by Robert Bly
Love
Robert
Lying in a Boat, Troubled
I listen to the hull cut through the water,
water hitting the hull
and being thrown back!
The sound
is the snow falling,
the path down the mountain being slowly obscured.
1974
30 Jan, ’74
Dear Tomas, I’ve been doing some work on your tour, and things look well! I’ll write you tomorrow with the new dates. It looks roughly this way—
Week of Feb 24 [sic]—Tucson etc.
(through the desert to:)
Week of Feb 3—California!!
Week of Feb 10th—Midwest; Wisconsinetc.
—at the end of this week to
Week of Feb 17th—MADISON, MINN!
one or two readings around here then east
Feb 25th—Toronto, Ontario.
I’m enclosing several missives, self-explanatory, and a version of the kamikaze poem. Please comment on errors of fact, tone, and taste!
Field wrote me that you had sent them some bad translations by “your Scottish friend,” so I tried to rescue them from their dilemma (my solution is always the same) by sending them “Sentry Duty,” “Further In,” “Elegy,” and the kamikaze poem.
Robin Fulton’s translation of Baltics V is readable, but curiously pale, like someone who has been in a hospital for months with pneumonia or gall bladder trouble—even the hair on the old bull has turned gray—the sea winds move feebly about the cemetery stones, pausing to rest often—
I will close now—a kiss to Monica! A hug for your two sweet girls—
Love
Robert
Västerås 13-2-74
Dear Robert,
I hope you had my emergency message—sent to Mr Galin in New York. The content was: there is no third week in February. I have to be back around 15–16 of February. I have so far heard nothing from the man in Canada so this part can be neglected. And I am so grateful for California. I will—if I don’t get another message—buy a ticket: Stockholm-New York-Albuquerque-Tucson-Los Angeles-Cleveland-Minneapolis (or Sioux Falls?)-New York-Stockholm. If I buy it in Sweden I get a 25% discount. Los Angeles can probably be changed to San Francisco without much cost in the U.S., if it is that part of California you are preparing for me.
I will call you from New York (probably one hour after you have this letter).
XXX
Here is such a mess. I am impossible. I cannot find your letter with the “Along the Lines” translation! But I remember it well. The good thing with your translations is that I always meet again the original emotion I felt just when the poem started. Other translators give a (pale) reproduction of the finished poem but you bring me back to the original experience. I like it tremendously. What I am against is that you translate the “words of love” with “word” (singular), I insist that it should be plural. Also I am against stanza 2, the 2 last lines of it. If I am turning my shoulders, but still sitting there, I will be more and more like a corkscrew. Why not simply “turning slowly”?—I need your translations of the latest poems very much, I have only first versions of some of them—I think you took them back to polish for Beacon Press. What I need is especially: “Looking through the Ground,” “Sentry Duty,” “Along the Lines,” and the rushingwaterpoem with the car graveyard. (Please type them and send me quickly or I’ll have to read the Fulton versions!!) (“Headlong, headlong waters” etc.) Type them and send them to Lois Shelton in Tucson. In Albuquerque I have the mad idea to read “Baltics” (exoticism), but not in Fulton’s translation but in Sam Charters’s (a pupil of Charles Olson!), which you have not seen, and not (yet) condemned. Sam Charters is a good man and he has smelled some sea winds.
They read “6 winter privacy poems” recently on the Swedish radio as “dagens dikt.” I was paid 117 crowns for the translation. Did you get anything?
XXX
I am sorry you have to type so much. It is awful to type. But what can I do without the texts?
XXX
Solzhenitsyn just landed in Frankfurt.
Goodbye, auf wiedersehen, love
Tomas
12 March, ’74
Dear Tomas,
It was a great joy to see you as always! I did regret that, pressed by circumstances neither of us could control, constant conviviality kept us from the muskrats and what other small fallen creatures this flatland affords. After you left, I laughed and laughed to think of all the Jungian fanaticism you had been subjected to in just two or three days—this fanaticism in changing everyone is American, but perhaps when it starts to broaden to Jung, it’s going too far! At least half of what I said was absurd, so please do forgive me, forgive all of us—the Sitting Bulls of psychology.
