Cultural Cohesion (58 page)

High-handedly rebuking his wife for writing dull letters, Waugh told her that a good correspondence should be like a conversation. He most easily met his own standard when writing to Nancy Mitford but really there was nobody he short-changed. Even the shortest note to the most obscure correspondent is vibrant with both his irascible temperament and his penetrating stare. Above all he was funny—the first thing to say about him. Writing to his wife in May 1942, he described what happened when a company of commandos set out to blow up a tree stump on the estate of Lord Glasgow. The account can be found on page 161 of this book. Anyone who has never read Evelyn Waugh could begin with that page and become immediately enthralled.

But by this time there is no argument about his stature. While academic studies have gone on being preoccupied with the relative and absolute merits of Joyce and Lawrence, Waugh's characters have inexorably established themselves among the enduring fictions to which his countrymen traditionally refer as if they were living beings. In this respect Waugh is in a direct line with Shakespeare and Dickens. Since he was public property from the beginning, a critical consensus, when it arrives, can only endorse popular opinion. The consensus has been delayed because many critics were rightly proud of the Welfare State and regarded Waugh's hatred of it as mean-minded. He was paid out for his rancour by his own unhappiness. For the happiness he can still give us it is difficult to know how to reward him, beyond saying that he has helped make tolerable the modern age he so abominated.

New York Review of Books
, 1980; later included in

From the Land of Shadows
, 1982

POSTSCRIPT

Merely to enjoy the novels of Evelyn Waugh, let alone to praise him as a great writer, it helps to have been born and raised in Australia. As a student at Sydney University in the late 1950s I employed his early novels as one of my most effective displacement activities to console me for my neurotic neglect of the set books. I read
Decline and Fall
and
Vile Bodies
over and over, as if they were poems. The class-conscious background of the books was no mystery to me, or to any other Australian of my generation: most of us had been brought up on
Tip-Top, Wizard, Rover
or their girlish equivalents. We knew what a public school was, even though we had never been to one, except in the sense that our public schools really
were
public. The only misapprehension I laboured under was that Waugh, because he satirized the English social structure to such effect, must have stood outside it. Later on, in England, I read everything else he had written, plus a lot that had been written about him, and realized that he had stood right in it. He turned out to have been more snobbish than any snob in his books, but it was no skin off my nose. It was clear to me that Brideshead, like King's Thursday before it, was a house built in the imagination. In real life he might have dreamed of being the master of Castle Howard, but in his creative life he had better ambitions.

For a visitor like myself it was easy to separate the petty, spiteful and intermittently demented would-be gentleman from the majestically generous artist who had given us his fantastic England. But for the reader born and raised in the actual England this necessary distinction was not so easy to make. Orwell could do it, despite the deep repugnance he felt for everything Waugh stood for both socially and politically. But Orwell had been a long time dead and his indigenous successors in the critical tradition showed few signs of having grasped his point. Forced to explain Orwell's enthusiasm for Waugh, they might well have said that it was no surprise, because both men had the same background. Even today, and to an alarming degree, background remains a factor in any Englishman's perception of the arts, because it is such a factor in his perception of society—to the extent that even the most aesthetically sensitive critic finds it hard to purge himself of the supposition that the arts serve social ends.

Cleverness is no safeguard against this peculiar obtuseness, of which F. R. Leavis, still volcanically active during my time at Cambridge, was merely the most flagrant example. There is no cleverer critic working in Britain today than Professor Carey. (The consideration that I might think this because he gave me the best review I ever got can perhaps be offset by the fact that he also gave me the worst.) Professor Carey is an adventurous reader who makes his judgements according to his enjoyment. He enjoyed
Decline and Fall
enough to hail it as a comic triumph, but judging from the general trend of his social commentary he would have liked the book even better if it had come out of nowhere. He avowedly loathes the whole ambience of the landed gentry and reserves a special hatred for the arty social climbers who danced attendance. To find, decades after the whole
galère
paddled itself out of sight, a sophisticated intelligence wasting its fine anger in this way would be comic if it were not so unsettling. What
is
it with the Poms? one asks one's shaving mirror helplessly. Evelyn Waugh was a snorting prig. He was also a great writer. Perhaps the ability to hold two such contrary facts in the mind without their clouding each other and the mind as well is the bonus for having been born elsewhere and having arrived in England just in time to see its social coherence fall apart—which no doubt it deserved to do, but to deny the fruitfulness of its last gasp looks like perversity. Although here again, where did the perversity come from, except as a lingering, recriminatory and very understandable reaction to the old iniquities?

