Poetry Notebook

by Clive James

  But those few are the ones we tend to notice. What we notice is their musicality, and conjuring music out of spoken words was an aim that Frost made explicit. He was ready to suffer neglect as long as he could pursue that aim. Having safely arrived in England, Frost wrote to an American friend: ‘Poetry is not a living. It is not even a reputation today. It is at best a reputation next year or the year after.’ Does that sound like a master manipulator hustling for position?

  Of course it doesn’t. But he was justifiably concerned with getting his work put in front of the public; all the more justifiably because he was, in his own schooled and studious opinion, pretty good. ‘A little of the success I have waited for so long won’t hurt me. I rather think I deserve it.’ In England, he was able to bring out the first few slim collections that could somehow never find a publisher back in America. In England, his self-esteem was augmented by esteem from others, with a familiar result: he was able to worry less about the awkward necessity to blow his own trumpet. And anyway, some of his new fans could blow a trumpet at the level of a military bugler announcing the next dawn.

  Ezra Pound admired him, and told the literary world. Prominent writers listened to Pound because they had no choice: he got into their heads like an earwig. We can deduce two main reasons for Pound being impressed by Frost. The first is merely persuasive: Frost really was at home in Latin and Greek, whereas Pound only pretended to be. But Pound, armed with an infinite intellectual arrogance, was not easily made to feel ignorant by anybody. The second reason is decisive: Pound could see – or, better to say, hear – that Frost was a supreme technician, a bearer of the modern torch. Frost’s advocacy of a language ‘absolutely unliterary’, of a ‘war on clichés’, was catnip to Pound, who had long favoured just such a campaign himself. The fact that Frost was better equipped than himself to pursue it was not one that crossed Pound’s mind; or if it did, he was not inhibited in his determination to jump up and down on Frost’s behalf.

  Frost, a lifelong enemy of all arty pretension, thought that Pound dressed the part of the poet. But Frost never disparaged Pound’s antics, even when they worked to his, Frost’s, detriment in the very area which his English sojourn was meant to ameliorate: his standing at home. Pound not only proclaimed Frost’s virtues, he insisted on announcing, at the top of his voice, that those virtues had been beyond the comprehension of American editors. Frost, who had always been polite to editors even when they rejected him, was appalled. Quite apart from the question of elementary courtesy, Frost knew that he would have to go home some day soon, and at this rate the earth would be scorched before he got there. He and Pound fell out. But it was after they fell out, and not before, that Frost told a friend: ‘Pound is the most generous of mortals.’ A poet who is out to sabotage his rivals – a monster of egotism – doesn’t say things like that.

  Frost rated Pound highly but Yeats even higher: ‘the man of the last 20 years’. Amiable and clearly decent, Frost was welcomed into all the right groups of literati; ‘the allurements of the London literary crowd’. But he was allured only up to a point. He seldom gave his whole admiration to anyone. He was glad to have the company of the Georgian poets but his praise for their work was generalized. His praise for W. H. Davies was specific but limited: ‘those flashes in a line’. He was unequivocal only about Edward Thomas, his fellow late-starter. Here, surely, is the certain and final proof that Frost, from the career angle, was at least as much a giver as a taker. He did everything he could to help Thomas along as a poet, and when Thomas was killed on the Western Front, Frost’s grief was terrible.

  Despite the loss of a true soulmate, however, Frost’s invasion of Europe had been an early version of D-Day. Success was achieved and made secure. But there was nothing easy about the process, and a close reading of these letters will reveal that England, despite its traditional congeniality for an idealistic literary class, was just as rich a source as America for chumps, cheats and fools. Booby-traps were made more deadly for Frost by his accursed virtue of honouring a bargain. There was a woman called Mrs Nutt who got hold of some of his best copyrights and used them to screw him around for years. He should have had her bumped off. (Later in his life, he should have lowered the boom on Lawrance Thompson, but nobody could persuade Frost against honouring a promise even if it killed him, and that one damned near did.)

