ISSUES | spring 1984

I recommend all seven of these books, six for their promise, and the seventh for its fulfillment of promise. The seventh is Sydney Lea’s The Floating Candles; I think it clearly demonstrates potential made powerful. The other six books are as different from each other as their promise and their problems, though they each involve, in some essential way, an act of will.

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Featuring the short plays:

Beauty Is the Word
Hot Milk at Three in the Morning

Some time ago T.S. Eliot impatiently (and correctly) declared that “criticism is as inevitable as breathing.” Perhaps the contemporary equivalent would be the proclamation that theorizing is as inevitable as breathing. Indeed, a quick glance at MLA job lists or ads for new books of literary criticism quickly convinces us that all “serious” English departments must have specialists in critical theory and that graduate students and literary scholars must have training in critical theory. My intent is not to trace the rise of critical theory in current academic curricula, but to ask about a different relationship: what is, or what ought to be, the relationship between critical theory and contemporary American poetry?

A few years ago philosophy was widely perceived (by non philosophers, of course) as having become an irredeemably irrelevant intellectual enterprise. No longer a discipline with any semblance of unity, philosophy was conceived of quite differently in English speaking countries and on the continent. The existence of this split led to the circulation of rather unflattering pictures of each philosophical traditon: on the one hand, Anglo-American philosophy was caricatured as a minute inquiry into grammatical subtleties that no one without such an analytical training can see the point of; on the other hand, Continental philosophy was caricatured as an ineffable and incomprehensilbe search to say what cannot be said. The analytical traditon produced trivial clarity; the Continental tradition produced profound nonsense.

Last summer a bronze sculpture by Henry Moore was installed in a corner of Harvard Yard outside the Lamont Library. For a month workers rehearsed placements and then roped off a small area to direct the sinking of the base. Two forms were set down, securely but not permanently, and the roped removed. In the sculpture’s first hours, passers by approached, inspected, and cautiously touched as the placers watched from a distance. In its first year the work has become an extension of the scenery. All fall and spring students have studied and sunned there, casually hugging the forms.

I had what Jan Kott calls “a typical East European eduation.” He means, Hitler and Stalin taught us the basics. When I was three years old the Germans bombed Belgrade. The house across the street was hit and destroyed. There was plenty more of that, as everybody knows. When the war ended I came in and said: “Now there won’t be any more fun!” That gives you an idea what a jerk I was. The truth is, I did enjoy myself. From the summer of 1944 to mid-1945, I ran around the streets of Belgrade with other half-abandoned kids. You can just imagine the things we saw and the adventures we had. You see, my father was already abroad, my mother was working, the Russians were coming, the Germans were leaving. It was a three-ring circus.

“From Orphic Songs”
“Voyage to Montevideo”
“Autumn Garden”
“In the Mountains”
“Song of Darkness”

“A Sunday at the Beach, 1938”
“A Summer Night on Long Island”

“The Arriviste”
“The Rabbi Said Never Go to Bed Angry”

This poem is not currently available online.

This poem is not currently available online.

“Sentry of the Silent”
“End of Solemnities”
“Predecessor”

This poem is not currently available online.

This poem is not currently available online.

This poem is not currently available online.

“Horizon”
“Let Old Fools Have the Floor”

“Album”
“To Kill a Deer”
“The Migration of Butterflies”

“Autumnal”
“Below Keats’ Room, Early Morning”

“Intransitive”
“Works & Days”

“A Summer Song Cycle”
“The Raft”
“Evangelist & Peregrine”
“Five Poems of Farewell”

On that Saturday afternoon before the ice and while the exterminator was still roaming around her house, Jane phoned Diana Tunbridge to tell her that she was coming over, after all. They arranged to meet halfway across the meadow so that they could walk back together to Diana’s where Jane would spend the night. By the time she had collected her things and packed her backpack she was overtaken once again by that familiar dolefulness that assailed her whenever she deserted her mother and father. It worried her to leave them to their own devices even when she was angry at them. They were still sitting quietly in the living room when she came downstairs, and she stopped in the doorway to say goodbye, but both Avery and Claudia were abstracted, and her mother was a little irritable.

All of us, whether or not we descend from noble lineages, have our genealogies. I am descented from Genesis, not out of pride, but out of necessity. My parents were born in a Jewish Ukraine, very different from the Ukraine of today, more different yet from the Mexico where I was born, this Mexico, Federal District, where I had the luck to come into the world amid the cries of the merchants at the Merced market, those merchants whom my mother, dressed in white from head to foot, used to stand watching in amazement.

