Lowell was the most brilliant poet of the postwar period. If he remains out of fashion, our postmodern day loathes poetry that refuses to be easy or clever. (I feel like a reviewer with a taste for Bergman when most everyone wants to watch Pirates of the Caribbean 3). An editor with a fresh and severe eye must produce the selected edition of Lowell’s work now desperately needed. There were no reasons other than perversity and laziness to bring this bedraggled Selected back into print, where it will confuse Lowell’s readers for years to come.
Henri Cole
Henri Cole’s spare new book is a meditation serving as memoir—scenes come and go; parents fade away; the poet takes sidelong glances at his aging, graying face in the mirror. Blackbird and Wolf shows the confidence of a poet no longer struggling toward expression (Cole’s early books were rococo weddingcakes of expression). These quiet, unsettling poems often seem fractured from within, distracted in the intensity of their observation.
My lilacs died today, floating in a bowl.
All week I watched them pushing away,
their pruned heads swollen together into something
like anger, making a brief comeback
toward the end, as if secretly embalmed.
The psychological nuance of these images shows the botanical eye of Plath, not the naive curiosity of Roethke. Few recent poets have been this Freudian, Viennese to their fingertips—it’s as if Cole had read The Interpretation of Dreams and then memorized it. (For the past century, the chicken-and-egg problem has been whether dreams are Freudian because they’re dreams or because the dreamers of dreams read Freud.)
The speaker here—cautious, anxiety-ridden, homosexual, devastated by the air he breathes—is trapped in the self, which would seem self-centered if self were not the very thing he was trying to escape. Cole’s recent books, The Visible Man (1998) and Middle Earth (2003), gave astringent analysis to a temperament tormented and miserable. The new poems wrestle with an inarticulate anguish. As with Bishop, as with Moore, the poet has found, among animals and in the “effortless existence” of the plant world, surrogates for all he cannot say. (The things a writer most wishes to say may be what he has no words for—and the love that dare not speak its name is sometimes, like all love, the love of which nothing can be said.) Of a dead wren:
When I open your little gothic wings
on my whitewashed chest of drawers,
I almost fear you, as if today were my funeral.
Moment by moment, enzymes digest
your life into a kind of coffin liqueur.
Two flies, like coroners, investigate your feathers.
Those hilarious fly-coroners give almost scientific detachment to death (the “coffin liqueur” might have come from an episode of C.S.I.); but gothic takes us back to the incense-laden air of medieval churches, to the old religion that no longer consoles or absolves. The poet has mixed relations with his God, wrestling, not just with faith, but with the faith in faith.
Blackbird and Wolf is fascinated by nature’s violence—in the human world, there is only a mediated loneliness. These poems are more obscure than Cole’s recent work, more uneasily and sometimes clumsily phrased. All the guff about animals can make him seem a poor man’s Galway Kinnell, going on about bears, or a slightly dotty Dr. Doolittle (the poet talks to crow and hornet and weed, but the poems are no wiser for it). Worse, there are poems about the war in Iraq that try to turn the poet’s gifts for troubled reflection into a medium of public outrage.
When Lowell wrote his version of family history, he did not omit the comedy; and Cole is most indebted to the older poet when seeing his father plain:
My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum,
watching a portable black-and-white television,
reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
which he preferred to Modern Fiction.
One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease,
except the one that guarded his corpse
found holding a tumbler of Bushmills.
The schnauzers, the tumbler of Bushmills—these are the inheritance of Life Studies, the Flaubertian details that secure the habitation of the eye. The precision of observation has its dry philosophical flourish—to the voyeur comes loneliness, but also the spoils of beauty.
Poured through the bees, the sunlight, like flesh
and spirit, emits a brightness pushing everything
else away except the bees’ vibrating bronze bodies
riding the air as if on strings that flex
and kick back as they circle the hive.
The moody grandeurs of this short book are those of a poet who keeps company with himself and can offer no more, not the social torsions of Lowell or the vengeful hostilities of Plath. Misery doesn’t love company—misery is company.
Pynchon in the Poetic
The monastic saints … familiarly accosted, or imperiously commanded, the lions and serpents of the desert; infused vegetation into a sapless trunk; suspended iron on the surface of the water; passed the Nile on the back of a crocodile; and refreshed themselves in a fiery furnace. These extravagant tales … display the fiction, without the genius, of poetry.
—Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Poetry was the mother of fiction, and its reduction to a minor species of memoir has not been without cost. That poetry and fiction share more than they divide (fiction at times bearing the private burden of memory, poetry failing memoir in pure fictions) is often concealed by the hermit-crab isolation of contemporary novels, for which realism is old-time religion.
