Latest Readings

by Clive James

  Kenneth S. Lynn’s 1991 full-length biography of Hemingway is another seven hundred–page whopper. Less infected with Papa-style would-be factual posturing, it is even more depressing, because it removes any trust you might have had that Hemingway got sick slowly. Alas, he was in trouble from the beginning. Like Rilke he was raised as a girl by a doting, perhaps slightly mad, mother. He spent his truncated lifetime ridden with doubts about his sexual nature that not even his world-beating pose as an athlete and animal killer could cure. Alcohol couldn’t cure them either. His intake of booze is practically the saddest thing about him, because it became evident, quite early on, that he couldn’t drink at that rate without pickling his brains. Beside him, a mere lush like William Faulkner sounds like a teetotaler. Strangely enough, we tend to think of Scott Fitzgerald as the juice-head, and Hemingway as the man of discipline. When Hemingway, in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” wrote those fateful three words “Poor Scott Fitzgerald,” he helped to weaken his rival’s profile for generations to come. Such is the power of images transmitted posthumously through the media: in actuality, Hemingway was the drinker beyond redemption. But he was so talented, and so masterful at projecting his masculine image, that the impression he gave of being the man in control has lasted all the way until now, and will probably last forever.

  There is something to it. Dwight Macdonald was correct to point out that the mannerisms of The Old Man and the Sea go all the way back to the first, supposedly disciplined, stories: but underneath the fussy surface of overwrought simplicity there is a lasting strength of visualization. It wasn’t his alone—D. H. Lawrence was just as good at describing a clear stream in a mountain valley—but Hemingway had the most of it, and in a way you couldn’t miss. He made a thing of it, as young people say.

  Unfortunately, to descend another layer, underneath the lasting strength there is an incurable weakness. The duality in his sexual nature was something that he could never explore directly, but only through hints. For the writer who defied all other limitations, his own inner life was taboo. The height of his tragedy was that he could not write about his own finale, which, lasting so long, could have been his great theme. For any writer who does not die instantly, the time of physical decline is a new subject. But he would have been in no condition to tackle it even had he felt free. Too many injuries to the head had wrecked his concentration. He would stand there blasting away at his Royal Quiet DeLuxe (he wrote standing up), typing the same sentence over and over, actually producing the numberless drafts that he had once only boasted of. But even had he been in physical shape, he was psychologically proof against what he would have needed: an honesty that might have been taken as weakness by the media parasites that he had been too afraid of to ward off. His only way out was to destroy himself. He should have had aesthetic objections to that. It left a terrible mess, which his loved ones, to whom he knew he had been a burden, had to clean up. It was ungallant of him, and it wasn’t brave. A measure of his magnificence, however, is that we feel so sorry.

  On Wit

  MARINA TSVETAEVA said that Boris Pasternak, in his youth, looked like an Arab and his horse. The underlining of a single word is the stroke of wit. I was thinking of the economical nature of wit—if a sentence is wordy, then it’s never witty—when I was once again reading Abba Eban’s Personal Witness, one of his essential books on the history of Israel, the state that he did so much to bring into being. Nobody in the world was more learned than Eban: his triple first from Cambridge was in three hard ancient languages, and he was conversationally fluent in several of the modern languages as well. (When he was Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, delegates from Arab nations seated on each side of him had long conversations across his back until they finally caught on that he understood everything they were saying.) But there have been learned men who have been unable to keep things brief. Eban could do with a prose idea what the poet must learn to do with a poetic idea: make it mark out a space and then fill that space exactly. Of a U.N. official he could not admire, Eban said that he was a man of few words, but they were enough to express his range of ideas. I can’t think of a niftier way of putting that. Eban knew how to throttle back on the witticisms, however, or he would never have been the great orator he was. The audience for a serious speech is there to listen to the deep fire of reason, not to the crackle of a Las Vegas stand-up act. Lately, after reading both Personal Witness and Abba Eban: An Autobiography again, I ordered Voice of Israel on the web. It is a collection of Eban’s speeches, many of them of historic moment. Dealing with the most serious subjects conceivable in his world, up to and including the possible obliteration of the nation he represented, they are light on laughs, but always impressively compact. Off the record, he could be funny even about the stuff of tragedy. Eban was the man who said that Yasser Arafat never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The crack contained, compressed into a few atoms, everything that spelled tragedy for the Palestinian refugees. The Israelis survived Arafat’s leadership, but for the Palestinians it was a straight stretch downhill all the way to Hamas, whose rule in Gaza has been such a conspicuous part of the great international political disaster that marks the end of my time on earth. How good it would be to be sure that the nightmare will not stretch on into the next generation. But of course it will.

