The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  For all her self-destructiveness and nihilism, there was something resilient about Rhys; she held on to life almost out of spite, to prove she could get the better of her own “rum existence,” as she describes the plight of Julia Martin, one of her autobiographical antiheroines. She moved to Paris in 1919 with the first of her three husbands, Jean Lenglet, who “was known to the police of three countries” and with whom she had two children, a son who died in infancy and a daughter who lived mostly with her father after the couple parted in the mid-1920s. (They divorced in 1933.) Most important, she wrote a clutch of books during those decades—four novels and a collection of stories—that gave voice to her dark, outsider’s sense of human relations, where vulnerable women were pursued and then abandoned by predatory men while society turned an indifferent eye. They were published to admiring but cautionary reviews. No less a critic than Rebecca West singled her out as “one of the finest writers of fiction under middle age” in her review of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930) but pointed out that Rhys was “enamored of gloom” and that her novel was an inducement to suicide. After 1939, in which she published Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys did not publish a novel for almost thirty years, during which time she lived a peripatetic, chaotic existence, which included a stay in Holloway prison for assaulting a neighbor—and, indeed, was rumored to be dead.

  Rhys’s career as a writer received a fresh infusion when a dramatization of Good Morning, Midnight was featured on BBC radio in 1957. (“She missed the eventual broadcast,” Pizzichini bemusedly notes, “because she still had not worked out how to tune a radio.”) Francis Wyndham and Diana Athill, editors at the British publishing firm André Deutsch and long-standing admirers of her work, signed Rhys to a contract that same year for the novel that would emerge, years later, in 1966, as Wide Sargasso Sea. Its author was by now an elderly woman living in a condemned farmworker’s dwelling in the Devon countryside fitted out with wartime linoleum and a bare bulb; her main visitor was the local vicar, and a bottle a day of whiskey was, as she wrote, a “must.”

  After years of obscurity, Rhys entered the 1970s as a literary celebrity. Visitors trekked to her village to pay homage; V. S. Naipaul wrote about her, and the Queen gave her a commander of the Order of the British Empire. She was writing again—going back and forth between a final collection of stories, Sleep It Off, Lady (1976), and Smile Please—but paranoia and depression remained constants. She worried how she looked in photographs, was irritated by the causes of the day such as women’s lib and black activism, and was none the happier for her newfound renown: “Fame and financial security had come too late to make any difference to an old woman. She told her new friends this over and over again. She was too old for this, and they were far too late.” Rhys died on May 14, 1979, in a nursing home, watched over by a young friend, Jo Batterham, who persuaded the attending nurse not to feed Rhys or to replace the oxygen mask she had pushed off her face. A connoisseur of bleakness, the writer had remarked to David Plante (who recounted his vexed relationship with Rhys in Difficult Women [1983]) that “the end would be joy,” and she appeared to welcome it.

  The Blue Hour is an admirable effort to document the inner workings of a complex, opaque woman who distrusted words as well as people yet believed in the redemptive possibilities of writing more than she let on. That the fascination with Rhys’s fragmented, messy existence and wounded psyche continues to grow—textual and psychoanalytic studies show no sign of abating—attests to the uniqueness of her unflinching vision. She articulated the plight and sensibility of a certain kind of female—the kind who speaks to the inner bag lady in all of us—better than anyone before or since. Still, one wonders what Rhys, who considered her life an “abject failure” except for her writing and who, like Oblomov, preferred sleeping to most anything else (“Sleep is so lovely better than food or thinking or writing or anything,” she wrote in her memoir), would have made of all the fuss.

  LAST TANGO

  (ANNE CARSON)

  2001

  The writing of poetry is regularly deemed a dead art, so it is little wonder that its living practitioners are a somewhat petty and xenophobic bunch—or that the enterprise itself has come to seem, except in the hands of a few populist types like Sharon Olds, Philip Levine, and Billy Collins, almost willfully insular. “Contemporary poets,” noted the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska in her 1996 Nobel acceptance speech, “are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves.” One can hardly blame them, of course, seeing as how most people return the compliment by avoiding the stuff altogether.