What makes Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon a poetic act is, not just its fanatic ignorance of current fashion (this historical novel almost makes a reader forget that beneath his cocky demeanor and hipster’s cant Pynchon has always been a throwback), but its use of means, in its languors as well as its language, more properly poetic. There have always been fiction writers of poetic temperament: Joyce and Faulkner not surprisingly began as poets—minor poets, perhaps, but ones who took their early understandings of language through a form very different in its pretense, its rhythm, its design. (Melville was a much better poet as a novelist than he ever was writing verse.) Though Pynchon has learned from the modernists by coming after them, he is a novelist of old-fashioned sentiments, not just in historical curiosity (his novels of contemporary life, Vineland and the thinly mannered The Crying of Lot 49, have been his weakest), but in his adoption of Dickensian comedy, beginning with his absurd and fantastic names.
The narrator of Mason & Dixon is Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke. One difference between Dickens and Pynchon is that Dickens usually gets away with his names—Dickens invents characters so true to their names they are false to their unreality; Pynchon loathes the idea of character, and his names wither into whimsy at the expense of character. The philosophy of names is too divisive to have bearing here; but there are few words more Falstaffian, considering the worlds they include, than poem or novel. Our unwillingness to deny anything with the ambition of being a poem the honor of the name may make discretion impossible, yet most readers have a Platonic sense of what a poem is and is not (that sense may be merely typographical). Though it may be modified by experience or experiment, this sense is unlikely ever to admit a doughnut, a desk lamp, or any literary act wearing the clothes of other conventions (whether diary, play, or novel, though there may be novels in verse, verse plays, and perhaps rhymed diaries—they may use poetry without being poems). What calls itself a poem may, within limits, be taken as poem; but those limits are less enclosing boundaries than liberated tyrannies.
Mason & Dixon is a novel, and yet the experience of reading it is at times purely poetic. Pynchon has embraced in his arguments and actions the crowded ambiguity and frothy imagery of poetry; and to examine them is not to suggest these means lie outside the novel, but to recall how long they have been estranged, not just from recent fiction, but from recent poetry as well.
Snow-Balls have flown
their Arcs, starr’d the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,—the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking’d-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel’d Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,—the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax’d and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy Advent, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.
This clamorous opening sentence, dense with the chaotic rush of new sensation (every novel plunges into the cold river of a New World), is rife with the novel’s animating themes—the ascents and descents of lives beneath those of the stars. Jeremiah Dixon is a journeyman surveyor, Charles Mason an assistant to the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich. The arcs and stars of those hurled snowballs are the heraldic signs of their professions: in the comedy of their lives, cutting arcs across oceans, siting stars, these characters make order from the anarchic motions suggested by the children in their frolic. The heated sugar is the earliest intimation of the trade that drove colonial expansion (its sweetness cost the lives of slaves): the lively microcosm (the whole novel might be said to be upon the fly, the characters ever in purposeful dither) serves a macrocosm yet unknown, a universe whose existence, whose author, is adumbrated by fond jokes—of punctuation called up by punctuated, of beginnings (and religious awakenings) summoned by Advent.
The microscope of the sentence reveals the universe of a novel. Pynchon is everywhere sensitive to what a sentence bears, eighteenth-century punctuation not taxing his inventions with the firmer syntax and fixed stops of a later era (the characters meet in 1761). The comic irritation of the capitals (no Bar to Readers of the Period, accustomed to such Emphases) removes the novel to the bewildering thicket of the past, as old spelling does to Hamlet; but apart from its manipulation of reader psychology (we must become the readers of the past), the distancing of such capitals makes pastiche the comedy of form the way a sonnet is a comedy of emotion, the compression and entanglements of love finding their spirit in the spirit of form.
This intensity of imagery, this continual and immodest word-by-word invention, ruptures the plain understandings most fiction now requires. Novels must in part be linear and straightforward—they have somewhere to get to. Pynchon’s have coiled upon themselves, devouring their bodies, as if distrustful of the long vista, cut straight through Appalachian forest and over mountains, that is the narrow goal of his novel’s characters: the settlement of an eighty-year-old boundary dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland by drawing an imaginary line, the line that would soon become the worried demarcation between states slave and free.
When a word quibbles, the reader’s attention turns minute and cautious. Mason’s chat with Martha Washington (one of many clumsily imposed encounters with historical figures) defends astronomy in terms shivering with ambiguity, jokes that darken his speech with the pressure of the unsaid.
“All Lens-fellows, I mean, recognize that our first Duty is to be of publick Use. … Even with the Pelhams currently in Eclipse, we all must proceed by way of th’ establish’d Routes, with ev’ry farthing we spend charg’d finickingly against the Royal Purse. We are too visible, up on our Hilltop, to spend much time among unworldly Speculations, or indeed aught but the details of our Work,—focus’d in particular these days upon the Problem of the Longitude.”
“Oh. And what happen’d to those Transits of Venus?”
“There we have acted more as philosophical Frigates, Ma’am, each detach’d upon his Commission,—whilst the ev’ryday work of the Observatories goes on as always, for the task at Greenwich, as at Paris, is to know every celestial motion so perfectly, that Sailors at last may trust their lives to this Knowledge.”
