Black Light (11 page)

afterword by Robert Hass
afterword by Robert Hass

B
lack Light
was published in 1966. It came into existence because Galway Kinnell had spent six months in Iran in 1959 as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tehran and stayed on for another six months as a journalist writing short articles about the country for an English-language newspaper. Reading it again recently, after its author's death in October 2014, I was struck by its originality and ferocity. And I found myself looking in it somewhat more urgently for Galway Kinnell, and wondering—especially in these days when Iran is so much in the headlines—about how its young author came to the place—psychically, geographically—where it was written.

There were not many road markers in the 1950s for young Americans aspiring to write poetry. That seemed a place to start. Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and brought up in Pawtucket, a working-class town, in the last years of the Great Depression. His parents were immigrants, his father Scottish, his mother Protestant Irish. His father was a carpenter and teacher of woodworking, a man with craft skills. Kinnell, asked in an interview about powerful influences in his life, said that he
thought that Pawtucket was that influence. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “the sense of stagnation I felt growing up in a decaying mill town in the Depression damaged me into poetry.” One notices this because Jamshid, the protagonist of
Black Light
, is a man who, by committing a violent crime, breaks out of a deadening life.

Kinnell's way out of Pawtucket was a scholarship to a prep school in his senior year—the Wilbraham Academy in Massachusetts. From there, at eighteen, he entered Princeton, intent on writing poetry. The war was on. He joined Navy ROTC and after a semester went on active duty. “When I was in boot camp,” he later told an interviewer, “I was put in charge of 120 men who had also come into boot camp at that time and I was put in charge because I had a semester of college. Then I fell into the habit at night when everyone was in bed and it was very quiet of reading one poem before the lights went out. So I've been interested in poetry, in writing poetry, basically all my life but I hadn't published anything then. When I was in Iran my first book was published . . . and mailed to me. That was very satisfying to see.”

I like the way the comment in the interview elides the ten years between the college freshman, turned ROTC officer, reading poetry at night in the barracks, and the young poet who holds his first book in his hands in another world altogether. When the war ended, Kinnell returned to Princeton. Universities had begun to teach creative writing courses and the English department at Princeton offered courses taught by R. P. Blackmur, a poet who was also one of the most eminent modernist critics of his time, and John Berryman, one of the country's most visible emerging poets. Kinnell did not sign up for their classes, having a feeling, he said, that there was something wrong with
the idea of “teaching” people to write poetry—and also, he said, afraid that they wouldn't like his poems anyway. But one of his classmates was W. S. Merwin, who also was going to become one of the prominent poets of his generation, and Kinnell in the same interview remembers one night when an excited Merwin first showed him the poems of William Butler Yeats, stayed all night, in fact, and read poems to him into the dawn. And one Princeton teacher, Charles Bell, he remembers, told him that one of his poems was “good,” after which Kinnell walked home, he said, “in a state of near delirium.”

In the summer of 1947, he attended Black Mountain College on the GI Bill, and he records of that time that another student on a backpacking trip read him the poems of François Villon and that, walking into a railway station with a black writer from the college, and seeing him peel off without comment into the Black Only section of the tiny station, he got his first Northerner's glimpse of the way segregation worked in the South. He graduated from Princeton the following spring in 1948 and took a master's degree at the University of Rochester in 1949. Why Rochester? A future biographer will have to inform us. He wrote a thesis there on Hart Crane's
The Bridge
and for the next two years was an English instructor at nearby Alfred University in upstate New York. I find it hard to visualize him as a college instructor for some reason. There was something leonine about him, about his intensity, so that he always seemed either to be in repose after having feasted or about to pounce, and I can't quite see how this would have worked in a classroom. But after his death in October last year, one of Kinnell's students wrote a note to Bobbie Bristol, his widow, that gives us a glimpse of him in those years. “He was my English professor at Alfred and one of
the best professors I have ever had. He came to Alfred with a new master's degree, only about five years older than his students, and enchanted us all.”

That would have been the years 1949–51. The war was over, the postwar and the Cold War were on, and the next move of this young would-be poet was to take a job teaching in and then directing an adult education program established by the University of Chicago in its downtown center. It was a job he did for three years from 1952 to 1955. There is even a publication from those years of which he is listed as coauthor—Stuart Demerest, Galway Kinnell, and Alvin Johnson, “New Directions in University Adult Education: A Symposium,” March 1955—which suggests he gave himself to the job with some earnestness. Later he would publish a book of his juvenilia, titled
First Poems, 1946–54
. That would cover the period from his first year at Princeton until this last year in Chicago. And the first poem in his first published book,
What a Kingdom It Was
, is set in Illinois, so perhaps one can mark his beginning to write his own poems to that year. It's a quite mannered poem (as an older man he liked to recite it from memory at readings, as if to touch ground with the first impulse to poetry in himself). It sounds a bit like Yeats and a bit like Dylan Thomas and it's about a boy, “a sapped thing, weary to crying” from hauling dung all day, who hears what he thinks of as joy in the song of pond frogs and finds his way to music.

So he had begun to find his way in his poetry when he got what must have seemed in those years a gold ring: an invitation to become a Fulbright scholar in France and to teach American literature at the University of Grenoble and then for a summer on the Riviera at the University of Nice. It was the same program that would take him to Tehran. The Fulbright program was begun in 1951 by a
civilized Southern senator, William J. Fulbright, a former Rhodes scholar, who understood that the new international role of the United States in the aftermath of World War II required a more internationally minded intellectual class and more cultural exchange bringing the world to American universities. American popular culture was thought to be, and mostly was, isolationist and provincial, with a sense of the larger world got from comic books and movie stereotypes. Fulbright fellows—exchange students—and Fulbright scholars—exchange faculty—were to be the advance guard of a more cosmopolitan country—or from another point of view, a first wave of American imperial influence abroad in the Cold War years.