Biddy made a Raggedy Ann for Paula or Emma, and is mailing that tomorrow. We’re still reading Miss Jane Pittman, to open mouths.
Ruth says that she thinks that in your Baltics poem you are moving in the right direction—I guess broadening the view back toward ancestors—and that since the island belongs to the area of the Mother—or of your mother—you have to walk carefully.
Tell me what other adventures you have had!
Love from us
all and a hug—
Robert
New York 15-3 [1974]
Dear Robert,
a few last words before I take off from that other continent. Thank you for your letter! Everything went fine in Ohio—for me, but not for the people around me. Stuart Friebert got the flu and Tom Lux, who replaced him, yes, his lungs collapsed so he had to be taken to a hospital. In Ada no one was sick. When arriving in N.Y. I was supposed to meet Jim Wright and Michael Benedikt. Both were ready but—alas—Jim Wright got suddenly “dizzy” and had to go to bed before seeing me. Now we waited for Michael. He was coming on a bus from Connecticut. But I did not see him either. He got sick on the bus and had to go to bed immediately. So I bring plague to everybody. As soon as I am in the neighborhood people turn sick. I hope you and your family are well. I feel like a poltergeist, but very healthy.
Carl Gustav Jung sends his best and reminds you that because intuition is my strongest side I should write poetry with my fact-grasping part, e.g. collecting more dull facts for Baltics and trying to make the poem still more flat. I will try to do that in Part VI.
Love to you all and grateful hugs from
Tomas
15 March, ’74
Dear Tomas,
That’s strange—Jung had the same effect upon people. Freud fainted once when he was with Jung...it sounds as if in this over suggestible country they start fainting as soon as you enter the city. First Jim Wright falls over, dreaming you are his father, then Michael Benedikt collapses in the aisle of a bus, convinced he is irretrievably an orphan.
I’m enclosing a brochure, showing where—according to Daniela herself—(an old girlfriend of John Logan’s and Bill Knott’s)—the Great Mother essay in Sleepers is now leading innocent and suggestible feminists. This ought to cheer Lars Forssell up.
Do write.
Love,
Robert
30 March, ’74
Dear Tomas,
I hope you are well there! Spring still hasn’t come here—and it looks exactly the same as when you were here! I am still working on the same poem, too, so nothing has changed!
A new APR has come out, with a continuation of my Jung brainwashing (archetype-implanting, we call it) and I’ve torn out a copy to enclose. The rest of the issue, which includes a letter from Louis Simpson claiming he is not a thinking type at all, but, I gather, some sort of universal man, like Goethe, I’ve sent on by ship mail. I’m going out tomorrow on a 10 day trip, including Kenyon, where the undergraduates talk of the Great Mother a lot, and yet when you listen to them, she seems indistinguishable from the reason! Of co
urse, I must go and straighten them out—with my beak and a cawkle.
I enclose the gruesome news from the telephone company—but this is all of it. Next time I’ll do it by letter!!
Love,
Robert
Västerås 30th of April -74
Dear Robert,
I should not write to you now because my thinking function is very weak here, the day after the leaves really came out. It is good, ecstatic spring weather. Monica is preparing a gigantic party—the first for many years. The good mood from the U.S.A. trip is still left. That usually happens: the first 2 weeks after returning I float like a balloon, and then the balloon loses air and eventually I drop, slowly, into the mess of everyday duties, the Swedish cultural politics etc. But this time was different. We went to Madeira, for the first time since 1959 we were together alone in a new place for a whole week. Monica had had a tough time during February–March and she recovered completely on this fantastic island, I started to write and read books. We were completely irresponsible.
