by Kay Ryan
In other words, in this bit of thinking, meaning has no “meaning” value but rather imparts to a poem a kind of useful basso quality. This is a savagely aesthetic point of view and a surprising one when you think of Frost’s weakness for too much meaning in his lesser poems. Which may be why he needed to dethrone it from time to time. Certainly in other moods he esteemed the point of a poem very highly—and esteemed his own passion for point-making, arguing that it was necessary to develop this habit in speech and prose or “how can you expect them to occur to you in the emergency of … poems.” And of course whether at any particular moment Frost is pro-sense or pro-sound is of much less interest to him than that he isn’t in the gormless middle.
The question I kept considering in reading this giant mess of scraps was: What am I finding out that I couldn’t learn elsewhere? Little I’ve mentioned so far does more than confirm what we already knew; it’s all in his poems, introductions, and lectures—and there it’s in complete sentences. Of course in reading the notebooks some things are underscored. For example, so many of his notes are in dialogue that your appreciation deepens for how elemental dialogue really is to Frost’s mind. And the many lists of course and lecture ideas underscore what a big part of his life teaching and lecturing were. And naturally you see lots of rewriting and can watch Frost giving his work its signature physical and idiomatic punch, even in such a small sample as this: “when they were absent behind their backs.” But the main thing one discovers in the notebooks is Frost’s great fidelity to himself. Over the long project of reading this lifetime of notes (nearly a lifetime itself) you see how long a poet can stay fascinated by an image or thought, how he gets hooked and can’t get unhooked—whether he ever can make anything from the image or not; how he works his ideas over decades, how he favors them, how he develops a limp for them.
The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)
Wang-Pang-Woo-Poo-Woof-Woof
I got my opinion of poet Wallace Stevens nailed down at just about the same time that the Letters first came out. As an undergraduate, and having analyzed the obligatory clutch of Stevens’s poems to a contextual nub, I was convinced that there was a single master combination that I had figured out which would throw all of the poet’s empty but imposing safes open to me.
Well, age and nine hundred pages of letters have softened my stand. While it remains true that Stevens is endlessly fingering the tumblers of the big imagination-versus-reality lock, and that some things do get to looking terribly familiar, I no longer believe that I’m so smart and he’s so not. My adolescent impatience with all things antinomic has converted to sturdy admiration and—perhaps more—affection, both for the man and for his immense and stubborn endeavor. Even saying “stubborn” makes me feel I have wronged a friend. For I now freely acknowledge that Stevens never had a choice. He was never released from the center of the struggle between the claims of the mind and the claims of the world.
Wallace Stevens is in the same fix his whole life. His earliest dandified letters to his mother are true to a natural-born thinker who cannot bear much more than the flowers and zithers of the physical world. He is collecting and practicing language—as he must—for the private speech his nature requires. But as we see from his early journal entries, he understands also that he is a conventional sort of person who must fit in socially, a person who will require the pleasant things that take money. Although his pleasures come only from what is “unsullied,” he must compromise, he tells himself, perhaps becoming a “bustling merchant” or a “moneymaking lawyer.” “We must, come down, we must use tooth and nail,” he chants to himself. Young Stevens is a wonderful paradox. He accuses himself of cold “artificiality” and aesthetic distaste for the world, and yet he is also physically vigorous, “a hearty Puritan” who grows to six foot two and can hike a whopping forty-two miles in a day. But of course when he gets to his destination he may not like it; by the age of twenty-three he is already saying, “The sea is loveliest far in the abstract when the imagination can feed upon the idea of it. The thing itself is dirty, wobbly and wet.”
After his student days at Harvard and brief sallies into journalism and independent law practice, Stevens settles in lifelong as an executive with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He marries Elsie—a lovely and unlettered creature who had quit high school to play piano in the sheet music section of a department store, with whom he has carried on a five-year epistolary courtship—and sets them up in a fine house within walking distance of the office. Eventually there is a daughter, Holly, who will become the editor of the Letters. It is exactly the mild and regulated life he requires.