  Richard Wilbur’s Precept

  DURING THE LONG and taxing business of preparing the text of my Poetry Notebook for publication, I deliberately did not look at the great American poet Richard Wilbur’s book of critical prose, which I have been reading, off and on, ever since it came out in 1976. I was too afraid of echoing his tone, and of seeming servile if I did so. But I couldn’t fail to remember his knack for laying out his knowledge in an easy-seeming sweep of conversational English. (How did literary theory get started? Because the theorists couldn’t write.) Several of my touchstone poets—Larkin, Auden, and Eliot would be other examples—had the gift of talking with a passionate detachment about the art they practiced, but I always thought that Wilbur was the kingpin. Now I can safely read his prose again; and find that his chapter “Poetry’s Debt to Poetry” still strikes me as the ideal lesson, for beginning students, in how to think about the way the poetic heritage is handed down through the generations. Without a conscious display of erudition, but with a wealth of solid knowledge learned by heart, he gives you the sense that all the poets who have ever mattered always knew about any poet who mattered before them, even if they did not approve. (If the question had been raised of how Dante could have made Homer king of all the poets without being able to read him, Wilbur would have had the answer: Dante could not read Homer, but he trusted Virgil’s opinion.) It was in this essay that Wilbur crystallized the formulation that has stayed with me so usefully ever since: in poetry, all the revolutions are palace revolutions.

  That being said, ignorance can have, within strict limits, a creative power of its own. With all my critical writing about poetry done and dusted, I really didn’t want to discover any new poets, so I was almost glad to know nothing about Richard Howard. But only almost. Having now discovered him—through his rich collection Inner Voices—I am impressed by his long lifetime of work in verse. Born in 1929, he has ten years on me and has always used his time to lyrical and learned effect, even when writing criticism; so how can I, of all people, have not known he was there? Like the leading pair of my other formalist Americans, Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, he has the gift of working a mind-ful of memories and impressions into an apprehensible shape.

  Had I encountered Richard Howard early on, I might even have been affected in my own poetry by the sheer delight he takes in spreading his erudition through a stanza. To take only one example, his poem “Venetian Interior, 1889,” might be subtitled “All you need to know about what happened to Robert Browning’s son.” It is a sumptuous piece of work, a boutique with the range of a supermarket. But it also runs on. Brevity is not in his gift, or anyway not among his interests: he presumes his readers hav
e the time. In my own work I have always assumed that the readers have no time at all, and need their attention snared from moment to moment, even when I am translating the Divine Comedy. But on that point, reassurance comes from Dante himself: in the Inferno he always has a new event waiting around every corner, and in his Paradiso there is another light show every ten minutes. Still, Richard Howard’s relaxed approach has its virtues.

  Above all, he has a better reason for writing than merely to be recognized. In that regard, it would be conceited on my part to think that he ever needed my approval. Such a conceit is a déformation professionnelle for critics: after an initial period of relative sanity, they tend to think that nothing—not even the career of, say, Horace—ever happened without their interest in it. At its worst, the madness reaches the point where the critic behaves as if his new book about Shakespeare will save Shakespeare from oblivion. One way of praising Richard Howard would be to say that his mentality is the exact opposite: the note of nonpossessive appreciation is one that he strikes with every sentence he writes, and when it shows up in a poem it has a bewitching effect, even when the poem is ten times longer than the complete works of Samuel Menashe.

