On the crossed brow of listening.
He beats his empty hands on his ears, and twists
All around his leg, white, edged gold, sewn flat
Beside a hooded falcon burned in grass
—to the war whoop of the last poems—
Real God, roll
roll as a result
Of a whole thing: ocean:
Thís: wide altar-shudder of miles
Given twelve new dead-level powers
Of glass, in borrowed binoculars, set into
The hand-held eyes of this man
—you get the sense someone told him he was holding the reins too tightly and he thought, All right, then, I’ll go to hell. The later poems have a Poundian energy, an arrogance, that can be both daft and charming. But they seem to want to say more than they do—they would speak of final things in thunder but must settle for shouting about next-to-last things. Howard says, “Dickey grew too big for mere poetry,” but poetry, even at its merest, is big enough for anything James Dickey could have thrown at it. It’s rather that his poetry grew too small for its unruly grandiloquence. Even while acknowledging, with the trope of binoculars, that his eyes are borrowed and too powerful for the scene—the Beowulf poet at the beach—he compares his son’s riding in on the surf to the Last Days ( “his second son coming to his head / Like Armageddon, with the last wave” ).
It’s in the middle poems that Dickey flashes out into raw, free sharpness. A real god rolls through “May Day Sermon to the Women of Gilmer County, Georgia, by a Woman Preacher Leaving the Baptist Church,” a diesel-fumed negative hallelujah of backwoods terror:
Each year at this time I shall be telling you of the Lord
—Fog, gamecock, snake and neighbor—giving men all the help they need
To drag their daughters into barns.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Telling: telling of Jehovah come and gone
Down on His belly descending creek-curving blowing His legs
Like candles, out putting North Georgia copper on His head
Dickey moves into the sermon form like the devil himself, flicking his forked tongue above the congregants, preaching at full throttle for ten giant pages, his voice never breaking, soaring past country girls “dancing with God in a mule’s eye,” “the black / Bible’s white swirling ground,” past an incestuous father “rambling / In Obadiah,” past a needle passing “through the eye of a man bound for Heaven,” past hogs and quartermoons, an old man “with an ice-pick on his mind, / A willow limb in his hand,” the kudzu advancing, “its copperheads drunk and tremendous / With hiding, toward the cows.”
And I would just go on quoting if I could, because Dickey finds in this poem—and in “The Christmas Towns,” “For the Last Wolverine,” “Adultery,” and a dozen more—a canvas large enough for his palette. The closing lines of “May Day Sermon” are worth a hundred Armageddons:
the animals walk through
The white breast of the Lord muttering walk with nothing
To do but be in the spring laurel in the mist and self-sharpened
Moon walk through the resurrected creeks through the Lord
At their own pace the cow shuts its mouth and the Bible is still
Still open at anything we are gone the barn wanders over the earth.
* * *
Dickey remained to the end a votary of that period style that liked its bourbon neat and its hawks locked in spiritual combat. “The Surround,” Dickey said,
is a kind of elegy for the American poet James Wright, a close friend of mine for years, who feared the change from day to night and the coming of the predators, when the whole climate of fighting in the animal world changes to that of prey and predator, in the dark: he used to say that he feared the dark because he feared the change “in the surround.” I am telling him in the poem that he is not to fear this anymore, for he is the surround; the whole thing good and bad, and that the moon is beautiful on water, and that the tree grows its rings in the dark as well as the light.61
This is, on the one hand, sentimental trash, and, on the other, an eloquent deployment of a vocabulary in which Dickey and certain of his contemporaries were so at home that they mistook it for a kind of natural language. Robert Bly, who accused Dickey of macho warmongering, had more in common with him than he imagined.
For all their stylistic differences, these poets shared a somewhat desperate (and somewhat ridiculous) refusal to accept that the cultural authority of the Poet had been eclipsed. If I’ve lapsed into psychological criticism, it is because their poetry was so often nakedly psychological—a sifting of correlatives of moods and inner states. For Dickey, these were often “old-stone,” deliberately archaic, as if the only horses alive enough were painted on the recesses of Altamira. Someone should count the appearances of the moon—that old bone—in Dickey’s poetry. Even now he is crouched beneath it, wrapped in a bearskin and stoned on glory, trying to shape-shift into a wolf.
