Airmail (14 page)

I enclose a letter from Mr. Hall which has been injured—not by the FBI but by me—it got mashed in my briefcase.

Jan Erik Vold has sent greetings to me on two occasions. He rides a motorcycle and wears a complete diving suit—he looks—from a distance—like a minor character out of some James Bond movie. When he has taken off his motorcycle outfit, he’s pure friendliness. Awhile back he wrote some good poems but I don’t connect with his latest phase at all—his texts make me feel so troublesomely old-fashioned.

It’s rainy and windy out here. I’m devoting myself to escapism on the sofa, reading Sherlock Holmes—the great comforter. Regression!

Till we meet again! See you in a few days

Tomas      

Runmarö, undated [August 8, 1968]

Dear Bly’s! (because I write by hand I try some English—to make life less complicated for you and the FBI-people—if Louis Simpson too is under supervision). Oh we miss you! The cave is almost empty but summer goes on. Paula is fat as a broiler and Emma learned to swim yesterday. I have been back to Västerås and working with a few unreal city-clients for 2 days, then returning to the island. In the mail I found a large swarm of letters for you (which I will forward to Madison) and the magazine
Motor
for me. Passing Stockholm I visited Bonniers and handed over the list of books—they will send you soon I hope. I got some news about Martinson—he is not so ill after all—he was ill this winter but has recovered and would probably be interested in getting some support—send him
Unicorn
! Address is simple: Gnesta, Sweden. They did not know about your translations except for the Ekelöf book—Bonniers is of course interested in novel translating primarily, businessmen as they are. But they should know! They always say that there is no interest in Swedish poetry abroad. So send them a
Unicorn
too.

In Västerås I watched television from Miami Beach for hours. A paradise of fools! but the small excerpt from Lindsay’s speech was not bad. The rest was more terrible protoplasm of stomach-and-muscle rhetoric, which causes severe attacks of suffocation among nervous-system-listeners.

Mother feels a little better now. But she is losing her hair. “Hair does not want to stay on a sick person,” she said.

5 hugs to all of you from us!

Vännen     Tomas

[on envelope]

THE WIND SHAKES CATERPILLARS

DOWN FROM THE TREES—ONE

LANDS ON MY SHIRT.

Västerås 2 Sept. 68

Dear Robert,

first a catastrophic message from Lars Gustafsson—he has been instructed to start setting up your book “within 14 days” and it’s therefore necessary that you send the poems to me, or to Bonniers, in the order you want them—and that you send them by air. Preferably with a foreword—though I think the foreword can be sent a week or two later if you haven’t had time to write it.

I’ve sent the “three presidents” to the Finland Swedish magazine
Horisont
but haven’t heard back from them yet.

As you will understand, I’ve spent a great part of the past 24 hours in front of the TV and seen tanks roll by from morning till night. I’ve been able to follow the Czechoslovakian drama from hour to hour—it has made an enormous impression here—I doubt whether you in the U.S. have experienced the events more than 25% of what the Europeans have experienced. Honorable leftists of Sonnevi’s type must be having a very hard time. Communists loyal to the party have solved the problem in a radical way by wholeheartedly condemning what’s happening—Hermansson, the party leader, requested that we recall our ambassador to the Soviet Union! (No other party has requested that.) Among the NLF groups a number of members have requested that the movement be expanded so as to oppose the Soviet Union. In other words it would be an anti-U.S.–anti-Soviet movement. From the humanitarian point of view such a thing would be perfectly logical, but from an ideological one it would be absurd (you know North Vietnam’s position). The whole thing is a boiling cauldron.

In Västerås the flag is at half-mast.

We often think of you and miss you.

Love to Carol!

Your friend     T    

18 Sept, ’68

Dear Tomas,

Sorry I’ve been away! Part physically & part spiritually! I didn’t realize deadline was so close! Enclosed find poems with order indicated, approved STAMP

I’m working on foreword, it will appear in 10 days or two weeks (I’ll bet!)

Love to you and your beautiful, graceful, bird-like

branch-like wife and family!

Robert

21 Oct, ’68

Dear Tomas,

I’m sending some literary curiosities here in an old
New World Writing
(1959!) with my first political (glumpf ) (and my last, some would say) poems. Also a little book of interviews from 1963 that has had a lot of influence one way or the other. A new
Stand
with some of my ranting, and two
Kayak
s. #12 has my criticism; and I’ve asked George to send you #13, which has the critcism of me for my criticism!

