OH, THIS happiness is strong stuff. It’s marvellously liberating. I’m free, I feel, to tell you exactly what you must be longing to hear now. That is, if, as I know you do, you love best in this world those little beings of pure spirit with a normal temperature of 125°, then it naturally follows that the creature you love next best is the person—the God-lover or God-hater (almost never, apparently, anything in between), the saint or profligate, moralist or complete immoralist—who can write a poem that is a poem. Among human beings, he’s the curlew sandpiper, and I hasten to tell you what little I presume to know about his flights, his heat, his incredible heart.
Since early in 1948, I’ve been sitting—my family thinks literally—on a loose-leaf notebook inhabited by a hundred and eighty-four short poems that my brother wrote during the last three years of his life, both in and out of the Army, but mostly in, well in. I intend very soon now—it’s just a matter of days or weeks, I tell myself—to stand aside from about a hundred and fifty of the poems and let the first willing publisher who owns a pressed morning suit and a fairly clean pair of gray gloves bear them away, right off to his shady presses, where they’ll very likely be constrained in a two-tone dust jacket, complete with a back flap featuring a few curiously damning remarks of endorsement, as solicited and acquired from those “name” poets and writers who have no compunction about commenting in public on their fellow-artists’ works (customarily reserving their more deeply quarter-hearted commendations for their friends, suspected inferiors, foreigners, fly-by-night oddities, and toilers in another field), then on to the Sunday literary sections, where, if there’s room, if the critique of the big, new, definitive biography of Grover Cleveland doesn’t run too long, they’ll be tersely introduced to the poetry-loving public by one of the little band of regulars, moderate-salaried pedants, and income-supplementers who can be trusted to review new books of poetry not necessarily either wisely or passionately but tersely. (I don’t think I’ll strike quite this sour note again. But if I do, I’ll try to be equally transparent about it.) Now, considering that I’ve been sitting on the poems for over ten years, it might be well—refreshingly normal or un-perverse, at least—if I gave what I think are the two main reasons I’ve elected to get up, rise, from them. And I’d prefer to pack both reasons into the same paragraph, duffel bag-style, partly because I’d like them to stick close to each other, partly because I have a perhaps impetuous notion that I won’t be needing them again on the voyage.
First, there is the matter of family pressure. It’s doubtless a very common thing, if not much more common than I’d care to hear about, but I have four living, lettered, rather incontinently articulate younger brothers and sisters, of part Jewish, part-Irish, and conceivably part-Minotaur extraction—two boys, one, Waker, an ex-roving Carthusian monk-reporter, now impounded, and the other, Zooey, a no less vigorously called and chosen nonsectarian actor, aged, respectively, thirty-six and twenty-nine; and two girls, one a budding young actress, Franny, and the other, Boo Boo, a bouncy, solvent Westchester matron, aged, respectively, twenty-five and thirty-eight. Off and on since 1949, from seminary and boarding school, from the obstetrical floor of Woman’s Hospital and the exchange-students’ writing room below the waterline on the Queen Elizabeth, between, as it were, exams and dress rehearsals and matins and two-o’clock feedings, all four of these dignitaries have been laying down, through the mail, a series of unspecified but discernibly black ultimatums of what will happen to me unless I do something, soon, about Seymour’s Poems. It should be noted, perhaps immediately, that besides being a writing man, I’m a part-time English Department member at a girls’ college in upper New York, not far from the Canadian border. I live alone (but catless, I’d like everybody to know) in a totally modest, not to say cringing, little house, set deep in the woods and on the more inaccessible side of a mountain. Not counting students, faculty, and middle-aged waitresses, I see very few people during the working week, or year. I belong, in short, to a species of literary shut-in that, I don’t doubt, can be coerced or bullied pretty successfully by mail. Everybody, anyhow, has a saturation point, and I can no longer open my post-office box without excessive trepidation at the prospect of finding, nestled among the farm-equipment circulars and the bank statements, a long, chatty, threatening