Prose (70 page)

I sent off the Aiken volume, glowing like a stop light, last week. I don't think it will tell you much about what I am doing, however. I am not an academic, neither do I think there is much point in encouraging the current mystique of author-worship by writing a lot about your life. One of my troubles in getting started with this book has been to decide what, exactly, is important in your poetry. The outline which follows may give you an idea of my conclusions. Perhaps you won't agree, but I think you may at least be interested. Of course, I'll be glad to revise and rethink. At any rate, I have taken a number of excursions—into Transcendentalism, into Imagism, into contemporary German Art—or contemporary in the 1930's and 40's—all with great benefit to
me,
returning from circuitous voyages much enriched. My husband, who is a sinologist but who also has an incredible knowledge of philosophy and art, suggested that Wittgenstein as well as Klee and Ernst, was concerned at one point in his career, with the nature of seeing. In his notebooks he writes, “All that we see could also be otherwise; all that we can describe at all could also be otherwise.” This seems to descend from Hegel—a fact that has escaped most positivist philosophers today—whose distinction between Actuality and Reality is like that of the Transcendentalists and indeed of many mystics. This kind of insight may lie behind “surrealistic[“] poems like the MONUMENT, even more, behind the kind of inversion of realities implied in THE MAP and in the last two or three stanzas of LOVE LIES SLEEPING. Perhaps this is of more interest to me than any one else, however. My father—who studied with Dewey once—is fairly well known as a follower of Wittgenstein, and is fairly hated by the theoretical poets who misinterpret what he is doing. So you see how untranscendental my own background has been.

But let me sketch my outline for you. I won't fill in with details just now, but leave them for the next installment.

 

Chapter I.
THE TRAVELLER    A simple, rather austere account of life and travels, friends, too, like Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell who have affected your writing. Since so many poems are concerned with travel and the coast, I'll illustrate from them from time to time. Also, mention your two childhood stories. Other sources of poetry, dreams, pictures, and a feeling for natural, unsophisticated people (
Jeronimo's House,
Cootchie,
even
Helena Morley
) will work into the introductory chapter too, so that a reader who doesn't know you at all will get a notion of what to expect, at least.

 

Chapter II.
THE ARTIST    I'm not altogether sure about the title of this one. I think you're an “artist” more than you are a “writer”—that is, you are preoccupied with form. What you have to say is very much the way you say it, in the stories as well as the poems. In this you are like Webern who defined life, I think, as a search for form “To life, that is to defend a form.” Also like Wittgenstein who was unable to make a system of his philosophy because he was unable not to think clearly. In this chapter, I'll mention your liking for Klee and Ernst—artists very different in temperament but who worked in the same atmosphere in Germany and must have had an effect on you. In temperament you are probably more like Klee than the flamboyant Ernst, but
Man Moth
and the
Monument
and some of your sleeping (or not sleeping) poems are very Ernstish. I think both Klee and Ernst used hallucinatory and dream material as much as they could, and I'll mention this. However, I think it is important to understand that they, and you too, I believe, regard dream experience as part of the continuum of experience in general. That is, there is no split personality, but rather a sensitivity that extends equally into the subconscious and the conscious world. That was one of the discoveries of the surrealists and symbolists too. Or perhaps I'm wrong? What do you think?

 

Chapter III.
AFFINITIES    This chapter will follow through your suggestion that you are a “descendant” of the Transcendentalists. Thoreau, I think, more than Emerson and some of the others. For the more intellectual transcendentalists, Nature was what Emerson called “a dream and a shade[,]” a veil in which God was immanent. They presumed that a moral order was present in the Universe, and that man interpreted that order through his observations of Nature, and, like Wordsworth, regained knowledge of immortality and eternity. It's hard for anyone now to regard things in so simple a manner. However, once the metaphysics fades, what remains is an amazing sense of nature itself, animals as animals, plants as plants;—Thoreau's views all along. There is a poem about the sea which I will quote, in which Thoreau says he would rather “stroll upon the beach” picking up pebbles and talking to shipwrecked sailors than plunge into the depth of the sea where there are fewer pearls. I'll quote this in connection with
The Imaginary Iceberg.
I think too, that it is no longer possible to anticipate great ends for mankind.
Cirque d'Hiver,
“Well, we have come this far.” And the “half is enough” of
The Gentlemen of Shallot,
are hardly transcendentalist views.