  In the small world of people who keep up with contemporary poetry, Anne Carson, a Canadian professor of classics, has been cutting a large swath, inciting both envy and admiration. Her publishing trajectory has been something other versifiers can only marvel at, having propelled her from a position on the periphery to her perch as a MacArthur fellow and a commercially viable author at a prestigious mainstream house. It was clear from the start that Carson’s writing was unclassifiable, even by today’s motley, genre-bending standards. Was she writing poetry? Prose? Prose poems? Fiction? Nonfiction? Did even her publishers know for sure? (Her current paperback house, Vintage, calls her first book, Eros the Bittersweet [1986], “An Essay” in its listing of her titles, while the 1998 Dalkey Archive paperback edition of the book gives it no such designation.)

  Beginning with Eros the Bittersweet, Carson seemed determined to pull out all the stops by bringing everything she knew—specifically her knowledge of Hellenic literature but also her vast reading in other fields, including philosophy, fiction, and poetry—to bear on her writing. In the abbreviated, free-associative mode that she instantly established as her trademark, any thought might set off any other thought, or even a demi-thought: a discussion of Sappho’s understanding of erotic desire in the opening of Eros the Bittersweet, for instance, segues quickly into the most fleeting of allusions to Anna Karenina. The enclosing context of Greek myth is everywhere in evidence, but so are the writerly presences of Simone Weil, Virginia Woolf, and Eudora Welty, to name but a few. Freudian and Lacanian theory also puts in an appearance, as does a passing observation on Sartre’s understanding of the experience of viscosity. And all this by page 40!

  Carson has since gone on to write five more books, each distinctive in the elusiveness of its style; these have included Glass, Irony, and God, Plainwater (subtitled Essays and Poetry), and the much-acclaimed Autobiography of Red, published in 1998. This last, billed as “a novel in verse,” was based on an obscure Greek myth about a winged red monster named Geryon, which Carson reworked, improbably but spellbindingly, into a gay coming-of-age story. The book added Alice Munro and Harold Bloom to her growing cadre of fans; the latter recommended her, a bit obliquely, as “a disciplined version of Gertrude Stein.”

  Autobiography of Red also succeeded in bringing the truly innovative aspect of Carson’s work into sharper focus. This, as it turned out, had less to do with her dazzling but sometimes tiresome erudition than with her carefully controlled use of a post-confessional voice—one that darts into the text by way of casual snatches of dialogue or raw asides:

  Don’t pick at that Geryon you’ll get it infected. Just leave it alone and let it heal,

  said his mother

  rhinestoning past on her way to the door. She had all her breasts on this evening.

  Geryon stared in amazement.

  In her second-to-last book, Men in the Off Hours, Carson continued to demonstrate her easy familiarity with the history of ideas, both high and low, through her use of ironic appropriations and cross-pollinated allusions. The book’s characteristically hybrid offerings included a cinematic rumination on Catherine Deneuve and a poem-essay on “the phenomenology of female pollution in antiquity.” But Carson also continued to exhibit an emotional daring that is rare in this level of discourse—and even rarer in a writer who wears her brain on her sleeve. So a short poem with the fussy title “Essay on Error (2nd Draft)” skip
s across an invented mental landscape, archly strewing references (including one to her own poem of a few pages earlier, another to a letter from Freud to Ferenczi, and yet a third to a phrase of Descartes’s) before collapsing into a pure, unmediated image of nostalgia:

  After all

  what are you and I compared to him?

  Smell of burnt pastilles.

  I still remember the phrase every time I pass that spot.

  It is this very sudden and unexpected surrender to the rush of experience that makes Carson unusual—her willingness to drop her eggheady defenses, the references to Artaud and Derrida, and risk sounding like Lucinda Williams:

  Not enough spin on it, said my true love

  when he left in our fifth year.