After forty years in residence, I think I know something of the country's social tensions, but it's still a relief to be able to say that it's not my fight. We who are exempt from the local vendettas should be slow, however, to erect a relative advantage into an absolute virtue. It's always possible that we have missed the nub of the matter, and that an artist like Waugh committed, as a man, sins we have no right to gloss over. There are bright, well-read people in Argentina who will tell you that the capacity of Borges to say so little about life under the military dictatorship irredeemably weakens everything he had to say about life in general. There are veterans of the old Czechoslovakia who can't hear the name of Milan Kundera without remarking bitterly on the unbearable lightness of his not being there when it counted. I still think it a privilege of the
Weltbürger
, the man without a country, to be genuinely above such battles. But he should make it his business to know what the battle is about, because some of the people he meets might have been wounded in it, even if they look well.

Reliable Essays
, 2001

36

AS A MATTER OF TACT

Responses: Prose Pieces 1953–1976
by Richard Wilbur

There is nothing surprising in the fact that the most intelligent, fastidious and refined of contemporary American poets should produce intelligent, fastidious and refined prose, but it does no harm to have the likelihood confirmed. This collection of Richard Wilbur's critical writings is an immediate pleasure to read. Beyond that, the book provides an absorbing tour of Wilbur's preoccupations, which admirers of his poetry had already guessed to be of high interest. Beyond that again, there is the harsh matter, steadily becoming more urgent, of whether or not the study of literature is killing literature.

In America, the place where crises burst first, it has long been apparent that the output of critical works from the universities, most of them uttered by intellectually mediocre student teachers, has reached the proportions of an ecological disaster. Yet here is one book, written by a Professor of English at Wesleyan University, which would have to be saved from the holocaust if President Carter were to take the sensible step of rationalizing his energy programme by ordering all academic writings on the subject of English literature to be fed directly to the flames, thereby ensuring that useless books, inflated from only slightly less useless doctoral theses, would find at least a semblance of creative life by providing enough electric power to light a pigsty, if only for a few seconds.

But then Wilbur is no ordinary professor. His university career has really been a kind of monastic hideaway, where he has been able to hole up and contemplate his principal early experience, which was the Second World War in Europe. Military service was Wilbur's first university. If for ever afterwards he was a writer in residence, at least he was writing about something that he had seen in the outside world. In the deceptively elegant symmetries of Wilbur's early poetry could be detected a pressure of awareness which amply warranted his retreat to the cloisters.

While his contemporaries held the mirror up to chaos, Wilbur took the opposite line: the more extreme the thing contained, the more finely wrought the container had to be. Berryman and Lowell went in for stringy hair, open-necked shirts, non-rhyming sonnets that multiplied like bacilli, and nervous breakdowns. Wilbur, on the other hand, looked like an advertisement for Ivy League tailoring and turned out poems built like Fabergé toy trains. I think there is a case for arguing that by the time the 1960s rolled around Wilbur had cherished his early experience too long for the good of his work, which in his later volumes is simply indecisive. But earlier on he was not indecisive at all—just indirect, which is a different thing. The poems in
The Beautiful Changes, Ceremony
and
Things of This World
sound better and better as time goes on. Where his coevals once looked fecund, they now look slovenly; where he once seemed merely exquisite, he now seems a model of judicious strength; as was bound to happen, it was the artful contrivance which retained its spontaneity and the avowedly spontaneous which ended up looking contrived. There is no reason to be ashamed at feeling charmed by Wilbur's poetry. The sanity of his level voice is a hard-won triumph of the contemplative intelligence.

