'I Don't Look for Novelty'

"Literature is insight and synthesis, which means that poetry, ultimately, is heroic. Naked, weak, hungry, trembling, endangered by all the elements, all the beasts and demons, the cave men performed that act of heroism for consolation, in the deepest sense of the word. And at that time there in Lubyanka this seemed to me the essence of literature and the source of its legitimacy in the world. Consolation for a weak, naked cave man.” 

Aleksander Wat (1900-67), a poet who wrote middling avant-garde poems in Polish, also “spoke” one of the last century’s essential books (along with Solzhenitsyn’s, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s, Whittaker Chambers’ and Vasily Grossman’s): My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, edited and translated into English in 1988 by Richard Lourie from transcripts of conversations Wat had late in life with Czesław Miłosz. He wrote as a witness.

 

On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, sixteen days after Nazi Germany had invaded the country from the west. The invasions had been secretly agreed upon less than a month earlier with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by October 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in the summer of 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. Wat would spend two years in Soviet prisons and camps, including the notorious Lubyanka in Moscow.

 

Good news: New York Review Books is soon to publish the coded diary kept by Wat, decrypted by his wife, Ola Watowa (1903-91), and translated by Alissa Valles, who has already given us Zbigniew Herbert, Józef Czapski and Ryszard Krynicki. Book Post has published an excerpt. Following a stroke in 1953, Wat suffered from chronic pain, often cited as his cause of death by suicide in 1967. Wat writes:

 

“The only thing that gives me a sense of safety, is when a new life situation, an accidental configuration of things, persons, words, gestures, recognizes itself in identical images and comparisons of what has already been. This is the one thing I need, I of all people, once an adventuristic ex-avant-gardist: to know, touch, feel that what is has already been, that what I am experiencing in this moment has already been experienced and survived, that therefore it is within human power, and therefore within my power, to survive it.”

 

And this: “Because of today’s rules in poetry, today’s lack of rules, today’s elements—how else? I’m not a scribe or an antiquarian—I don’t look for novelty but rather for the continuous authentication of new arrangements of things, words, rhythms that have already been experienced many times. Nihil novi is not my philosophy, it is my shield, for in the new there is a terrifying meaning, in new nonexistence, since the “new,” insofar as it is new, has arisen from nothing.” 

 

Wat's fluency, the articulation of his memories and intellectual linkages, his gift for sheer storytelling, are phenomenal for a man in his sixties in chronically ill health, ravaged by the century he endured. In section XV of The Triumph of Love (1998), Geoffrey Hill writes:

 

"Flamen I draw darkly out of flame.

Lumen is a measure of light.

Lumens are not luminaries. A great

Polish luminary of our time is the obscure

Aleksander Wat."

 

Wat illuminates our dark age with luminous words.

'Pass Judgment on Only What He Understands'

“Anyone who says the artist’s field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. . . . You are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.” 

What little I’ve ever known and understood seems to be dissolving. I can still name all the presidents, in order, and the capitals of every state. But I haven’t a clue as to AI, the midterm elections or what to do about Russia. There was a time when, if I had no intelligent answers to such questions, I would have bluffed my way through them. Answering questions was not a quest for truth but an exercise in ego-massaging.

 

The passage above is taken from the letter Anton Chekhov wrote to his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin on October 27, 1888. Suvorin had an earnest streak. Like many people today, his choice of politics seemed to be performative. He conformed to the fashions of his set. Chekhov writes:

 

“I sometime preach heresies, but haven’t once gone so far as to deny that problematic questions have a place in art. In conversations with my fellow writers I always insist that it is not the artist’s job to try to answer narrowly specialized questions. It is bad for the artist to take on something he doesn’t understand. . . . The artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is as limited as that of any other specialist . . .”

 

I’ve never read a work of literature, whether novel or poem, looking for answers, though they have occasionally been supplied without me seeking them.

 

[Chekhov’s quotes are taken from Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (trans. Simon Karlinsky and Michael Henry Heim, 1973).]

'The Breezy Wight Who Cannot See'

I often think about the continuity of personality. Not in the abstract sense, as an academic exercise in human psychology. Rather, as an aspect of your life and mine. Are we the same people we were at age twelve or twenty? Is that a metaphysical question? Is it trivial?

At the trivial level of DNA, of course. Our genetic inheritance is always with us. But why is it, when I look back at my younger self, I am puzzled and sometimes ashamed? Why the hell did I do that? What did I hope to accomplish? How could I be so thoughtless? At the time, I would have congratulated myself on making enlightened decisions. I read Freud and Proust. I knew something about people and their behavior. That twenty-year-old kid seems foreign to me, and yet I recognize him. I hurt people and congratulated myself on my precious moral principles. 