I got a lovely bunch of books from Bonniers—the
only
thing they didn’t send were the prose books I needed to get an owl eye view of you African-Swedish poets. For example there was one paperback on poets of the ’50’s with an article on you, and another paperback I think with an article on your parachute poem. How could I (sob) get copies of those?

I had a marvellous week alone by myself in the woods, and I wrote some moonlight poems I’ll send you this winter—and I wrote an outhouse poem the other day! But now I have to put my harness on, stick the bit in my mouth, and start pulling the manure spreader. Tomorrow I start off on a long tour to get money for us through the winter. I decided to put all readings into the fall this year, so I will have Dec, Jan, & Feb all to myself, utan program!

Then we’ll write long letters to each other, and “settle all difficult interpretations.”

(I did a draft of the introduction last night and will send it to you from my tour.)

Love to you and Monica

and Paula and Emma!        from usn’s

Robert

Västerås 10 dec. 68

Dear Robert, Caruso of 78 RPMs,

I’ve received a strict order from Bonniers to write to you immediately and remind you of THE FOREWORD TO THE BOOK. I’ve gotten the proofs, but the foreword, where is that? We now have to have it by January 1. You are good at forewords (Take for example Neruda). Or shall we ask Carolyn Kizer to write it? I saw in the paper that she was here recently making a good-will visit to Swedish writers and institutions.

These last few days the most wonderful pieces of mail have been dancing down into my mailbox. Ah what a lot of fun I’ve had with
Kayak
and with various books. Most of all I like the letters from
The Sixties
readers. Harry Smith takes the cake. I will beg a few publishers for some books to send you, a CHRISTMAS PACKAGE, which by the usual swift surface mail can be expected to arrive around March. (The Cutty Sark isn’t running any longer.)

[------]

In November—right after I’d gotten myself back together after the damned Presidential election—I went to Berlin for an “author symposium” with Professor Walter Höllerer. We sat and philosophized around a long table for four days: Lars Gustafsson, I and two Swedish prose writers and 30 German docents and professors and authors and thinkers and linguists and observers from the Swedish Institute etc. etc. I didn’t even understand the title of the conference! Erklärbarkeit und Nicht-Erklärbarkeit der Welt als Axiom für die Literatur? The food was good. Afterwards there was a reading: I had bad German translations with me. They were improved by a bunch of Dichter und Denker and were finished 5 minutes after the reading was supposed to begin. I stumbled out of a taxi and up to the podium and read “Nach einem Tod” so that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. “Im Freien” was read by a Mr. Jürgen Becker. Nothing by one of the novelists (Enquist) got read, the other, Jersild, got a terrible presentation by his translator who after having read (in a pathetic voice) for 40 minutes suddenly broke off and said with an anguished expression on his face: “Ach meine Damen und Herren, Entschuldigung, the text is just too long, I’ll have to skip over part of it”—whereupon he skipped to three lines from the end and fell across the finish line. It went in other words the way it usually goes when Swedish literature is presented abroad. Even so we are considered to have had a certain success—especially Enquist whom the audience escaped hearing: his book was purchased direct. I myself was courted by Professor Höllerer’s poetry series editors, by Rundfunk and by
Akzente.
I’m even going to appear in Suhrkampf. It’s my (problematic) translator who tells me this—what do I know? I do hope so, I do absolutely want a reason to travel down to the continent again soon and eat Sauerkraut.

Our household economy has gotten even worse of late and I’ve taken on a few extra jobs—among other things I’m leading a group-counseling session for social workers in Västerås: they sit and unbosom themselves under my tactful guidance. It’s dark and cold as hell but my 1966–67 depression has in fact released me and I feel quite energetic.

Now we would very much like to hear from you. Love to you all! Sometimes I walk with a stiff right leg and think how nice it was to have Biddy hanging on to it.

Your friend

    Tomas

P.S. Poems enclosed. Give me a fatherly advice—should I say “I” instead of “he” in “The Open Window”?

T.

30 Dec, ’68

Dear Tomas,

I can’t describe what weather we’re having—fantastic! No mail goes out for days, and we don’t get out of the yard for days. It’s like a medieval village!