I can’t be accused, like Isaac Babel, of flowery writing or bookishness, since unlike him (or my father) I didn’t study Hebrew or the Bible or the Talmud (because I wasn’t born in Russia and I’m not male). Like Joan of Arc I hear voices, but I am not a maid and I have no desire to be burnt at the stake, although I am attracted by the gaudy and beautiful colors that Shklovski condemned Babel for when they were not yet old men, and that he remembers nostalgically now that he is one (that is to say, Shklovski remembers, because Babel died in a concentration camp in Siberia, 14 March 1941).

His wife told him at the dinner table that it wasn’t right for male and female cousins to be living together under one roof.

“It was bad enough when their grandmother was alive,” Alice Rogers said. “Cora was so deaf those two could have been humping till daylight for all she’d know.”

“She was only deaf in one ear,” Orson Rogers said, extracting a piece of gristle from his mouth. His wife always bought cheap roasts, and he felt swindled.

“She only heard what she wanted to hear.” Alice Rogers tapped her finger on the table in a precise, aggravating beat. “I asked Cora Hendricks which side she slept on at night, and she said the right. That’s her good ear! Orson, that woman winked at me; said it was a blessing to be deaf in one ear. All you had to do was sleep on the good one. The walls could fall down around you for all you cared.” Alice wiped her fingers over her mouth. “What do you suppose kind of noises she was shutting out?”

His wife’s voice took on a hypnotic depth and power whenever she talked about other people. Initially, it had been the husky magnetism of her voice that had drawn him to her. For several Sundays during the summer he was twenty-five, he had listened to her read the Bible, then proposed to her like a man spellbound. Her oratory had stirred him to imagine what passion lay behind her words. After he married her, he decided it had been the idea of burning in the afterlife.

Word of Uncle Luden’s visit came in the form of a postcard from Reno, Nevada, with his loose purple scrawl: Make plenty that good cornbred, Il’e be there soon. He signed both names, Luden Sorrells.

My grandmother didn’t allow me to examine the postcard because it was a photograph of dancing girls naughtily clad. Johnson Gibbs, the eighteen year old orphan boy who had come to live and work on our farm, sneaked it out for me and we looked at it for a long time behind the corncrib, but I was disappointed. A long line of girls taken from a distance and all the important details blurred. “I can’t see anything,” I complained

He grinned. “You sure you know what to look for?”

Though the photograph was disappointing, the message was glorious news.

My father nudged Johnson’s elbow. “We’re going to eat fine now. Uncle Luden is the prodigal son. Any fatted calf in the neighborhood, his days are numbered.”

“Prodigal son how?” Johnson asked.

“Just like in the Bible,” my father said. “Uncle Luden will lie down with the swine. Or anything else handy.”

The farm work that had got the best of us until Johnson showed up to help had disgusted Uncle Luden early in his career. My mother’s brother had little of her sunny but long-suffering patience. In the back alfalfa fields he had found a dilapidated old hay wagon and had worked it over until it looked sturdy and bright and something like new. On his sixteenth birthday he sold the wagon to a gullible neighbor, bought a second-hand motorcycle, and sped off to California in a cloud of gravel and a hail of loose bolts.

Jack says there’s nothing out here but a lot of nothing, nothing but a lot of space. He says he likes it that way, all sky and dirt spreading out from one side to the next with nothing in between but highway and bean fields and arroyos pointing toward the little black dots that are us. When we drive, he looks straight ahead. He says you’ve got to take things as they come, watch your landmarks, and not want more than what you’ve got to begin with, otherwise you get lost and go blow away like dust. He says if you take what’s there to begin with, then what happens won’t sneak up behind you. That’s why he traps the wild dogs that live down in the arroyo. He brings them home and locks them up in the old Chevrolet out back. Those dogs are so mean you have to poke their food in through the side window with a stick so you don’t get your hand bit off. Slobber and dog fur on the windshield so thick sometimes you can’t see what’s inside, but boy, can you ever hear them when you walk by. Miss Jewel, Tom Go and the rest, they try to keep the dogs off with guns and poison, but Jack traps them alive. Three years ago, a pack of them broke through Miss Jewel’s fence and carried off two pies and her pet chihuahua, but none of them will ever come around our place anymore. They know better than to come sneaking around when they hear their friends yeowling inside the Chevy.

To begin, then, here is a scene in which I am the man and my friend Sarah Cole is the woman. I don’t mind describing it now, because I’m a decade older and don’t look the same now as I did then, and Sarah is dead. That is to say, on hearing this story you might think me vain if I looked the same now as I did then, because I must tell you that I was extremely handsome then. And if Sarah were not dead, you’d think I were cruel, for I must tell you that Sarah was very homely. In fact, she was the homeliest woman I have ever known. Personally, I mean. I’ve seen a few women who were more unattractive than Sarah, but they were clearly freaks of nature or had been badly injured or had been victimized by some grotesque, disfiguring disease. Sarah, however, was quite normal, and I knew her well, because for three and a half months we were lovers.