In 1914, the year he turned seventy-four, Thomas Hardy published Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces. Among the poems collected in the volume is “Seventy-Four and Twenty”:

 

“Here goes a man of seventy-four,

Who sees not what life means for him,

And here another in years a score

Who reads its very figure and trim.

 

“The one who shall walk to-day with me

Is not the youth who gazes far,

But the breezy wight who cannot see

What Earth's ingrained conditions are.”

 

I turn seventy-four today and feel like an unlikely mashup of Hardy’s two subjects. I’m often as blind and oblivious as the old man and occasionally able to “read” life’s “very figure and trim.” I can soothe myself with words like this – “That’s just human” – which smells rankly like bullshit. In another poem from the volume, “Regret Me Not,” Hardy writes:

 

“I did not know

   That heydays fade and go,

But deemed that what was would be always so.”

'Capable of Giving True Pleasure'

The Crimean War (1854-56) is remembered in the West for being the first photographically documented major conflict and for Tennyson’s barnburner of a poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” The blundering attack during Battle of Balaclava, on October 25, 1854, was a slaughter for British forces. The war pitted Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia against Russia, which threatened to take control of the Dardanelles. Apart from its rousing rhetoric-- 

“Half a league half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred”

 

--Tennyson’s poem is noteworthy for celebrating bravery (however misguided) rather than victory. Like generations of prior students I learned “The Charge of the Light Brigade” not from a book but from Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, who recited Tennyson’s poem, or at least the first two verses and a portion of the third, in the 1936 Our Gang comedy “Two Too Young.” Even in that form the poem was rousing and rhythmically memorable. I can’t remember not knowing the lines Alfalfa recites and a few others later in the poem, in particular “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die,” which I’ve always thought distilled a military and patriotic ideal.

 

Some fifty other poems were written by English poets to commemorate the charge but only Tennyson’s has survived in memory. Casualties included 118 dead, 127 wounded and 60 taken prisoner by the Russians. French Marshal Pierre Bosquet, who witnessed the charge, famously observed: “C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre: c'est de la folie.” Little more than a month later, on December 9, 1854, Tennyson published his poem in the Examiner. Slightly revised, it was collected the following year in Maud, and Other Poems, and published as a four-page quarto broadsheet for British troops in the Crimea.

 

In his essay on Kipling, George Orwell famously described Tennyson’s poem, among others, as a prime example of the “good bad poem.” He defines his terms: “All of these reek of sentimentality, and yet – not these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this kind, are capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them. One could fill a fair-sized anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant fact that good bad poetry is usually too well known to be worth reprinting.”

Eric Ormsby R.I.P.

Marius Kociejowski has written to tell me the poet, critic, translator, Islamic scholar and voluptuary of sound Eric Ormsby has died, apparently in Prague, at age eighty-five. As always when a good writer dies, our impulse is to honor him by reading his work. 

In 2012, I reviewed his collection The Baboons of Hada: Selected Poems (Carcanet) and wrote:

 

“Born in Georgia in 1941 and raised in Florida, his career has been unusually scholarly and cosmopolitan, qualities that distinguish his verse yet never make it stuffy. He lived for decades in Montreal, serving as director of University Libraries and professor of Islamic thought at McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies. Now he is professor and chief librarian at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. His previous books include Theodicy in Islamic Thought and Moses Maimonides and His Time, and Ormsby has earned a reputation as a discerning critic and reviewer in England and North America. He shares the bookish bent of those other librarian-poets, Borges and Larkin.”

'A Sound Like a Rusty Pump Beneath Our Window'

Among humans, complaining is always annoying. Short of murder, rape, theft and treason, it may be our most detestable quality. A complainer assumes he or she is important, and everyone ought to know all about it. When such people don’t get their way, they announce it to the world, loudly, often whiningly and at great length. 

And yet, my favorite bird is probably the king of avian complainers, the blue jay. When I hear one griping, I assume a neighbor’s cat is on the prowl. It’s a sound I enjoy for its boldness and total indifference to any other species. It can go on for hours and I fancy I hear the bird getting hoarse, like a marathon human kvetcher or a filibustering Congressman. The late Paul Lake published “Blue Jay” in the Autumn 1986 issue of The American Scholar and collected it in Another Kind of Travel (1988):

 

“A sound like a rusty pump beneath our window

Woke us at dawn. Drawing the curtains back,

We saw - through the milky light, above the doghouse—

A blue jay lecturing a neighbor's cat

So fiercely that, at first, it seemed to wonder

When birds forgot the diplomacy of flight

And met, instead, each charge with a wild swoop,

Metallic cry, and angry thrust of beak.