RED
On her fourth album, Nashville’s twenty-two-year-old ambassador to the malls of America is feeling a bit insecure about her status: “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” finds her ex listening to “some indie record that’s much cooler than mine”; she and her friends “dress up like hipsters” on “22” and get dissed by the “cool kids.”
It’s never a good idea for megastars to complain about how uncool they are, but she has a point. Aren’t we finished condescending to Taylor Swift yet? If a young female songwriter this talented and consistent were making indie music on Domino Records, would critics find it necessary to congratulate her for writing her own songs or reproach her for naïve sentiments? Have these people ever listened to the xx? Forget Swift’s age (even if she did write “Tim McGraw,” the best teenage lyric since Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat,” when she was a freshman in high school), her Forever-21-fresh image, her alleged ideological failings, Red is as smart and catchy as any album of this century. Pardon me if I hear more vitality and verve in her corniest love-story/break-up anthem than in all the adolescent morosity Justin Vernon wrings from his wounded soul.
Swift’s third album, 2010’s Speak Now, had its boggy moments (though it also had “Dear John,” one of her best songs), but most of record four is on ground as firm as an endless country road in August. There are a few puddles: Taylor, if you’re reading this, the slow ones aren’t working (“featuring Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol” is not the most promising phrase to see tagged to an MP3 file). And the vocals could be tighter and less mannered: “The trademark catch in her voice,” Greil Marcus e-mailed me, “makes her the fourth, white-girl member of Destiny’s Child.”
But most of these songs go down like pop punch spiked by pros. The gorgeous “All Too Well” cribs the bass line from U2’s “With or Without You” and dances “ ’round the kitchen in the refrigerator light.” “Starlight” disco-dazzles Swift right out of her usual AOR persona. On “State of Grace” and “Holy Ground”—which, with their chugging rhythms and guitar filigree, sort of are indie rock, except without the creative writing–workshop world-wariness—Swift gets staccato over Larry Mullen–sized drums and whoa-oh-oh-oh-whoa cheerleader chants. And “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” cowritten with Max Martin, is the best hit Kelly Clarkson never had, a venomous confection of processed guitars. It’s a monster. You can hear the Bubblicious smacking in Hot Topics across the land as Taylor Nation sings along.
Is it country? Country fans and country radio seem to think so.I The question usually just reveals the ignorance of its asker. Listen to Jerrod Niemann’s “Free the Music,” Keith Urban’s “Used to the Pain,” the Band Perry’s “Miss You Being Gone,” or Miranda Lambert’s “Kerosene,” then get back to me about what country music is. My answer: the most dynamically vibrant pop genre of the last decade or so. Sure, the tropes that, like the “autumn leaves” of “All Too Well,” “fall dow
n like pieces into place” are generic enough to fit any genre. On Red, someone has “a new Maserati,” but only “dead-end streets” and “little town streets” to drive it down. Autumn’s a season of mists; summers, boys pick you up on the boardwalk, you sing along with the car radio, then they stop calling.
It’s just that country has been, for some time, the genre with the least need to be humorless about its own identity (Brad Paisley’s “This Is Country Music” is funny). Is “All love ever does is break and burn and end” too earnest for you, even with its tail of Donnean iambs? Country’s very hospitality to the unironic—Springsteen surges, Bon Jovi licks—is what gives it the scope of actual irony, dialectical and reflective: “happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time,” as Swift puts it on “22.”
Whatever it is, this music is full of adult pleasures, even if the most explicit image Swift offers is of an ex-boyfriend sniffing her scarf because it smells like her. On Red—the color of blood and lipstick and fire and southern dirt and hearts and conservatism and tractors and communism and sin, this last a word whose charged valence here might discomfit know-it-alls who would never use it without scare quotes—Swift’s too smart and tuneful to condescend to her contradictions. Or to yours.