Selected from twenty years of occasional prose, the essays and addresses collected in
Responses
combine conciseness with resonance, each of them wrapping up its nominal subject while simultaneously raising all the relevant general issues—the best kind of criticism for a student to read. A lecture like “Round about a Poem of Housman's” could be put into a beginner's hands with some confidence that it would leave him wiser than before, instead of merely cockier. Previously available only in that useful anthology
The Moment of Poetry
, the piece gains from being set among others from the same pen. It is an excellent instance of close reading wedded to hard thinking. The general statements are as tightly focussed as the specific observations, which from so sensitive a reader are very specific indeed. By attending patiently to Housman's delicately judged tones of voice in “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,” Wilbur is able to show that the contempt superficially evinced for the hired soldiers is meant to imply an underlying respect. The casual reader might miss this not just through being deaf to poetry, but through being deaf to meaning in general. “A tactful person is one who understands not merely what is said, but also what is meant.” But meaning is not confined to statements: in fact the sure way to miss the point of Housman's poem is to do a practical criticism that confines itself to paraphrase. A song like “It's Only a Paper Moon” and a poem like “Dover Beach” can be paraphrased in exactly the same way. (This seemingly offhand illustration is typical of Wilbur's knack for the perfect example.) It follows that meaning embraces not just statement but sound, pacing, diction. Thus the subject expands to include questions of why poetry is written the way it is. How much can the poet legitimately expect the reader to take in?

Yeats, for example, overdoes his allusions in “King and No King.” It is one thing for Milton to expect you to spot the reference to the
Aeneid
when Satan wakes in Hell, but another for Yeats to expect you to know a bad play by Beaumont and Fletcher. For one thing, you can see what Milton means even if you have never read Virgil, whereas Yeats's point seems not to be particularly well made even when you have Beaumont and Fletcher at your fingertips—in fact pride at being in possession of such information is likely to colour your judgement. (Says Wilbur, who
did
possess such information, and whose judgement
was
coloured.)

It is worth pausing at this juncture to say that in a few paragraphs Wilbur has not only raised, but to a large extent settled, theoretical points which more famous critical savants have pursued to the extent of whole essays. In
Lectures in America
Dr. Leavis argues, with crushing intransigence, that Yeats's poetry needs too much ancillary apparatus to explain it, so that when you get right down to it there are only three poems in Yeats's entire
oeuvre
which earn the status of a “fully achieved thing.” Wilbur takes the same point exactly as far as it should be taken, which is nowhere near as far. Possessing tact himself, he can see Yeats's lack of it, but correctly supposes this to be a local fault, not a typical one. If Dr. Leavis is unable to consider such a possibility, perhaps it might be of interest to Professor Donoghue, who in a recent issue of the
New York Review of Books
was to be heard complaining about Yeats's limitations at some length. It is a bit steep when an academic who devotes half his life to a dead poet starts doubting the poet's merits instead of questioning the effects of his own bookishness.

As for Wilbur's reference to Milton, well, it is very relevant to some of the positions adopted by Dr. Steiner, whose important gift of transmitting his enthusiasm for the culture of the past seriously overstepped itself in Milton's case. Perhaps goaded by the misplaced self-confidence of a student generation who not only knew nothing about the history of civilization but had erected their doltishness into an ideology, Dr. Steiner declared that you couldn't tell what was going on in
Paradise Lost
unless you were intimate with the classical literature to which Milton was alluding. Wilbur's fleeting look at this very topic helps remind us that Dr. Steiner got it wrong two ways at once. If you
did
have to know about those things, then Milton would not deserve his reputation. But you
don't
have to know, since the allusions merely reinforce what Milton is tactful enough to make plain.

Such matters are important to criticism and crucial to pedagogy. For all Dr. Steiner's good intentions, it is easy to imagine students being scared off if they are told that they can't hope to read an English poet without first mastering classical literature. Wilbur's approach, while being no less concerned about the universality of culture, at least offers the ignoramus some hope. Anyway, Wilbur simply happens to be right: poets allude to the past (his essay “Poetry's Debt to Poetry” shows that all revolutions in art are palace revolutions) but if they are original at all then they will make their first appeal on a level which demands of the reader no more than an ability to understand the language. Which nowadays is demanding a lot, but let that pass.