At last, here is the introduction stained by snow. Tell me what you think—should some be dropped? It seemed egotistical to write an introduction to my own poems, so I stole some paragraphs from older prose—the second section is new. I did the best I could.

I’ll write a longer letter soon, with some poems—thank you for the two lovely poems!—I must trudge out with this—Gustafsson has been threatening me—I’m frightened of the snow gods—

love as ever,

Robert

Poetry’s purpose in its recent growth is to advance deeper into the unknown country. In order to penetrate into this country poetry must learn to sleep differently, to awake differently, to listen for new sounds, to walk differently.

What is the unknown country? It is the change in inward life which corresponds to the recent changes in outward life. In the last hundred years, outwardly, colonialism dies, engines are born, the religions lose power, business takes power, the falcon and the eagle weaken, fear of the mother increases. The change has been thorough. The change penetrates deeper than we believe. Poetry has been able to describe that inward change better than fiction has. Neruda tells us more about modern life than Faulkner; Rilke tells us more than Mann.

All around us are huge reservoirs of bypassed emotions, ignored feelings, unexplored thoughts. As Rilke said to sculptors, there are hundreds of gestures being made which we are not aware of. The purpose of poetry is to awaken the half of us that has been asleep for many years—to express the thoughts not thought. All expression of hidden feelings involves opposition to the existing order.

************

New poetry then embodies hidden feelings, feelings that are almost inaccessible to the eyes and hands of the Western ego. Spiritual joy rises from levels of the personality far beneath the ego; the impulses that cause the Vietnam war rise from levels of the American personality far beneath the American ego. What is necessary—for an American poet—to write political poetry is inwardness.

When we first write political poems, we hope to use our opinions, to build the poems out of our opinions. But all our opinions are like the tin cans that lie around some modern woodcutter’s house in the forest. The longing to kill Asians—it is a longing, not an opinion—lies far down in the soil of Westerners, tin cans rot at that depth, there is too much acid in the soil. But poetry finds those longings there, they are almost indestructible. The love of solitude lies at the same depth, nothing can make it disintegrate.

What I value in poetry are the mysterious lines that cross, roads that start out in political energy and end in spiritual energy, roads that start out in solitude and end in human love, roads that start out in primitive energy and pass through compassion and on into spiritual energy, passing many other roads on the way.

ROBERT BLY      

1. As I mentioned in the previous letter it’s now 100% certain that the book will be published and that it will happen either this fall or spring 69—probably this fall.
   

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Västerås 1-8-69 [January]

Dear Robert,

Good! I’ve translated the foreword and sent it to Bonniers. Those are good, strong formulations, which I have perhaps not been able to do full justice to in Swedish. One section is less persuasive than the others: the one beginning “when we first write political poems” and ending with “The love of solitude.” This is owing partly to the Swedish. “Längta,” which is the only thing “longing” can be translated into, is a positively charged, rather weak and sentimental word in Swedish. For that reason “The longing to murder Asians” [“Längtan att mörda asiater”] has an odd sound. The whole discussion of that dark urge to murder Asians is confusing among all the tin cans. I understand what you mean, but it’s possible that the whole discussion will sound strange to a Swede. I’ll ask some Swedes. You can decide yourself whether or not it should be dropped. The conclusion with “what I value in poetry” proceeds very well in Swedish and hangs together well with what goes before “When we first write polit...” so as far as continuity is concerned it works fine to drop the tin cans and the deep longings. Decide right away and I shall obey. I don’t know when the book will be published but we need to hurry. Lars G. called last night and said he thought it would be out in a month. He has just come home from Israel and is writing a “25-page essay on my experiences,” after that he flies to Vienna where he will lecture on Swedish literature “a follow-up to what we did in Berlin,” after that he goes to London to “take part in a film on Bakunin’s life” etc. He is developing an activity combining those of the octopus and the albatross. The snow lies deep now in Västerås which resembles a Siberian town more than it does a medieval village. I’m longing very much for some new poems from you, a longing that comes from the deeper regions in my personality.

Love to you, Carol and the kids

    Tomas

15 Jan, ’69

Dear Tomas,

My dear wife tells me that we both are wrong. I’m wrong for putting those tin cans in that paragraph in the first place, and you’re wrong for being willing to drop the whole paragraph! She says there is a third way—redo the paragraph!

So that’s what I have done, a very limping, prosaic job, leaving out my beloved tin cans, scattered about the Grimm Brothers house.

