by Harold Bloom
“November Sunday Morning” is a hymn to light and reminds me that Alvin enjoyed chanting aloud Milton’s invocation to book III of Paradise Lost. I remarked once to my friend that he did not center upon the sun as did Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens but only upon the light. It was as if his sense of natural light cut itself off from the solar trajectory, in defiance of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and of all poets who emerged from Nietzsche’s shadow. What mattered about the light for Alvin was its cleansing effect upon everything open to perception. Plato would not have termed the light an all-exacting good, yet Feinman was no Platonist. Severe and rigorous, “November Sunday Morning” offers only a self-limiting transcendence. That so minimal a vision should become a poem of this extraordinary distinction continues to surprise me after so many decades of repeated recitations that I murmur to myself.
I remember Alvin’s attachment to Pilgrim Heights on Cape Cod. When first he showed me this poem, I remarked it could take a Stevensian title: “I Was Myself the Compass of That Sea”:
Something, something, the heart here
Misses, something it knows it needs
Unable to bless—the wind passes;
A swifter shadow sweeps the reeds,
The heart a colder contrast brushes.
So this fool, face-forward, belly
Pressed among the rushes, plays out
His pulse to the dune’s long slant
Down from blue to bluer element,
The bold encompassing drink of air
And namelessness, a length compound
Of want and oneness the shore’s mumbling
Distantly tells—something a wing’s
Dry pivot stresses, carved
Through barrens of stillness and glare:
The naked close of light in light,
Light’s spare embrace of blade and tremor
Stealing the generous eye’s plunder
Like a breathing banished from the lung’s
Fever, lost in parenthetic air.
Raiding these nude recesses, the hawk
Resumes his yielding balance, his shadow
Swims the field, the sands beyond,
The narrow edges fed out to light,
To the sea’s eternal licking monochrome.
The foolish hip, the elbow bruise
Upright from the dampening mat,
The twisted grasses turn, unthatch,
Light-headed blood renews its stammer—
Apart, below, the dazed eye catches
A darkened figure abruptly measured
Where folding breakers lay their whites;
The heart from its height starts downward,
Swum in that perfect pleasure
It knows it needs, unable to bless.
“Pilgrim Heights”
Feinman’s almost solipsistic rapture is partly inherited from Stevens’s Whitmanian Hoon, who finds himself more truly and more strange by singing another “Song of Myself.” When he gave me the poem, I initially felt wonder at what seemed Alvin’s most distinguished performance up to that time. After more than sixty years, the sense of ecstasy that for him constituted the spirit of solitude has become more dialectical in my understanding. The darkened figure who breaks the poet’s reverie restores the shadow of an external world. Feinman balances the perfect pleasure that the poetic heart requires against the cost of confirmation that is a stance excluding the power of blessing otherness, whether in persons or in the hawk’s yielding balance. The poem labors to attain a generosity toward otherness and yet knowingly falls short of this accomplishment.
William Butler Yeats, another presence haunting Feinman’s poetry, trusted that casting out remorse would give him a sense of being blessed by everything and then looking upon all otherness and blessing it. Feinman, who comes later, has a vision of the mind as a ceaseless activity, engaged in suffering a process of working apart all things that are joined by it. That rending allows no hope of being blessed even by the mind’s power over a universe of death.
Alvin’s major poem is “Preambles,” a hard, driving gamble with the limits of discursiveness. Its opening never abandons my memory:
Vagrant, back, my scrutinies
The candid deformations as with use
A coat or trousers of one now dead
Or as habit smacks of certitude
Even cosmographies, broad orchards
The uncountable trees Or a river
Seen along the green monotonies
Of its banks And the talk
Of memorable ideals ending
In irrelevance I would cite
Wind-twisted spaces, absence
Listing to a broken wall
Though it is a poem in three parts, each segment flows without break, a quality that adds to the difficulty of discussing individual passages. Thus the montage of “Wind-twisted spaces, absence / Listing to a broken wall” leads on to further wounded tropes:
And the cornered noons
Our lives played in, such things
As thwart beginnings, limit Or
Juxtapose that longest vision
A bright bird winged to its idea
To the hand stripped
By a damaged resolution
Daily of its powers Archai
Bruited through crumbling masteries
To hang like swollen apples
In the river, witnesses
Stilled to their clotted truth All
Discursion fated and inept
So the superior reality
Of photographs The soul’s
Tragic abhorrence of detail.
