by Paul Auster
Being in Washington on a visit at the time, “the old gray” went over to Baltimore, and though ill from paralysis, consented to hobble up and silently take a seat on the platform, but refused to make any speech, saying, “I have felt a strong impulse to come over and be here today myself in memory of Poe, which I have obey’d, but not the slightest impulse to make a speech, which, my dear friends, must also be obeyed.” In an informal circle, however, in conversation after the ceremonies, Whitman said: “For a long while, and until lately, I had a distaste for Poe’s writings. I wanted, and still want for poetry, the clear sun shining, and fresh air blowing—the strength and power of health, not of delirium, even amid the stormiest passions—with always the background of the eternal moralities. Non-complying with these requirements, Poe’s genius has yet conquer’d a special recognition for itself, and I too have come to fully admit it, and appreciate it and him.”
If Whitman was the only major poet to attend the ceremony in the flesh, there was another who was there in spirit—or at least that was how he recalled it years later—which is just as significant, I believe, if not more so. I am referring to Stéphane Mallarmé and his exquisite sonnet, “The Tomb of Edgar Poe.” This poem was actually commissioned after the Baltimore ceremony for a memorial volume about Poe—by one Sarah Whitman, no relation to Walt, but rather one of Poe’s fiancées from the last months of his life, who worked diligently for many years to keep Poe’s literary reputation alive. The Mallarmé poem, which Mrs. Whitman translated herself, turned out to be the sole foreign contribution to the volume, and I find it extremely interesting that that contributor should have been Mallarmé, unquestionably the most important French poet of the period, and the one poet from that time—along with Whitman—who continues to exert an influence on the poets of today.
The Tomb of Edgar Poe
As to Himself at last eternity changes him
The Poet reawakens with a naked sword
His century appalled at never having heard
That in this voice triumphant death had sung its hymn.
They, like a writhing hydra, hearing seraphim
Bestow a purer sense on the language of the horde,
Loudly proclaimed that the magic potion had been poured
From the dregs of some dishonored mixture of foul slime.
From the war between earth and heaven, what grief!
If understanding cannot sculpt a bas-relief
To ornament the dazzling tomb of Poe:
Calm block here fallen from obscure disaster,
Let this granite at least mark the boundaries evermore
To the dark flights of Blasphemy hurled to the future.
(translated by Henry Weinfield)
But this poem was not Mallarmé’s only involvement with Poe. Beginning in 1862, when he was just twenty years old, Mallarmé had been translating Poe’s poems into French—a project he would continue working on until 1888. It was in 1883, when “The Tomb of Edgar Poe” was first published in French—as part of an essay on Mallarmé by Verlaine—that Mallarmé scrambled his facts and wrote to Verlaine that the poem had been read aloud at the Baltimore ceremony in 1875. Mallarmé, the most scrupulous and honest of men, would not have made this mistake on purpose. It can only mean that he actually thought it had happened—which serves to underscore the depth of his unconscious attachment to Poe.
Before Mallarmé, of course, there was Baudelaire, the master poet of the preceding generation, and he, more than anyone else, was responsible for establishing Poe’s enormous reputation in France, which continues until this day. His first (very long) essay on Poe’s life and work appeared as early as 1852, and as most of you probably know, he took on the considerable task of translating all of Poe’s stories into French. Baudelaire’s attraction to Poe was more than just literary admiration: Poe was an utterly heroic figure for him—the purest example of the modern writer, the writer as outcast, the genius at odds with the strictures of his own society. From the 1852 essay:
The life of Edgar Poe was a lamentable tragedy … The various documents I have just read lead me to believe that for Poe the United States was a large cage, a great book-keeping establishment, and that he made grim efforts his entire life to escape the influence of this antagonistic atmosphere.
Sentiments such as these led to a growing feeling in America that Poe was not really an American writer—but a French writer who wrote in English. Most of his famous stories, after all, had European settings, and his celebrated detective tales, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” take place in Paris and have a French hero, Auguste Dupin. Poe somehow didn’t fit into the schemes devised by literary historians about early American literature. He wasn’t connected to a legendary New World past as Washington Irving was, for example (the Dutch of New York), or to the colonial past as Nathaniel Hawthorne was (the Puritans of New England)—and above all, and underneath all, he just wasn’t optimistic enough to suit American tastes. In 1925, however, a mere fifty years after the ceremony in Baltimore, William Carlos Williams—another poet from New Jersey, and perhaps the most consciously “American” poet since Whitman—had this to say about Poe in his book In the American Grain:
Poe was not “a fault of nature,” “a find for French eyes,” ripe but unaccountable, as through our woollyheadedness we’ve sought to designate him, but a genius intimately shaped by his locality and time. It is to save our faces that we’ve given him a crazy reputation, a writer from whose classic accuracies we have not known how else to escape …
It is the New World, or to leave that for the better term, it is a new locality that is in Poe assertive; it is America, the first great burst through to expression of a re-awakened genius of place.
Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.
Williams goes on to talk about Poe’s literary criticism at great length—the reviews and articles that the hardworking author wrote throughout his short life concerning recently published American books—attack after attack against the mediocrity he found everywhere around him—his struggle to define what would be a distinctly American literature, independent of English and European models. In this sense—and perhaps in this sense alone—he resembles Whitman: an American writer seeking to ground himself in a purely American approach to writing.
“Thus Poe must suffer by his originality,” Williams goes on. “Invent that which is new, even if it be made of pine from your own yard, and there’s none to know what you have done. It is because there’s no name. This is the cause of Poe’s lack of recognition. He was American. He was the astounding, inconceivable growth of his locality. Gape at him they did, and he at them in amazement. Afterward with mutual hatred: he in disgust, they in mistrust. It is only that which is under your nose which seems inexplicable.
“Here Poe emerges—in no sense the bizarre, isolate writer, the curious literary figure. On the contrary, in him American literature is anchored, in him alone, on solid ground.”
By now we are in the twentieth century, and it is interesting to note that Williams’s three most distinguished contemporaries—Eliot, Pound, and Stevens—all turned to the French for inspiration. At roughly the same time that Paul Valéry, Mallarmé’s disciple, was basing his theory of poetry on an interpretation of Poe’s “poetic principle” (an essay that in all likelihood was written as a practical joke), Eliot, Pound, and Stevens were immersing themselves in the poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Laforgue, and other late 19th-century French poets. And at just this same time we have another major French poet, Valery Larbaud, treating Whitman as such a compelling influence that not only did he translate Leaves of Grass but wound up striving to create poetry in French that directly corresponded to the expansive tone and linguistic flourishes to be found in Whitman’s work. In other words, poets in each country were looking across the ocean for new ideas. Eliot: “The kind of poetry I needed, to teach me the use of my own vo
ice, did not exist in England at all, and was only to be found in France.” Pound: “Practically the whole development of the English verse-art has been achieved by steals from the French.” Stevens: “French and English constitute a single language.”
When a poet looks to a poet from another country for inspiration, it means that he is looking for something not readily available to him in his own language or literature, that he wants to break free of the confines of his own culture—but always, in the end, to make it his own, to bring it back to his own place. Slavish imitation can produce nothing of any interest, but every original artist has always been alert to what other artists are doing—(no one can work in a vacuum)—since the important thing is to use what inspires you in another’s work to your own purposes—which means that you must have a purpose to begin with. The Whitman-Larbaud connection is instructive. Larbaud wrote that he wanted to invent a poet—himself—“who was sensitive to the diversity of races, peoples, and countries; who would find the exotic everywhere;—witty and international—one, in a word, capable of writing like Whitman but in a light vein, and of supplying that note of comic, joyous irresponsibility that is lacking in Whitman.” Larbaud was looking to Whitman for inspiration, yes, but also rejecting those aspects of his work that did not seem relevant to him—and the result was something totally original, totally French, totally Larbaud himself.
If the spunk and spirit of many of the best French poets of the early 20th century—Larbaud, Apollinaire, Cendrars—can be seen as a transatlantic response to Whitman, it is equally true that these same poets had a lot to do with the spunk and spirit that developed in certain strains of American poetry in the 1950s—particularly in the work of the poets who comprised what is known as the New York School, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara—both Francophiles—among them …
I sometimes feel that the soul of Guillaume Apollinaire flew across the ocean after his death in 1918, and after seven years of searching for someone in whom to be reborn, finally chose to inhabit the mind and body of Frank O’Hara. The parallels between the two poets are remarkable, even uncanny. Not just because of the exuberance to be found in their work, their oneness with the times they lived in, their urban sensibilities, the stylistic freedom of their poetic inventions, but also because both men lived among and wrote about painters, the radical painters of their day (Apollinaire the Cubists, O’Hara the Abstract Expressionists) and because both of them died so horribly, horribly young—Apollinaire at 38, O’Hara at 40—as if a soul such as this one simply burned too brightly, too intensely to be granted a long life on earth.
