Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (6 page)

TWO

THE SPACE BETWEEN

There will always be a gap of some kind. It may be located in places as small as the sentence, or even the individual word; it may govern entire relationships—among characters, between character and author, between author and reader. It may be a purely metaphorical absence, or it may involve an actual cut or deletion. But it is always there.

Sometimes the severance, the gap, is built into the authorial strategy itself. Dickens is a master of this. His most memorable characters seem to possess detachable parts—salient characteristics which, in taking on a life of their own, come eventually to represent the whole personality. The less realistic these humorously exaggerated characters are, the more they are prone to demonstrating a single, representative quality that exists apart from themselves. Yet in some ways these distinctive habits, always practiced to excess, are the most realistic thing about these people, for it is precisely in their notable excrescences that we are likely to recognize ourselves. Hardly a year ever passes, for instance, without my recalling Mr. Dick, the pleasant, loony gentleman in
David Copperfield
who is sane on every subject save that of King Charles’s head. Unfortunately, he simply can’t keep his mind off this beheaded monarch’s gruesome appendage; it
will
keep popping into his awareness, and into his voluminous writings, despite his best efforts to keep it out. You would be surprised how many people suffer from their own variety of a King Charles’s head. I am always surprised when I see my versions of it (and I have a number of them) popping up and ruining my pages.

Detachability is the key element here, not only for Dickens’s metaphor, but for literary practice in general. It is the space left in between—the gap between Charles’s imagined body and his severed head, the sliver of reality separating me from Mr. Dick—that thrives intensely, and perhaps singularly, in literary works.

Sometimes the gap is imposed from the outside, by a force even stronger and more uncontrollable than the writer’s own obsessions. One of the strangest aspects of Dostoyevsky’s
Demons
is the fact that its most powerful and seemingly necessary episode—the chapter in which Stavrogin confesses to the crime that underlies all his behavior, the long-ago rape of a young girl who subsequently committed suicide—was cut by the censorious editors before the book’s publication. That crucial chapter (which Dostoyevsky repeatedly fought to keep in, but with no success) disappeared from
Demons
for the rest of the author’s life, and for many decades after; even now it survives only as an appendix in most editions. How could the novel have existed without it? How could anyone have begun to understand
Demons
or respond properly to it without this essential key? And yet people did. Literature is a remarkable thing, and so are its readers. Together, they manage to triumph over even the most severe amputations, or decapitations.

Poetry, as it turns out, works largely through severances of this kind. In a poem, the kind of connection that is usually essential to our understanding of what is happening has been purposely removed. A bridge that normally leads between two precipices has been chopped away, and we are left to jump across on our own. Character and plot, the two elements that in the novel help us locate ourselves, are more shadowy, less evident in poetry, becoming transformed at times into just the sound of a voice, or the remembrance of an event. And yet they are still there, even in the briefest of poems; they are part of what enables us to leap over those chasms.

Consider the opening lines of one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s most wrenching sonnets:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

We ourselves are pitched immediately into a profound emotional darkness, the superlative version of a nonexistent negative, with that strange, extreme phrase “No worst, there is none.” Yet even here, in this state of complete abandonment, we are somehow held, enclosed, located in a feeling if not in a precise place. And that, I think, is because we can sense the presence of the characters and the relationship between them: the idiosyncratic, pain-wracked speaker, and those absent others (“Comforter,” “Mary”) to whom he pleadingly, uselessly speaks.

The poem, in its very language, reenacts and alludes to the procedure by which it operates, that leap across an unbridged chasm which the poet is now requiring of us, just as his God is apparently requiring it, in a much more painful fashion, of him. The sonnet ends with the lines

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

What has been cut out is not just the connective words (a comfort
that
serves in a whirlwind, may
those
who never hung there) or even letters (so that the arcanely poetic “ne’er” here has a radical, rejuvenated, bridge-chopped-off function). The fulcrum of it all, the platform from which speech emerges, has itself been eliminated. That steep or deep
what
? Where, in all this nothingness, can one locate that exclamatory Here? Yet despite the radical excisions, the voice is stronger than ever. Its rhymes are insistent to the point of comedy (though certainly no one is laughing here), and there is a tenderness in that appositive command—“creep, / Wretch, under a comfort…”—that brings a distinctly human note to this otherwise stark landscape. This is a voice that is continuing to speak even though no one is listening. And one senses that the person being addressed has changed by the end of the sonnet: no longer God or Mary, the presumed listener is now that wretch who can only find comfort in the thought of death. Hopkins may be speaking to himself here—
must
be speaking to himself, or we wouldn’t feel so much agony emanating from the poem—but the poor, abandoned creature he is addressing is also his reader. This is our problem too, even if we don’t know it yet. We are the other character brought to life by such a poem.