* * *
I. After 1989—a record I love almost as much as Red—I’ll take no for an answer.
MAKE THE MACHINE SING
In 1937 Sergei Eisenstein noted an affinity between filmic montage and the imagistic sequencing Homer employed in The Iliad. Joanna Paul, in Film and the Classical Epic Tradition, traces several arguments “that certain pre-modern societies understand visuality in a way that can be equated to cinema.”62 Paul Leglise, working from Lucretius’s conception of vision, wrote in 1958 that “it is no paradox to claim that the new terms” of cinema “define very exactly certain literary techniques used by an ancient Latin poet.”63 Leglise thought of Virgil, not Homer, as the first cineaste; in 1970 we find Alain Malissard arguing that Homer’s poetry, not Virgil’s, anachronistically exemplifies the seventh art.
Obviously, it is problematic to liken ancient poetry to a medium that was invented around the same time as Coca-Cola. But I’ve been thinking of The Iliad in cinematic terms since I first read it in college, when I was also learning about Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko, Godard and Nicholas Ray. Eisenstein, drawing on G. E. Lessing’s Laocoön, isolates Homer’s description of Hera’s chariot, pointing out how the poet depicts the wheels in stages. In Stanley Lombardo’s flinty rendition:
Hebe slid the bronze, eight-spoked wheels
Onto the car’s iron axle, wheels with pure gold rims
Fitted with bronze tires, a stunning sight,
And the hubs spinning on both sides were silver.
Strangely, there is no good film version of Homer’s epic. Or perhaps that’s not so strange. As cinematic as its techniques may be, The Iliad does not lend itself easily to conventional commercial moviemaking. Maybe it would take something like Jacques Rivette’s Out 1—a thirteen-hour film in which theater groups rehearse avant-garde adaptations of Aeschylus—to capture its sweep and roil. (This is one reason Godard’s Le Mépris remains the best Homeric movie—among other things, it’s a consideration of how one might bring Homer to the screen; Fritz Lang plays himself, hired to adapt The Odyssey.) Directors tend to play up the romance angle and tack the sack of Troy from The Aeneid onto the end, as in Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy (1956) and Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004). As Paul notes, The Iliad “does not claim to be ‘about’ the Trojan War, and it does not matter that it ends before the war does.”64
Troy is a bad movie, peppered with basic errors and laughable dialogue. But it contains one scene that seems to me to possess genuine Homeric insight. It’s the battle between Achilles, played pretty well by Brad Pitt, and Eric Bana’s Hector. Achilles is insane with rage and grief over Patroclus—you know the story—and controls the fight from the outset. But at one point, Hector scores a blow, nicking Achilles’s breastplate. Achilles looks down at the mark in astonishment. It’s just a scratch on the leather, not worth a second thought, but Achilles can’t believe it, and you realize—no one has ever penetrated his defenses that far before. No sword point has ever been that close to his flesh. It’s a brilliant moment: it tells you how good Hector is, and, even more, how good Achilles is. And in a flash, from a simple glance, you have a sense of these two warriors as titans—the son of a god contending with the son of a king.
This is the sort of effect the late Christopher Logue achieves again and again in War Music: An Account of Homer’s Iliad, the greatest film adaptation of Homer ever set down on paper. The new edition gathers the poem, written over forty years and published in installments over twenty-five—War Music (1981, covering books 16–19); Kings (1991, books 1 and 2); The Husbands (1995, books 3 and 4); All Day Permanent Red (2003, books 5 and 6); Cold Calls (2005, books 7–9)—and adds as an appendix Big Men Falling a Long Way, editor Christopher Reid’s reconstruction of Logue’s projected final installment, which contains fragments from books 10 to 24.
It’s very far from a translation, by design—Logue, who couldn’t read ancient Greek and worked from existing translations, rearranges Homer’s material as he pleases and drags the diction into the present by way of Pound’s Cantos, even borrowing lines from August Kleinzahler. The redoubtable classics scholar Bernard Knox was shocked at the liberties taken in The Husbands. It might have helped to think of it as a movie. Indeed, Logue opens with an establishing shot worthy of John Ford:
Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.