  Back in America, he could take pride in the success of his plan to build up a reputation offshore. It had worked, and he had become thought of, at long last, as a prominent American poet. But poetry, in the material sense, was still not a living. He worked hard to make a go of farming, thereby providing himself with the store of imagery that lent the substance to nearly all of his most memorable work. But in the long run he could not make farming pay the rent. Farming is a full-time job, and perhaps Frost spent too much time with his mind on other things – poetic masterpieces, for example.

  And as always, when he was not actually writing, he was thinking about how to do it. Thinking about the local rhythm of a phrase within the grand rhythm of a sentence might not have been the best thing to have on his mind while trying to plough a straight furrow, but it was good preparation for teaching. Though his image in our minds is of a taciturn rustic artisan stacking stones to form a wall, he actually spent most of his life giving lectures. He had a gift for prose, but that was where the gift went to: it was talked out across a lectern. Though the duties and skills of tending the land were always present in his imagination, he was quite proud of his knack for holding an urban audience. ‘I am a much better teacher than farmer,’ he said.

  Scanning the addresses from which the later letters in this volume were sent, the reader will find that Frost was often on the road. A born performer, and doubly blessed because he performed his own stuff, he was in demand in distant colleges for the kind of evening in which the poet gives what amounts to a one-man show. Frost was inventing the poetry circuit; the blessed device which nowadays, both here and in America, helps to keep the best poets alive – as well, unfortunately, as some of the worst. Frost soft-pedals all questions of stipend, but it’s a fair guess that his share of the gate made the trips worthwhile. No wonder Thompson hated him. Frost was self-sufficient, and a true acolyte can allow the object of his worship any virtue but that. Helpers want to be needed.

  Frost made no apology for collecting his rewards. ‘Nothing is quite honest that is not commercial.’ If what he did had been subsidized, he wouldn’t have felt that it was proper work. You could call it a right-wing view. He was conservative in many ways, but none of them matter except one: he was a die-hard believer in art as a discipline, and not as a mere indulgence. For him, there could be no such thing as ‘the literature of irresponsible, boy-again, freedom’. But even while he still lived, we were already surrounded by the literature of boy-again freedom, and girl-again freedom too. Today, freedom rules, and the rules are nowhere.

  Yet some of the thousands of our current poets might harbour the secret urge to take their work seriously. They might be like those bad boys in the Anthony Burgess novel who sat in the back of the class surreptitiously teaching themselves Latin. In view of that possibility, there is plenty that a clueless but hungry young tyro can learn from Frost, and the learning would be made more palatable by the fact that there was at least one kind of freedom that Frost believed in all the way.

  Frost was the man, even more than Eliot and Pound, who both formulated and demonstrated the modernist principle of listening for the rhythms of poetry in the language around us: ‘We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven’t been brought to book.’ In our day as in his, the privilege of bringing vernacular tones to book is a freedom beyond price. Our tyro might find this privilege reassuringly near to his own propensity for bunging down anything that comes into his head, but he might as well start from a position of comfort, because he faces a mountain of hard work. Among the many things that poetry essentially is, poetry is essentially the business of finding a form by fitting things i
nto it. Frost, in this respect not conservative at all, thought, or said he thought, that the resultant form should be equally non-threatening to everybody. ‘I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds,’ he said. ‘I want to reach out.’

  His most formidable detractors think that his reaching out was too often a folksy grab at the lapels. The truth of the matter is that the typical, seemingly unambitious little Frostian poem is a wonder of sophisticated construction: no other poet could have done it. Our tyro – Coleridge would have called him a nursling – will soon find that Frost’s poetry, even at its most approachable, is the product of craft at a level that it takes sweat even to analyse, let alone to emulate. Frost could tell you what made an English vowel long or short; it was as if he had transported the tools of a quantitative language, Latin, into a new language, English, that was not supposed to have quantities, only stresses. But Frost had studied how the metre and the intonation formed an interplay which, on the page, would stabilize the rhythms of a conversation overheard from the next room; a conversation whose specific meaning might be a mystery but whose drift was detectable from how the speech rose, fell, sped and slowed. It was a version of Eliot’s electrifying proposition that poetry in a foreign language could communicate before it was understood.

