by Jim Harrison
No. Only that every hamster is a hostage to fortune.
Int:
Have we touched on organic gardening?
McGuane:
We had one of those things out at the end of the lawn. A lot of work. Then a certain horse named Rex got loose in the night and ate the whole plot to ground level. Sad to say but the most organic thing in the world is pus. I read it yesterday.
Int:
Are any of your friends living in domes?
McGuane:
Yes. I have a close friend who has built a $100,000 home that looks precisely like a Spalding Dot.
Int:
The golf ball, I presume?
McGuane:
Yes. From time to time he and his family can be seen scuttling in and out one of its pores. It's a noble way of life. Also, they have a duck inside with them.
Int:
Where has everyone gone?
McGuane:
Bolinas.
Int:
All of them?
McGuane:
All of them.
Int:
For the striped bass?
McGuane:
For the patchouli.
Int:
Why did you call your dog Biff?
McGuane:
Sprat.
Int:
Dink?
McGuane:
Frab . . . [snit]
[The interview terminated here. An inevitable tedium seized us. Mr. McGuane attempted to sing from Jarry's Ubu Roi accompanying a Merle Haggard record. Then he read to me from some aerosol cans he gathered in the bathroom: “Never spray toward face or open flame, avoid inhaling. If rash develops discontinue use. Contains riboflavin” etc. . . .]
1971
The Nick Adams Stories, by Ernest Hemingway
It was certain that he was playing to a much larger crowd than his immediate critical audience or the academic community. It was hard to forgive him this and it would muddle the issue (his true stature) for years afterward, even in 1972. “My God,” one would have thought, had one been old enough to think in those days, “Hemingway carries on as if he were Lord Byron, Natty Bumppo and Humphrey Bogart all in one suit of clothes.” Even some of his friends who were distinctly small-canvas or pointillist types felt called upon to parody and attack this monster—the most intelligent among us tend to be fans of some sort but we don't really want our writers to act like sports stars or screen heroes, don't want the sacred line between poet and hero to be confused. And the mood after the war, public and private, was for a separate peace: up through the Eisenhower senescence and the McCarthy rampages there was the feeling in the vaporous literary establishment that Hemingway was somehow “out of order,” or more plainly, an anachronism. Now all the residual intemperance on both sides is passing and a clearer view is possible. (There is a fine recent statement in the New American Review by Reynolds Price called “For Ernest Hemingway.” This essay is also included in Price's new book, Things Themselves, published by Atheneum.) It seems we will have to forgive Hemingway his fabled idiosyncrasies in favor of his good works, which in the gospel sense are obviously living after him, just as he would have forgiven, or at least not noticed, us for doing nothing much at all.
It is pleasant to see all the Nick Adams stories under one cover, and that is justification enough for Scribners reprinting them. Before, of course, one had to sort through several volumes to find all of them and the chronology was a trifle confusing. Now we have the additional delight of eight fragments and stories hitherto unpublished. Of the latter I liked “The Last Good Country” the best; it runs about fifty pages and serves as a beginning, evidently, of an unfinished novel. In “The Last Good Country,” Nick is escaping from two game wardens after killing a deer out of season and selling trout to a hotel. Nick takes his sister with him and though much is left undeveloped the main thread is sort of “if Huck Finn had a sister.” It shows an enormously tender, almost maudlin, side of Hemingway's character. I'm sure when Leslie Fiedler gets hold of it, and perhaps justly, some mildly incestuous aspects of the story will be drawn to the surface with a fury. But it is most of all a summer idyll, the writing very relaxed and beautiful, and obviously a first draft with the guard left down.
There is a not very delicate question here, in the eight additions, of whether unrefined or unfinished work should be allowed to emerge. After reading Islands in the Stream and African Journal serialized in Sports Illustrated one would have to opt for a yes. None of the fragments are without interest, and “Wedding Day” and “On Writing” are fascinating sketches. One could have wished that Phillip Young's preface to the volume had been longer and more detailed. Young's prose has all the subtlety of a valve grinder but he perceives some of the joy in Hemingway that was so disastrously missing in the Carlos Baker biography.
After a decade without reading these stories one is struck first by the incorruptible purity of the style, the splendor and clarity of the language as language. We must remember that Hemingway after all was a pointy-headed intellectual and artist and his avowed intent was to write like Cézanne painted. The stories have all the Apollonian precision that his gaudy life apparently lacked; but again it is easy to fall into the perverse monism of the book reviewer or professor. Mistakes have been made trying to teach Philosophy 101 out of the stories, or errantly gathering, as so many young men have done, a life-style from them. Wisdom in a novelist or poet is so often an elaborate hype that is only self-applicable. As an instance one turns to Faulkner again and again to be enriched, to get pleasure pure and simple, not to find principles of conduct though they might be individually perceived. The Nick Adams stories are a young man's stories written by a young man and enjoyed mostly by other young men. The faultlessness of their pursuits is an embarrassment to older, wiser souls who miss the full panoply of contemporary attitudes and beliefs that helped them accommodate themselves to the miseries of the twentieth century. At least half the stories wear their durability as art very openly and easily. And “The Big Two-Hearted River” would be near the summit in any literature.