The filmic qualities become explicit at times, infiltrating the poem’s vocabulary. The shift of speakers in Achilles’s insolent exchange with Agamemnon is produced by “Silence. // Reverse the shot. // Go close. // Hear Agamemnon . . .” After Hector kills Patroclus, as the Greeks mass on the beach to attack: “Close-up on Bombax; 45; fighting since 2.” “Quick cuts like these may give / Some definition to the mind’s wild eye.”
Critics have focused on these cinematic aspects of the poem, but Paul brings out how properly Homeric they are—how The Iliad is “primed and ready to be made cinematic.”65 Logue’s poem, I’d argue, zooms in closer to Homer than the plodding literalism of a version like Richmond Lattimore’s, made to “please professors,” as Guy Davenport said.66 Of course lines like these take us far from the Greek text:
“There’s Bubblegum!” “He’s out to make his name!”
“He’s charging us!” “He’s prancing!” “Get that leap!”
THOCK! THOCK!
“He’s in the air!” “Bubblegum’s in the air!” “Above the dust!”
“He’s lying on the sunshine in the air!” “Seeing the Wall!” “The arrows keep him up!”
THOCK! THOCK!
And you’ll find Kansas in these pages, and Uzis, binoculars, Stalingrad, and Cape Kennedy, “headroom” and guitars, helicopters, airplanes, fly-fishing, gigantic font, and the earth revolving around the sun. But like Brad Pitt’s stunned face, War Music finds a visual and emotional equivalent for Homer’s human realities, as when Achilles looks over the armor Thetis has brought him:
Spun the holy tungsten like a star between his knees,
Slitting his eyes against the flare, some said,
But others thought the hatred shuttered by his lids
Made him protect the metal.
His eyes like furnace doors ajar.
When he had got its weight
And let its industry assuage his grief:
“I’ll fight,”
He said. Simple as that. “I’ll fight.”
And so Troy fell.
It doesn’t always work. But Logue’s reconciliations of idea and image are often perfect.
Think of a raked sky-wide Venetian blind.
Add the receding traction of its slats
>
Of its slats of its slats as a hand draws it up.
Hear the Greek army getting to its feet.
These lines even have a soundtrack, the repeated staccato alliteration of the slats recalling Ginsberg’s “boxcars boxcars boxcars.”
There are fine passages in the unfinished material culled from Logue’s notes—with a title as delicious as Big Men Falling a Long Way there would almost have to be—including an initial stab at Brad Pitt vs. Eric Bana, the scene I most lament Logue’s not having lived to complete. But welcome as it is, this material is mostly undeveloped and diffuse, and can’t add much to our experience of the poem. We can all regret that the poet was unable to undertake his planned rewriting of Homer’s famous 130-line description of Achilles’s shield, which Logue proposed in his notes to extend.
But War Music is complete in its way, one of the mad socko follies of the twentieth century, writhing with coarse, fevered life. Logue conveys the terrible rush of war with the guerilla pathos of Samuel Fuller’s epigraph to The Big Red One: “ ‘Why are you crying?’—An insane child to a burning tank.” Odysseus to Achilles:
They do not own the swords with which they fight,
Nor the ships that brought them here.
Orders are handed down to them in words
They barely understand.
They do not give a whit who owns queen Helen.
Ithaca’s mine; Pythia yours; but what are they defending?
They love you? Yes. They do. They also loved Patroclus.
And he is dead, they say. Bury the dead, they say.
A hundred of us singing angels died for every knock
Patroclus took—so why the fuss?—that’s war, they say,
Who came to eat in Troy and not to prove how much
Dear friends are missed.
Yes, they are fools.
But they are right. Fools often are.
Bury the dead, my lord,
And I will help you pitch Troy in the sea.”
Western literature is born in rage. But it is also born in song. μηνιν and ἀείδω. “Our machine was devastating,” Michael Herr wrote of America’s profane destruction of Indochina. “And versatile. It could do everything but stop.”67 Logue’s Homer makes the machine sing.
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