by Robert Bly
Your friend Tomas T.
Västerås 4-19-68
Dear Robert,
I sent a super-urgent message to you in New York a fortnight ago and also wrote then that I would send one to England at the same time in case you should be there. The problem is that you have disappeared, like Livingstone. I never got around to sending anything to England—here it comes instead. Let’s hear from you! Write to Bonniers1 and say where you are! Write to Göran S. and tell him how the Vietnamese children’s fund will work! Write to me—above all—and tell me how you’re doing! Enough for now, it feels pointless to write more when I don’t know whether you will ever get these messages in bottles, urgent letters, emergency flares, tootings in the fog. We won’t talk about the world, way too much has happened. But we’re finally past the NADIR, I think. It feels like that anyway.
Your friend Tomas T.
23 April, ’68
Dear Tomas,
Your letters just came, both in the same day! After two months of talk in New York, I lapsed into hermitical silence, not even replying to fences or puppies. But I’m going to start writing letters again, today! So I’ll write to you first. We are in Thaxted, in a little cottage across from a flock of geese! They talk all night themselves, in low and hoarse voices, like New York divorcées. I have been reading Taoist books, which give off pure and clear sounds, like flutes. My voice is—alas—half way between.
I’m looking foward to seeing you and your sweet women folk this summer! It will definitely come to pass! But when I’m not sure yet. We have some uncertainty about when we can be in this house, etc.
How wonderful that Bonniers is going ahead with the book! I’ll write them today, as soon as I finish this! The poems I’m sure are better in translation than in the original, and I’m entering the country under false pretenses. I’ll have to get a forged passport too! Thank you for encouraging this book! I’ll never criticize Sweden again.
We’re all happy here, in this odd and un-American country. But the happiest day we had was the day Johnson QUIT! How fantastic! It meant that the peace movement had won! It was already impossible for him to give speeches anywhere except at military bases, and the planners of the Democratic Convention in Chicago had already decided they could not bring him to the hall through the streets—the hippies would have covered his car with urine and calf blood—he was to have been brought to the roof by helicopter. Even that was not entirely safe.
I tossed my private grenade at the National Book Awards ceremony. What a scene! A huge elegant hall with chandeliers, panelling and speeches guaranteed to be of the most impeccable boredom, politeness and obsequiousness. Each of the 6 winners had 500 words they were allowed to say. George Kennan’s, just before me, was polite and standard. When I got about ten sentences into mine, I literally saw faces full of shock and disbelief—the first time I’ve ever seen it. The mink-coated crowd went wild with rage. The rest, about ⅔ of the audience, enjoyed it to the tips of their toes, or so they told me. At the end, I called up a young man from Resistance out of the audience, gave him the $1000 check, and then repeated Spock’s crime, urging him not to enter the U.S. army, ever, etc. Mayor Lindsay was on stage—he had opened the proceedings—and this put him in a spot. A public official must leave the stage if a law is broken in his presence, or he is condoning the [breaking of the] law. But if Lindsay had left the stage, he would have gotten booed by the crowd; in any case, he stayed—I’m sending along some extra clippings etc people have sent. You needn’t return them. Also a copy of the speech.
This speech might be published at the end of the selected poems if you think it’s a good idea. Harpers is thinking of doing it, but it probably has more meaning to the U.S. literary community than to Europeans. See what you think.
Do you still want some sort of preface from me? What should it say? “Unaccustomed as I am to speaking in Swedish, gulp, cough.”
Thank you for the clipping with the review of Ord om Vietnam. Your description of the climate in Sweden—“either write political verse or we’ll turn you into a grasshopper”—is eerie—it is a stage we haven’t gotten to yet. But the Swedes move faster in such things because the war means less to them. The English are the same. Their riots are unreal, and their support of the NLF is so much oatmeal.
The European failing is always the drive to polarize everything—utter good or utter evil. Only the Taoists know clearly how dumb that is!
“Bend and you will be upright,
Curl up and you will be straight,
Keep hold of emptiness and you will be full.
