Talking to Strangers

by Paul Auster

  Let other people come as streams

  that overflow a valley

  and leave dead bodies, uprooted trees and fields of sand:

  we Jews are as dew,

  on every blade of grass,

  trodden under foot today

  and here tomorrow morning.

  And yet, in spite of this deep solidarity with the Jewish past, Reznikoff never deludes himself into thinking that he can overcome the essential solitude of his condition simply by affirming his Jewishness. For not only has he been exiled, he has been exiled twice—as a Jew, and from Judaism as well.

  How difficult for me is Hebrew:

  even the Hebrew for mother, for bread, for sun

  is foreign. How far I have been exiled, Zion.

  *

  The Hebrew of your poets, Zion,

  is like oil upon a burn,

  cool as oil;

  after work,

  the smell in the street at night

  of the hedge in flower.

  Like Solomon,

  I have married and married the speech of strangers;

  none are like you, Shulamite.

  It is a precarious position, to say the least. Neither fully assimilated nor fully unassimilated, Reznikoff occupies the unstable middle ground between two worlds and is never able to claim either one as his own. Nevertheless, and no doubt precisely because of this ambiguity, it is an extremely fertile ground—leading some to consider him primarily as a Jewish poet (whatever that term might mean) and others to look on him as a quintessentially American poet (whatever that term might mean). And yet it is safe to say, I think, that in the end both statements are true—or else that neither one is true, which probably amounts to the same thing. Reznikoff’s poems are what Reznikoff is: the poems of an American Jew, or, if you will, of a hyphenated American, a Jewish-American, with the two terms standing not so much on equal footing as combining to form a third and wholly different term: the condition of being in two places at the same time, or, quite simply, the condition of being nowhere.

  We have only to go on the evidence. In the two volumes of Complete Poems (1918–75), recently published by Black Sparrow Press, there are a surprising number of poems on Jewish themes. Poems not only about Jewish immigrant life in New York, but also long narratives on various episodes from ancient and modern Jewish history. A list of some of these titles will give a fair idea of some of Reznikoff’s concerns: “King David,” “Jeremiah in the Stocks: An Arrangement of the Prophecies,” “The Synagogue Defeated: Anno 1096,” “Palestine under the Romans,” “The Fifth Book of the Maccabees,” “Jews in Babylonia.” In all, these poems cover more than 100 pages of the approximately 350 pages in the two volumes—or nearly a third of his total output. Given the nature of the poems he is best known for—the spare city lyrics, transcriptions of immediate sensual data—it is strange that he should have devoted so much of his writing life to works whose inspiration comes from books. Reznikoff, the least pretentious of poets, never shows any inclination toward the scholarly acrobatics of some of his contemporaries—Pound, for example, or Olson—and yet, curiously, much of his writing is a direct response to, almost a translation of, his reading. By a further twist, these poems that treat of apparently remote subjects are among his most personal works.

  To be schematic for a moment, a simplified explanation would be as follows: America is Reznikoff’s present, Judaism is his past. The act of immersing himself in Jewish history is finally no different from the act of stepping out into the streets of New York. In both cases, it is an attempt to come to terms with what he is. The past, however, cannot be directly perceived: it can only be experienced through books. When Reznikoff writes about King David, therefore, or Moses, or any other biblical figure, he is in effect writing about himself. Even in his most lighthearted moments, this preoccupation with his ancestors is always with him.

  God and Messenger

  The pavement barren

  as the mountain

  on which God spoke to Moses—

  suddenly in the street

  shining against my legs

  the bumper of a motor car.

  The point is that Reznikoff the Jew and Reznikoff the American cannot be separated from one another. Each aspect of his work must be read in relation to the oeuvre as a whole, for in the end each point of view inhabits all the others.

  The tree in the twilit street—

  the pods hang from its bare symmetrical branches

  motionless—

  but if, like God, a century were to us

  the twinkling of an eye,

  we should see the frenzy of growth.

  Which is to say: the eye is not adequate. Not even the seen can be truly seen. The human perspective, which continually thrusts us into a place where “only the narrow present is alive,” is an exile from eternity, an exclusion from the fullness of human possibility. That Reznikoff, who insists so strenuously in all his work on this human perspective, should at the same time be aware of its limits, gives his work a reflexive quality, an element of self-doubt that permeates even the most straightforward lyric. For all his apparent simplicity, Reznikoff is by no means a primitive. A reductionist, perhaps, but a highly sophisticated one—who, as an adroit craftsman, always manages to make us forget that each poem is the product (as he put it in one work) of “hunger, silence, and sweat.”