 

“Later, we found the reason. Near the fence

Among the flowerless stalks of daffodils,

 A weak piping of feathers. Too late now to go back

To nest again among the sheltering leaves.

And so, harrying the dog, routing the cat,

And taking sole possession of the yard,

The mother swooped all morning.

 

                                                “I found her there

Still fluttering round my head, still scattering

The troops of blackbirds, head cocked toward my car

As if it were some lurid animal,

When I returned from work. Still keeping faith.

As if what I had found by afternoon

Silent and still and hidden in tall grass,

Might rise again above the fallen world;

As if the dead were not past mothering.”

 

I always think of the ability to identify a bird’s song or a wildflower or a mammal’s scat as forms of reading. I feel at home when, like Adam, I can name things. I stopped complaining about the blue jay’s squawk when, some years ago, I found an explosion of black, white, gray and predominantly blue feathers on the grass behind the garage. A cat, or possibly a hawk or owl, had grabbed a blue jay, took it away and left the incriminating evidence.

''There is Nothing Easier Than to Destroy a Book'

 This blog has been around for more than twenty years and I could easily devote the next twenty to replying to the complaints I often receive. Some are deserved. I appreciate readers who correct errors of fact, point out typos and suggest alternatives to stylistic infelicities or misused words. Such replies to posts are encouraged, especially if they are given politely and respectfully. Less helpful are ad hominem attacks (Racist! Sexist! Fascist!) and complaints rooted in fashionable politics. This week I got a doozy. A reader – a male – complained I have seldom devoted posts to female writers. “You seem to really hate women,” he wrote. This will come as a surprise to my wife, former bosses and colleagues, and female friends. 

I write with regularity (I have no quota system) about some of my favorite writers – Rebecca West, Stevie Smith, Olivia Manning, Janet Lewis, Marguerite Yourcenar, George Eliot, Elizabeth Taylor, Helen Pinkerton, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Kay Ryan. And then there’s a writer for whom love and admiration seem almost inadequate – Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980), widow of the great murdered poet Osip Mandelstam. She was tough, smart and resourceful. She has stayed with me, in memory and in moral inheritance, for more than half a century. Her two volumes of memoirs document the persecution and final destruction of her husband by Stalin and his goons and the final forty-two years of her own harassed and impoverished life in the Soviet Union.

 

Here is a passage from her first autobiographical volume, Hope Against Hope (trans. Max Hayward, 1970), lines retained since I first read the book in 1974: “To think that we could have had an ordinary life with its bickering, broken hearts and divorce suits! There are people in the world so crazy as not to realize that this is normal human existence of the kind everybody should aim at. What wouldn’t we have given for such ordinary heartbreaks!”

 

The human craving for immunity to life’s unpleasantness is blind and eternal, while the gratitude we owe for our “ordinary heartbreaks” is bottomless. And another: “The coming of a new book into [her husband’s] life was like a first encounter with someone destined to be a friend.” That passage is from Chapter 49 of Hope Against Hope, “The Reader of One Book,” which begins like this:

 

“In his youth M. always carefully weighed his words—it was only later that he tended toward levity. In 1919, when he was still very young, he once told me that there was no need at all to have a lot of books, and that it was best to read one book all one’s life. ‘Do you mean the Bible?’ I asked. ‘Why not?’ he replied.”

 

Nadezhda thinks of the “splendid graybeards of the East who read the Koran throughout their lives.” She says of Osip, “I could scarcely picture my light-hearted companion as one of them.” Knowing what was soon to come in the Soviet Union, it’s poignantly difficult to think of Mandelstam as ever having been “light-hearted.” She goes on: “A real poet is always recognized immediately—by his enemies as well as by his well-wishers. It seems inevitable that a poet should arouse enmity.”

 

Mandelstam refers not to poetasters masquerading as agents provocateurs, anti-bourgeois poseurs and “activists,” but the real thing, dedicated writers. The two breeds are instantly distinguishable on the page. Nadezhda writes:

 

“M. never tried to commit what he read to memory, but rather to check it against his own experience, always testing it in the light of his own basic idea—the one which must underlie any real personality. It is reading of the passive type, which has always made it possible to propagate predigested ideas, to instill into the popular mind slick, commonplace notions. Reading of this kind does not stimulate thought, but has an effect similar to hypnosis—though it must be said that the modern age has even more powerful means for dominating people’s minds.”