It seems altogether fitting that Stevens’s life should divide early into two hermetic parts, one half the businessman and one half the poet. Stevens was a genius of accommodation: rather than being torn to shreds by his antithetical parts, he just doubled himself. He figured out a way to achieve a very enduring, serviceable equilibrium, living his requirement for office routine, domestic quiet, and financial security, and jobbing out the impulses that wouldn’t fit.
As a creature of endless desire, he puts himself on a slow desire-drip. He is always trying to control his appetite for a life of motion and travel, persuading himself that “perhaps, it is best … that one should have only glimpses of reality,” and as much as he can discouraging himself from wanting: “For all I know, thinking of a roasted duck, or a Chinese jar or a Flemish painting may be quite equal to having one.” Throughout his life he exchanges letters with travel surrogates in Cuba, France, Ireland, and elsewhere, desiring the world of them, as in this letter to a favorite young Cuban: “What I really like to have from you is not your tears on the death of Bernanos, say, but news about chickens raised on red peppers.” He has endless packages—carved figurines in a “box from Peking” or tea from “Wang-Pang-Woo-Poo-Woof-Woof”—shipped to him by a network of friends of friends living abroad. The letters acknowledging these casks and cartons are among his most delighted. In his own domestic travels for Hartford insurance, Stevens’s favorite destination is the Florida Keys, where he for once finds an exoticism equal to his imagination. On one illustrative occasion he enjoys a light repast of “doves on toast,” which would have made a good title for one of his poems. One feels the insatiability of his appetites for unfamiliar things. In the quiet rooms of his pleasant Hartford home he breathes up their foreign air, so essential to his established domestic bliss.
Stevens must order out for fresh air from the world of reality, but in the world of poetry he generates his own. And for a long time he doesn’t seem to need to write any letters about it. It is startling then to encounter his first letter to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, who is the first to accept his work. It is 1914 and he is thirty-five. He tells her, “My autobiography is, necessarily, very brief; for I have published nothing.” How has he become a poet without us knowing? We have had little hint beyond a half-embarrassed admission to his wife in 1913 that he has been “trying to get together a little collection of verses.” Yet somehow he has secretly evolved from the writer of negligible packets of love poems for his wife-to-be into the Wallace Stevens we know.
Stevens explains his “obscurity” as an interim condition: “I wish rather desperately to keep on dabbling and to be as obscure as possible until I have perfected an authentic and fluent speech for myself.” His letters repeat again and again this ferocious desire not to be untrue to himself. He does not mean to be cautious as he is in real life. Referring to the poem of which he pronounced himself fondest, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” he says, “I dislike niggling, and like letting myself go. This [poem] represented what was in my mind at the moment, with the least possible manipulation.” By his own report, he writes easily. He is so focused and imaginatively hair-triggered that he hardly remembers what he’s written later and dislikes looking back. He does feel, however, that his inclination to abstraction is a danger for him and likens h
is case to “the boy whose mother told him to stop sneezing; he replied: ‘I’m not sneezing; it’s sneezing me.’”
Stevens’s predispositions make a weird combination, fostering a poetry that is at the same time abstract and sensorially immediate, with none of the great, warm middle range of the personal. Still, even if one prefers the personal (as I do not) it is hard to stay impatient. In the Letters one feels the immensity of his ambition for poetry—to provide a spiritual compass in a drifting world: “Certainly, if civilization is to consist only of man himself, and it is, the arts must take the place of divinity.” Stevens argues that “a competent poem introduces order,” and that order brings “peace.” Although this peace is an illusion, it brings a necessary “freshening of life.” He is impatient with poets who “have no conception of the importance of the thing… . The world never moves at a very high level, but a few men should always move at a very high level.”
Stevens’s poems have a hilarity that isn’t funny, a joie without the vivre. In the Letters it is great fun to hear him trying to explain his exuberant private yelps. Illuminating “The Man with the Blue Guitar” for an Italian professor, he patiently reveals that “this-a-way and that-a-way and ai-yi-yi are colloquialisms… . A man who is master of the world balances it on his nose this way and that way and the spectators cry ai-yi-yi.” Such yelps were native to Stevens’s speech since he wrote letters as a boy to his mother (he transcribes the “tink-a-tink-a-tink-tink-a-a-a” of his brother’s mandolin playing) and as a young suitor, serenading Elsie with the inflaming rhythms of “Rig-a-jig-jig / And a jig-jig-jig.” They have always been rather lonely sounds. But loneliness is not the grief for poets that it is for others. Says Stevens, “Poets are never lonely even when they pretend to be.”