Apollinaire was the first truly modern poet in France, the first poet to embrace the wonders and contradictions of the 20th century, to feel perfectly at home in a world of automobiles and airplanes and gigantic cities. Consider the opening lines of “Zone,” as translated by Samuel Beckett:
In the end you are weary of this ancient world
This morning the bridges are bleating Eiffel Tower oh herd
Weary of living in Roman antiquity and Greek
Here even the motor-cars look antique
Religion alone has stayed young religion
Has stayed simple like the hangars at Port Aviation
You alone in Europe Christianity are not ancient
The most modern European is you Pope Pius X
And you whom the windows watch shame refrains
From entering a church this morning and confessing your sins
You read the handbills the catalogues the singing posters
So much for poetry this morning and the prose is in the papers
Special editions full of crimes
Celebrities and other attractions for 25 centimes
This morning I saw a pretty street whose name is gone
Clean and shining clarion of the sun
Where from Monday morning to Saturday evening four times a day
Directors workers and beautiful shorthand typists go their way
And thrice in the morning the siren makes its moan
And a bell bays savagely coming up to noon
The inscriptions on walls and signs
The notices and plates squawk parrot-wise
I love the grace of this industrial street
In Paris between the Avenue des Ternes and the Rue Aumont-Thiéville
Forty years later, in a poem entitled “A Step Away from Them,” O’Hara describes a walk through midtown Manhattan during his lunch hour—musing on the sights and sounds and people he encounters, beautifully evoking the jumble of New York’s streets and sidewalks, thinking about his recently dead friends, by turns joyful and wistful, utterly alive to what is around him, and then, quite unexpectedly, the poem ends with these lines: “A glass of papaya juice / and back to work. My heart is in my / pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.”
Reverdy: the much-admired contemporary of Apollinaire—as if O’Hara were saying to us in that last line: Reverdy is with me, his work has helped me to see all the things I am seeing, and without his example I would not be able to discover where I am.
All poets belong to a place, to a language, to a culture. But if the task of poetry is to see the world with fresh eyes, to reexamine and rediscover the things that everyone else passes by without noticing, then it stands to reason that the “place” of the poet will often seem unfamiliar to the rest of us. He’s been looking at that brick wall or that mountain or that flower and thinking about it more than we have—and so, when he tells us about it, there’s a good chance he will surprise us, tell us things we haven’t thought about until we heard his words—and therefore his words might strike us as strange. We might have to listen a second time before we understand. It might take a hundred times—or a hundred years—before we can hear what he is saying.
This brings us back to Poe—the luckless, misunderstood Edgar Allan Poe, the man who never managed to fit in—but an American just the same. And more deeply American than the poets who refused to come to the memorial ceremony in 1875—Longfellow and Whittier, whom Poe had rightly attacked years before as imitators and fakes. It took the French to rescue Poe from obscurity. But since then we have been able to claim him back as our own.
Poe and Whitman—two wildly different writers, but both quintessentially American, and it is significant, I think, that Whitman himself could finally recognize this toward the end of his life. What do I mean by American? I mean a writer who is directly engaged with the question of America itself. In the first half of the 19th century, that meant confronting the newness of the place, its enormous size, the materialistic insanity that drove its citizens, but also the idea of America, the utopian dream that this country was somehow destined to become a second Eden. Whitman, of course, embraces all this in his work, whereas Poe recoils from it, appalled by America’s lack of tradition, its vulgarity, its eagerness always to give money the last word. Still, Poe’s work could not have been written by anyone other than an American, just as Baudelaire and Mallarmé—two giants equally enamored of Poe—could not have come from anywhere but France. In France, the problems were precisely the opposite of those that prevailed in America: too much tradition, too much past, too many monuments cluttering the present, with no wilderness left, no space in which to lose oneself—to reinvent oneself. Beginning with Baudelaire, the story of French poetry has been one of corrosiveness, of trying to eat away at those monuments and clear a new space to breathe in. I believe that was why Baudelaire was so taken with Poe: because he was at odds with his place. But it was also why Whitman appealed to so many later French poets: because he taught them the myth of the open air …
II
In 2012, I found this letter in a box of old, unpublished writings. It is addressed to someone named Michael, who had asked me to write something about George Oppen in the weeks or months following Oppen’s death. I can think of three possible Michaels who might have done that, but I can no longer remember which one it was. It is unclear to me why I failed to send the letter, but I suspect
it was because I felt my words were inadequate …
Brooklyn
October 24, 1984
Dear Michael:
Since your telephone call two months ago, I have been trying to put something down on paper about George’s work—but I can’t seem to get anywhere with it. His death is too new to me, I think, and it keeps getting in the way. God knows that the work is important to me—as important as any American poetry I have read—but it is there, after all, and will continue to be there no matter what I say. It doesn’t need George in order to survive. Once it was written, it never did.
Still, it is important for you to know that I carry his poems inside me, and again and again, over many years, small, unforgettable lines and phrases have continued to come surging up into my consciousness—just like that, for no reason that I am aware of, suddenly washing through me with their intense and simple beauty—speaking out in me, I suppose, for the simple reason that they are unforgettable.
For example:
Like a flat sea,
Here is where we are, the empty reaches
Empty of ourselves.
For example:
The family cars in the dim
Sound of the living
The noise of increase to which we owe
What we possess. We cannot reconcile ourselves.
No one is reconciled, tho we spring
From the ground together.
For example:
Ultimately the air
Is bare sunlight where must be found
The lyric valuables.
For example:
—Sara, little seed,
Little violent, diligent seed, come let us look at the world
Glittering: this seed will speak,