  There is, however, a bridge between time and eternity in Reznikoff’s work, a link between God and man, in the precise place where man is forced to abstain most vigorously from the demands of the self: in the idea of the Law. The Law in the Jewish sense of the word and, by extension, in the English sense. Testimony is a work in which reading has become the equivalent of seeing: “Note: All that follows is based on the law reports of the several states.” What Reznikoff has observed, has brought to life, is the word, the language of men. So that the act of witness has become synonymous with the act of creation—and the shouldering of its burden. “Now suppose in a court of law,” Reznikoff told Dembo in their interview, “you are testifying in a negligence case. You cannot get up on the stand and say, ‘The man was negligent.’ That’s a conclusion of fact. What you’d be compelled to say is how the man acted. Did he stop before he crossed the street? Did he look? The judges of whether he is negligent or not are the jury in that case and the judges of what you say as a poet are the readers. That is, there is an analogy between testimony in the courts and the testimony of a poet.”

  Trained as a lawyer (though he never practiced) and for many years a researcher for a legal encyclopedia, Reznikoff used the workings of the law not only as a description of the poetic process, but also, more basically, as an aesthetic ideal. In his long autobiographical poem, Early History of a Writer, he explains how the study of the law helped to discipline him as a poet:

  I saw that I could use the expensive machinery

  that had cost me four years of hard work at law

  and which I had thought useless for my writing:

  prying sentences open to look at the exact meaning;

  weighing words to choose only those that had meat for my purpose

  and throwing the rest away as empty shells.

  I, too, could scrutinize every word and phrase

  as if in a document or the opinion of a judge

  and listen, as well, for tones and overtones,

  leaving only the pithy, the necessary, the clear and plain.

  Testimony: The United States (1885–1915) Recitative is perhaps Reznikoff’s most important achievement as a poet. A quietly astonishing work, so deceptive in its making that it would be easy to misread it as a document rather than as a piece of art, it is at once a kaleidoscopic vision of American life and the ultimate test of Reznikoff’s poetic principles. Composed of small, self-contained fragments, each the distillation of an actual court case, the overall effect is nevertheless extremely coherent. Reznikoff has no lesson to teach, no axe to grind, no ideology to defend: he merely wants to present the f
acts. For example:

  At the time of their marriage

  Andrew was worth about fifty thousand dollars;

  Polly had nothing.

  “He has gone up to the mine,

  and I wish to God he would fall down

  and break his neck.

  I just hate him.

  I just shiver when he touches me.”

  “Andy, I am going to write a letter that may seem

  hardhearted:

  you know that I do not love you

  as I should

  and I know that I never can.

  Don’t you think it best

  to give me a divorce?

  If you do,

  I will not have to sell the house in Denver

  that you gave me,

  and I will give you back the ranch in Delta.

  After we are divorced,

  if you care for me and I care for you,

  we will marry again. Polly.”

  *

  Jessie was eleven years old, though some said fourteen,

  and had the care of a child

  just beginning to walk—

  and suddenly pulled off the child’s diaper

  and sat the child in some hot ashes

  where she had been cooking ash cakes;

  the child screamed

  and she smacked it on the jaw.

  It would be difficult for a poet to make himself more invisible than Reznikoff does in this book. To find a comparable approach to the real, one would have to go back to the great prose writers of the turn of the century. As in Chekhov or in early Joyce, the desire is to allow events to speak for themselves, to choose the exact detail that will say everything and thereby allow as much as possible to remain unsaid. This kind of restraint paradoxically requires an openness of spirit that is available to very few: an ability to accept the given, to remain a witness of human behavior and not succumb to the temptation of becoming a judge.

  The success of Testimony becomes all the more striking when placed beside Holocaust, a far less satisfying work that is based on many of the same techniques. Using as his sources the US Government publication Trials of the Criminals Before the Nuremberg Tribunal and the records of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Reznikoff attempts to deal with Germany’s annihilation of the Jews in the same dispassionate, documentary style with which he had explored the human dramas buried in American court records. The problem, I think, is one of magnitude. Reznikoff is a master of the everyday; he understands the seriousness of small events and has an uncanny sympathy with the lives of ordinary people. In a work such as Testimony he is able to present us with the facts in a way that simultaneously makes us understand them; the two gestures are inseparable. In the case of Holocaust, however, we all know the facts in advance. The Holocaust, which is precisely the unknowable, the unthinkable, requires a treatment beyond the facts in order for us to be able to understand it—assuming that such a thing is even possible. Similar in approach to a 1960s play by Peter Weiss, The Investigation, Reznikoff’s poem rigorously refuses to pass judgment on any of the atrocities it describes. But this is nevertheless a false objectivity, for the poem is not saying to the reader, “decide for yourself,” it is saying that the decision has already been made and that the only way we can deal with these things is to remove them from their inherently emotional setting. The problem is that we cannot remove them. That setting is a necessary starting point.

  Holocaust is instructive, however, in that it shows us the limits of Reznikoff’s work. I do not mean shortcomings—but limits, those things that set off and describe a space, that create a world. Reznikoff is essentially a poet of naming. One does not have the sense of a poetry immersed in language but rather of something that takes place before language and comes to fruition at the precise moment language has been discovered—and it yields a style that is pristine, fastidious, almost stiff in its effort to say exactly what it means to say. If any one word can be used to describe Reznikoff’s work, it would be humility—toward language and also toward himself.

  I am afraid

  because of the foolishness

  I have spoken.