In reading the Letters we warm to Stevens in a way his poems alone are less likely to warm us, not so much because we are able to see him sitting in Elsie’s flower garden, or bringing a cake to his grandson, or remorseful at having said something perhaps too personal to Marianne Moore after one too many cocktails, but because we truly see that the difficult Wallace Stevens we sense from the poems was not a pose or a reduction but a brave and unrelenting articulation of his own impossibility. Late in the letters he describes to a friend the robins and doves that sit on his chimney before sunrise; he says they are “connoisseurs of daylight before the actual presence of the sun coarsens it.” I, for one, have no trouble making out a bulky old insurance man perched right up there with them in the pearly dawn.
Letters of Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens (University of California Press, 1981)
The Trail of the Hunted Wolf
Nobel Prize–winning poet Joseph Brodsky was born to be posthumous. He groomed himself for it, spending his life vigorously dismissing the facts of life, discounting “what happened,” shaking off biography. He bent his prodigious talents to keeping his life provisional and to resisting “collection”—professing himself eager to have his poetry misarranged by future editors, after the fashion of the fragments of the classical Greeks and Romans: “The fate of an ancient author, Archiloches or someone. All that’s left of him is rats’ tails. There’s a fate I could envy.” Brodsky’s poetry is riddling, elusive, shape-shifting, and compulsively playful. Hounded first by the KGB and later by his own fame, he was a man playing catch-me-if-you-can, a man whose only safety lay in never going to ground, a man for whom the best solution was dissolution. Brodsky invited being broken up precisely because he knew that language—which is what mattered supremely to him, and, he insisted, should to all of human ambition—will always find and reassemble itself. His great dazzling puzzle will go together many ways and all of them right.
One could almost hope that Brodsky’s conversations with Solomon Volkov would prove less blinding than his two collections of essays, Less Than One and On Grief and Reason, which should be read through a welder’s mask. But alas, while Volkov and Brodsky do spend a certain amount of time catching up on their common Leningrad memories—of blessedly mild interest to American readers—the sparks otherwise fly. In 1978, Volkov, a musician steeped in Russian literature and a fellow émigré, got the idea of recording these conversations with Brodsky in their native tongue (now gracefully translated). Neither poet nor academic, Volkov was not another remora looking for a ride, and this he believes made him attractive to Brodsky. The project extended over fifteen years. Volkov turned out to be the perfect sparring partner for Brodsky, exercising him hard enough to make him sweat.
It couldn’t have been an easy relationship. In his excellent introduction, Volkov describes the Brodsky of those early years, the “lone wolf of Russian literature … a hunted wolf, aggressively baring his fangs to drive back the pressing chase.” He reports that even casual meetings with Brodsky “had an upsetting effect” on people: “There were always overtones of menace.” At one point Volkov and an émigré friend confess to one another that they have each gotten nosebleeds after “long tête-à-têtes with Brodsky.”
Volkov assembles twelve conversations which loosely follow the history of the poet’s life and generally radiate out from Brodsky’s passion for one writer or another. Although pieced together from zillions of hours of tape, the conversations come across as seamlessly elastic and alive. It’s hard to imagine how Brodsky could have placed himself more securely at the cultural heart of Russian/Western history in the second half of this century. The titles Volkov gives to the dozen conversations tell the tale: A Leningrad Youth; Marina Tsvetaeva; Arrests, Asylums, and a Trial; Exile to the North; Robert Frost; Persecution and Expulsion; W. H. Auden; Life in New York and the Defection of Alexander Godunov; Italy and Other Travels; Remembering Anna Akhmatova; Rereading Akhmatova’s Letters; and St. Petersburg: Memories of the Future.