  The squirrel bounced down a branch

  and caught a peg of tears.

  The way to hold on is

  afterwords

  so

  clear.

  Goodbye, Mr. Derrida; hello, Mr. Heartache. (Okay, so she felt the need for that closing pun with “afterwords.” Let her have it.)

  Now, less than a year later, comes The Beauty of the Husband, boldly and a bit vaingloriously subtitled A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. Its subject is the waywardness of lust and the disaffection of the heart as seen through the lens of a marital breakup. “There is something pure-edged and burning,” Carson writes, “about the first infidelity in a marriage.” Never mind that the union in question probably shouldn’t have occurred in the first place, given that the husband is an inveterate philanderer who is “loyal to nothing” and “lied about everything.” The poet would bid us understand that logic has nothing to do with it:

  Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty.

  As I would again

  if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible.

  Beauty makes sex sex.

  The book, in fact, takes as its overt theme what has been the ever more insistent subtext of Carson’s prior writing—the “dilemma of desire” and the ways in which intellectual discernment (a familiarity, say, with “the passive periphrastic” tenses in Latin) and erotic taste often pull in opposite directions. The inexplicable nature of romantic longing, the insuperable divide between thought and feeling, is a predicament as old as the hills and one that, I’d guess, women are more disturbed by than men—especially the sorts of women who have “grasped certain fundamental notions first advanced by Plato” and still find themselves doubled over with “the agony of sexual reasoning.”

  There are other, walk-on characters, including the watchful mother who instinctively distrusts her daughter’s choice in suitors: “To abolish seduction is a mother’s goal.” A pair of sisters, improbably named Dolor and Merced, figure briefly as objects of the husband’s attention, but they remain paper-thin and seem to have been chosen primarily for the foreign sound of their names, like characters who have wandered in from an Almodóvar film. More memorably there is Ray, a gay friend of the husband’s who befriends the ex-wife and keeps her posted on the randy goings-on. A painter by day and a short-order cook by night, he is introduced in one of Carson’s cinematic bursts:

  Ray flips two half-fried eggs with one hand

  and catches an explosion of toast (too light, shoves it back down)

  then spins left

  to pick a clean plate off the dishwasher stack.

  With his casual insights about the wife’s predicament (“You married people get too tight with things, get all strained in and sprained up”) and “his beautiful wicked grin like a skirt flying up,” Ray helps to ground the book in whatever semblance of narrative it has. But then again, a story line in any conventional sense is not what fuels Carson’s writing—or what she cares about, except as it may enable her to ask the questions that interest her: To what avail are Parmenides and “the true lies of poetry” when set against the “welter of disorder and pain” that “is our life”? “How do people / get power over one another?” (This conundrum fascinates Carson sufficiently for her to pose it twice within the first thirty-five pages of the book.) And perhaps most poignantly: “What does not wanting to desire mean?”

  Carson’s willingness to implicate herself in the discussion at hand—her refusal to edit out the personal, even at its most pathetically lovelorn—has become more obvious with each successive book, and The Beauty of the Husband takes her further out on the precarious limb she has claimed as her own. It is always difficult, of course, to gauge how much is autobiographical in a writer’s material, and Carson is trickier than most in this regard, but Husband strikes me as being the least cloaked about its origins in lived life. There is far less of the brainy braggadocio that has marked her previous work, especially if one looks beyond the tap dancing around the Keatsian equation of Truth and Beauty that is invoked in epigraphs preceding each section. From the very first “tango,” she is cutting pretty close to the bone:

  A wound gives off its own light

  surgeons say.

  If all the lamps in the house were turned out

  you could dress this wound

  by what shines from it.

  Similarly, the voice of sensual lament that Carson has resorted to with poignant effectiveness in the past is here presented without the fig leaf of fancy cerebration:

  Naked in the stone place it was true, sticky stains, skin, I lay on the hay

  and he licked.