Many many thanks for the book of seal poems, it comes in the right moment when I am hungry for good prose. I also had the 2 Danish pamphlets. The translations look reasonable.
A rumor says that Lars-Olof Franzén from Dagens Nyheter wants to visit you. If he arrives, don’t forget to sing the hymns before meals! Give him the full Jungian/Lutheran treatment!
Your community/network discussions in APR are very interesting and with a better thinking function (which will appear in a few days) I will say something about it. I have recommended the book to my colleagues here in the office—I think the ideas are relevant for Sweden too, and not especially for writers and artists but for vast areas of our society. It is a great thing that you have this column in APR. As soon as you happen to read a book that really makes an impression on you, you start to feed the audience with the stuff, like feeding a baby with a spoon.
Love to everybody in the Bly farm.
Tomas
16 July, ’74
Dear Tomas,
I’m so glad to hear from you! I was afraid that as soon as you got back to Sweden, you had called in friends, poets and reporters and said, “I now have definite proof that Robert Bly is a Jungian!” (Gasps of horror.) (I have heard that Jung is hated in Europe by amazingly large masses of people.) And you would follow that with a declaration: “I am never going to write to Robert Bly again!” (Loud cheers from assembled Swedes.) “Every time he mentioned with favor a horned animal, such as a moose, he was really talking of Jung.” (Cheers “Good job of detective work. Those fellas are subtle, etc.”)
I’ve been reading Jung since an early age, and rehabilitation is difficult now. As Khrushchev said, “Only the grave can cure a hunchback!”
Around here it is hot summer, no islands, no delicious paths through high trees, no swims in the Baltic, no rowboats among the duck utopias. I am learning to play a dulcimer, and Bill Holm comes once in a while with his clavichord in the trunk, and we all have a lovely time then.
Jim Wright committed himself to a hospital for four days, and is determined to end his drinking; John Crowe Ransom died last week, quietly, in his sleep. Ingegerd Friberg (the one who is doing a thesis on my poems in Göteborg), much buoyed up by that Dagens Nyheter article by Lundqvist—(I sounded there like a bull elephant, who was a “special friend” of the Mother’s—imagining I am an elephant, of course, I liked it)—she brought me a Lapp drinking cup. Don Hall, the stomach type, is writing poems about going to bed with skeletons and things—I don’t understand that.
That’s all the literary news! At my shack I have your new poem, which I like—do not leave out the “crystallizing” line! It is very interesting, and necessary. I think I’ll try to translate the poem—it will probably end up set in Iceland, since my Swedish dictionary is not there!
Love to you all,
Robert
18 Aug, ’74
Dear Tomas,
I’m sending along a letter proving that there was one person at least alive in our audience in St. Cloud this spring! It’s a very gloomy day here—late August, the grass has nearly given up, little rain, the farmers are crabby at supper time, the tractors break down, the farmers’ sons ruin the engines of their $200 cars by racing to the nearby towns, where the girls have their hair in curlers, getting ready to go to the State Fair. Then they get there, and think the boys are vulgar, and rabbits come in and eat all the flowers in the old ladies’ gardens overnight. That is what it is like around here. I’m about to go up on the belfry of my old schoolhouse with a book and stay there—no one can find me there, because this being a Protestant country, no one ever looks up!
We do have gypsies here, real ones, and I was once invited to join a band of them—but I knew I would pick the wrong girl and get knifed—
Do write.
Love, Robert
Västerås 22-8-74
Dear Robert,
back again in Västerås after a rainy and cold summer—but I enjoyed it, oh I needed it, and we must go back to Runmarö for a couple of days soon. I completed Östersjöar (bad for you Jungians!) and the whole pile will be published by Bonniers in October.