  Eliot, the man of the century, respected Frost. I myself, who have never stopped reading Eliot since I was a student in Sydney in the late 1950s, have often stopped reading Frost – not, I think, because he daunts me, but because his vast barn of country reference is not congruent with my personal experience. Most Australians, including the literary people, are city-bred. (Les Murray is almost unique in his closeness to the land; the main reason, I think, why he sometimes reminds us of Frost.)

  So I keep on having to rediscover Frost, but I am delighted each time I do. Whatever else they reveal about him – perhaps he stole cars – the next two volumes of letters are bound to go on showing that he was as thoughtful and hard-working as an artist can get: further evidence that the best of modernism is a way for the classical to keep going.

  Interlude

  While I continued to write articles and book reviews about poetry, I necessarily had a last chapter of my poetry notebook in mind, because my declining health told me that it might be wise to wrap things up. The trouble was, there was still so much to say. It’s in the nature of the subject. Poetry is finite – from all of its history, only some of it is of the first concern – but it is also limitless. In music, you don’t have to hear Beethoven’s late quartets very often before you realize that you will never stop responding to them. And in music, unless you are musician, your response is not complicated by technical questions. With poetry, there is not only the appreciation of a successful work, there are all the questions of how it got that way. It would be easier if the enjoyment of a poem put your mind to sleep. Instead, you are woken up. That degree of mental excitement can be awkward when your physical strength has begun to flag. The old urge to get everything said should by rights be stymied by the awareness that time is running out, but instead there is a renewed determination, entirely inappropriate to the resources available. ‘Old men ought to be explorers’ said Eliot in ‘East Coker’. That line has always given me the picture of some buffer tottering under the weight of an enormous backpack topped off with a collapsible canoe.

  No, the time comes to let go. And anyway, what we say about a poem is a small part of its point. The large part is what the poem says about us. In his ‘Secular Masque’ of 1700, Dryden wrote:

  All, all of a piece throughout;

  Thy chase had a beast in view;

  Thy wars brought nothing about;

  Thy lovers were all untrue.

  ’Tis well an old age is out,

  And time to begin anew.

  We could talk forever about the easy pomp of those lines, but the first thing to do is to submit to them. Even if we won some of our wars and our lovers were as true as angels, the old age is bound to go out, and someone else will begin the new one. There is grief in all poetry, even when it is light-hearted. Poetry holds itself together, and eventually we ourselves do not. I started this book by recalling some of my young reactions. Since then, a lot has changed in the sociology of the art form that I chose, or that chose me. Women now exercise unquestioned the equality that once they had to fight for. Where once there were only hundreds of would-be poets, now there are thousands. But poetry remains what it has always been: the thing that hardly anyone can do. Most of the contenders are aware of that, but go on trying anyway. Since there are such thin rewards even for success, and no rewards at all for failure, we might as well say that they do it from instinct, and call the instinct divine. And besides, there will be no lingering embarrassment from failing to make one’s mark: a poem that doesn’t work will be forgotten even while it is being set down. When Keats said that his name was written in water, he was right about almost every poet except himself.

  PART III

  FINALE TO A NOTEBOOK

  TRUMPETS AT SUNSET

  When I was young, cartoons by James Thurber were so widely known that people would refer to them in conversation just by quoting the captions. I remember not quite understanding the reference in one caption: ‘I said the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces – but let it pass, let it pass.’ I thought the line very funny at the time but I didn’t know that Thurber was quoting Swinburne’s ‘Atalanta in Calydon’. You don’t need to get the reference to get the joke; but the joke eventually got me to Swinburne, who would gradually turn out to be the most accomplished poet that I couldn’t stand. Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, would occasionally throw in an alliterative line for effect (‘Sober he seemde, and very sagely sad’) but Swinburne wanted the whole poem to be that way: a meal of popcorn. Sometimes, in his blizzard of alliteration, he failed to notice that he had written an identity rhyme instead of a rhyme:

  And time remembered is grief forgotten,

  And frosts are slain and flowers begotten . . .