“Poetry and Happiness” is another richly suggestive piece of work. Wilbur talks of a primitive desire that is radical to poetry, “the desire to lay claim to as much of the world as possible through uttering the names of things.” Employing the same gift for metaphysical precision which he demonstrates elsewhere in his essay on Emily Dickinson, Wilbur is able to show what forms this desire usually takes and how it affects the poet's proverbial necessity to “find himself.” I don't think it is too facetious to suggest that this might be a particularly touchy subject for Wilbur. Complaining about the lack of unity in American culture, he seems really to be talking about his own difficulties in writing about the American present with the same unforced originality—finding yourself—which marked his earlier poems about Europe.

In the following essay, a fascinating piece (indispensable for the student of his poems) called “On My Own Work,” he rephrases the complaint as a challenge. “Yet the incoherence of America need not enforce a stance of alienation on the poet: rather, it may be seen as placing on him a peculiar imaginative burden.” It is a nice point whether Wilbur has ever really taken that burden up. I am inclined to think that he has not, and that the too typical quietness of his later work (“characteristic,” in the sense Randall Jarrell meant when he decided that Wallace Stevens had fallen to copying himself) represents a great loss to all of us. But we ought to learn to be appropriately grateful for what we have been given, before we start complaining about what has been taken away.

“It is one mark of the good critic,” Wilbur observes, “that he abstains from busywork.” Except for the essays on Poe, which tend to be repetitive, this whole collection has scarcely a superfluous sentence. When Wilbur's critical sense lapses, it is usually through kindness. He makes as good a case as can be made for Theodore Roethke's openness to influence, calling admirable what he should see to be crippling. But even full-time critics can be excused for an occasional disinclination to tell the cruel truth, and on the whole this is a better book of criticism than we can logically expect a poet to come up with. If there is a gulf between English and American literature in modern times, at least there are some interesting bridges over it. The critical writings produced by some of the best American poets form one of those bridges. Tate, Berryman, Jarrell, John Peale Bishop, Edmund Wilson—those among them who were primarily critics were still considerable poets, and those among them who were primarily poets have yet managed to produce some of the most humane criticism we possess. With this superlative book, Richard Wilbur takes a leading place among their number.

New Statesman
, 1977; later included in

From the Land of Shadows
, 1982

POSTSCRIPT

It was no surprise that the kamikaze aspect of the American poetic career as exemplified by Lowell, Berryman and Sylvia Plath should make a journalistic splash in Britain. More worrying was that an established literary figure like A. Alvarez—who as poetry editor of the
Observer
wielded almost American powers of dispensation—should write critical articles reinforcing the notion that a near-suicidal commitment was a guarantee of seriousness. In the introduction to his influential Penguin anthology
The New Poetry
, Alvarez marked Lowell high at Larkin's expense, on the assumption that Larkin, who made fewer explicit mentions of the modern world's horrors, had found no artistic response to them. I thought that this was a false critical emphasis even when applied solely to the American picture.

I had already learned to admire Wilbur, and later on, with the encouragement of Frank Kermode, I finally got around to reading Anthony Hecht, and felt the same admiration all over again. Here were the quiet Americans who had put everything into creation, with nothing left over for self-destruction. Perhaps it was just another sign of America's world-girdling cultural hegemony that even its atypical products should have such range and influence, but it seemed only good manners to be thankful.

Wilbur, in particular, was a blessing. The right man at the right time, he was a reminder that the Americans who had been flung abroad by World War II could bring back the world into their work, absorbing it without lowering its value. Wilbur, in the best poems of
Things of This World
and
The Beautiful Changes
, absorbed Europe the way Hecht absorbed Japan in his masterful lyric “Japan.” In each case, the artistic representative of the victorious power brought to a defeated, occupied country the sensitivity that would honour its real heritage. Each poet was a virtuoso of the intricate, self-invented stanza that replicated itself exactly for the length of the poem, magically refilling itself with meaning each time, like the goblet of Fortunatus. The evidence already suggests that in the long run what will count, for its international effect, is more likely to be that kind of elegant control than Lowell's “raw meat hooked from the living steer.”

Looking back earlier into the twentieth century, we find that it was by no means a rare thing for American poets to match European formality at its own game. There are several poems by Elinor Wylie (try “Wild Peaches” just for a start) in which you can already hear Wilbur. But it was Wilbur, I am sure, who, in that period of concussion after World War II when a stunned planet waited upon America, spread to the whole of the English-speaking world this uniquely American manner of incorporating and re-energizing the tradition of the well-made poem.