  I must diet

  on silence;

  strengthen myself

  with quiet.

  It could not have been an easy life for Reznikoff. Throughout the many years he devoted to writing poetry (his first poems were published in 1918, when he was twenty-four, and he went on publishing until his death in early 1976), he suffered from a neglect so total that it verged on scandalous. Forced to bring out most of his books in private editions (many of them printed by himself), he also had to fight the constant pressures of making a living.

  After I had worked all day at what I earn my living

  I was tired. Now my own work has lost another day,

  I thought, but began slowly,

  and slowly my strength came back to me.

  Surely, the tide comes in twice a day.

  It was not until he was in his late sixties that Reznikoff began to receive some measure of recognition. New Directions published a book of his selected poems, By the Waters of Manhattan, which was followed a few years later by the first volume of Testimony. But in spite of the success of these two books—and a growing audience for his works—New Directions saw fit to drop Reznikoff from its list of authors. More years passed. Then, in 1974, Black Sparrow Press brought out By the Well of Living & Seeing: New & Selected Poems 1918–1973. More important, it committed itself to the long overdue project of putting all of Reznikoff’s work back into print. Under the intelligent and sensitive editing of Seamus Cooney, the sequence so far includes the two volumes of Complete Poems, Holocaust, The Manner Music (a posthumous novel), the first two volumes of Testimony, and will go on to include more volumes of Testimony and a book of Collected Plays.

  If Reznikoff lived his life in obscurity, there was never the slightest trace of resentment in his work. He was too proud for that, too busy with the work itself to be overly concerned with its fate in the world. Even if people are slow to listen to someone who speaks quietly, he knew that eventually he would be heard.

  Te Deum

  Not because of victories

  I sing,

  having none,

  but for the common sunshine,

  the breeze,

  the largess of the spring.

  Not for victory

  but for the day’s work done

  as well as I was able;

  not for a seat upon the dais

  but at the common table.

  1974; 1976; 1978

  2. “IT REMINDS ME OF SOMETHING THAT ONCE HAPPENED TO MY MOTHER…”

  In 1974, I was invited by Anthony Rudolf to contribute an article to the London magazine European Judaism for an issue celebrating Charles Reznikoff’s eightieth birthday. I had been living in France for the past four years, and the little piece I sent in on Reznikoff’s work was the first thing I wrote after coming back to America. It was a fitting way to mark my return.

  I moved into an apartment on Riverside Drive in late summer. After finishing the article, I discovered that Reznikoff lived very nearby—on West End Avenue—and sent him a copy of the manuscript, along with a letter asking him if it would be possible for us to meet. Several weeks went by without a response.

  On a Sunday in early October I was to be married. The ceremony was scheduled to take place in the apartment at around noon. At eleven o’clock, just moments before the guests were due to arrive, the telephone rang and an unfamiliar voice asked to speak to me. “This is Charles Reznikoff,” the voice said, in a singsong tone, looping ironically and with evident good humor. I was, of course, pleased and flattered by the call, but I explained that it would be impossible for me to talk just now. I was about to be married, and I was in no condition to form a coherent sentence. Reznikoff was highly amused by this and burst out laughing. “I never called a man on his wedding day before!” he said. “Mazel tov, mazel tov!” We arranged to meet the following we
ek at his apartment. Then I hung up the phone and marched off to the altar.

  Reznikoff’s apartment was on the twenty-second floor of a large building complex, with a broad, uncluttered view of the Hudson and sunlight pouring through the windows. I arrived in the middle of the day, and with a somewhat stale crumb cake set before me and numerous cups of coffee to drink, I wound up staying three or four hours. The visit made such an impression on me that even now, almost a decade later, it is entirely present inside me.

  I have met some good storytellers in my life, but Reznikoff was the champion. Some of his stories that day went on for thirty or forty minutes, and no matter how far he seemed to drift from the point he was supposedly trying to make, he was in complete control. He had the patience that is necessary to the telling of a good story—and the ability to savor the least detail that cropped up along the way. What at first seemed to be an endless series of digressions, a kind of aimless wandering, turned out to be the elaborate and systematic construction of a circle. For example: Why did you come back to New York after living in Hollywood? There followed a myriad of little incidents: meeting the brother of a certain man on a park bench, the color of someone’s eyes, an economic crisis in some country. Fifteen minutes later, just when I was beginning to feel hopelessly lost—and convinced that Reznikoff was lost, too—he would begin a slow return to his starting point. Then, with great clarity and conviction, he would announce: “So that’s why I left Hollywood.” In retrospect, it all made perfect sense.

  I heard stories about his childhood, his aborted career in journalism, his law studies, his work for his parents as a jobber of hats and how he would write poems on a bench at Macy’s while waiting his turn to show the store buyer his samples. There were also stories about his walks—in particular, his journey from New York to Cape Cod (on foot!), which he undertook when he was well past sixty. The important thing, he explained, was not to walk too fast. Only by forcing himself to keep to a pace of less than two miles per hour could he be sure to see everything he wanted to see.