I think Emily Dickinson moves away from transcendentalism in the direction of Thoreau. For her, there is a theological framework of course. Yet she opts for the real world when it appears to be at odds with Heaven. In that wonderful poem “I cannot [live] with you/ it would be life…” she labels paradise “sordid”. And the poem, “Because I could not stop for death…” proceeds, in thought and image, your CHEMIN DE FER. I wonder if I am right in detecting a note of loss in many of your poems. Loss of the religion Emily Dickinson had. I take the whole of CHEMIN DE FER as a parable, a conceit, really, in which the pool and the old hermit can be understood as symbols of the church, and of Christ, possibly. I'm not sure it should be overlaiden with “meaning”, but that is what I make of it. Then, your lyrics use half rhyme as E.D. did. And you personify, occasionally, as she does. “A warning to the
startled
grass/ That darkness is about to pass.” Again, in your sestina
Miracle for Breakfast
I take it there is a reference to the Eucharist … often alluded to by Emily Dickinson. Your view is far more complex than hers, and I think that particular poem plays with vision as Ernst does, but is less bitter in its implications. There's a wonderful quotation from Hoffmansthal that I'll quote in connection with the sestina … describing the collapse of the visible world: “My mind compelled me to view all things with uncanny closeness; and just as I once saw a piece of skin from my little finger under a magnifying lens, and it looked like a landscape with mighty furors and caves, so it was now with people and what they said and did.” This in connection with the breadcrumb that turns into a mansion. I love that poem.

I hesitate to mention, as a last
Affinity,
the Imagists because so many critics seem to have lined you up with them. There is, however, something to be said here. When a poet “paints pictures” or images he also, like the painter,
interprets.
That is, he chooses how to present something, and he presents it in a way that says something. What he says, of course, is open to interpretation of a secondary sort. I think you are right to think that the reader should make of your poems what he wants to. Nevertheless, the poet limits the canvas. William Carlos Williams limited his canvases. I know what his moral views of life are, even though he is true to his dictum, “no ideas but in things.” The same with you. When the pelicans crash “unnecessarily” hard, it is you who see them, it is you who intrude the qualification. I don't think this is wrong—on the contrary, it is necessary and it makes the poem resonant. But I think one should mention that imagism is not so far from the stream of English Literature as some people suppose.

 

Chapter IV. PRECISION AND RESONANCE.    I think I mentioned this pet theory of mine to you before. The success of imagist poetry depends, I think, on the tension maintained between the accurate descriptions and their possible meanings. This goes with what I mentioned above concerning interpretation. Mere accuracy is boring and flat, like a text book. (I'll find more examples to illustrate) On the other hand, it is often more annoying to read poetry which seeks resonance without precision. In the light, Ezra Pound's whole career may be regarded as a search for resonance, sometimes achieved, as in the translations from the Chinese, sometimes failing miserably, as in the more obscure Cantos because the allusions are not precise enough. Since I am anxious to get this to the mail, I'll leave the illustrations from your poems and stories—IN THE VILLAGE is full of resonance—for a later letter.

 

Chapter V. SOURCES OF RESONANCE.    There are common sources of resonance—i.e. metaphor, literary allusion, allusion to common social phenomena and background. These are frequently found in your poems and I'll give examples. But I think there are two or possibly three sources of resonance that you have, in a sense, developed. The first I call the
ambiguity of appearances.
The crumb can be a mansion. The map can be more real than the land; tapestry of landscape suddenly lifts and floats away before the Christians. [ … ] with this visual ambiguity, is the possibility of inversion—correction, almost, through inversion.

 

In LOVE LIES SLEEPING, for instance, the man who “sees” is the man who sees the inverted city as correct. (Is this also a play on the theory of optics?) And in
Insomnia,
the image of the moon in the mirror is truer, or appears more true than the moon titself. I could find many more examples—from the new poems, too.

