November
17, 2001 Pure
Simon
Poets,
poetry, and a touch of autobiography.
eaders
of National Review are familiar with John Simon's writing about
movies, but in other venues he has written on just about everything, and
with the same stringency. Here we have him on poets and poetry, and it
is a dazzling book. Simon is courageously lucid, literate in several languages,
formidably erudite, and can turn a phrase into a rapier — as when
he observes that Whitman reads as well (or badly) in French as in English.
Woven
into these fine essays are bits of autobiography. At Harvard, Simon wrote
his Ph.D. dissertation on the prose-poem genre, focusing on the difficult
Arthur Rimbaud; he assisted the legendary polymath Harry Levin in his
big course on modern comparative literature. (Why Harvard did not anoint
Simon as Levin's successor is beyond me; from that missed moment literary
studies at Harvard have declined precipitously.) In thinking of Levin
with Simon at his side, one irresistibly recalls the great Benjamin Jowett,
the redoubtable Oxford classicist about whom the student jingle went:
"Here I come, my name is Jowett / All there is to know, I know it
/ What I don't know, is not knowledge / I am the Master of this College."
One is also reminded of Harvard's own George Lyman Kittredge, a Chaucerian
and Shakespearian who refused to take the oral examination for his Ph.D.,
explaining, "No one at Harvard is competent to examine me."
Kittredge, by the way, unsuccessfully opposed tenure for Levin on the
grounds that Levin was Jewish. Gaudeamus igitur.
Among the important
matters Simon deals with here are Eliot's Quartets,
Robert Graves and his dominatrix Laura Riding (what's in a name?), James
Merrill, the "New York School" of poets, Oscar Wilde's poetry,
a virtually unknown great poem about sexual intercourse (I will reprint
this for you in a moment), Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Rilke, Larkin, Celan,
Verlaine, Akhmatova, Brodsky, and a roundup review of 19 poets in translation,
most of them awful, including some early lyrics by Karol Wojtyla, clearly
not yet infallible.
Simon's approach
is careful and intelligent, paying close attention to technique. The many
languages in which he is fluent enable him to be especially persuasive
when he evaluates translations of lyric poetry, many of the properties
of which tend to be almost untranslatable.
Among Simon's many
accomplishments in this book is making the persuasive case for a new look
at Oscar Wilde's poetry. Long ago I decided that Wilde was a purveyor
of paste gems, utterly derivative, a sort of anthologizer of the weakest
aspects of the Romantic tradition. But Simon demonstrates that Wilde in
his later lyrics did develop a distinctive voice and style that made worthwhile
his technical skill. Simon is also delightful in his demythologization
of the so-called New York School of poets (John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara,
Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler). With disarming — and amusing —
candor, Simon writes: "To put my cards on the table . . . I declare
that none of these poets has written what I would call a single poem of
any importance." True; and I will myself here toss some cards on
the table. I have read perhaps 50 poems by John Ashbery, and have taken
the pledge: I will not read one more poem by him. He strings words together
in pleasant patterns, but nothing happens; there's no there there. When
Boswell asked Johnson whether any modern man could have written the Ossian
poems, Johnson replied, "Any man, any woman, any child." This
applies to Ashbery.
Simon's essay on
James Merrill, a very gifted poet, opens a window on abnormal psychology.
Merrill's life combined high culture with a continuous homosexual orgy.
"There are witty aperçus, as when Merrill observes two of
his male friends together: 'Pangs reserved exclusively for the gay shot
through me — I was jealous of both parties at once.'"
Simon is so engaging
and perspicacious a commentator that one is surprised to come upon such
a judgment as the following: "For me, the Arch Poet of the modern
English language has always been Robert Graves. E. E. Cummings, Louis
MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, and John Crowe Ransom follow closely, but Graves
is 'it.'" That is so far outside the informed consensus that has
evolved over the last 50 years that it would take sustained argumentation
and demonstration even to attempt to defend it. In actuality, it is not
sustainable. The consensus, as of the end of the 20th century, would be
this: Eliot, Yeats (or Yeats, Eliot), Frost, Auden, Stevens, Pound. That,
gentlemen, as Hemingway would say, is the "A" team.
Nobody can justly
accuse Simon of critical timidity. Here's another example: "It would
be preposterous, indeed foolish, to try to pick the greatest love poem
in the English language. But I will stick my neck out and name my candidate
for the finest overlooked love poem in modern English." After that
first sentence, one starts thinking of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress"
and Donne's "To His Mistress Going to Bed" (Elegy XIX); the
second sentence lowers the bar somewhat, but, as it turns out, not that
much. Simon has unearthed a very fine, almost unknown poem by one Eric
Robertson Dodds, professor of classics at Oxford. Dodds's other poetry
was undistinguished; this one, however, entitled "When the Ecstatic
Body Grips," beautifully describes the strength and ambiguity of
one kind of sexual experience.
When the ecstatic
body grips
Its heaven, with little sobbing cries,
And lips are crushed on hot blind lips,
I read strange pity in your eyes.
For that in you
which is not mine,
And that in you which I love best,
And that, which my day-thoughts divine
Masterless still, still unpossessed,
Sits in the blue
eyes' frightened stare,
A naked lonely-dwelling thing,
A frail thing from its body-lair
Drawn at my body's summoning;
Whispering low,
"O unknown man,
Whose hunger on my hunger wrought,
Body shall give what body can,
Shall give you all — save what you sought."
Whispering, "O
secret one, forgive,
Forgive and be content though still
Beyond the blood's surrender live
The darkness of the separate will.
"Enough if
in the veins we know
Body's delirium, body's peace —
Ask not that ghost to ghost shall go,
Essence in essence merge and cease."
But swiftly, as
in sudden sleep,
That You in you is veiled or dead;
And the world's shrunken to a heap
Of hot flesh straining on a bed.
That is a strong
piece of writing by an obscure don. Not coincidentally did I think of
17th-century dialogues between body and soul. One must judge the man's
behavior as deplorable: The goal is not to frighten the woman, let alone
hurt her. He should have heeded those Renaissance commentators on love
who urged mesure, "moderation," or, in the circumstances,
"consideration." But congratulations to Simon for discovering
this poem, and champagne to him for a dazzling book.
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eaders
of National Review are familiar with John Simon's writing about
movies, but in other venues he has written on just about everything, and
with the same stringency. Here we have him on poets and poetry, and it
is a dazzling book. Simon is courageously lucid, literate in several languages,
formidably erudite, and can turn a phrase into a rapier — as when
he observes that Whitman reads as well (or badly) in French as in English.