  Licked it off.

  Ran out and got more dregs in his hands and smeared

  it on my knees neck belly licking. Plucking. Diving.

  Tongue is the smell of October to me.

  Carson is one of the great pasticheurs, and her influences are diverse. Emily Dickinson is said to be a favorite, although I don’t see much of her in the work, but there are traces of Gerard Manley Hopkins in her use of bricolage-like constructions and of Anne Sexton in the sudden dips into the fondly maternal (“Little soul, poor vague animal”) and in her flashes of emotional clarity: “We are mortal, balanced on a day, now and then / it makes sense to say Save what you can.” Overall, one would wish for less archness, which too often gives the writing a brittle patina of self-regard, and I wonder when Carson will realize that not every performance has to be a bravura one. Sometimes, too, the images strain credulity—“He could fill structures of / threat with a light like the earliest olive oil”—and at other times the writer seems lost in an enterprise of her own devising.

  Still, I don’t think there has been a book since Robert Lowell’s Life Studies that has advanced the art of poetry quite as radically as Anne Carson is in the process of doing. Although I can understand why Carson’s peers might bristle at the grandness of her ambition and squabble about her imperious disregard for even the laxest of forms, it seems to me that there is only one relevant question to be posed about her writing. What her fellow poets would do well to ask themselves is not whether what Carson is writing can or cannot be called poetry, but how has she succeeded in making it—whatever label you give it—so thrillingly new.

  DUST-TO-DUSTNESS

  (W. G. SEBALD)

  2003

  It’s tempting to try to make sense of the randomness of fate by reading an eerie quality of foreboding into the tragic end of a writer who has presented an elegiac view of life in his books. As was the case with Albert Camus (whose life was cut short at the age of forty-six) so with the German writer W. G. Sebald, who died in a car crash in December 2001 at the age of fifty-seven. A keen, almost triumphant presentiment of extinction pervades the four novels that were published during Sebald’s lifetime and in remarkably short order established his reputation as an austere literary voice of the utmost moral seriousness.

  Sebald’s work reads like a lamentation or a dirge, as though existence itself were no more than a way station on the journey from dust-to-dustness (“We lie prostrate on the boards, dying, our whole lives long”) and he had long ago said his goodbyes. His books are all depictions, in one way or another, of the ashen premonition of lo
ss; and they might be said to take place in a state of permanent déjà vu, in which a geographic site that is reconstructed from “mountains of rubble” or an emotion that is dredged up from the ocean floor of psychic debris seems no more than a revisiting of something that was glimpsed once before, in a far-off time or place.

  Considering that Sebald was a late starter—he began to publish fiction only in his mid-forties—the rapid ascension of his melancholic literary star (although he has never received the reverential attention in his native Germany that has been paid him in England or America) is all the more striking. The details of his life are sparse, and those that are available are opaque, adding to his mystique. He was born in 1944 in a tiny village in the Bavarian Alps; his father served in the Wehrmacht but maintained a silence on the subject of his wartime experiences after returning from a POW camp. Sebald immigrated to England in his early twenties and settled in Suffolk, where he taught at the University of East Anglia for thirty years, eventually becoming the founding director of the university’s British Centre for Literary Translation.

  It is an attribute of all truly inspired writing to seem original, whatever its provenance or influences, and Sebald’s work reflects this wherever you turn. It feels almost unprecedented in tone, although his weltanschauung derives from Schopenhauer and his literary affinities can be traced to a select group of writers, including Adalbert Stifter, Heinrich von Kleist, Robert Musil, and, most discernibly, Thomas Bernhard. His meandering and curiously formal prose (one German critic has described it as prose that is always dressed in a tuxedo) bypasses the ordinary exigencies of narrative, drawn instead to the graveyard silence that looms over the hectic impulse of storytelling.