Poetry Notebook (12 page)

Had he not been a poet, John Berryman would have been a Shakespearean scholar, and well qualified for the task, even though his drinking habit was as ungovernable as his beard.
In addition to his vast knowledge of the field, Berryman had unusually sensitive instrumentation for measuring the intensity of language. As a critic, if not always as a poet, he was especially
good when deciding whether a fine phrase had a deep thought behind it, or was just showing itself off. And he was very convincing when he argued that Shakespeare had the same priorities.

According to Berryman, the older and better Shakespeare got, the more he was concerned that the verse should spring from what we might call a deeper consideration. Berryman pushed this line to
the point of feeling able to say that if a stretch of verse in one of the plays seemed sufficiently preoccupied with the question of how the words needed thought to spring from, then Shakespeare
might well have written that passage later in his career, even if it was inserted in a play dating from earlier on. Berryman said as much about the interchange between the king and Bertram in
All’s Well That Ends Well.
The interchange – which is really a paean to Bertram’s father, addressed to the son by a king who doesn’t mind holding his interlocutor
captive while he explores the subject so as to pin down every nuance – is not a passage which does very much for the plot of the play into which it has been introduced. It is more like a
little play all on its own.

Coleridge once said that Polonius, in
Hamlet
, is the embodiment of a reputation for wisdom no longer possessed. The king in
All’s Well
really is wise, but he has
Polonius’s habit of worrying at a point while his interlocutor, usually much younger, sneaks impatient glances at the nearest sundial. But Shakespeare, this time, isn’t making a joke of
it. The king is on to something that interests the playwright as a matter of professional conviction. We could quote from the scene for as long as it lasts, and indeed one short bit is reasonably
well known, although nothing like as well known as most of the Shakespearean ‘old man’s wisdom’ quotations that we carry around in our heads if we have lived long enough. The king
says:

Instruct the actor (if necessary at gunpoint) to hit the hidden extra stress in the word ‘dissolvèd’, so that the second line, which must be expressed as a
wish, becomes as rhythmically forceful a pentameter as the first, and you’ve got one of those little show-stopping moments that should happen every few minutes as the night goes on. Unless
they are badly spoken, they don’t really stop the show, of course: but they do lift the listener’s heart, to make him forget time as the fragments of deeper consideration join up
throughout the evening.

There is a lot more in the interchange, however, than that fine idea. The king has been considering wisdom, and the speaking of wisdom. And he wants to tell Bertram that his, Bertram’s,
father was the embodiment of how that should be done. To make sure that Bertram gets the message, the king wields his monarchical privilege of repeatedly telling Bertram what he, Bertram, must know
already, and even takes the liberty of quoting one of Bertram’s father’s speeches: something that Bertram could probably have done better, except that he – and this is the
armature of the scene’s dynamics – is too young to feel yet what the king has come, through time, to know is true.

These lines about a judgement being had only so it can be snazzily dressed up to fit the fashion have a nice symmetry with the more famous passage, in the same play, where old
Lafeu warns young Bertram against the showmanship of the fop Parolles: ‘there can be no kernel in this light nut; the soul of this man is his clothes.’ You could easily quote it as
verse, but Lafeu, as it happens, is expressing himself in prose: the kind of toughly, densely argued prose that Hamlet uses when he gets down to bedrock.

There is a notion of bedrock throughout Shakespeare’s work almost to the end: a notion that the essential meaning, the deeper consideration, has to be protected against all transient
distortions, including the poet’s own gift for . . . what? Well, the answer is in the opponent’s name: Parolles. Words. Words are the bewitching enemy, the beautiful seducer.

The threat posed by the spectacular expression that outruns its substance was a long-running theme in Shakespeare, and is surely one of the preoccupations that now make him seem so modern.
Though he seems modern in every age – modern all over again – he seems especially modern in ours, when we look at him from the angle of analytical philosophy, a school of thought which
has, at its tutorial centre, a concern for scrupulosity of language: the scrupulosity that was incarnated by Wittgenstein, and as much in his likes as his dislikes. Wittgenstein’s admiration
for Mörike depended on the poet’s determination that the word should not exceed the thing. We should be slow to read back from the grim philosopher agonizing over a conceptual nuance for
weeks on end in his cold digs to the fluent playwright composing a whole different version of Act V on Monday night before the new play opened on Tuesday, but it still seems legitimate to propose
that Shakespeare was concerned enough by the capacity of his own facility to fly off by itself, and thus to want it anchored to something solid.

It might seem madness to suppose that Shakespeare shared the same conviction about the seductive power of words as Wittgenstein, but it should be possible at least to entertain the notion that
Shakespeare could not have created his most evocative enchantments without a notion of limit and precision; and all precision, in language, eventually depends on a disciplined adherence to thought.
The process of composition might produce a new thought – always one of the best reasons for composing in verse at all – but the new thought, too, has to test out, meeting a standard of
quality if not of contiguity. Although the combination of thoughts might fiercely resist being reduced to a prose equivalent – think of almost any striking stanza by, say, John Crowe Ransom
– it must be something more than a vague suggestion towards the indefinable. (If Mallarmé seems to do that, it is because he is treating the indefinable as his subject.) When, in later
Shakespeare, we have trouble anchoring an image to a thought, it’s at least worth considering that the thought has gone awry – that the deeper consideration is not fully formed –
before deciding that we have been granted an insight into the inexplicable. But we would not even conceive of such a possibility if we did not have, as a measure, everything that Shakespeare had
already done. It’s his store of dazzling clarities that warns us against the assumption that there might be a further profundity in the obscure.