Here his professional vocabulary summons his metaphors, his private world mirrored in the limits of his language (the author’s conscious authority always concealing from his characters their unconscious—the author is their unconscious). The Pelhams (a powerful pair of English brothers who served in succession as prime minister) are not out of favor; they are in eclipse. The astronomer is focus’d. The hilltop the stargazers stand on is at once literal and figurative, but their own “speculations” (their stargazings) shade uneasily into speculations philosophical and financial (talk of money is close by—it isn’t just time that is spent). Mason claims he has no time for unworldly speculations, and yet he does and doesn’t—a stargazer’s “speculations” are all unworldly. Even the financial gambles of astronomers are not likely to have much worldly in them—Mason means his God is in the details, but he means so much more than he means.
A speech later, these speculations transform into “philosophical” frigates, a metaphor compacted of the wars raging on the Atlantic (Mason and Dixon have already been hapless participants in one skirmish), the individualism of the period’s philosophy (each man well armored in his belief, as well as stoic in it), the isolation of the astronomer’s work (as well as the diaspora of astronomers to far-flung outposts to observe the transit of Venus), and the self-observant comedy necessary to such a metaphor. To be “detached” is to have professional standing, professional disinterest, and professional disengagement, without forgetting the literal meaning: to be sent on a military mission. That a commission is a document of work in hand does not ignore the commissions necessary to officer any vessel. (In this novel, all commissions hint at the secret world of decision making of which Pynchon makes such delightfully paranoid use.) Those metaphorical frigates steer toward real sailors for whom lack of an accurate way of determining longitude at sea cost their lives. The search occupied much astronomic and horological research for a century and saw the creation of the Board of Longitude (the naturalist Joseph Banks was a member) to adjudicate the scientific disputes and judge the winning method.
The pleasures of such a nervous, finicky style (each farthing of meaning charged against the reader’s attention) are densely repeated at many levels of discourse and disputation. At times, one image awakens a world of vertiginous richness. Here a cook, in company, admires a fop’s recently brandished sword:
“Damascus steel, ’s it not? Fascinating. How is that Moiré effect done?
“By twisting together two different sorts of Steel, or so I am told,—then welding the Whole.”
“A time-honor’d Technique in Pastry as well. The Armorers of the Japanese Islands are said to have a way of working carbon-dust into the steel of their Swords, not much different from how one must work the Butter into the Croissant Dough. Spread, fold, beat flat, spread, again and again, eh? till one has created hundreds of these prodigiously thin layers.”
“Gold-beating as well, now you come to it,” puts in Mr. Knockwood, “—’tis flatten and fold, isn’t it, and flatten again, among the thicknesses of Hide, till presently you’ve these very thin Sheets of Gold-Leaf.”
“Lamination,” Mason observes.
“Lo, Lamination abounding,” contributes Squire Haligast, momentarily visible, “its purposes how dark, yet have we ever sought to produce these thin Sheets innumerable, to spread a given Volume as close to pure Surface as possible, whilst on route discovering various new forms, the Leyden Pile, decks of Playing-Cards, Contrivances which, like the Lever or Pulley, quite multiply the apparent forces, often unto disproportionate results.…”
“The printed Book,” suggests the Revd, “—thin layers of pattern’d Ink, alternating with other thin layers of compress’d Paper, stack’d often by the Hundreds.”
From this single object, families of reference flood, each lowly example claiming an ever-more-distant cousin, the layered patterns of Damascus steel (its secret still hidden from the modern world) metamorphosing into samurai swords, croissants (the fop is known as a Macaroni),* gold beaters, the Leyden pile, eac
h image itself beaten and folded into another, the layers of imagery creating just that concentration of power, that multiplication of forces, to which Squire Haligast refers. This tour de force is a miniature of Enlightenment knowledge—knowledge by association, advancing insight by applying the stray evidence of one field to the general principle of another. This ability to draw theory from the mass of particulars is scientific method in small.
Such an unruly mob of images might have been mere caprice, if the Leyden pile were not elsewhere the controlling metaphor of the novel’s own preoccupation with the advance of science (each repetition making the Leyden pile its own Leyden pile). The image that follows the passage above is of a heap of broadsides, “dispers’d one by one, and multiplying their effect as they go,” dispersed like the astronomers scattered to their transits, gathering knowledge while also broadcasting it. That the harvest of examples may itself form an ars poetica gives the passage its bookish purpose: to end with the power of printing first to focus and compress information (words by themselves each performing nothing) and then to scatter it. Images that might have radiated into ornament become instead the novel’s enterprise, to make the free market of reference part of the nascent laissez-faire economy slowly emerging from monopolies of commerce, the chartered companies that held the reins of empire (the novel’s failure is its failure to find a plot beyond such local communities of power).
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