Surely Hemingway's presence has its irritations and all that he did, wisely and unwisely, between novels continues to live after him. Last October in a bar at the Hotel Europa in Leningrad I had a long, semi-drunken conversation with an East German cello player where it was revealed that I liked to fly-fish and hunt for grouse. The cello player said, “Oh, like Hemingway.”
1972
Afterimages: Zen Poems by Shinkichi Takahashi
Properly, we shd. read for power. Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hands.
—EZRA POUND, Guide to Kulchur
Takahashi is a Zennist as purely as San Juan de la Cruz and Saint Teresa are Christian (Dante and Milton remain students of bliss with feet surely stuck in the often muddy field of dogma). Shinkichi Takahashi is a poet, truly a foreign poet, so foreign that our taxonomy exhausts itself until we remember that an encounter with a true poet usually has this quality of foreignness. You need know nothing of Zen to become immersed in his work. You will inevitably know something of Zen when you emerge, but that is not my purpose here. I will try to keep my Western feet out of my mouth by leaving Zen to those who are masters, and opt for a manic attempt to get an American poetry audience to buy and read this book.
The sixties and early seventies have been predominantly an “internationalist” phase in American poetry. The energies behind this phase are ubiquitous and it has slowly gathered a great deal of energy since Kenneth Rexroth said it was happening in a rather cranky New Directions essay back in 1956. He was on the money, it seems, a precursor whose renditions from the Japanese and Chinese never got the interest they deserved in the midst of the new and vibrant introductions to European, Russian, Latin American poetry appearing everywhere. Jerome Rothenberg and others even attempted to introduce us to the poetry of those Native Americans, the Indians.
But work from the East appeared more slowly, despite Whaley, Pound, Bl
yth, Rexroth, and dozens of others. And after an early interest in a rather Zennist sort of “image” Pound went awry in Confucianism, which is grand for a good society but a less meaty source for poetry. As a poet I would frankly not trade a single wanka from Dogen for the sum of Confucius. And if good government interests you more than the Diamond Sutra, take a civil-service exam. But I wander. In my own muddled head the East entered slowly through the proselytizers everyone knows about—Suzuki, Watts etc.—but more dominantly by way of poets like Clayton Eshleman and Cid Corman, and most powerfully of all through Gary Snyder. Snyder is a marvelous poet to read, a very disturbing poet to be around, and a Zen Buddhist. Now Lucien Stryk must be added to this list. He translated After-images with Takashi Ikemoto, and has published a number of books dealing with Zen in addition to his own poetry. We understand how desperately feeble and parochial our poetry is when Shinkichi Takahashi reaches seventy-two before all but a very few of us know he exists.
Oddly, Takahashi is perilously available. He is not one of those poets of whom we lamely say that “he cannot be quoted.” In my notes I find twenty-two poems I want to quote in whole or part. Afterimages owns a “thingness,” an omniscience about the realities that seems to typify genius of the first order. If one image is worth many volumes as Pound infers, what may a thousand images be worth? Takahashi, of course, would say they are worth nothing. But that is an Olympian view that we need not concern ourselves with. He is there. We are here. Knut Hamsun was within this mode when he told an interviewer he wrote because it “didn't matter.” So were Li Po and Tu Fu when they stood on a bridge together one evening composing poems on leaves and throwing them into the river.
But this thingness—when Takahashi writes of a crow, it is an actual crow, not as so often in our poetry, a convenient fulcrum on which to dangle an idea or our neuroses:
CROW
The crow, spreading wide wings,
Flapped lazily off.
Soon her young will be doing the same,
Firm wings rustling.
It's hard to tell the male
Crow from the female,
But their love, their mating
Must be fresh as their flight.
Asleep in a night train,
I felt my hat fly off.
The crow was lost in mist,
The engine ploughed into the sea.
This quality of “thingness” is allowed to reach monstrous levels of consciousness in “Destruction”:
DESTRUCTION
The universe is forever falling apart—
No need to push the button.
It collapses at a finger's touch:
Why, it barely hangs on the tail of a sparrow's eye.
The universe is so much eye secretion,
Hordes leap from the tips
Of your nostril hairs. Lift your right hand:
It's in your palm. There's room enough
On the sparrow's eyelash for the whole.
A paltry thing, the universe:
Here is all strength, here the greatest strength.
You and the sparrow are one
And, should he wish, he can crush you.
The universe trembles before him.
It is difficult to characterize metaphor except with metaphor. Afterimages is like seeing a long, beautifully filmed movie on a hundred mammals we didn't know existed. And after the movie many of the animals decide to step from the screen and live with you. They don't ask. You simply have to make room. This quality of freedom of imagination is so prepossessing that other aspects are easily forgotten. But we stumble over all of the greasy dogma we attach to “freedom” while we don't over a sparrow. Or the magpie in “Magpie”:
MAGPIE
I start across the bridge.
Coining toward me from the other side,
A woman, drenched and perhaps
Having failed to purchase apples, mutters—
“Sardines, sardines.” Below, listening,
A magpie bobs mournfully up and down.