  Perhaps he noticed but thought we wouldn’t, intoxicated as we were bound to be by his sonic hurtle. But for a poet to be all sound is nearly as bad as for a painter to be all paint. After several attempts over the years to detect any signs of an underlying strength, I still find that a Swinburne poem affects me like a painting by John Bratby: there is so much impasto that the only tension lies in your wondering whether it will slide off the picture and fall on the floor. I have to give up on Swinburne; there is no time to go on quarrelling; and besides, there are problematic poets with whom one can quarrel to more purpose.

  •

  A dangerous point arrives when you tell yourself that you are still proud of your memory. It means that your memory is failing. Nowadays there is always Google, but that huge and dumb storage facility can’t always make up the difference. As far as I can tell, the phrase ‘trumpets at sunset’ is one I thought of, but perhaps I lifted it from someone else. Always, during my time as a writer, I made it a rule never to use unacknowledged a phrase that was not my own: but perhaps my subconscious, in its old age, has taken to making its own rules. If I did lift this phrase, I hope it was from someone serious, like Kipling. But if I had seen the phrase on the page, surely I or Google would remember that; besides, I make marks in books, and often a phrase or line that strikes me as outstanding gets copied into the endpapers, so eventually I come across the moment of treasure again. More likely, if I didn’t borrow the words, I borrowed the mood. Scott Fitzgerald called the last of his short-story collections Taps at Reveille. Though his plangent title needs translation – ‘Taps’ for ‘Last Post’ is strictly an American usage, and in America ‘Reveille’ rhymes with ‘Beverly’ – you can’t miss the threnodic complaint that the end has come too early.

  Dorothy Parker, however, is the most probable victim of any urge to emulate that I might happen to have had. She called one of her little collections Sunset Gun. There is no time-twisting paradox in that title, but there is an aching beauty. Leaving aside Dorothea Mac
kellar (in school we all read her great hymn to Australia, ‘My Country’), Dorothy Parker was my first woman poet. But although I enjoyed the witty carpentry of her poems and even memorized a few of them, I was never touched by her use of language, except for that one title. By the phonetic coupling of those two words, ‘sunset gun’, I was bowled over, and for life. Their rhythm became for me, so early on in my writing career, a part of the tread of passing time, the grander rhythm to which I’m afraid that I now have better access when I write: afraid, because you don’t hear that music properly unless you are already on your way into the empty regions. Sunset gun. The sound of a slamming door, but it’s behind you.

  •

  As one’s time runs out, the mind is weighed down with a guilty mountain of the critical duties that won’t be attended to. There is barely time to read Elizabeth Bishop’s poems again and pay them a less stinted praise. When I first wrote about her, thirty years ago, I tried to be clever. It was a failure in judgement: she was the clever one. Still conceited enough to think that even so illustrious a reputation as hers could benefit from my recommendation, I should try to put things right. Any young student who has not yet discovered Elizabeth Bishop simply must be told about ‘The Man Moth’, ‘his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him’, or about the ‘Sandpiper’ walking along the beach, taking for granted ‘the roaring alongside’. And her famous poem ‘The Fish’ deserves more fame yet. I still hold by my original opinion that its tactics are bad: her final decision to ‘let the fish go’ is bound to elicit the wrong kind of smile when the reader considers how long she kept the fish in the boat while she was describing it. The pictures within her general picture of the fish, however, brook no belittlement. ‘I thought of the coarse white flesh / Packed in like feathers . . .’ Not just an eye for texture: an ear for it.