•

Shakespeare in his last years was still young, even by the standards of the time. We tend to think of men of genius, in the long age before modern medicine, as struggling to
make it past the age of fifty, but the tendency takes a battering when it runs into the case of, say, Titian, still painting at the age of ninety. It seems fair to say, however, that the later
Shakespeare was getting on, and fair also to look on his later work as a field of study that might help illuminate all that happened earlier. Perhaps there are developments occurring that we
don’t quite grasp because we ourselves aren’t old enough. As my own dotage approaches, heralded by instances of forgetfulness that I would list here if I could only remember them, I
fall further and further out of love with the common idea that lyrical talent, like the talent for original mathematics, burns out early. I would like to think that a lifetime of experience gives
me more to say, and that any early exuberance which I can no longer summon was partly the product of an emptier head. Give me maturity or give me death.

Mature to a fault even when he was young, Samuel Menashe has spent a long lifetime avoiding publicity. It was a measure of his self-effacement that the Poetry Foundation felt compelled to give
him, in 2004, its Neglected Masters Award. The neglected master’s most recent and perhaps climactic collection,
New and Selected Poems
, which contains ten more poems than his 2005
Library of America compilation, was published in America in 2008, but I am ashamed to say that I never noticed it until it was re-published in Britain later on by Bloodaxe Books. Since his name has
always been slightly less obscure in Britain than in America – after the Second World War he was taken up in London by the poet Kathleen Raine – I was intermittently aware of him, but
from this book I can get his full force, which is no noisier than a bug hitting your windscreen, except that it comes right through the glass. Take the poem called ‘Beachhead’:

That’s the whole poem, and there is a whole war in it. Like Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, Menashe was a soldier in the last campaigns of the war in Europe. He was at
the Battle of the Bulge, in which thirty German divisions were stopped only at the price of nineteen thousand dead GIs. Menashe must have seen terrible things, but none of them is evoked directly
in his poetry. It is remarkable, and instructive, how little either Wilbur or Hecht wrote directly about what they had seen, but even more remarkable was that Menashe – rather like J. D.
Salinger, who also saw it all from close up – wrote even less. Yet he wrote about the helmet in the sand, and somehow his wealth of sad experience is in that single tiny haiku-like
construction. It makes his war a nation’s war. The deeper consideration is that he was one among many, and, unlike too many, he lived to speak. That he speaks so concisely is a condition of
his testament: consecration and concentration are the same thing. This is a world away from the expression of the self. This is bedrock.

All Menashe’s poems give the sense of having been constructed out of the basic stuff of memory, a hard substratum where what once happened has been so deeply pondered that all individual
feeling has been squeezed out and only universal feeling is left. The process gives us a hint that the act of construction might be part of the necessary pressure: if the thing was not so carefully
built, the final compacting of the idea could not have been attained. There could be no version of a Menashe poem that was free from the restrictions of technique, because without the technique the
train of thought would not be there. Even when he writes without obvious rhyme, he has weighed the balance of every syllable; when he uses near rhymes, the modulations are exquisite; and a solid
rhyme never comes pat, but is always hallowed by its own necessity.

In a poem by Menashe, an awful lot goes on in a short space, and it might seem like cherrystone scrimshaw at first. But so does a little poem by Emily Dickinson, until you look harder. Menashe
is in her tradition, packing sound together to shed light. Compared to ‘Beachhead’, his poem ‘Cargo’ is gigantic, but it is still only ten short lines. Here is the whole
thing:

For all we know, one of his scars is the memory of the Fifth Panzer Army heading towards him through a snowstorm. But what we can be sure of is that he had a lot to get over.
When he finally went home to New York, he disappeared into a fifth-floor walk-up whose lack of luxury has to be seen to be believed. The Bloodaxe edition has an accompanying DVD that shows him in
situ, reading his poems aloud. His voice is wonderfully rich, but everything around him spells poverty. Obviously this monk-like self-denial is part of his dedication, although you might say that
he sacrificed his purity when he let a camera through the door. One is very glad, however, that his privacy was invaded, because the message of dignity in old age, after a long life of
uncomplaining commitment, is one that all young poets should hear. That, and the message that there has to be bedrock beneath meaning even if the bedrock is no longer visible. Kandinsky’s
abstract painting grew from the precisely drawn outlines of the church and the town square.

•

When proposing, as an ideal, the art of getting a lot said in a small space, one should in fairness keep room in the mind for the counter-argument by which some poets who get a
little said in a long space are still saying something unique. (Think of Christopher Smart’s
Jubilate Agno
, whose demented sprawl contains far more lyricism than his lyrics.) As
critics get older, they very easily succumb to the notion that there is no more room in the pantheon. But there is always more room in the pantheon, because the pantheon is not a burial chamber for
people who have said things, it is an echo chamber for things that have been said. I was in the middle of concocting some pontifical statements about Shakespeare’s powers of compression when
a long chain of memory led me back through Ovid (whose
Metamorphoses
Shakespeare knew by heart) to Ovid’s title
The Art of Love
, and from that to the niggling recollection that
Kenneth Koch had written a longish poem of the same name, and that I had once thought enough of it to make a mental note that I should read it again one day.