It is a long black bridge,
So long that to cross it is unthinkable.
My white breath dies, rises and dies.
Life: dust on a bridge rail.
Wars, revolutions: bubbles on a stream.
Late in the frosty night, alone,
I cross an endless bridge.
Quite naturally, nearly all poetry is elaborate harness that never smelled a real horse. How refreshing to find a book full of wild horses. The harness that contains their energies is a nearly invisible tracery, a spirit harness. Perhaps it is even a mistake to mention Zen, which is only a word people seem to trip over; rather they trip over false conceptions of Zen. They think of monks sitting around in a full lotus eating rice. This is like trying to visualize an entire, unknown body from a single hair. As an instance, Takahashi's poems can contain anger and profound sexuality.
THE PEACH
A little girl under a peach tree,
Whose blossoms fall into the entrails
Of the earth.
There you stand, but a mountain may be there
Instead; it is not unlikely that the earth
May be yourself.
You step against a plate of iron and half
Your face is turned to iron. I will smash
Flesh and bone
And suck the cracked peach. She went up the mountain
To hide her breasts in the snowy ravine.
Women's legs
Are more or less alike. The leaves of the peach tree
Stretch across the sea to the end of
The continent.
The sea was at the little girl's beck and call.
I will cross the sea like a hairy
Caterpillar
And catch the odour of your body.
There is a lovely humor in Takahashi that catches us unaware. At one moment we may be dwelling on a poem in which the poet wishes to give up his life for an ill wife, and at the next moment encounter a poem such as “Fish.”
FISH
I hold a newspaper, reading.
Suddenly my hands become cow ears,
Then turn into Pusan, the South Korean port.
Lying on a mat
Spread on the bankside stones,
I fell asleep.
But a willow leaf, breeze-stirred,
Brushed my ear.
I remained just as I was,
Near the murmurous water.
When young there was a girl
Who became a fish for me.
Whenever I wanted fish
Broiled in salt, I'd summon her.
She'd get down on her stomach
To be sun-cooked on the stones.
And she was always ready!
Alas, she no longer conies to me.
An old benighted drake,
I hobble homeward.
But look, my drake feet become horse hoofs!
Now they drop off
And, stretching marvelously,
Become the tracks of the Tokaido Railway Line.
Nothing is denied entrance into these poems: department stores, the atomic bomb, rats, clouds, Mars, stewardesses, helicopters, penguins, the Thames, trucks, strawberries, rain, dogs. All things are in their minutely suggestive proportion and given an energy we aren't familiar with, lost as most of us are in the romantic lie of the world as a confused extension of our personalities. The poet's stance is nimble and totally devoid of any of the usual crappy whining and self-pity the world habitually isolates as items in the poet's persona. Think how wonderful it would be if, when poets “mooned” over things, the verb would describe the dropping of the trousers rather than the usual Ichabod Crane trip.
Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, the joint translators, present useful, occasionally brilliant, introductions. The introductions are extremely helpful, gates through which one enters the house of the book. Ikemoto, a profound Zennist himself, quotes Takahashi—"In short, confidence and action is all. One would present a
sorry sight if one kept loitering, fascinated, within the fold of literature. True poetry is born out of the very despair that the word is useless and poetry is to be abandoned.” Stryk offers a marvelous Rilke quote that is peculiarly Zennist:
We play with obscure forces, which we cannot lay hold of, by the names we give them, as children play with fire, and it seems for a moment as if all the energy had lain unused in things until we came to apply it to our transitory life and its needs. But repeatedly . . . these forces shake off their names and rise . . . against their little lords, no, not even against—they simply rise, and civilizations fall from the shoulders of the earth . . . .
Perhaps it is our syncretist impulse, that Stryk notes in Rilke, that attracts us so strongly to Takahashi. He was an early Dadaist and that sneaks in. Some of the poems remind you of the lucidity of Rimbaud's Illuminations—all primary colors mixed with nouns, verbs and vision. There are no hedges or temples, grottoes, shrines. At times the impassivity disturbs us until we see the energy just barely contained by the skin of the poem. Afterimages has all the dangers owned by a considerable poetry when it implies a Code of Behavior. We shy away. Then return discomfited, with the simple eagerness we owned before we became so smart. We visit places in Takahashi that we once may have visited hastily in a dream, or in a moment too startling to record the perception. We had no equipment to catch it. The book engages and subsumes us. We become that perfectly vulnerable reader that any poet wishes for his work.
Part of the power must come from the fact that the poet has ten thousand centers as a Zennist, thus is virtually centerless. He is not defending a core known as Man Making Literature. All of this in a poet who thinks himself no better or worse than a quail.
QUAILS
It is the grass that moves, not the quails.
Weary of embraces, she thought of
Committing her body to the flame.
When I shut my eyes, I hear far and wide
The air of the Ice Age stirring.
When I open them, a rocket passes over a meteor
A quail's egg is complete in itself,
Leaving not room enough for a dagger's point.
All the phenomena in the universe: myself.