I hear in the foreground of this the aura of Hart Crane’s “Repose of Rivers” and a shadow of his “Sunday Morning Apples,” a poem Alvin liked to recite to me. Yet Crane does not present us with the cognitive difficulties that are the matrix of “Preambles.” Memory in Hart Crane transmembers the poet’s sufferings into song, but in Feinman memory is always blocked. His scrutinies return to him damaged by their overreaching and yield him metaphors of deformation, twisting, absence, thwarting, limiting, stripping, and clotting. The image of working apart what has been inextricably and exquisitely joined is his central trope.
In the second preamble, an adagio intervenes, as if to lower the poem’s intolerable tension, though the darkness gathers and does not fall:
So
Statues hold through every light
The grave persuasive
Candors of their stride And so
The mind in everything it joins
And suffers to redeem apart
Plays victim to its own intent
Wallace Stevens, in his “Saint John and the Back-Ache,” has the Back-Ache, which I take to be the fallen history of each of us, complain to Saint John:
The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father,
Because, in chief, it, only, can defend
Against itself. At its mercy, we depend
Upon it.
I recall remarking to Alvin in 1955, while we toured Devon and Cornwall together, that Stevens had a premonition of the impasse “Preambles” was to constitute for the later poet. The final section of Feinman’s major poem renders that impasse with an agile but self-undoing eloquence:
These even love’s rejoinder
As of every severed thing
The ecce only, only hands
Or hardnesses, the gleam a water
Or a light, a paused thing
Clothes in vacua killed
To a limbless beauty Take
These torn possessives there
Where you plead the radiant
O
f your truth’s gloom Own
To your sleep, your waking
The tread that is walked
From the inner of its pace
The play of a leaf to an earth.
The image of severing always negates the gleams and radiances that Feinman ultimately inherited from Wordsworth and from Stevens. For Wordsworth, the light of common day at last subsumed the glory and the freshness of his poetic dream. Stevens, who cried out jubilantly, “What is there here but weather, what spirit / Have I except it come from the sun,” sustained his poetry in Whitman’s mode of opening the self to the wind and the weather and, above all, the sun. I sorrowed even in the middle 1950s that Alvin was destroying his extraordinary gift by an asceticism alien to poetic vision.
I do not find in any of his later poems anything equal to the best work in Preambles and Other Poems (1964). The only one that moves me greatly is “Matinal,” initially titled “Morning-Hymn for the Breaker of Horses.” I have no idea when Alvin composed this, and at first reading it seemed a kind of self-parody. Gradually, I have come to admire it, but with some reservations, since its high style is rather hyperbolical. Feinman must have been aware that W. B. Yeats is too strong a presence in “Matinal.”
Where wild god-bridled terrors joy
My thundered pulse; not I,
Some lashed stone presence wakes
To wield, to quicken, buoy
This thrill galvanic gusto sky-
Ward where sun-slashed heavens break,
To chant the reins of spirit skilled
To bone, as is thy sling
Of brilliance turmoil bound,
Thy mounted salvos drilled
Past dare of conjuring
The paean of tempest deafness drowned…
Alvin was always happiest on or near rocky beaches, whether on Cape Cod or in Cornwall. He particularly liked to watch dawn come up, and exulted in the impact of wave on rock. His ascetic spirit was assuaged by the blast and vaulting of the wind’s voice echoing cliffs and scattering the light of a new day. Nine years after his final vanishing, I continue to mourn both my friend and the gift he failed to nurture. I write this in the elegy season of September 2017 and wonder at the final quatrain of “Matinal”:
Wave shattering wave past sense,
Past power commute the breath,
O epic tempo of no birth or death
Blastbind the blood thy reverence.
Something that is being released there had been long repressed by Feinman. It is as though his earlier avoidance of the high style in Yeats, Stevens, Hart Crane now takes a revenge upon him. His final poems and fragments are caught between his fundamental disjunctiveness and this belated desire to give expression to the voice that was great within him. I am strangely moved by one of them:
The sun beating on his brain
And a cat slouching on the woodpile
And flies nauseous with heat
He holds three eternal parameters
The habit of his eye repeats
The shapes he reifies
Let the silence silence its own ache
There is nothing but the plenum of a small red brain
The flies fall suppurant among the sticks
The cat prepares for life
As though the moveable could move
Even the impossible recedes
As though within the clot of brain
Were space or sun to make a world
“Backyard, Hoboken, Summer”
I have no idea of the date of this rather Stevensian poem. It was not published in Alvin’s lifetime. “Backyard, Hoboken, Summer” is hardly a poem one could love. Yet it could only have been written by Feinman. He had a unique power, stronger even than that of Elizabeth Bishop, to so order the visual and the visionary that the borders between them vanished. His consciousness was a plenum that could have created a heterocosm, where space and sun might have made another world.
