Picked-Up Pieces

by John Updike

  What did attract this excellent British fantasist to Paradise Lost? Possibly its superficial shimmer of the fantastic, of the hallucinatory. The conceit of making it into cinema recalls an image Santayana uses, of Dante, in Three Philosophical Poets: after pages of praise for the medieval poet, Santayana adds the devastating demur “… he has no true idea either of the path to happiness or of its real conditions. His notion of nature is an inverted image of the moral world, cast like a gigantic shadow upon the sky. It is a mirage.” Some such mirage-sense of Milton’s poem may be at the root of the curious metamorphosis Collier has wrought. Of the assembly in Pandemonium his scenario says, “Perhaps this vast, dark sphere is Satan’s brain, and the luminous seraphs are the brain cells, glowing or flashing or dimming according to the electrical impulses that pass through them.” A frequent (and, I would think, technically implausible) feature of his script is the specification of elaborate trompe-l’oeil effects:

  … a reddish flush emanating from the maddened seraphs hangs like a luminous cloud in the centre of the vast, dark sphere. Soon it coalesces into a tangle of fuzzy, incandescent lines which form a fiery tracery, semi-abstract, showing an imagined assault on the battlements of Heaven.

  Satan ruffles a tree of dark leaves with light undersides so that from a hundred yards it exactly resembles Eve; Mulciber’s body goes transparent and becomes his palace; a vast horde of devils so disperses itself as to shadow forth the forms of Adam and Eve, like a marching band at half-time. What does Collier intend by such illusions except to transfer the entire cosmic epic to the realm of dream and subjective psychology? A movie screen has no substance; it exists only for our eyes, which in turn—physiologists tell us—are specialized segments of the brain, the only ones that have surfaced and protrude through our skins.

  But would these grandiose tricks—mist into angels, angels into “semi-abstract” tracery—work? Much is possible to the movie camera; but it remains a camera, a mirror of the external world’s texture and accidents. Though there is immense visual ambition in Mr. Collier’s directives to his hypothetical technicians, there is little that is effortlessly concrete. Phantasmagoria eclipses the luminously mundane. The human protagonists, for instance, are presumably naked until the fig leaves descend, but the script never brings Eve’s body to our awareness like these lines of Milton:

  … but Eve

  Undeckt, save with herself more lovely fair

  Than Wood-Nymph, or the fairest Goddess feign’d

  Of three that in Mount Ida naked strove,

  Stood to entertain her guest from Heav’n …

  Collier’s “Apology” announces that his hero is Eve, yet she seems more the subject of speculation than an object of vivifying love. This kind of love Milton shows her when he has Adam say:

  “Neither her out-side form’d so fair, nor aught

  In procreation common to all kinds …

  So much delights me, as those graceful acts,

  Those thousand decencies that daily flow

  From all her words and actions.…”

  Collier’s Adam says:

  “… she grew so lovely that

  all she does and says seems

  wisest and most virtuous and best.”

  Which is indeed bleak praise, if not blank verse. Milton has not been generally prized for the virtues of psychological tenderness or lively sensuality; Mr. Collier’s script leads us to realize how much of those virtues Milton possessed. And it leads us to suspect that in a fictional universe there is no borrowed gravity; unless an author is writing for his life, images become mere “effects” and fly into space. Precision is a function of attention, and attention is a function of concern. Too diffidently Mr. Collier tells us, of the poem’s Christian content, “I do not share these beliefs, and I have substituted other ideas, also not profound in themselves, but which are more in accord with those commonly held today.” There are ideas here, but no possessing idea. Milton’s God may be a tedious old bluffer, but he fascinated Milton, and aligned the poet’s inspirations in one magnetic field. A phrase like “those thousand decencies that daily flow” holds a piece of felt reality up to a moral light, and transfigures all women, all wives. Mr. Collier’s Eve, on the other hand, is conceived unsteadily: eating the apple on her knees like a drugged porn queen, voting for life like some vociferous Shavian heroine, snivelling like a groupie when the angelic fuzz arrives, jerked through a series of attitudes by the dead strings of Genesis 3. The screenplay ends—for this viewer, at least—as a flicker of unweighted significances and symbols. The projector throws not a beam of light but a tatter of brilliancies.

  Auden Fecit

  ABOUT THE HOUSE, by W. H. Auden. 84 pp. Random House, 1965.

  There are two atlases: the one

  The public space where acts are done,

  In theory common to us all,

  Where we are needed and feel small …

  The other is the inner space

  Of private ownership, the place

  That each of us is forced to own,

  Like his own life from which it’s grown,

  The landscape of his will and need

  Where he is sovereign indeed …

  Thus, in his great New Year Letter of 1940, Auden distinguished between the two realms explored by his life-long search for “the City.” As a young man, his concern was more with “public space,” and he remains the poet of the foreboding that preceded World War II, the lucid exhausted voice of “September 1, 1939” and the elegies to Freud and Yeats, both dead in 1939. As an aging post-war man, he has turned more toward the “inner space,” the landscape of his will and need and (from the same poem) “the polis of our friends.” His latest collection, About the House, celebrates this intimate city, the microcosm of his privacy, in almost doting detail. But the best of the poems are redeemed from triviality by the seriousness with which Auden considers his own comfort an episode in civilization.

