'The War Is Over and Not Over'

“Chaos and tragedy were around him early, in the impersonal mess of war and in events that touched him more intimately, and seeing them firsthand gave him a passion for order, propriety, and a humane justice. He loved (the word is not an exaggeration) these three qualities because he thought they were the best guarantee of civilized life, and because he knew from his own experience how fragile they are and how easily they can slip into the cruelty, willfulness, and self-righteous rage to which none of us, at our worst, is immune.” 

Helen Pinkerton once told me that though she had known Edgar Bowers and his poems for more than half a century, she still found much of his early work difficult. Her admission shouldn’t be mistaken for dismissal. Helen never thought Bowers’ poems were meaningless or incoherent, as a lazy reader might. She trusted the poet and his poems, and found the experience of returning to them a rewarding exercise. To her, Bowers made difficulty useful, even stimulating.

 

The quoted passage at the top is from a memorial essay Dick Davis wrote for Poets and Writers, “The Mystery of Consciousness: A Tribute to the Poet Edgar Bowers,” several months after Bowers’ death in 2000 at age seventy-five. Drafted into the army during World War II, he worked in counterintelligence in Germany, and was stationed for a year at Hitler’s retreat, Berchtesgaden. Davis’ mention of the “impersonal mess of war” prompted me for the first time to think of Bowers as a World War II poet, along with such fellow Americans as Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov, Karl Shapiro and Richard Wilbur. Consider the sixth section of “Autumn Shade,” collected in his second book, The Astronomers (1965):

 

“Snow and then rain. The roads are wet. A car

Slips and strains in the mire, and I remember

Driving in France: weapons-carriers and jeeps;

Our clothes and bodies stiffened by mud; our minds

Diverted from fear. We labor. Overhead,

A plane, Berlin or Frankfurt, now New York.

The car pulls clear. My neighbor smiles. He is old.

Was this our wisdom, simply, in a chance,

In danger, to be mastered by a task,

Like groping round a chair, through a door, to bed?”

 

Bowers never describes combat. Typically, as in this passage, he moves from a remembrance of war or its aftermath, briefly ponders it, and moves on to today. By rough count, in the 168 pages of his Collected Poems (1997), he published some thirty poems that make reference, usually muted, to the war and his experience of it. As Davis notes, “there is no welter of unjustified emotion” in the poems. In other words, though obliquely autobiographical, Bowers will never be mistaken for a confessional poet. He’s no Anne Sexton. In “Clothes,” among the new poems in Collected Poems, he describes the discovery of the body of a German woman who has committed suicide, and his reaction:

 

“I sobbed out loud and, on my uniform,

Vomited up my lunch—over the tie,

The polished buttons and insignia,

The little strips of color and the green

Eisenhower jacket with its Eagle patch,

The taut pants in a crease, the glistening jump-boots—

Vomiting and still sobbing, like a child

Awakened in the night, and sick. Wegner and Hans

Held me, murmuring, ‘Ach, dear sir, the war

Is over and not over, such things happen.’”

 

I sense Bowers’ reputation is in severe eclipse, like many of our best writers. If he is remembered, it is often as a gay poet. I would hope that someone better equipped than I, more attuned to scholarship and criticism, would look at Bowers as a war poet. Davis writes in his tribute:

 

“He is a hard man to describe, because he eschewed the eccentric and flamboyant, and was almost studiously ‘ordinary’ in everyday life. He had a deep distrust for the cult of ‘the poet’ and used to say trenchantly, ‘A man is only a poet when he is writing a poem.’”