Another source of resonance is, I think, your use of personification. However, I think there are a number of kinds of personification. Usually the pathetic fallacy is a device—saying one thing by means of another—pure metaphor. As in “the heavy surface of the sea,/ swelling slowly as if
considering
spilling over” or “The moon in the bureau mirror/looks out a million miles.” This is quite usual in poetry, and I don't think you overpersonify. There are times when the landscape does not seem to be really personified but vivified—or given a life of its own, as Neruda gives the sea life and animals and plants life.
Florida
begins with ordinary personification—the tanagers are “embarrassed” the birds “hysterical” but then the landscape begins to live. The turtles are not like men, but like themselves, the shells lie helplessly on the beach. Perhaps I exaggerate. Yet I get a similar sense of the life of the beast from the
Fish
and
The Armadillo.

But this will need much more working out—and I'm not sure I need make such a distinction. Certainly it is true, though, that you switch characteristics of things back and forth. There is an official name—metonymy or synecdoche.

 

CHAPTER VI, the last chapter has no name as yet. I'll try to summarize what I have said and remark on “the poet's contribution to American literature.” Because I do think there is such a contribution, I hope not to sound too asinine. I want to mention Helena Morley again, and your feeling for the truth of the child's world—an unsentimental one for you—as for anyone who knows children at all. (I really get rather sick of people who are unsympathetic with any child but the memory of themselves. Even mothers who can't be bothered to understand their own children, but who will reminisce about their own childhoods as if they grew up in the Golden Age.)

This is enough. I wonder if you can read it. I've written in a rush because [I'm going] out soon. And I don't think everything I've said can be reasonable. But let me know what you think.

 

Samambaia, December 30th, 1963

name of place, 8 miles outside P—

means “giant fern”—Petrópolis is always the mailing address

Dear Mrs. Elvin: (or may I call you Anne?)

I have two long letters to you here, one over a month old, and I've carried them (off for a week at Cabo Frio) up here to the country and tried re-writing them from time to time. I am sorry to be so slow—they are in answer to yours of October 28th. I thought it was a very good letter and I have been trying to do it justice. I also received the Aiken book safely and thank you very much. I am glad to have one on hand—but I am sorry now you went to the trouble of sending it because while it was on the way a whole set of the books appeared at the Jefferson Library in Copacabana right near where I live in Rio. I've looked them over and taken out
Edward Taylor
to read (a bit dull!) They seem quite scholarly; your letter seems very scholarly! Hegel, Wittgenstein, etc—I am delighted. I have always been weak at philosophy so I am impressed by your being able to connect me with such brains. Like M. Jourdain speaking prose—I must have been philosophizing without realizing it.

Also—please don't apologize for your typing or spelling—I'm not very strong in those subjects, either.

And thank you for the nice little Chinese drawing. In return I am sending you (I've had it ready to mail for weeks but held off in order to try to finish the letter) a
very crude
Brazilian wood-cut—one of those used on the outside of the little ballad booklets they still sell by the thousands here, particularly in the north. I suppose there are 1,000 years, technically, between your picture and mine. The poem inside mine, however,—
about a
spectacular murder—would be in a very strict old Portuguese form, almost like Camões. I hope you are happy to be going to England and when is it you go? Saturday I had the U S Cultural Attaché up here for the day and he brought along a young couple—Tom Skidmore—who is here learning Brazilian history in order to teach it at Harvard next year. Perhaps you know him?—an English wife.—I meant to ask him if he knew you, but somehow the chance escaped me. I've been up in the country for about ten days—and hope to stay over the week-end. This is where I really live, but have spent very little time here for three years now because—I may have said this before—the friend I live with here is working for Carlos Lacerda, the Governor of Guanabara State (where Rio is) and so we have to stay in the city. After looking over the Aiken book a few things have struck me—one is that for the chronology I think you could put in Lota's name—I owe her a great deal; the next book of poems will be dedicated to her, and we have been friends for 20 years or so. (We also own, and are still building, this house together.) Something like: “November 1951—went on a trip to S.A. with the money from Bryn Mawr. Stopped over in Rio to visit Maria Carlota de Macedo Soares, an old friend, got sick—and then stayed on”—and on—However you wish to phrase it.