Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (10 page)

I suppose that is one of the features that define a great city: with the passage of time, the names of its districts and quarters and streets and buildings become so woven into the tapestry of poems and stories that even readers who have never visited can find their way blindfolded: down 42nd Street as far as Baker Street, then make a left onto Nevsky Prospekt.

The 1950s and 1960s now look to me like a great age in American poetry, after which things have quietly gone downhill. Am I wrong? Is there something I am missing?

Rationalists are exasperated by the way in which words, even freshly minted ones, pick up connotations that blur their sharp denotative edges. One of the great projects of the Royal Society, founded in England in the late seventeenth century, was to establish a language free of associations, a language fit to be used by philosophers and scientists. The language that the scientific heirs of the Royal Society use today looks to us fairly pure, but only because it is based so heavily on Greek words, whose connotations are thoroughly lost to us (
electricity
from
elektron
, but who can say what this word, which denoted a precious-metal alloy, called up in the mind of Odysseus?).

(And what of my own response to
electric
, forever corrupted by the passage of “doom’s electric moccasin”—Emily Dickinson?)

Though Swift made fun of the Royal Society project, the ideal it reached for was not ignoble. I have never fully understood why Beckett dropped English, but I suspect that part of the reason was that he found the language too encumbered with literary associations. Conrad, as I recall, inveighed against the English word
oak
, which, he said, could not be employed without evoking a whole history of British navigation and British empire.

It is not uncommon for writers, as they age, to get impatient with the so-called poetry of language and go for a more stripped-down style (“late style”). The most notorious instance, I suppose, is Tolstoy, who in later life expressed a moralistic disapproval of the seductive powers of art and confined himself to stories that would not be out of place in an elementary classroom. A loftier example is provided by Bach, who at the time of his death was working on his
Art of Fugue
, pure music in the sense that it is not tied to any particular instrument.

One can think of a life in art, schematically, in two or perhaps three stages. In the first you find, or pose for yourself, a great question. In the second you labor away at answering it. And then, if you live long enough, you come to the third stage, when the aforesaid great question begins to bore you, and you need to look elsewhere.

All the best,

John

Brooklyn

September 29, 2009

Dear John,

We walked into the film with such low expectations (not only because of your remarks but because translating novels into movies is such a precarious business) and walked out pleasantly surprised, feeling the result wasn’t half bad at all. Yes, John M. was miscast, but his performance was more subtle and less mannered than most of the things I’ve seen him in over the past few years—good enough, in any case, not to destroy the mood of the story. We thought the daughter was excellent—much thinner and more attractive than the character in the book, of course, but this is the movies, and what can you do, since attractive women are what the movies are all about. Direction, photography, production design, locations—admirably done. The New York reviews that I saw were largely favorable. The audience sitting in the theater with us was engrossed, and given how poor most films are these days, it was refreshing to see something with some spine and intelligence to it. No, it doesn’t have the force of the book, but it tries to do justice to the book, and if I were in your shoes, I would feel reasonably satisfied, not the least bit betrayed. To add to your collection of UNIMPORTANT OBJECTS, I enclose our ticket stubs from the Quad Theater on 13th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues—just in case you want to show them off to your friends.

You talk about a golden age of American poetry in the fifties and sixties and then a quiet falling off. My first response was to say “nonsense,” but now that I’ve given the matter some thought, I sadly have to admit that I agree with you. Most of the great modernists were still breathing then (Stevens died in 1954, but Pound, Eliot, and Williams all lived on into the sixties, Williams in particular doing some of his best work then), the so-called Objectivists were still thriving (the next generation, including Zukofsky, Oppen, and Reznikoff), Charles Olson was in full flower (how I loved Olson when I was young), and the generation after that (poets born in the 1920s) was emerging: Kinnell, whom you mention, but also Creeley, Ashbery, O’Hara, Merwin, Spicer, Ginsberg, and numerous others. Kinnell, Ashbery, and Merwin are still with us, but they are old men now, and what has happened after them? There are several poets born in the late thirties and early forties whose work I greatly admire and follow avidly—Michael Palmer (published by New Directions), Charles Simic (Harcourt), Ron Padgett (Coffee House Press) among them—not to speak of the somewhat younger Paul Muldoon (born in Northern Ireland, now an American citizen)—but they are all friends of mine, I have watched their work evolve over decades, and perhaps this personal connection clouds my judgment. I would be curious to know what you think of them, any one of them. There is also Susan Howe (New Directions), much admired, much debated, but oddly enough, the book I consider to be her best is a work of prose,
My Emily Dickinson
, an astonishingly brilliant and original text—in the spirit of Olson’s
Call Me Ishmael
or Williams’s
In the American Grain
: the poet as critic, criticism as a form of poetry, wonderful stuff. But no, none of these writers is as strong as the giants from the recent past. We live in an age of endless writing workshops, graduate writing programs (imagine getting a degree in writing), there are more poets per square inch than ever before, more poetry magazines, more books of poetry (99% of them published by microscopic small presses), poetry slams, performance poets, cowboy poets—and yet, for all this activity, little of note is being written. The burning ideas that fueled the innovations of the early modernists seem to have been extinguished. No one believes that poetry (or art) can change the world anymore. No one is on a holy mission. Poets are everywhere now, but they talk only to each other.

