Prose (73 page)

There are hundreds of things I could say about your letter, but I don't want to write too much today because I think you should get this soon. Suppose I stop now to get this in the mail. Later on, this week or next, I'll write again. I have a few questions about the newer poems. Oh, how I wish I could fly to Brazil, but I can't see how we could ever afford it. England I know well—I married, quite disastrously, in England just after I graduated from Michigan in 1954 and lived in London for 6 years. Margaret was born there. At that time I never would have had the sense to understand anything, however. I look forward to going back. Love Ireland and Scotland, but Cambridge is queer, though queerly tough.

Much love,

 

Rio, February 16th, 1964

Dear Anne:

It was a compliment to be the “class aesthete” … Two friends & I were cartooned, at Vassar, with the caption “The Higher Type.” Thank you very much for offering to send me books, and I am going to accept the
Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon,
because I've heard so much about it. But if it is at all expensive
you must let me pay for it.
I have already given away here two copies of that edition of Isaac Babel you mention, so you see what I think of him. He is superb. That brief account of the Reds taking over an old monastery (my copy's up in the country so I can't give the title) is one of the most beautiful short pieces of reporting I know.—He's the other writer besides Chekov I wish some Brazilian genius would come along and write
like
—except that Brazil is closer to Chekov, a decidedly “feminine” country and Babel is a masculine writer. If one should make these distinctions—but compared to England, or Germany,—Brazil is
decidedly
“feminine.”

I'd be grateful if you'd somehow make the point that my reasons for staying here so long are personal. I'd rather live in my own country if I could. But my feelings about both the USA and Brazil would look like seismographs during earthquakes, just during any week, no doubt. My last trip back was late 1961 and I was horrified by pre-Christmas New York—it had all grown so much worse. Now I am horrified by things here, as the situation deteriorates very fast. But no one outside the country can really understand what is going on so I won't [ … ]

Please forgive this long digression—I am really trying to cheer myself up—things are so bad here—by talking English. I have written several poems about Brazil recently—one you will see shortly in The New York Review, and another—a fausse naïve ballad, very long, in The New Yorker.

I am very sorry to hear about the miscarriage and I know they have very bad effects … When is it you are going to England? There is a slight chance that I may go there myself for a month or two, perhaps in April. I haven't been for so long it is hard to get going, but I'd like to make a tourist trip and see literary things I didn't see on my trips long ago. I once drove around most of Ireland and had a lovely time—probably before you were born! If I do get there I'll certainly try to meet you somewhere.

Some of Robert Lowell's poetry, the first two books, certainly, is very difficult—a few poems I never did understand until I'd asked him. But then they do make very good sense. He has written a few really lovely ones in the past year or two—lyrical, finished,—musical, too—two I think among his best poems. Randall, I think—well, I think that sentimentality is deliberate, you know—he is trying to restore
feeling,
perhaps—but I just don't think we can believe in it these days. I think he was influenced some years ago a bit too much by Corbière. Frost is a complicated case—a lot of what he wrote about was just homely to me, after my Nova Scotia days, but the kind of things I have tried to avoid sentimentalizing. I hate his philosophy, what I understand of it—I find it
mean
—while admiring his technique enormously. “Two Tramps at Mudtime” for example—what is it but a refusal to be charitable? (and he was hideously uncharitable, conversationally, at least.) Well—as Cal says frequently—“We're all flawed,”—and as far as poetry goes I think we have to be grateful for what we do get. They all rise above their flaws, on occasion.—I am interested in Berryman and wish he'd publish that long poem soon. I wish I knew something of Chinese poetry—a nice old ex-missionary teacher in Washington told me a lot about it the year I was there and enlightened me some—and I was properly impressed by the sophistication and elaboration, etc.

Shapiro, Winters, etc.—seem sad to me—the problem is how to be justly but
impersonally
bitter, isn't it.—(Even Marianne Moore's disappointments show through too much sometimes, I think—but then she is very Irishly cagey and manages by avoiding a great deal … She's a wonder!)

No—I just have a couple of small paper-backs on the haiku—and I don't know how good Donald Keene (?) is (they're up in the country, too.) I have never read Tolkien's work after one attempt several years ago—I didn't seem to have time, so I couldn't have liked it much! For children—well, I still think Beatrix Potter wrote a fine prose style … I admire Jemima Puddleduck, Tom Kitten, etc. very much, and have introduced the series (along with New England Fish Chowder) to many Brazilians. This is idle chat and I must get to work—I am glad you sound happily married—As a very stupid uncle of my friend Lota's used to say
*
—“I prefer my friends to be rich. I like rich happy friends better than poor unhappy friends.”

Affectionately,

        
Elizabeth

 

44 Porter Street

Watertown, Mass.

March 6, 1964

Dear Elizabeth,

As you see, I am sending you a revised chronology which I hope you'll correct, amend, delete etc. as you see fit. As I work on the first chapter I find that I may need more factual information, and, if you don't mind, I'll ask a few questions before trying to answer your long letter properly. I don't think the little I write about biography needs to be too detailed, but on the other hand, it's best not to sound evasive, and worse, to make mistakes.

 

1. About your mother's family. Was your grandfather a sea captain like his ancestors? Did his whole family come from Nova Scotia … and were there two or three aunts? Perhaps it would be helpful to know the name of your aunt in Boston—the one you liked because she was amusing. Is there anything you remember particularly about people in your childhood? Who introduced you to music, to poetry … Teachers? One can tell a great deal about your childhood in Nova Scotia from the two New Yorker stories, and the “feel” of it is in poems like Cape Breton, but I would like to be a little more precise about people and exact places.
Sorry, but I must picture things to write about them.