Here is the new paragraph to replace the old:

Now do what you wish with it! Rewrite it, or cut it, or cancel the entire book! If you think these particular opinions, like the desire to kill Asians, and its relation to the murder of the Indians, are so outré, so foreign and unbelievable in this brief exposition, that it will make the Swedes think me an utter fool, then I suppose you should leave them out. I’m so used to the idea that it sounds perfectly reasonable to me. This you have to decide!

I’d rather have it in, but I can’t tell how it might sound in Swedish, or to Swedes. At least it turns the discussion of the war away from Imperialism and the Sonnevi Marxist clichés.

In my next letter, I’m going to send you a whole bunch of miscellaneous poems. Here’s my only one line poem.

I’m not sure that could be translated. “Sea-urchin” is such a marvellous word in English—it’s one of those spiky round things, you know, but “urchin” is fantastic.

Yes I
definitely
think you should use “I” in the “Open Window.” Yes!

I don’t understand three lines: “Sa mycket han tyckte om, har det nan tyngt?” (This is a question I would never be able to answer!) Also, the final two lines are a puzzle. I don’t see how the
horse
got in there.

I think I can translate the cement piping poem—it is a rich thing! But I need a little help with “dödläge”—deadlocked? or condemned (as we say, this building is condemned, a thruway is coming here)? I’m not sure, either, of the associations the translation of “lagardar” ought to have.

Love to you all! I’m enclosing your first check from your poems floating about on the American waters, in my translation at least: this is for “Kyrie.” We have some more photographs from Runmarö we will send soon.

Tell me how your mother is. I think of her often, but you haven’t mentioned her in your letters.

Yours affectionately,

Robert   

Västerås 1-18-69

Dear Maestro,

quit brooding about what I wrote about your foreword! Anyway it’s too late. Bonniers has been gripped by The Great Panic and decided to bring the book out on February 7. At the last instant I was able to correct some craziness they’d written about you in a little biographical blurb on the back cover—among other things that you’ve been a Lecturer in Norway. Nice that you’ll be coming out so soon. I’ll send clippings from our politicized critics. Bonniers is also going to start a new literary magazine for the younger generation. The entire editorial board is made up of eager Communists and the Editor-in-Chief explained on the radio that literature was a “fucking dusty word” and that we should only hold debates. We already have approximately 50 such magazines (
Marxistiskt Forum, Zenit, Tidsignal
etc. etc.) so why not one more? There’s reason to believe that you’ll be regarded as an extreme reactionary (though not because you named the name of Rilke—there probably aren’t many people who know who he is anymore). Thanks for Misan’s mittens! They came the other day and were a great success. I’ll write again soon.

Love to C, B, M and N.

Tomas    

Västerås 5-18-69

Dear Robert,

I’ve been waiting for 3 months for the promised ONE-LINE poems by you. They certainly do take a long time to write down. How are you? Are there problems? Is the old family firm
The Sixties
bankrupt? I feel so well and lively now that I want to see all my friends blossom on all sides of the oceans. Unfortunately I haven’t got much poetry to show, but here comes something anyway, my newborn prosepiece “The Bookcase”—I find it awfully good. It is very European.

War and Silence
has gotten reviews—very benevolent for the most part—in many local papers, but the big papers—with the exception of
Aftonbladet
—haven’t written anything about it. Miserable lazybones! Nearly everyone who’s written about the book has focused on the foreword—it was obviously an excellent foreword, very effective in its subtle authority. The poor youngest generation of Swedish poets truly needs all the help it can get. The youngest are often aggressively polemical and judgmental in their attitudes but suffer from an absolute lack of inner self-confidence.

Tomorrow I fly to the wonderful island of Gotland where I will give a lecture for some social-work codgers about the criminal behavior of young people. On the same trip I’m reading poems in a High school in Visby (the medieval city, with a wall around it). I won’t be paid anything apart from my expenses for travel and lodgings. Navigare necesse est.

Our best regards to the family! Hug Carol “she-almost-bet-the-old-man” Bly.

Tomas

P.S. (on the train) The above letter is no longer current since Franzén has done a big write-up for you in
Dagens Nyheter.
Enclosed.

The biographical detail that always turns up is that you were “menig i flottan” (private in the navy)—it’s presented as if a great military secret were being exposed.