Your reference to “late style” reminded me that I still haven’t read Edward Said’s book. I will try to track it down in the coming days. Tolstoy is a good example, but what about Joyce? It seems to me that his early style is late (by your definition, or by Said’s definition) and that as he progressed from book to book he became more and more ornate, complex, baroque, culminating in a final book that is so complex that no one can read it (alas). But Joyce died at fifty-nine, and perhaps it could be argued that he didn’t live long enough to have entered his late period. In any case, his is the only name that jumps out at me to contradict this theory. No, perhaps Henry James as well, whose final, dictated books are filled with some of the most tortuous sentences in English literature. Other writers, perhaps most writers, strike me as fairly consistent from beginning to end—Fielding, Dickens, Nabokov, Conrad, Roth, Updike, fill in the blanks. Not Beckett, of course, and in parallel with the late Bach, think of the late Matisse and his spare and sinuous cutouts. More stripped down, less stripped down, the same. Those are the three possibilities—which is to say, each person follows his or her own path. Goya said: “There are no rules in painting.” Are there any rules in the life of an artist?

Summer seems to be over. Brisk days now, a new bite in the air. Siri plunges on with her novel, and I am unemployed again.

Warmest thoughts,

Paul

October 1, 2009

Dear John,

I forgot to mention Robert Lowell. I forgot Elizabeth Bishop. I forgot John Berryman. I forgot Sylvia Plath. I forgot Robert Duncan. I forgot James Wright. I forgot William Bronk. I forgot Larry Eigner. I forgot H. D. (d. 1961) and Mina Loy (d. 1966) and Marianne Moore (d. 1972) and Laura Riding (d. 1991) and Lorine Niedecker (d. 1970). Not to speak of Theodore Roethke, Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov, James Schuyler, Richard Wilbur, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Merrill. No doubt I am forgetting others still.

Yesterday, I bought Edward Said’s
On Late Style
. Have read the first essay (mostly about Beethoven and Adorno) and see that the argument is not quite as simple as I originally thought. I will push on and give you my comments later.

Said, by the way, was the adviser for my M.A. thesis at Columbia in 1969–70—and we stayed in touch, off and on but warmly, until his death. The man who put the book together, Michael Wood, was another teacher of mine—and is still a friend. Just yesterday, Siri saw him at Princeton (where he now teaches) to talk to his class on the contemporary novel. I myself will be going to the same class in two weeks. I don’t know why I mention this—simply because, I suppose, so many memories came rushing back to me when I bought the book yesterday.

All good thoughts—

Paul

October 9, 2009

Paul,

See below.

What does one do?

John

“22 September 2009

“J.M. Coetzee, c/o Vintage Books

“Dear Mr. Coetzee,

“I am disappointed and find it a shame that a writer enjoying such eminence as you do, should stoop to using anti-Semitic slurs, and these wholly gratuitously.

“I refer to your book ‘Slow Man’ Chapter 22 pages 167 and 168. Your reference to ‘Jews’ made in this derogatory way in no way furthered the story, and in my opinion should not have been used.

“For me an interesting book has been spoiled.

“Yours sincerely,

“[Name and address supplied]”

October 10, 2009

Dear John,

What to do? Do nothing—or something. That is to say, ignore the stupid letter and think no more about it. Or else, if you find yourself so deeply irked that it is impossible to stop thinking about it, write to the woman in England and tell her that you have written a novel, not a tract on ethical conduct, and that disparaging remarks about Jews, not to speak of out-and-out anti-Semitism, are a part of the world we live in, and just because your character says what she says does not mean that you endorse her comments. Lesson one in How to Read a Novel. Do writers of murder stories endorse murder? Do you, as a committed vegetarian, expose yourself as a hypocrite if one of your characters eats a hamburger? The woman’s letter is absurd, idiotic. But the sad truth is that all novelists receive letters of this sort from time to time. My standard response is to crumple them up and toss them in the trash.

I imagine you have received my last letter by now, along with the card listing the names of more poets (still more, many more, have since occurred to me). I would appreciate your thoughts on the Adorno/Said notion of late style which, I confess, eludes me somewhat.

Hoping you are well.

Affectionately,

Paul

October 14, 2009

Dear Paul,

Last week I sent you a copy of a letter I had received from a reader in England, with a rather despairing accompanying note: What is one to do about this?

The letter points to a passage in my novel
Slow Man
in which Marijana
, the Croatian inamorata of the hero, makes an anti-Semitic remark about a certain shopkeeper. The letter writer accuses me, as author of the book, of anti-Semitism.

You wrote back pointing out, very sensibly, that there are indeed things one can “do” about such a letter. One can ignore it, for instance. Or one can write back explaining that characters in novels have a degree of independence from their authors, and—particularly in the case of secondary characters—do not unfailingly speak for them.

You also point out that as a writer of a certain prominence I must expect to get all kinds of mail from readers, including mail that doesn’t necessarily reflect a sophisticated understanding of what fiction is or does.

Yet my question still stands: What is one to do about this? For—the world being as it is, and the twentieth century in particular being what it was—an accusation of anti-Semitism, like an accusation of racism, throws one onto the defensive. “But I’m not one of them!” one wants to exclaim, displaying one’s hands, showing that one’s hands are clean.

The real question, however, is not whose hands are clean and whose are not. The real question arises out of the moment of being thrown onto the defensive, and out of the sinking feeling that comes next, the feeling that the goodwill between reader and writer has evaporated, the goodwill without which reading loses its joy and writing begins to feel like an unwanted, burdensome exercise. What does one do after
that
? Why go on, when one’s words are being picked over for covert slights and heresies? It’s like being back among the Puritans.