to describe Morris:
“Like all true poets, he invites us to see things in a light in which we do not know them, but which turns out to be almost that one in which we have always hoped one day to see them bathed.”
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2 comments:
“There is something sad in the dismantling of a library, but even more so when the library belonged to an individual deserving of recognition and study. Ideally, this library would have remained intact.
“The remaining questions about Herbert Morris's life are many: Why did he wait so long to publish his first collection?; How did he support himself?; Why was his library dismantled after his death? I suspect many of these questions will have to remain unanswered. As you pointed out in your email to me, he may have just wanted it that way.”
There is a nice, Jamesian irony is all of this. James worked and reworked the theme of the manifold ways in which the master's acolytes might try to gain entry to the innermost chambers of the temple of the master's life and art. Just off the top of my head, and even with my limited familiarity with James, I can recall stories about prying biographers, over-zealous critics seeking the figure in the carpet that is the key of keys to a master’s work, and inspired acolytes looking for the letters that might reveal a long lost love affair. And if my reading of these stories is not off base, there is generally something problematic and, perhaps, a bit impious about these efforts or at least the people making them. In the story about the biographer, if I recall correctly, the master’s ghost shooes him away.
It always seemed to me that these stories richly mined two overlapping themes – the limits of the master’s mastery and the ineradicable desire to learn the mysteries of the creation of art. In the end, the master’s estate is disposed of by his readers, his family, and others; his words, however masterful, can no more control them than they could master the objects of his art. The master’s acolytes find that despite their efforts to learn the secrets of their master, the master likewise remains maddeningly close but elusive. Yet in the failure of their efforts, the acolytes themselves learn something of the limits of their master and the nature of his art and, in that sense, come closer to their master by experiencing the insuperable distance separating them.
Morris most likely dealt with this, as other artists do, on several levels – a will, making his wishes known to his family or other likely executors, and, most interestingly for us his readers, in his art.
Are you aware of Morris’s efforts, either directly or indirectly, to address this theme in his art?
This is a fine Blog posting: thank you!
I am obsessed with Herbert Morris because I find his brilliant poems to be hypnotic, transportive.
Thanks for bringing attention to this neglected poet.
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