  The first, and superior, half of the book is a sequence of twelve poems inspired by the rooms of his recently acquired house in Austria. Each poem carries a personal dedication, and though the anonymous reader may be charmed by intimations of custom-tailored pertinence (a husband and wife get the cellar and attic respectively, and Christopher Isherwood is awarded the toilet), he is more likely to feel merely excluded; what with the Kennedys, the Glasses, the Sinatra Clan, the friends of Norman Podhoretz, and the Pop-Camp-Hip crowd, there seem enough in-groups in the Western world without a formal roll-call of Auden’s acquaintanceship. Plato’s vision of the Perfect City ruled by philosopher-kings seems somewhat impudently transmuted into genial snobbery:

  The houses of our City

  are real enough but they lie

  haphazardly scattered over the earth,

  and her vagabond forum

  is any space where two of us happen to meet

  who can spot a citizen

  without papers.

  Technically, the sequence is marred by the erratic interruption of “Postscripts”—short poems in another meter, often in the irksome form of haiku, tacked on wherever (however vaguely) appropriate. And it must be said that Auden, in developing each room into a cosmic instance and drawing significance from every nook, does not always avoid his besetting sin of, well, silliness. The steamy bath is extolled in an uncharacteristic non-meter which he explains as a “mallarmesque / syllabic fog,” and the stanzas to excrement include:

  Freud did not invent the

  Constipated miser:

  Banks have letter boxes

  Built in their facade,

  Marked For Night Deposits,

  Stocks are firm or liquid,

  Currencies of nations

  Either soft or hard.

  But in sum the twelve poems comprise an impressive essay upon Man the domestic animal; his domesticity is felt as a consecration of his animality.

  city planners are mistaken: a pen

  for a rational animal

  is no fitting habitat
for Adam’s

  sovereign clone.

  Precise biological terms—clone, conurbation, neotene—insist on humanity’s living context. The poem on the dining-room with high wit summarizes the full organic history of dining:

  The life of plants

  is one continuous solitary meal,

  and ruminants

  hardly interrupt theirs to sleep or to mate, but most

  predators feel

  ravenous most of the time and competitive

  always, bolting such morsels as they can contrive

  to snatch from the more terrified …

  Only man,

  supererogatory beast,

  Dame Kind’s thoroughbred lunatic, can

  do the honors of a feast,

  and was doing so

  before the last Glaciation when he offered

  mammoth-marrow

  and, perhaps, Long Pig, will continue till Doomsday

  when at God’s board

  the saints chew pickled Leviathan.

  The house abounds in remembrances of human prehistory: the cellar “Reminds our warm and windowed quarters upstairs that / Caves water-scooped from limestone were our first dwellings”; the archetype of the poet’s workroom is “Weland’s Stithy”; like the “prehistoric hearthstone, / round as a birthday-button / and sacred to Granny,” the modern kitchen is the center of the dwelling; in conclusion, “every home should be a fortress, / equipped with all the very latest engines / for keeping Nature at bay, / versed in all ancient magic, the arts of quelling / the Dark Lord and his hungry / animivorous chimeras.” Nor is history forgotten: the bathroom is seen as a shrunken tepidarium; the dining table is compared with “Christ’s cenacle” and “King Arthur’s rundle”; and the peace of the living-room is felt against “History’s criminal noise.” The function of each chamber is searched in such depth that a psychological portrait of man is achieved. Auden finds in defecation the prime Art, an “ur-act of making”; in swallowing “a sign act of reverence”; in sleeping a “switch from personage, / with a state number, a first and family name, / to the naked Adam or Eve.” His anatomization is controlled, at times playfully, by religious conceptions:

  then surely those in whose creed

  God is edible may call a fine

  omelette a Christian deed.

  Biology tends toward theology; our personal and animal particulars are grounded in the divine ontology. Speech is “a work of re-presenting / the true olamic silence.” This sequence of poems, entitled “Thanksgiving for a Habitat,” is an essay in architecture, which is to say the creation of a structure enabling the human organism to perform its supernaturally determined functions of praise and service. In a faithless age, there are

  no architects, any more

  than there are heretics or bounders: to take

  umbrage at death, to construct

  a second nature of tomb and temple, lives

  must know the meaning of If.

  While one regrets that Auden’s Christian faith is so iffy, its presence has enabled him to organize his youthfully indiscriminate variety of perceptions and data into a credible humanism.