Gunnar will publish one of your APR columns in Lyrikvännen and that could give Jung a push forward among your fans here in Sweden. I think his underground position so to say is strong—his books are always borrowed in the libraries, but in the Office Intellectual Sweden he is probably not highly valued—the Junta favors a strange combination of Freud and Marx.1
So you are tempting me with the South again. I would love to visit the U.S.A. and I can do it in autumn 75, not in the spring. In the spring I have to stay here and work hard at the office to pay my delayed taxes. But let us do a reading in New York or elsewhere under the supervision of Betty Kray. I think Carleton College in Minnesota will have me too—the nice reviewer in Carleton Miscellany wrote me and gave a half-invitation. Don’t use the telephone any more, I can write postcards in advance, we have plenty of time.
Another of your fads, the brain-philosophy, had a fantastic confirmation lately—the last months of President Nixon, the reptile brain fighting long after the battle was lost. The whole tape story also has something to do with reptile thinking, the need to roll up, to protect oneself with winding things. Sam Charters and his wife were visiting us the day he left his President job, 5 pm Swedish time, we were sitting drinking beer outside the shop in Södersunda village, the sun was shining, they looked very pleased, they wanted to see him in jail—I don’t want to, I have no real explanation for that, maybe I suspect putting him in jail would be too easy a way to get rid of the really sad fact: that the fellow was elected by YOU, the People, by a landslide victory. I think everyone who voted for him should go to jail for three minutes (of silence) instead.
I have come close to Frida, our dog, this summer. She is absolutely 100% mammal brain, there is not a single atom of other brains in her. The rest of the family is a mixture, as before.
You ask about the photo for the Beacon Press book. I think there is a stamp on the back of the photo with the name and address of the woman who took the picture—I don’t remember her name but she is nice and married to the poet Walter Höllerer in Berlin. She is definitely not Hungarian.
Love to everybody in Odin House!
Tomas
3 Sept, ’74
Dear Tomas,
OK, let’s agree on October of 75!! Betty Kray wants us to read together in N.Y. and then you can read in So Carolina for that strange person called GUS SUCCUP. I will avoid the telephone, and pass along to you—by fish express—any hints I hear of places looking for a Nixon sympathizer. I love your idea that everyone who voted for him should go to prison for 3 minutes. The prison would be full of feeling types and sensation types—the intuitive types would be standing around outside smiling.
We’re all well here. Carol is working hard on her project to get buses for old people. Ru
th is about to get a job, she hopes, as a planner in a nearby town. Sam and Noah come home from school, and leap immediately on their aged ponies, who had hoped for a calm old age, and gallop off in several directions. The ponies usually get a revenge by running them through an apple tree on the way home—last night it was a plum tree. Noah arrived at the supper table all scratched up.
Love to you and Monica
and the girls,
Robert
P.S. I like the Danton poem. I expect it is about your father. Please help me with the waiting room at the end—is it a waiting room in a railway station? or a doctor’s office? In what sense do the alleys bend down towards it? Is this a slum, or some sort of “gamle by”? It’s a wonderful, strong poem.
16 Oct, ’74
Dear Tomas,
I’m on the bus to Mpls, off on my first reading this year, to Texas. Last week I got a letter from a student, who said someone there in the physics dept wanted “to photograph my aura.” That sounds wonderful, though I have the same fear as the native when the first white man wants to photograph his face. Also the man’s name (the physicist) is not Dr. Dostrorski, or Dr. Jonathan Adamson, but JOE PIZZO. I must proceed carefully.
I sympathize with your problem vis-à-vis the Swedish Academy. Nothing is nicer than to be a cricket, living in the laundry chute. We don’t have such a severe problem with these official positions in the U.S., because somehow, we produce a constantly hatching supply of Mark Strands, who fill all these positions with alacrity and satisfaction.
Anne Sexton committed suicide last week. She sat in her idling car in her garage, after having been divorced a few weeks before. Menninger in Man Against Himself mentions that many people find suicide too unconventional in its naked state, and so they embezzle money or get divorced in order to provide an acceptable excuse for the suicide.