As Alvin lay dying, his wife, Deborah Dorfman, read aloud his poem “Morning, Arraignment with Image”:
That wave that high turning that
Once disresembled that
Once disremembered a future—
Now its wake broad conscripting suffices
And leaves a roomful of years unmolested…
Except for this short pre-morning of truck sounds,
This barrack of seasons no longer embodied;
You thought to have proffered an image of justice
But the fall of that wave now
But the scroll of that wave now
Is heartbreak terror and boldness knowing
That justice that hates you
Your eyes its own eyes and our shame.
I have always found this dark and distinguished yet have never liked it. According to the writer James Geary, once Alvin’s student, the dying Feinman asked his wife, “Who wrote that?” Deborah, once my student, took him to mean that the person who composed that poem was already gone. She said that his last words were “I’m past tense.”
Love makes it difficult to render a full judgment upon a poet and his poems. A double handful of Feinman’s poems will live. I could wish that he had been less of an ascetic of the spirit. But then he would not have been himself. To have written “November Sunday Morning,” “Pilgrim Heights,” and “Preambles” is a vindication of his rigor and integrity. For me they stand with Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane upon the heights.
John Ashbery, “At North Farm”
I BEGAN TO READ John Ashbery’s poetry in 1956, when I purchased Some Trees in a New Haven bookstore. Since I don’t keep copies of my handwritten letters, I cannot precisely recall what I wrote the poet directly after I absorbed Some Trees. Doubtless my letters to John are preserved in his Harvard archive. His letters to me are up in my attic and will be transferred to Yale at my death.
Our friendship has been continuous these sixty years, and I have just phoned him at the Whittier Rehabilitation Center, where he was recovering rather slowly from double pneumonia. He and Archie Ammons saluted each other as peers and gave one joint reading somewhere on the Jersey Shore. Together with the late James Merrill, they seem to me the major poets of their generation.
Ashbery was very reticent concerning Frank O’Hara, who was his close friend from their days at Harvard until O’Hara’s accidental death on Fire Island in 1966. Of Ashbery’s companions in what was called the New York School, I knew Kenneth Koch mostly through introducing some of his readings both in New Haven and in New York City. James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, and O’Hara I knew only slightly. I enjoy rereading Frank O’Hara, but he falls away from me, as does Guest. Schuyler, a very considerable poet, sustains study.
Ashbery stands apart. I begin with “Evening in the Country,” a poem in his beautiful fourth volume, The Double Dream of Spring:
I am still completely happy.
My resolve to win further I have
Thrown out, and am charged by the thrill
Of the sun coming up. Birds and trees, houses,
These are but the stations for the new sign of being
In me that is to close late, long
After the sun has set and darkness come
To the surrounding fields and hills.
But if breath could kill, then there would not be
Such an easy time of it, with men locked back there
In the smokestacks and corruption of the city.
Now as my questioning but admiring gaze expands
To magnificent outposts, I am not so much at home
With these memorabilia of vision as on a tour
Of my remotest properties, and the eidolon
Sinks into the effective “being” of each thing,
On motionless explorations of how dense a thing can be,
How light, and these are finished before they have begun
Leaving me refreshed and somehow younger.
Night has deployed rather awesome forces
Against this state of affairs: ten thousand helmeted footsoldiers,
A Spanish armada stretching to the horizon, all
Absolutely motionless until the hour to strike
But I think there is not too much to be said or be done
And that these things eventually take care of themselves
With rest and fresh air and the outdoors, and a good view of things.
So we might pass over this to the real
Subject of our concern, and that is
Have you begun to be in the context you feel
Now that the danger has been removed?
Light falls on your shoulders, as is its way,
And the process of purification continues happily,
Unimpeded, but has the motion started
That is to quiver your head, send anxious beams
Into the dusty corners of the rooms
Eventually shoot out over the landscape
In stars and bursts? For other than this we know nothing
And space is a coffin, and the sky will put out the light.
I see you eager in your wishing it the way
We may join it, if it passes close enough:
This sets the seal of distinction on the success or failure of your attempt.
There is growing in that knowledge
We may perhaps remain here, cautious yet free
On the edge, as it rolls its unblinking chariot
Into the vast open, the incredible violence and yielding
Turmoil that is to be our route.
I could not persuade Ashbery to include this poem in any of the many readings at which I introduced him. Like the famous “Soonest Mended,” it seems to be an aftereffect of O’Hara’s death. It is an epilogue to a dark passage in “Soonest Mended”:
These then were some hazards of the course,