 

The manner of reading Mandelstam describes, weighing what one reads against one’s experience of life, seems commonsensical but in fact is rare almost to the point of being exotic. Her volumes, in addition to chronicling one of literature’s great love stories (many of Osip’s poems once existed only in Nadezhda’s devoted memory), are, as Clive James writes of her in Cultural Amnesia (2007), “key chapters in the new bible that the twentieth century had written for us.”

 

In the second volume, Hope Abandoned (trans. Hayward, 1974), Mandelstam goes on writing as an acidic truth-teller, no respecter of the despotism that had murdered her husband. She writes:

 

“We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you.”

 

Mandelstam abominates any naively rosy understanding of human nature: “Everything we have been through here was the result of succumbing to the temptations of our era—to which no one is immune who has still to be struck down by the disease of putting his faith in force and retribution. Vengeance and envy are the prime motives of human behavior.”

 

Mandelstam may be the most bitterly ironic writer (and she is a writer, not merely a documentarian) since Swift. Her narrative is unrelenting, and she leaves us—her oh-so-fortunate Western readers -- feeling like callow teenagers: “No one should lightly dismiss our experience, as complacent foreigners do, cherishing the hope that within them—who are so clever and cultured—things will be different.” No human, she reminds us, is immune to the seductions of evil. Read the final paragraph of Chap. 41 of Hope Abandoned, “The Years of Silence,” in full:

 

“This book, which I have now nearly finished, may never see the light of day. There is nothing easier than to destroy a book, unless it already circulates in samizdat or has found it ways into print (as used to happen to books in the Gutenberg period of Russian history). But even if it is destroyed, it may, perhaps, not have been entirely in vain. Before being consigned to the flames, it will be read by those whose expert task it is to destroy books, to eradicate words, to stamp out thought. They will understand none of it, but perhaps somewhere in the recesses of their strange minds the idea will stick that this crazy old woman fears nothing and despises force. It will be something if they understand that much. The thought of it will be like a little pinch of salt to sprinkle on their privileged rations, or a garnishing to whet their appetite for that other literature designed to edify and instruct people of their kind, functionaries to whom nothing matters, neither life, nor man, nor the earth, nor anything—dimmed by their breath—that lights our way. Heaven help them. But will they really succeed in their task of universal destruction?”

'I Have Known His Voice Quaver'

“It was wonderful luck for me that I should have worked with Yvor Winters. at this particular stage of my life, rather than earlier, when I would have been more impressionable, or later, when I would have been less ready to learn. So he came at just the right time for me.”

 

Good teachers are exceedingly rare, which we’re not supposed to admit, but the same goes for students. It’s a matter of temperament and, as Thom Gunn suggests above, timing. By my count I had five excellent teachers in the formal sense, and dozens of lousy or indifferent ones. The good ones made it clear they had expectations of me. Since then, I’ve known several people I’ve informally adopted as teachers, beginning with Guy Davenport.

 

Gunn’s portrait of Winters is taken from a lecture he gave in 1977 at Lake Forest College in Illinois. The recovered transcript, titled “An Apprenticeship,” was first published in the Winter issue of The Threepenny Review in 2022.

 

In 1954, Gunn had graduated from Cambridge, published his first poetry collection, Fighting Terms, and came to the United States to study with Winters at Stanford. I’m always touched by Winters’ thoughtfulness and hospitality. He met Gunn at the train station, invited him home for dinner and made sure he had a place to stay. More from Gunn about Winters:

 

“Winters emphasized that poetry has to engage the whole self. He saw it as the prime art-form, into which one concentrated as much of one’s experience and intelligence and emotion as possible.”

 

“We were brought to feel a direct continuity between ourselves and other practicers of the art, like Corbière, Williams, the American Indian poets, and George Herbert.”

 

“There were two compelling things about Winters. One was his great personal warmth, his charm and good humor. The other was that he had a deeper love of poetry than I have ever come across in anybody else. I have known his voice quaver almost into tears while reading a poem to which he was especially attached.

 

“The love was behind his increasingly strict conception of what a poem should and should not be. It seemed to him an insult to the poem that it should be used as a gymnasium for the ego. Poetry was an instrument for exploring the truth of things, as far as human beings can explore it, and it can do so with a greater verbal exactitude than even good prose can manage. Large generalized feelings (as in Whitman, whom he abhorred) were out, and rhetoric was the beginning of falsification.”

 

Gunn offers an alternative to stereotyped notions of Winters as a reactionary crank. Years after being his student Gunn would write “To Yvor Winters, 1955,” which concludes:

 

“Though night is always close, complete negation  

Ready to drop on wisdom and emotion,  

Night from the air or the carnivorous breath,  

Still it is right to know the force of death,  

And, as you do, persistent, tough in will,  

Raise from the excellent the better still.”