'Come Back Now As You Were in Youth'

“Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life.” 

Donald Justice often skirts sentimentality in his poems, teetering at the lip of a cheap conceit, but preserves his integrity with craft and an intelligent capacity for nostalgia coupled with the gift of self-skepticism. Justice never raises his voice, parades his sensitivity or pleads for sympathy. The sentence above is the concluding line of “Invitation to a Ghost” (New and Selected Poems, 1995), dedicated to the poet Henri Coulette (1927-88). In 1990, Justice and poet Robert Mezey co-edited The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette (University of Arkansas Press). In their introduction they say, “. . . we have been struck once more by how splendid a writer our friend was and how badly neglected.” The same can be said of Justice and his work.  

 

Four years before Justice’s death in 2004, the English publisher Philip Hoy conducted a lengthy interview with the poet and in 2001 published the edited interview as a book by Between the Lines. Hoy quotes from a notebook kept by Justice and excerpted in Oblivion: On Writers & Writing (Storyline, 1998), a selection of the poet’s prose: “A copy of Chekhov’s stories lying open on a table. I realized as at once how glad I was that this man had lived. And that I did right to be glad. Of what writers now could that honestly and simply be said?” Clearly, senses an affinity with the Russian story writer who never wrote a poem in his life. To which Justice responds: “I hold Chekhov in very high esteem, yes, even when he is not quite at his best. One learns to like everything certain writers write. Well, almost everything.” The poem dedicated to Coulette begins like this:

 

“I ask you to come back now as you were in youth,

Confident, eager, and the silver brushed from your temples.

Let it be as though a man could go backwards through death,

Erasing the years that did not much count,

Or that added up perhaps to no more than a single brilliant forenoon.”

 

A common, harmless fantasy. We wish the cherished dead to return, restored to health and promise. Think of the writers we would revive, “perhaps to no more than a single brilliant forenoon.” To some writers, my allegiance is absolute. Even their minor or mediocre work, their juvenilia, is dear. This attitude, of course, is uncritical or pre-critical, and it’s nothing I would even attempt to defend in print, except to say that the existence of such writers gives me pleasure and a sense of reassurance. I can’t get enough of them – Chekhov and Henry James, for instance, and Donald Justice. And here is one of his curious observations, based on his 1982 return to Florida, the state where he was born. It sounds like the germ of a Justice poem:

 

“I have a distinct memory of walking out onto the golf course behind our house late one night, walking our dog, and standing there looking up at the moon as it flooded the fairway with light. Very nice. I felt touched by an emotion I must have been inventing.”

 

As though to dispel the impression that he is a poet only of twilit nostalgia, Justice then assaults the literary theorists who helped destroy English departments, literacy and the love of literature:

 

“I disliked practically everything about them: their jargon and their grammar, their vast intellectual pretensions, their easy disdain for things they knew little or nothing about and had no interest in, their lousy taste in literature and the other arts, their nasty politicking, their hatred of the past and the tradition in favor of the fashionable and the perfectly silly. . . . But please don’t get me wound up. It’s been years and I still tremble with passion.”

 

Justice was born one-hundred years ago today, on August 12, 1925, and died in 2004 at age seventy-eight.