*   *   *

At its root, almost all lyric poetry is a conversation between a speaker and a listener—a one-sided conversation, to be sure, but still a dialogue of sorts, in which the feelings and expectations of the silent partner are taken into account. Generally the “I” is the poet and the “you” is the reader, but in some poems these pronouns represent fictional characters, as they might in a novel or a short story. Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” for instance, is very like a brief epistolary novel. Its “I” is a young wife writing to her husband when he is away, expressing her longing for his return and recalling the history of their marriage. “At fourteen I married My Lord you,” Pound has her say, in his purposely stilted translation of Li Po’s classical Chinese masterpiece. The stiltedness is no doubt meant to suggest the cultural distance between her and us (we who are the hidden, unspoken “you” of this poem, just as her husband is the explicit, spoken one), but it also conveys the shyness of a child bride in an arranged marriage who has come to feel more love than she ever expected to. And she takes pleasure in the fact that her husband is in love with her, too: “You dragged your feet when you went out,” she recalls about the beginning of his trip. The emotion she expresses in this letter is both intense and suppressed; more is implied than is stated directly, and that too intensifies the feeling, or at least our response to it.

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you

        As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

she says at the end of her letter, and it is the longing expressed in the line breaks and word rhythms, as much as her explicit willingness to move toward him, that signals to us how powerfully she misses him.

Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is based on an equally fictional premise, but in this case the “I” is a wife-murdering duke and the “you” a visiting emissary from a potential new father-in-law. Nothing could be further in tone from the Pound. The obliqueness is there, yes, but it is of the villainously mustache-twirling, heavily ironic variety, and the suppressed emotion is not love but rage, or vanity, or petty annoyance. This poem is a scene from a play rather than an epistolary novel: the two characters occupy the same well-furnished set, sitting in a room of the duke’s palace before a portrait of his late wife as he elaborates on his grievances and his solution to them.

Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her …

                … as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift …

                … Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will’t please you rise?…

The humor of this poem—and it has a great deal of Ripley-like humor, though also, as in Highsmith, a significant aura of threat—lies primarily in our wondering how the silent visitor is taking all this. Does he understand what the duke is telling him, and will this awareness prevent the marriage between “The Count your master’s … fair daughter” and the emissary’s garrulous host? Does the duke even care that this might be the result of his sly confession, or is he too proud (or too crazy) to realize that his words could have this effect? The brief drama is over before we get any answers to questions like these. All the pleasure of the piece lies in the unfolding of the duke’s outrageous personality. He is the real character here; the duchess, though she claims the title and most of the poem, remains constricted by the unreliable narrator who describes her, and the “you,” however courteously addressed, is merely a cipher, a prop used to evoke the story.

The second-person pronoun of a poem is always, by definition, a less substantial person than the first. Even when the characters are not fictional—or perhaps especially in that case—the “I” is the person best known to the poet, most readily seen from the inside, most fully understood. (Though I do not want to suggest that “seen from the inside” and “fully understood” necessarily go together: sometimes, as in a stream-of-consciousness rendering of a character’s thoughts, or a mad killer’s perspective at the beginning of a murder mystery, to be thrust inside is precisely
not
to understand.) The poet’s “I” is likely to be less distinct from the poet’s real-life self than the first-person narrator of most novels; it is more like the “I” of an essayist, though it is not exactly that either. Except in the cases where the setting is explicitly fictional, as in the Pound and Browning poems, we tend to assume that the poet is speaking to us directly. And this in turn means that the “you” is meant to be us, even if the poet—because she is either long dead, or far away, or a recluse, or simply a complete stranger to us—cannot possibly have any idea who we really are. The poem works because she
seems
to know us, seems to have forged some kind of real connection with us.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you—Nobody—too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!

Emily Dickinson’s rendering of the poet-reader situation is perhaps the sharpest and wittiest imaginable. Yes, we are nobody to each other, we who meet only on the page. But that very invisibility makes “a pair of us”: in that sense, we are joined together (on the page if nowhere else) to the exclusion of all the rest. Dickinson’s “Don’t tell!” has a special force, coming as it does from a poet who largely renounced publication in her lifetime—but of course the silent “you” of
any
poem is not in much of a position to tell, so this plea is also a joke between us.

The dreamlike power of Dickinson’s voice—she is there, right inside us, and if she is a bit cracked, then so are we—is unlike anything else in poetry. But something of that boundary-crossing, that wish to overcome the gap between first-person speaker and second-person listener, appears even in poets who took a far more public stance. It is there in the work of Walt Whitman (who managed to be both cracked
and
public), and it is there even in the seemingly platitudinous but secretly dark verse of Robert Frost. His excessively anthologized “Birches” begins with the observations of the poet himself (“When I see birches bend to left and right”), but has moved by the fifth line to an actual, other second-person viewer (“Often you must have seen them”) and then, a few lines later, to a generic “you” who merges self and others, the speaker and everyone else (“Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away / You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen”). A much weirder version of this grammatical shift occurs in his little poem “The Pasture,” which starts:

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;

I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

This may sound coy at first reading, but the more you read the poem (which contains only one more stanza, also ending with the same three-word refrain), the more you come to believe in that “You come too” as a serious offer. A writer-farmer of my acquaintance, a man who first encountered this poem as a teenager, often thinks of those lines as he walks out into his own pastures—sees himself as somehow accepting that invitation. How strange and yet how natural it seems, the fact that Frost, long dead, has now become an intangible “I,” while the once-ghostly “you” has turned into a solid person moving through space. No matter: there’s still a pair of them.