It is particularly ironic that one who disdains the importance of external reality (“I think the individual should ignore circumstances”)—one who believes that thoughts are secreted from within rather than coming from outside the self—should have so much history tied like tin cans to his tail. He can never outrun it. As the legendary Akhmatova herself observed after Brodsky was sentenced in a sensationally absurd Soviet trial to five years of internal exile in the frozen North, “What a biography they’re creating for our redhead! You’d think he’d hired them.” But however extraordinary the events of Brodsky’s life, his reactions are consistently more extraordinary. It is not that he is unflappable—he flaps a lot, but never when you expect. Is he horrified by being thrown into a cell by the KGB? Not at all. “I actually liked it pretty well. It’s true, I liked it! Because it was a one-man cell.” Is he crazed when on his first night in an insane asylum the man in the next cot “slit his veins”? Not nearly as crazed as he is by the aesthetically maddening way in which space was organized in the room: “To this day I don’t know what was wrong. Either the windows were slightly smaller than usual, or else the ceilings were too low. Or else the beds were too big… . This violation of proportions drove me crazy.” Is he scarred by the famous trial that catapulted him to international fame as a poet martyr? “Believe me, it made absolutely no impression on me whatsoever. Really, none whatsoever!” If Brodsky skitters away from any admission of vulnerability and often seems to be posturing, it’s easy to see why. He knows that to dwell on or dramatize his oppression by the great faceless Soviet is to enter into the same kind of thinking the state uses. Brodsky just won’t play right; the state’s rules are nonsense to him. And if he won’t be the victim, it can’t be the master.
Brodsky’s conversations with Volkov are bullet trains from the ridiculous to the sublime. In one single (perhaps condensed) monologue, Brodsky moves from the bizarre idea that “a significant percentage of the support for Stalin among intelligentsia in the West had to do with their latent homosexuality” (they were attracted to his sexy mustache) to a heady analysis of Mandelstam’s satiric “Ode,” a poem famous for tweaking the untweakable Stalin. Brodsky describes how Mandelstam carries off “the same trick” against St
alin that the Russian fortune-teller does against her customer when she “dives into your face”; Mandelstam “violated [Stalin’s] distance, he violated that same territorial imperative… . To say nothing of the poem’s phenomenal aesthetics: cubist, almost posterlike.” A feral scent mixes with the smell of ether in all of Brodsky’s musings: “if I were Stalin, I would have slit Mandelstam’s throat immediately,” concludes the Lone Wolf with animal relish.
In keeping with the light boxer’s stance that Brodsky maintained against the world for his whole too-brief life (he died of a heart attack in 1996 at the age of fifty-five), the conversations dance with brilliant feints and shifts. But to me what soars above all else is the unshifting voice of Brodsky the seer, who simply knows secrets so pure and terrible that one feels that the ancient mask of poetry itself is speaking. In every way possible, grabbing his metaphors from the gutters and the galaxies, Brodsky insists upon language as the grail itself, and upon poetry as the great mental “accelerator,” the door to whatever moral wisdom there might be. Language, for Brodsky, precedes and contains all; language is the god that commands time and space. The poet is used by language for the purposes of language; forget the poet’s life. The only proof that he’s right is how our clothes are burned off when we try to stand directly in front of his mind. It’s not perfect proof, but it’s persuasive.
Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet’s Journey Through the Twentieth Century, by Solomon Volkov, translated by Marian Schwartz (The Free Press, 1998)
Only Doubts
You could think of these lectures on poetry as either the Essential Borges or the Redundant Borges. Using a favorite Borgesian device by which infinity may be unfolded from a scrap of paper, perhaps all of Borges’s work might be reconstituted from this little book in which he revisits many of his favorite ideas. (“A mere handful of arguments have haunted me all these years. I am decidedly monotonous,” he has said elsewhere with characteristic self-effacement.) On the other hand, given the likely survival of Borges’s books, it could be argued that these lectures are little more than a milky mirror reflection of mightier iterations, a handful of loosely organized talks filled with charming apologies for a blind man’s “slips.” They have the tone of Borges speaking more or less off the cuff to an obviously adoring Harvard audience for the 1967–68 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Their very tardy publication by Harvard University Press in 2000 (“transcribed from tapes only recently discovered,” says the book jacket) encourages this suspicion that the lectures are a minor footnote to a profound body of work.