postcard from one of my brothers or sisters, two of whom, it seems peculiarly worth adding, use ball-point pens. My second main reason for deciding to let go of the poems, get them published, is, in a way, much less emotional, really, than physical. (And it leads, I’m proud as a peacock to say, straight to the swamps of rhetoric.) The effects of radioactive particles on the human body, so topical in 1959, are nothing new to old poetry-lovers. Used with moderation, a first-class verse is an excellent and usually fast-working form of heat therapy. Once, in the Army, when I had what might be termed ambulatory pleurisy for something over three months, my first real relief carne only when I had placed a perfectly innocent-looking Blake lyric in my shirt pocket and worn it like a poultice for a day or so. Extremes, though, are always risky and ordinarily downright baneful, and the dangers of prolonged contact with any poetry that seems to exceed what we most familiarly know of the first-class are formidable. In any case, I’d be relieved to see my brother’s poems moved out of this general small area, at least for a while. I feel mildly but extensively burned. And on what seems to me the soundest basis: During much of his adolescence, and all his adult life, Seymour was drawn, first, to Chinese poetry, and then, as deeply, to Japanese poetry, and to both in ways that he was drawn to no other poetry in the world.2 I have no quick way of knowing, of course, how familiar or unfamiliar my dear, if victimized, general reader is with Chinese or Japanese poetry. Considering, however, that even a short discussion of it may possibly shed a good deal of light on my brother’s nature, I don’t think this is the time for me to go all reticent and forbearing. At their most effective, I believe, Chinese and Japanese classical verses are intelligible utterances that please or enlighten or enlarge the invited eavesdropper to within an inch of his life. They may be, and often are, fine for the ear particularly, but for the most part I’d say that unless a Chinese or Japanese poet’s real forte is knowing a good persimmon or a good crab or a good mosquito bite on a good arm when he sees one, then no matter how long or unusual or fascinating his semantic or intellectual intestines may be, or how beguiling they sound when twanged, no one in the Mysterious East speaks seriously of him as a poet, if at all. My inner, incessant elation, which I think I’ve rightly, if repeatedly, called happiness, is threatening, I’m aware, to turn this whole composition into a fool’s soliloquy. I think, though, that even I haven’t the gall to try to say what makes the Chinese or Japanese poet the marvel and the joy he is. Something, however (wouldn’t you know?), does happen to come to mind. (I don’t imagine it’s precisely the thing I’m looking for, but I can’t simply throw it out.) Once, a terrible number of years ago, when Seymour and I were eight and six, our parents gave a party for nearly sixty people in our three and a half rooms at the old Hotel Alamac, in New York. They were officially retiring from vaudeville, and it was an affecting as well as a celebrative occasion. We two were allowed to get out of bed around eleven or so, and come in and have a look. We had more than a look. By request, and with no objections whatever on our part, we danced, we sang, first singly, then together, as children of our station often do. But mostly we just stayed up and watched. Toward two in the morning, when the leavetakings began, Seymour begged Bessie—our mother—to let him bring the leavers their coats, which were hung, draped, tossed, piled all over the small apartment, even on the foot of our sleeping younger sister’s bed. He and I knew about a dozen of the guests intimately, ten or so more by sight or reputation, and the rest not at all or hardly. We had been in bed, I should add, when everyone arrived. But from watching the guests for some three hours, from grinning at them, from, I think, loving them, Seymour—without asking any questions first—brought very nearly all the guests, one or two at a time, and
without any mistakes, their own true coats, and all the men involved their hats. (The women’s hats he had some trouble with.) Now, I don’t necessarily suggest that this kind of feat is typical of the Chinese or Japanese poet, and certainly I don’t mean to imply that it makes him what he is. But I do think, that if a Chinese or Japanese verse composer doesn’t know whose coat is whose, on sight, his poetry stands a remarkably slim chance of ever ripening. And eight, I’d guess, is very nearly the outside age limit for mastering this small feat.