The young Galway Kinnell was a beneficiary of this moment. He used the time in France to work on what would be his first book of poems; one of the important events for him that year was, he said, his discovery of Walt Whitman when he was asked to teach American poetry at the University of Grenoble. He had been to college in the years of the ascendancy of T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats. It bred in Kinnell a permanent aversion to Eliot, but he took to Yeats. And Dylan Thomas had made his meteoric streak across the United States. He had died in New York City in 1953 after an epic drinking bout, and the early Kinnell poem set in Illinois—

       
Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy

       
After an afternoon of carting dung

       
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing

       
Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall

       
And he began to hear the pond frogs all

       
Calling . . .

—is shot through with the Welsh poet's music. So Yeats and Thomas were among the young Kinnell's influences. His first book also contains a poem entitled “To William Carlos Williams” and describes a reading in which the local “lovers of literature/paid you the tribute of their almost total inattention.” So it was to the ignored Williams side rather than the much-revered Eliot side of the modernist legacy that he was pledging himself. Later he would show the poem “First Song” to Dr. Williams and Williams told him that he didn't know anything about Illinois and that he should write about the places that he knew.

France and the French Riviera had been made permanently romantic for the American young in the 1950s by F. Scott Fitzgerald's
Tender Is the Night
, by the presence there of both Picasso and Matisse, and by a best-selling novel
Bonjour Tristesse
by the eighteen-year-old Françoise Sagan. There is a subgenre of American novels from the period about Ivy Leaguers at loose ends on the Cote d'Azur—James Salter's
A Sport and a Pastime
is the most memorable; also John Knowles's
Morning in Antibes
and Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels, and the interesting fact here is that this literary France, so fashionable at that moment, is completely absent from Kinnell's early work.

The Fulbright Foundation's contribution to international goodwill in the person of Kinnell in the country of France would come in the form of his translations. His first book publication, in 1956, while he was in Grenoble, was the translation of a then-popular novel,
Bitter Victory
, by René Hardy, which dealt with combat in the Libyan desert during the war. It was made the following year into one of Nicholas Ray's best films, with Richard Burton in the lead. This is interesting also because, like
Black Light
, it is a story about a hallucinatory trip across a desert and
because one of the protagonists is a rigid man driven to violence. This translation must have been a job picked up from a New York publisher. How he came to that literary task, I do not know. More crucially, he translated what was probably the most important book of new French poetry in that decade, Yves Bonnefoy's
On the Motion and Immobility of Douve
, which had appeared in 1953. Kinnell's translation appeared in 1968, two years after
Black Light
. Whether he had absorbed Bonnefoy's “poetics of imperfection” at the same time that he was discovering Whitman and how that bore on the creation of Jamshid, a man buried alive by a narrow and perfectionist temperament, is a subject for further research. What does seem clear about what he brought from France to Iran was the influence of the most important French novelist of the period. Albert Camus's
The Stranger
had appeared in 1942, the same year that he published
The Myth of Sisyphus
.
The Plague
appeared in 1947,
The Rebel
in 1952. And it's hard to imagine that Jamshid's story had not found its form under the spell of Camus's novels, which also inhabit a dream territory somewhere between fable and philosophical conte.

Kinnell returned to the United States in fall 1957 for a lectureship at New York University. It must have been during this time, living in the Village, that his first book of poems,
What a Kingdom It Was
, took shape. This is when the retrospective French poems might have appeared and didn't, and when seeing New York with fresh eyes, after his discovery of Walt Whitman, would have given him the remarkable catalogues of vivid street life in “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World.” And then he was off to Iran, with a book accepted for publication.

T
HE
S
HAH
'
S
I
RAN IN
1959 and 1960. The great book on the subject is Ryzard Kryzinski's
Shah of Shahs
. The simple version of the backstory is that the United States had taken on Great Britain's imperial role in the Middle East. Their aim was to stabilize and control the oil market. When a democratically elected parliament of Iran's constitutional monarchy began to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British corporation (now BP), the CIA staged a coup, had the prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, arrested and tried for treason, and installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who had fled the country during the political crisis, as monarch and autocrat. The oil business was returned to private hands in a new arrangement by which the US split the revenues with Great Britain, and a flood of cultural exchanges began, to promote American values and international understanding. President Eisenhower paid the Shah a visit, Duke Ellington's band came through, US military police began to train the Shah's security forces, and the promising young poet, Galway Kinnell, came to teach at the University of Tehran.

The coup occurred in 1953. Kinnell arrived in the fall of 1959, just as the country was celebrating (whether it wanted to or not) the Shah's third marriage. Kinnell would have taught in English. Fascinated by the country, he stayed for almost another year, working as a journalist for an English-language daily for which he wrote a weekly Sunday story about Iranian culture. It gave him, he was quick to understand, a particular and limited view onto Iranian culture. He would have gotten to know well-educated university students. In an unpublished draft of an essay on politics, he wrote about the wedding and Eisenhower's visit. He notes that the response on the street to the American president's visit was subdued. “More significant
perhaps,” he wrote, “was the reaction of young, educated, politically conscious Iranians, people who will surely have much to do with Iran's future. Since political opinions in this country are expressed only guardedly, and sometimes in riddles, I can't guarantee that the attitudes I report are representative, or even widely shared. It may be I just know the wrong people. I have the impression, however, that both the wedding and the president's visit were met, by young politically aware Iranians, with almost chilling reserve.” He was getting to know the country and had acquired by the time he left, he said, a vocabulary of about five hundred words of Farsi.