  The second half of About the House, “In and Out” (a habitat has been previously defined as “a place / I may go both in and out of”), consists of poems, often about travelling, that are casual in tone and middling in quality. The best is the last, “Whitsunday in Kirchstetten,” a kind of annex to the house poems, wherein the poet is discovered temporarily domiciled in church. In the author’s favorite late style, the long lines, pedantic terms, and discursive sequiturs evoke what was rather conspicuously absent from the house sequence—a sense of the “public space,” the enveloping condition of the world:

  from Loipersbach

  to the Bering Sea not a living stockbroker,

  and church attendance is frowned upon

  like visiting brothels (but the chess and physics

  are still the same).…

  Down a Gothic nave

  comes our Pfarrer now, blessing the West with water:

  we may go.

  Again, “Hammerfest,” a description of Auden’s visit to Norway’s northernmost township, frames within his baroque sense of lapsed time—“the glum Reptilian Empire / Or the epic journey of the Horse”—the geological innocence of a region whose “only communities … / Were cenobite, mosses and lichen, sworn to / Station and reticence.” And of the many (too many) poems in haiku-stanzas, I liked best “Et in Arcadia Ego,” a rephrasing of his habitual accusatory apostrophe to “Dame Kind”—who “Can imagine the screeching/Virago, the Amazon, / Earth Mother was?” The poem uses the exigencies of this Japanese form to generate lines of great energy, both polysyllabic (“Her exorbitant monsters abashed”) and monosyllabic (“Geese podge home”).

  Auden is the supreme metrical tinkerer. Haiku, canzoni, ballades, limericks, clerihews, alliterative verse (a whole eclogue’s worth)—there is nothing he will not attempt and make, to some extent, pay off. His ability, as in “Tonight at Seven-Thirty,” to coin an elaborate stanza-form and effortlessly to repeat it over and over, suggests the 17th-century metaphysicals and Tennyson: the latter more than the former. His technical displays cast doubt upon the urgency of his inspiration. It is one thing to sing in a form, whether it be Homeric hexameters or Popian couplets, until it becomes a natural voice; it is another to challenge your own verbal resources with insatiable experimentation. In any collection by Auden there are hardly two successive poems in the same form, which gives even his most integral sequences, such as the “Horae Canonicae” of The Shield of Achilles, a restless and wearing virtuosity. As a poet, his vocation begins in the joy of fabrication rather than in an impulse of celebration: in ways it is strength, enabling him to outlive his youth, to explore, to grow, to continue to think, even—blasphemous suggestion!—to believe, in order to feed the verse-making machine. He is that anachronism, the poet as maker; but he makes expressions rather than, by mimesis, men and deeds. Compared to Eliot, he has no dramatic imagination. Despite an almost desperate metrical juggling, his plays and dialogues are the monologues of one very intellectually imaginative voice. He dramatizes all sides of an issue, but lacks the modesty, the impish and casual self-forgetfulness, that tossed off Prufrock, Cousin Harriet, Sweeney, and the curiously vigorous phantoms of The Waste Land. If Eliot was a dramatist, Auden is an essayist, in the root sense: he will try anything, but his adventures never take him beyond the territory of the first-person singular. He is one of the few modern poets whose genius is for the long discursive poem; for all his formal invention, he has written best in two rather accommodating meters—a long, elegaic, unrhymed or loosely rhymed line less regular than pentameter, and the tetrameter quatrains or couplets associated with music hall lyrics and with light verse.

  His light vein is very rich. What could be better than, say, this stanza from “On the Circuit”?—

  Since Merit but a dunghill is,

  I mount the rostrum unafraid:

  Indeed, ’twere damnable to ask

  If I am overpaid.

  Or this, from “After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics”?—

  Marriage is rarely bliss

  But, surely it would be worse

  As particles to pelt

  At thousands of miles per sec

  About a universe

  In which a lover’s kiss

  Would either not be felt

  Or break the loved one’s neck.

  In his present pleasant house, to which his dream of the City has congenially dwindled, Auden portrays his workroom, “The Cave of Making,” with “windows averted from plausible / videnda but admitting a light one / could mend a watch by.” By such dry clear light, a dictionary at hand, he is best read—not, as he hopes, as “a minor atlantic Goethe” (the difference in generosity may be less between Goethe and himself than between Goethe’s Europe and our America), but as a man who, with a childlike curiosity and a feminine fineness of perception, trea
ts poetry as the exercise of wit. For almost always, in his verse, the oracular and ecstatic flights fail; what we keep are the fractional phrases that could be expressed in prose, but less pointedly. He defined light verse, for his anthology of it, as poetry written in the common language of men. Powerfully attracted by the aristocratic and the arcane, he has worked to preserve his democratic loyalties, his sense of poetry as a mode of discourse between civilized men. About the House, though it contains no single poem as fine as “Ode to Gaea” from The Shield of Achilles, has nothing in it as tedious as the infatuated concept-chopping of the “Dichtung und Wahrheit” interlude of Homage to Clio; and on the whole marks a new frankness and a new relaxation in tone. Auden remains, in the Spirit as well as by the Letter, alive.