2. You say you studied at the Schola Cantorum in Paris and later with Ralph Kirkpatrick. When was this?

3. I wonder who you knew when you went to Paris in 1935 or so? There was so much “in the air there”. One thinks of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, the Surrealists, painters and poets like Andre Breton. A great period of blossoming forth in that curious euphoric between-war period. And then the people on the Partisan Review, so fervent and determined to be “liberal” without knowing the consequences. I was looking at some old issues of PR in the library the other day and was seized with an awful sense of the bravery and, really, the fruitlessness of it all. I think it must have been exciting at the time. Again, when did you meet Calder, Dewey, Loren McIvor, Randall Jarrell. You seem to have been very fortunate in your friends. I think you are quite right about your belonging to the post world war I generation. Or, at least, I think one must make a distinction between the “you then” and the “you in Brazil.” That leads me to the poems.

4. What impresses me about the 1956 volume is a wonderful awareness of the ambiguity of things. “Faustina,” for instance … the
impossibility
of knowing her thoughts, that they might be either. Or the end of “Roosters” in which the sun “climbs in” … “faithful as enemy
or
friend.” This kind of uncertainty perhaps characteristic of the time as well of perhaps you. The new poems, except for
Questions of Travel
and
Brazil, January 1,
don't seem to spring from the same kind of uncertainty or urgency, but from a new climate and culture really. They have the same qualities of exact discription but the perspective is different. Even the poems about childhood—Sestina, and Cousin Arthur and Manners are “detached” (Is that what I mean?) from your old vision. They don't seem quite “it” … while the Brazilian poems have almost a settled quality.
Manuelzinho,
for instance, and curious mixture of superstition and mysticism and absurdity of
The Riverman.

 

Understand I am not criticizing these new poems. I like many of them very much—and besides, as you see, I can't really say what I mean about them. Therefore I don't think I'll say as much about them as about the others.
The Fish,
The Imaginary Iceberg,
The Map,
The Man Moth,
Cootchie,
Florida
these all seem to me masterpieces—better and better as I read them. But unless you think me terribly “dated” I would rather not deal with what probably should be called the “contemporary poetic scene”. It's a dreary one, in general, I think, and I'm not sure that any of your poems have much to do with it.

I see that I have “gone all muzzy again,” as Mark would put it. Well, maybe you can help me out. I do want to thank you for your long letter and to assure you that I will quote nothing without asking you. There is a passage that I would like to use, if I may, or if you approve. It concerns what you say about the “always-more-successful surrealism” of everyday life. As you have it, it is like this:

 

“There is no “split.” Dreams, works of art, glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important.” And then what you say of Darwin who builds an “endless heroic case” of observations “and then comes to a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one
feels
the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown…”

 

It is that point where rationality and irrationally meet that that your poems “catch fire” for me. Their resonance, their
real
perceptions—not just the fine descriptions—comes from the central awareness … the hardest and most elusive thing in the world to catch.

Two weeks ago I ran away to Ann Arbor to visit my father … and to be by myself for a while. While I was there I did a sort of Victorian Table of Contents of this whole book … all the ideas written out in outline form with references to poems etc.… now I'm fitting what I have already written into my outline (and throwing reams away). So it looks as if there may be a book after all in spite of viruses, ear-aches, and headcolds which seem to afflict my family—even the cat has a cold! I haven't yet looked up the photography of your house—I will, I'm glad you told me about “L'Architecture d'Aujord'hui” I hope I have everything you suggested include incorporated into the chronology. No, I havn't seen “The Trial” and I won't after your description. And I've been re-reading Chekov. Yes, Yes, Yes. Have you written any stories about Brazil? Somehow I think you should … What is it that makes good prose but isn't poetry—or perhaps it is.

I'm “baby sitting” with a friend's little girl and my own—we take turns—and I wish you could see the raisins and graham crackers piling up around the typewriter. And milk spilling! I think the time for literature has come to an end. Again, thank you for your kindness and help and patience in reading my letters to you.

 

Answers to your questions of March 6th
—[1964]

1. It was my greatgrandfather (maternal grandmother's father) who was a sea captain. William Hutchinson. He was lost at sea—all hands—in a famous storm off Sable Island when my grandmother was 9 years old. No—Cape Sable, I think—they're two different places, but Cape Sable would be on his way into the Bay of Fundy. Better not say. I made a trip to
Sable Island
(as I believe I've said) on a Canadian Lighthouse Service Boat, around 1949—

My maternal grandmother had four brothers; three were Baptist missionaries in India, the 4th a painter who spent most of his life in England, George Hutchinson. (Israel Zangwill's “Our Lady of the Snows” is supposed to be about him but I haven't read it.) One of the others was also President of Acadia College in N S, and another taught there, etc. The Hutchinsons seem to have had brains, talents, and were rather eccentric. As I think I said—one wrote bad novels, including the first novel in
Telegu.

Great Uncle George went to sea at 14 or so (he is in “Large Bad Picture”) except he never taught school; I don't know why I said that. For a few years. Even before then, he had started painting pictures of ships for the local ship-builders; Great Village was a ship-building place then, as many Nova Scotian villages were. But it came to an end around the turn of the century. Of the Bulmer side I don't know very much. As I said—there were Tories from N.Y. state, given farms in N S at the time of the Revolution, and more recent Scotch, Scotch-Irish, and English additions. My maternal grandmother's mother however was from England—London—which probably accounted for many anglicisms my grandma used, such as “hard as the knockers of Newgate.” I have a lot of notes from
aunt
Aunt
Grace
about this side of the family—the ship my greatgrandmother arrived in, her fearful trip, etc.—but I don't believe they'd be of much interest to you, really.