  So, come to think of it, I am doubly glad that I didn’t find Richard Howard earlier, but found him only now, when the pleasure of discovery can no longer pose any difficult choices. Wilbur might have added one further thought to his famous precept: all the revolutions are palace revolutions, but there is the occasional klutz who never figures out what’s going on until it’s all over.

  And goddam it, I have just found another accomplished and erudite American poet, in the books section of the Oxfam shop near Magdalene bridge: Lawrence Joseph. His collection Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos is full of quotable lines. I deduce from his Wikipedia entry (his book’s biographical note is coy about this information, as if he were a female film star) that he was born nine years after me, so where have I been all his life? And Stephen Edgar, in a letter, has only just now mentioned the name of the late Edgar Bowers, who turns out to have been an American formalist poet who not only came out of World War II like Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht but wrote poems intricate and precise enough to be considered along with theirs. I’m supposed to rest content with a comprehensive viewpoint marinated in experience, not to be jolted out of my bed-socks every five minutes by the belated discovery of someone who has been toiling away impeccably for decades writing exactly the sort of thing I have so often proclaimed indispensable. Further evidence, here, for a bittersweet truth: any overview of the cultural world, like any system of mathematics, can’t be complete without being false. We can legitimately preen ourselves on being brighter than the next literary critic down the corridor, but we had better not imagine that we are brighter than Gödel. But I must put Lawrence Joseph aside, because I have a new poem on the way, and it is always fatal, I have found, when you have something of your own to write, to get too close to someone else’s music. It gets into your lungs like secondary smoking.

  When Creation Is Perverse

  AS THE BRITISH PRISONS continue to fill up with veteran showbiz luminaries who have been busted for some sexual perversion with which they created emotional havoc in the days of their physical strength, I give thanks that my own compulsions were legal. An artist’s work is harder to like when it turns out that his sexual proclivities were criminal. Nevertheless, on the principle that fine art is usually the work of flawed people, one strives to maintain one’s appreciation. Eric Gill’s work I don’t much care about, so there is no problem in wishing it all to the devil along with him. But Adolf Loos designed perfect coffeehouses, and Peter Altenberg wrote perfect paragraphs: I find it hard to imagine the texture of a Vienna without their work. Balthus remains a real problem, because so many of his pictures haunt the memory, although it should have been obvious at the moment the memories got started that the pictures were perverse. For a long while I thought Basil Bunting was no problem at all: his taste for barely pubescent girls showed up in his poetry, but his poetry had nothing else in it. Lately, however, I have been reading his Collected Poems of 1970 (an Oxfam discovery), and I find that I was wrong all along. Whole stretches of his strangely crowded, clotted, and jagged verse are quite marvelous. Some of his notorious echoes of Ezra Pound are better than the originals. (If Bunting’s phrase “stork’s stilts cleaving sun-disk” had appeared in Pound’s Cantos, academics would have written articles about it.) Yet this inventive and dedicated man was every father’s nightmare. The best one can say for him is that he will live on, if he does, in the same category as Balthus: producers of images that you are glad to have in your head, even though their own heads were nests of vipers. The provenance of art can never be as morally elementary as we wish it. Art grows from the world, and the world, as Louis MacNeice said, is incorrigibly plural. This cruel but consoling fact really shows up when you start the slide to nowhere. The air is lit by a shimmering tangle of all the reasons you are sad to go and all the reasons you are glad to leave. It’s the glow of life: apparently simple, yet complex beyond analysis. Nevertheless, morality continues to send its strong interior signal that it is either absolute or it is nothing. Bill Cosby’s jokes used to make me laugh so much that years later I would laugh again when I remembered them. Today the laughter comes less easily. If he turns out to be guilty, how will we take back our appreciation? Ours is a minor problem, however, when compared with his.

