'Able to See Things as He Saw Through Things'

We often ate lunch at the Sky Port Diner in Scotia, N.Y., across the Mohawk River from our newspaper. Another regular who managed a small family-owned steel fabrication plant sometimes joined us. His favorite subject was his son who had graduated a few years earlier from Washington University in St. Louis. The kid was not an English major but his most influential teacher, according to his father, was Howard Nemerov, who taught there from 1969 to 1990. Our lunchmate said his son had problems and might have dropped out if Nemerov hadn’t befriended and informally counseled him. “Howard Nemerov was a good guy, a real mensch,” he said more than once. “I never read his poetry.” 

I’m not sure how many people do today. I read Nemerov early, as part of that remarkable postwar generation of American poets who fought in World War II, including Karl Shapiro, Edgar Bowers and Anthony Hecht. After graduating from Harvard in 1941, Nemerov flew fifty combat missions with the Royal Canadian Air Force as a fighter pilot and another fifty-seven with the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force. In a poem collected in War Stories (1987), Nemerov referred to “the clean war, the war in the air.”

 

He went on to publish more than fifteen poetry collections and three novels. Just last year I finally read the third, The Homecoming Game (1957), of which Vladimir Nabokov wrote in a letter to the poet: “It is full of true wit, and its structure—the intricate and satisfying interlacings of themes—is admirable.” A year earlier in the New York Times, Nemerov had protested the ban on the importation of Lolita into the U.S., and in The Kenyon Review published “The Morality of Art,” a review of Lolita (the two-volume Olympia Press edition) and Pnin:

 

“Lolita is nevertheless a moral work, if by morality in literature we are to understand the illustration of a usurious rate of exchange between our naughty desires and virtuous pains, of the process whereby pleasures become punishments, or our vices suddenly become recognizable as identical with our suffering.”

 

When I weigh Nemerov’s support of his student and his defense of Nabokov’s moral art, I think of “The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar’s House” (Gnomes and Occasions, 1973):

 

“For such a man, art is an act of faith:

Prayer the study of it, as Blake says,

And praise the practice; nor does he divide

Making from teaching, or from theory.

The three are one, and in his hours of art

There shines a happiness through darkest themes,

As though spirit and sense were not at odds.”

 

And this from “Larkin,” included in Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991, published in 1992, the year after Nemerov’s death and seven years after Larkin’s:

 

“It’s a quirky spirit he carried through the arch

To aftertime, making a salted fun

Of the holy show and grudging his respect

For all but truth, the master of a style

Able to see things as he saw through things.”

 

At first we think Nemerov should have  avoided “quirky” as too cute and hinting at euphemism, though it’s useful to learn the word’s oldest and still current meaning is “tricky, wily, cunning.” Nemerov knew what he was doing. “Cunning” is the epithet we associate with Odysseus, who also visited the “aftertime,” the Underworld. He returned, as Larkin did not. Nemerov alludes to “The Old Fools” and acknowledges a kindred spirit, a master, one of the “great and dead”: “Dear Larkin of the anastrophic mind, / Forever now among the undeceived.” Nemerov nods to “Vers de Société” and closes obliquely, looking back at Larkin’s first mature collection, The Less Deceived (1955). “Anastrophic,” the syntactic inversion, suggests not a backward mind but one forever looking back.

 

Nemerov died on this date, July 5, in 1991 at age seventy-one.

[Nabokov’s letter to Nemerov is collected in Selected Letters 1940-1977 (eds. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1989).]