Flowers at the Portal

In his essay Imagination as Value (from The Necessary Angel, 1942) Wallace Stevens lays out a case for "perceiving the normal," in contradistinction to "the deliberate exploits of the abnormal," as in the case of Rimbaud and Kafka:

"Jean Paulhan, a Frenchman and a writer, is a man of great sense. He is a native of the region of Tarbes. Tarbes is a town in southwestern France in the High Pyrenees. Marshal Foch was born there. An equestrian statue of the Marshal stands there, high in the air, on a pedestal. In his Les Fleurs de Tarbes, Jean Paulhan says:

One sees at the entrance of the public garden of Tarbes, this sign:

It is forbidden
To enter into the garden
Carrying flowers

He goes on to say:

One finds it, also, in our time at the portal of literature. Nevertheless, it would be agreeable to see the girls of Tarbes (and the young writers) carrying a rose, a red poppy, an armful of red poppies.

I repeat that Jean Paulhan is a man of great sense. But to be able to see the portal of literature, that is to say: the portal of the imagination, as a scene of normal love and normal beauty is, of itself, a feat of great imagination. It is the vista a man sees, seated in the public garden of his native town, near by some effigy of a figure celebrated in the normal world, as he considers that the chief problems of any artist, as of any man, are the problems of the normal and that he needs, in order to solve them, everything that the imagination has to give.”

A Second Dance

When I first read them, I found Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time books both highly entertaining and highly irritating. (I'm not the only one to feel irritation. Scribbled on the first page of my paperback copy of A Question of Upbringing is what I take to be a quondam reader’s exasperated warning: “NEVER TRY AGAIN.”) The books' narrative delivery is unusual: The narrator, Nick Jenkins, is a companionable but secondary presence. The books are mainly his investigations into the lives of other people—met at school, in business, and at parties; mixed up in the worlds of business, romance, politics, the arts and the second world war, inter alia. The books are short—they average about 230 pages—but in no hurry. The "action" isn’t so much slow as intermittent, sometimes abrupt. Sixty pages might be spent at a single dinner party. Dialogue alternates with Nick’s philosophical musings. Like Henry James, Powell operates at a slow boil, though to a lighter and a more comic effect.

I found the peculiar ruminativeness of Powell's style—which, if you lack a certain sense of humor, would be absolutely crushing in its deliberativeness—frequently irritating in my first run-through. I don't know why. Maybe I was missing a lot of the humor. Maybe I was more sympathetic to the gist of that famous and priggish Eleanor Roosevelt quote about great minds discussing ideas and small minds discussing people. But aren't novels, primarily about people, a higher form of gossip, anyway? Powell, not a small mind, discusses people first, to delightful effect. That's also his way of getting at ideas, which—it's easy for people like Roosevelt to forget—are never unaccompanied by human bearers. My second time through the Dance, my irritation with Powell is gone; my enjoyment, nearly unadulterated. (There are, here and there, longueurs.) I don’t mind his sixty-page dinner parties in the least. Bring ‘em on, I say! 

To like Powell, you have to find enjoyable this species of reflective riff: 

"There is something overpowering, even a trifle sinister about very large families, the individual members of which often possess in excess the characteristics commonly attributed to 'only' children: neurasthenia: an inability to adapt themselves: all the traits held to be the result of a lonely upbringing. The corporate life of large families can be lived with severity, even barbarity, of a kind unknown in smaller related communities: these savageries and distillations of egoism often rendered even less tolerable if sentimentalized outside the family circle."

Montaigne, showing his conservative streak:

"The worst thing I find in our state is instability, and the fact that our laws cannot, any more than our clothes, take any settled form. It is very easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are full of it. It is very easy to engender in a people contempt for their ancient observances; never did a man undertake that without succeeding. But as for establishing a better state in place of the one they have ruined, many of those who have attempted it have achieved nothing for their pains."

—Of Presumption

Montaigne on having a poor memory:

"Now, the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine."

—Of Presumption

Wallace Stevens on the poet's audience:

"Time and time again it has been said that [the poet] may not address himself to an elite. I think he may. The poet will continue to do this: to address himself to an elite even in a classless society, unless, perhaps, this exposes him to imprisonment or exile. In that event he is likely not to address himself to anyone at all. He may, like Shostakovich, content himself with pretence. He will, nevertheless, still be addressing himself to an elite, for all poets address themselves to someone and it is of the essence of that instinct, and it seems to amount to an instinct, that it should be to an elite, not to a drab but to a woman with the hair of a pythoness, not to a chamber of commerce but to a gallery of one's own, if there are enough of one's own to fill a gallery. And that elite, if it responds, not out of complaisance, but because the poet has quickened it, because he has educed from it that for which it was searching in itself and in the life around it and which it had not yet quite found, will thereafter do for the poet what he cannot do for himself, that is to say, receive the poetry."

—The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words

I’m not well read in poetry. In fact, that’s far too generous. Apart from Philip Larkin and Wallace Stevens—both of whom I love to read—I’ve barely sample any poetry at all. I’m thirty-one. A reader. Almost no poetry.

In the last couple of months, I’ve been reading the little remembered American poet L.E. Sissman. As with Stevens, some of his poems sail right over my head, or “resist the intelligence almost successfully,” as Stevens once rather mysteriously said poetry should do. I’m not sure how much intelligence Sissman is up against in this case.

Those poems of Sissman’s I most enjoy don’t require Talmudic scrutiny, though it helps to have a dictionary at hand. In addition to his poetry and criticism—he published with some regularity in the New Yorker—Sissman was (similar to Stevens in this respect) a businessman. He died at 47 of lymphoma and many of his most affecting poems deal with sickness and death. Among the most bracing is Homage to Clotho: A Hospital Suite:

“Nowhere is all around us, pressureless,

A vacuum waiting for a rupture in
The tegument, a puncture in the skin,
To pass inside without a password and
Implode us to Erewhon. This room
Is dangerously unguarded: in one wall
An empty elevator clangs its doors,
Imperiously, for fodder; in the hall,
Bare stretchers gape for commerce; in the air
Outside a trempbling, empty brightness falls
In hunger on those whom it would devour
Like any sparrow hawk as darkness falls
And rises silently up the steel stairs
To the eleventh and last floor, where I
Resided on sufferance of authorities
Until my visas wither, and I die.”

One of my favorite passages in Sea Room touches on the fluidity of the past:

“There is a temptation to imagine the past as essentially static and the present as essentially mobile and disrupted. Nothing could be further from the truth. The peopling of the Shiants is only one fragment of an endless chain. That is why this crossing of a potentially alarming sea, at a moment which is picked because the weather is kind and the spring is coming, because the tide running with you and the sun is out, when you can see where you are going and you have everything you need, is one of the deepest of historical experiences. Don’t imagine the past as a place full of catastrophe and horror. This is it’s colour: a chance fairly taken, a sense of happiness in the light of spring.”

I think of that passage in relation to another nautical book I’m in the middle of (I don’t know why two; I’m not interested in sailing) Samuel Eliot Morrison’s Columbus: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Nowadays, Columbus is a hated figure ranked among history’s most portentous villains. Morrison published his biography in 1942, and that's not his prejudice. Later in life, Columbus jumpstarted a grisly slave trade and governed—I’m told—disastrously, but early on he’s simply an adventurer (a visionary, a bit of a crank) taking a fair chance with the wind at his back. I saw his small coffin held aloft in the Seville Cathedral; he can’t have been much over five feet tall.