(No, no, I can’t stop now. It seems to me, in my Condition, that I’m no longer merely asserting my brother’s position as a poet; I feel I’m removing, at least for a minute or two, all the detonators from all the bombs in this bloody world—a very tiny, purely temporary public courtesy, no doubt, but mine own.) It’s generally agreed that Chinese and Japanese poets like simple subjects best, and I’d feel more oafish than usual if I tried to refute that, but “simple” happens to be a word I personally hate like poison, since—where I come from, anyway—it’s customarily applied to the unconscionably brief, the timesaving in general, the trivial, the bald, and the abridged. My personal phobias aside, I don’t really believe there is a word, in any language—thank God—to describe the Chinese or Japanese poet’s choice of material. I wonder who can find a word for this kind of thing: A proud, pompous Cabinet member, walking in his courtyard and reliving a particularly devastating speech he made that morning in the Emperor’s presence, steps, with regret, on a pen-and-ink sketch someone has lost or discarded. (Woe is me, there’s a prose writer in our midst; I have to use italics where the Oriental poet wouldn’t.) The great Issa will joyfully advise us that there’s a fat-faced peony in the garden. (No more, no less. Whether we go to see his fat-faced peony for ourselves is another matter; unlike certain prose writers and Western poetasters, whom I’m in no position to name off, he doesn’t police us.) The very mention of Issa’s name convinces me that the true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it. A fat-faced peony will not show itself to anyone but Issa—not to Buson, not to Shiki, not even to Basho. With certain prosaic modifications, the same rule holds for the proud and pompous Cabinet member. He will not dare to step with divinely human regret on a piece of sketch paper till the great commoner, bastard, and poet Lao Ti-kao has arrived on the scene to watch. The miracle of Chinese and Japanese verse is that one pure poet’s voice is absolutely the same as another’s and at once absolutely distinctive and different. Tang-li divulges, when he is ninety-three and is praised to his face for his wisdom and charity, that his piles are killing him. For another, a last, example, Ko-huang observes, with tears coursing down his face, that his late master had extremely bad table manners. (There is a risk, always, of being a trifle too beastly to the West. A line exists in Kafka’s Diaries—one of many of his, really—that could easily usher in the Chinese New Year: “The young girl who only because she was walking arm in arm with her sweetheart looked quietly around.”) As for my brother Seymour—ah, well, my brother Seymour. For this Semitic-Celtic Oriental I need a spanking-new paragraph.
Unofficially, Seymour wrote and talked Chinese and Japanese poetry all the thirty-one years he stopped with us, but I’d say that he made a formal beginning at composing it one morning when he was eleven, in the first-floor reading room of a public library on upper Broadway, near our house. It was a Saturday, no school, nothing more pressing ahead of us than lunch, and we were having a fine time idly swimming around or treading water between the stacks, occasionally doing a little serious fishing for new authors, when he suddenly signalled to me to come over and see what he had. He’d caught himself a whole mess of translated verses by P’ang, the wonder of the eleventh century. But fishing, as we know, in libraries or anywhere else, is a tricky business, with never a certainty of who’s going to catch whom. (The hazards of fishing in general were themselves a favorite subject of Seymour’s. Our younger brother Walt was a great bent-pin fisherman as a small boy, and for his ninth or tenth birthday he received a poem from Seymour—one of the major delights of his life, I believe—about a little rich boy who catches a lafayette in the Hudson River, experiences a fierce pain in his own lower lip on reeling him in, then dismisses the matter from his mind, only to discover when he is home and the still-alive fish has been given the run of the bathtub that he, the fish, is wearing a blue serge cap with the same school insignia over the peak as the boy’s own; the boy finds his own name-tape sewn inside the tiny wet cap.) Permanently, from that morning on, Seymour was hooked. By the time he was fourteen, one or two of us in the family were fairly regularly going through his jackets and windbreakers for anything good he might have jotted down during a slow gym period or a long wait at the dentist’s. (A day has passed since this last sentence, and in the interim I’ve put through a long-distance call from my Place of Business to my sister Boo Boo, in Tuckahoe, to ask her if there’s any poem from Seymour’s very early boyhood that she’d especially like to go into this account. She said she’d call me back. Her choice turned out to be not nearly so apposite to my present purposes as I’d like, and therefore a trifle irritating, but I think I’ll get over it. The one she picked, I happen to know, was written when the poet was eight: “John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.”) When he was twenty-two, he had one special, not thin, sheaf of poems that looked very, very good to me, and I, who have never written a line longhand in my life without instantly visualizing it in eleven-point type, rather fractiously urged him to submit them for publication somewhere. No, he didn’t think he could do that. Not yet; maybe never. They were too un-Western, too lotusy. He said he felt that they were faintly affronting. He hadn’t quite made up his mind where the affronting came in, but he felt at times that the poems read as though they’d been written by an ingrate, of sorts, someone who was turning his back—in effect, at least—on his own environment and the people in it who were close to him. He said he ate his food out of our big refrigerators, drove our eight-cylinder American cars, unhesitatingly used our medicines when he was sick, and relied on the U.S. Army to protect his parents and sisters from Hitler’s Germany, and nothing, not one single thing in all his poems, reflected these realities. Something was terribly wrong. He said that so often after he’d finished a poem he thought of Miss Overman. It should be said that Miss Overman had been the librarian in the first public-library branch in New York we regularly used when we were children. He said he felt he owed Miss Overman a painstaking, sustained search for a form of poetry that was in accord with his own peculiar standards and yet not wholly incompatible, even at first sight, with Miss Overman’s tastes. When he got through saying that, I pointed out to him calmly, patiently—that is, of course, at the bloody top of my voice—what I thought were Miss Overman’s shortcomings as a judge, or even a reader, of poetry. He then reminded me that on his first day in the public library (alone, aged six) Miss Overman, wanting or not as a judge of poetry, had opened a book to a plate of Leonardo’s catapult and placed it brightly before him, and that it was no joy to him to finish writing a poem and know that Miss Overman would have trouble turning to it with pleasure or involvement, coming, as she probably would come, fresh from her beloved Mr. Browning or her equally dear, and no less explicit, Mr. Wordsworth. The argument—my argument, his discussion—ended there. You can’t argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet’s function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.