  Conrad’s Greatest Victory

  STARTING IN THE infusion suite at the hospital, and continuing as I Ambulate up and down my kitchen, I have been reading Conrad’s Victory; and I feel that my recent years of reading have come to a kind of culmination. First published in 1915, the novel perfects Conrad’s signature themes. The hero, Heyst, is a Lord Jim figure without the guilt. Heyst has managed to get beyond the bounds of civilization, and even of capitalism: the coal company that he helped to found in the islands has fallen into ruins, but he himself has survived. In the dance hall of the despicable hotelier Schomberg, Heyst encounters the ideal girl, Alma, who is the helpless prisoner of the tatty Zangiacomo Orchestra and has nowhere to turn as Schomberg odiously threatens her with his attentions. Heyst bears her away to Samburan, a magic kingdom like Patusan and Sulaco. There, seemingly in control of events, he calls her Lena, princess of Samburan. They are like Adam and Eve, needing only each other. Or so it seems: but it soon emerges that they need a knowledge of evil, too, because it is heading toward them in the chilling form of “plain Mr. Jones,” one of Conrad’s most profound studies in terror. As the collision between bliss and destruction gets closer, the reader will spend at least a hundred pages praying that Heyst has a gun hidden away somewhere. The first big slaughterhouse battles of the Great War had already been fought while Conrad was publishing the novel, but there is not a hint of pacifism. Conrad knew that unarmed goodwill is useless against armed malice. It was to be a lesson that the coming century would teach over and over, and so on into the present century: peace is not a principle, it is only a desirable state of affairs, and can’t be obtained without a capacity for violence at least equal to the violence of the threat. Conrad didn’t want to reach this conclusion any more than we do, but his artistic instincts were proof against the slightest tinge of mystical spiritual solace, and so should ours be. Our age of massacres has also been an age of the intellectual charlatan, when people claiming to interpret events can barely be relied upon to give a straightforward account of what actually happened. Conrad was the writer who reached political adulthood before any of the other writers of his time, and when they did, they reached only to his knee.

  That being said, however, it must be admitted that Heyst’s upright stupidity grows tedious in the final scenes. Conrad should have made his heroes as intelligent as himself, the better to illustrate his thematic concern with how the historic forces that crush the naïve will do the same to the wise, if they do not prepare to fight back. Finally, he tends to reinforce our wishful thought that cultivation—gained, for ex
ample, from reading the novels of Joseph Conrad—might be enough to ward off barbarism. But barbarism doesn’t care if we are cultivated or not.

  Coda

  I HAVE BEEN READING two biographies at once. One, Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s The Pike, which is the life story of Gabriele d’Annunzio, deals with an almost entirely worthless individual: he wrote some resounding poetry, but otherwise he was good for nothing except whipping crowds into protofascist hysteria and proving that a galloping case of halitosis was no hindrance to his uncanny success with women. He must have had something, or so distinguished a woman as Eleonora Duse would not have gone to bed with him: but on the whole the only reason you would want to raise the raving twerp from his grave would be so that you could slap his face. The other biography is Mark Bostridge’s Florence Nightingale, the story of one of the most worthwhile individuals in the world. I am trying to do my duty to justice by finding her more interesting than him. On the plane of brute fact, nothing could be more interesting than how D’Annunzio, after the Paris premiere of Diaghilev’s Cleopatra, insinuated himself into Ida Rubinstein’s crowded dressing room and crammed his face between her legs. In sharp contrast, the only scandal generated by Florence Nightingale was the kind of brain-dead press concoction familiar to us today: in the hospital at Scutari, she watched amputations to learn how the process could be made less traumatic, and the press took the opportunity of calling her a sadist.

  She was, of course, exactly the opposite thing. Mercy was her vocation. That being said, her preoccupation was to take the practical steps that would transform nursing into an act of public benevolence, with a set of procedures to be universally instilled. The inertia that she had to overcome being nearly as powerful as a whole society, she had no time for mere fine feelings.