Västerås 14-6-69

Dear Robert,

here comes a new collection of Swedish country-papers’ writings about your book. I could not find the long and praising review in
Expressen
(Sweden’s biggest and probably worst paper) but it has appeared anyhow.

Do you realize that you have not written a line to me since beginning of February? That fact should hit you like a flash of lightning. From Sonnevi I have heard that you were alive as late as in March and some good pictures Carol sent in April show a poet who I with some difficulty can recognize as you. In the latest
Kayak
you are described as “the energetic editor”—that gives me some hope for the future. The best in
Kayak
was your prose poems.
¹
I have not read “sitting on some rocks” before. I should like to translate them but I can’t just now, because I am lately too interested in prose poems myself—I don’t want to get influenced. Monica thinks I should write prose—I have some hidden talkativeness inside me that does not come forward in ordinary verse (the hidden Stomach, within...).

We are preparing for Runmarö now—I bring the family to the island in the next week but I can’t get vacation myself until July. Yesterday I was making tests and interviews in the borstal Sundbo up in the woods. I have introduced something new in Swedish psychology: OUTDOOR INTERVIEWING—the client and the psychologist sitting in the grass—the problems, the vocational guidance, the drug addiction questions etc. evaporating in the burning sun—Scandinavia is for the present the hottest place in Europe.

Warm greetings to Carol and the children! Send a few lines and tell if you are going along well—it’s
important
for me to know!

Yours

    Tomas

24 June, ’69

Dear Tomas,

After my spring disturbance—remarkably long this year—I am myself again! (I mean the public nightmares.) I am back now writing poems. When you didn’t write me for so long about your mother, I had guessed that she was in the hospital once more. And then suddenly I knew that she had died: I woke one morning, and looked over at my bedside table, and suddenly realized that she had died that night or the day before. And a couple of days later your letter came. I’m glad I got to see her old neighborhood, and your old apartment—those rooms are some of the vividest places to me in Europe now. I remember them so well.

I am enclosing copies of first drafts of two translations, which I hope you will comment on! The
Twenty poems of T.T.
is about to go to press, at last! (We’ve had no money.) I predict for it a sale just under that of the King James Bible! I’ll do a special promotional pitch for nervous system types. “Tomas Tranströmer understands
you
! etc. Just fill out this coupon...”

I’m also enclosing several foolish attempts of my own. Did you get the
Tennessee Poetry Journal
? There are a few new poems in it. You’re right,
Kayak
was a dead loss this time except for some prose poems (which, according to a letter George Hitchcock received from Elizabeth Bishop, I stole from some prose-poems of
hers
!...I really stole them from you and Francis Ponge, but with my Minnesota accent, no one can tell...)

The press releases etc enclosed will help explain why I’ve written so seldom this spring. I think I visited about a total of 30 colleges this spring (they all flow together into one golden stream).

Another reason I don’t answer your letters is that they often have in them reviews of my book—praise, even! I can’t quite explain it, but there’s a special joy in piecing out my prose laboriously from a language you only half know. Reading something about my poems in Swedish, for me, is just like finding my name in the Bible! The thought of someone in a Swedish town reading my poems, and even understanding them, sends me off into lovely Wizard of Oz trips, I float along, bumping into doorframes, falling asleep in the middle of the day, setting up dormouse parties in the cellar, eating strawberries under the full moon etc.

I am still reading Erich Neumann, and learning, or seeming to learn, a great deal from him. His book
The Great Mother
—he is the Sheldon of the psychic underworld—made all the blizzards here this winter luminous, and now I’ve started on his
Origins and History of Consciousness.
If you can’t get those books in Swedish, let me know, and I’ll get the English versions for you. He wrote them in German, in Palestine.

I’m so surprised to be writing a letter that I think I’ll stop right here, and wait for you to write back! Carol, and Mary and Biddy and Noah are all well, and we all wish we could go to the island right now!

Write soon,

  Affectionately

    Robert

P.S. I’m going to London on July 8th for some poetry conference. I’ll be there two weeks, spending some of the time with the Tibetans in Scotland. I wanted them to invite you too, and they promised to next time! Meanwhile, the man in Austin, Texas, who was running the visitingEuropean-writers program to Austin resigned, and no one has been appointed to take his place yet. I’ll suggest to Nixon that he invite you for a poetry reading at the White House. Would you mind sharing a program with Billy Graham?