For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world—not life and death, perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things—work out rather beautifully. Before his finish, Seymour had over three years of what must have been the profoundest satisfaction that a veteran craftsman is permitted to feel. He found for himself a form of versification
that was right for him, that met his most long-standing demands of poetry in general, and that, I believe, had she still been alive, Miss Overman herself would very likely have thought striking, perhaps even comely, to look upon, and certainly “involving,” provided she gave her attention to it as unfrugally as she gave it to her old swains, Browning and Wordsworth. What he found for himself, worked out for himself, is very difficult to describe.3 It may help, to start with, to say that Seymour probably loved the classical Japanese three-line, seventeen-syllable haiku as he loved no other form of poetry, and that he himself wrote—bled—haiku (almost always in English, but sometimes, I hope I’m duly reluctant to bring in, in Japanese, German, or Italian). It could be said, and most likely will be, that a late-period poem of Seymour’s looks substantially like an English translation of a sort of double haiku, if such a thing existed, and I don’t think I’d quibble over that, but I tend to sicken at the strong probability that some tired but indefatigably waggish English Department member in 1970—not impossibly myself, God help me—will get off a good one about a poem of Seymour’s being to the haiku what a double Martini is to the usual Martini. And the fact that it isn’t true won’t necessarily stop a pedant, if he feels that the class is properly warmed up and ready. Anyway, while I’m able, I’m going to say this rather slowly and carefully: A late poem of Seymour’s is a six-line verse, of no certain accent but usually more iambic than not, that, partly out of affection for dead Japanese masters and partly from his own natural bent, as a poet, for working inside attractive restricted areas, he has deliberately hold down to thirty-four syllables, or twice the number of the classical haiku. Apart from that, nothing in any of the hundred and eighty-four poems currently under my roof is much like anything except Seymour himself. To say the least, the acoustics, even, are as singular as Seymour. That is, each of the poems is as unsonorous, as quiet, as he believed a poem should be, but there are intermittent short blasts of euphony (for want of a less atrocious word for it), which have the effect on me personally of someone—surely no one completely sober—opening my door, blowing three or four or five unquestionably sweet and expert notes on a cornet into the room, then disappearing. (I’ve never known a poet to give the impression of playing a cornet in the middle of a poem before, let alone playing one beautifully, and I’d just as soon say next to nothing about it. In fact, nothing.) Within this six-line structure and these very odd harmonics, Seymour does with a poem, I think, exactly what he was meant to do with one. By far the majority of the hundred and eighty-four poems are immeasurably not light- but high-hearted, and can be read by anyone, anywhere, even aloud in rather progressive orphanages on stormy nights, but I wouldn’t unreservedly recommend the last thirty or thirty-five poems to any living soul who hasn’t died at least twice in his lifetime, preferably slowly. My own favorites, if I have any, and I most assuredly do, are the two final poems in the collection. I don’t think I’ll be stepping on anybody’s toes if I very simply say what they are about. The next-to-last poem is about a young married woman and mother who is plainly having what it refers to here in my old marriage manual as an extra-marital love affair. Seymour doesn’t describe her, but she comes into the poem just when that cornet of his is doing something extraordinarily effective, and I see her as a terribly pretty girl, moderately intelligent, immoderately unhappy, and not unlikely living a block or two away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She comes home very late one night from a tryst—in my mind, bleary and lipstick-smeared—to find a balloon on her bedspread. Someone has simply left it there. The poet doesn’t say, but it can’t be anything but a large, inflated toy balloon, probably green, like Central Park in spring. The other poem, the last one in the collection, is about a young suburban widower who sits down on his patch of lawn one night, implicitly in his pajamas and robe, to look at the full moon. A bored white cat, clearly a member of his household and almost surely a former kingpin of his household, comes up to him and rolls over, and he lets her bite his left hand as he looks at the moon. This final poem, in fact, could well be of extra interest to my general reader on two quite special counts. I’d like very much to discuss them.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction Page 9