Grow old and you will be young,
Have little and you will get larger,
Have much and you will get confused.”
The two ends meet! So making poles—allt or intet—is trying to stop the world. As the Taoists say, “If you do that, you’ll be lucky if you don’t cut your hand!”
I’ll stop jabbering now. Write me right away, and I’ll write back. My love to your family—forgive my thick-tonguedness—
Robert
Västerås 6-9-68
Dear Roberto,
I’m finally sitting here, writing to you on my old black office typewriter. I’ve found a house for you! It’s in downtown Västerås, an old part of the city. Usually the writer Clas Engström lives there with his wife (who is a sculptor) + a son and a little adopted Indian girl. They will be away all of July and Clas has put the house at my disposal. You won’t need to pay any rent but you can of course leave them your two poetry collections when you move out. But we shouldn’t hang around Västerås, just have it as a base for various outings in different directions. The land right around here is depicted in the enclosed poem—destruction of nature is ongoing—farther north you’re in the woods.
I’ve just come back from a trip to my old haunts—Östergötland in other words—I had a psychology assignment there and seized the opportunity at the same time to take a few days off for writing. But the whole thing was wrecked by Kennedy’s murder. Right after things like that I’m so full of rage and resignation that poetry becomes impossible—working at my job goes well, however—the job is a kind of escape from reality! But to write is to go into reality itself, where the gunsmoke still lingers. Otherwise I was rather skeptical about Robert Kennedy, terribly split. I’ll never know what he really stood for. Maybe he was very good. But I’ve put all my eggs, my American eggs, in McCarthy’s basket. Maybe I should also let Lindsay take an egg. After all, he belonged to the part of your audience that put up with what you said (so damned well) and it shouldn’t be held against him too much that he called in sick the next day.
The prospect of this evening has put me in a bad mood. What’s happening is that a journalist from the local paper is coming here to finish an interview with me. He has previously managed to misunderstand, or maybe not misunderstand but caricature, my reasoning and viewpoints to such a degree that I don’t recognize them any more. So that the interview will finally be finished I’ve chosen to invite him to dinner, I thought it would all go a little easier that way. He has let it be known that he is a teetotaler, so I will try to soften him up with food instead. Nearly all the people who write in the newspapers about culture in Sweden these days resemble wolves that lie in Grandma’s clothing, waiting for Red Riding Hood. Some years ago they were like Santa Claus coming with presents. In both cases representatives of the pseudo-world. I myself want to be a MOLE that digs itself out of all this, right through illusion and into reality. He needn’t have golden wings, though that’s fine too, it’s enough that he’s alive and can dig.
Write soon. I want to hear about your address in Norway, travel plans etc. We send greetings and long to see you!
Your friend
Tomas T.
7 July, ’68
Dear Tomas,
Thank you for your letter, and the enclosed letters, which just arrived! The thing that amuses me is that the F
BI is unable to open and read my mail over here! That is a terrible frustration to them—they’re falling behind on various plots.
The Sixties is being printed in N.Y. now—I’ve sent page proofs back—and so will be out sometime!
I just read a book—prose poems—of Jan Erik Vold, who visited you. [------]
We’re leaving here the 14th of July, and will be in Oslo the 15th. But my host there has stuck me with a lecture on “modernisk Amerikansk poesi” at the Oslo Summer School on the 16th, so that we probably won’t get to Sweden until the 18th or 19th.
But it seems to me you said that you had your vacation until the 20th, so I’m worried that we’re bringing you back from Runmarö sooner than you would have come if I had not poked my nose into Sweden. It would be very easy for us to stay a day or two longer in Oslo, and arrive in Västerås on the 20th or 21st, so that you and your family could be in Runmarö for the time you had planned! Please write me in Oslo about that! Our address there will be c/o Skardal, Sørkedalsveien 229, Oslo 7. Telephone 24-58-68.
We’ll arrive in Oslo night of 15th, then the 16th I’ll be at the University during the morning and part of the afternoon, and on the 17th among relatives, probably at the Sørkedalsveien house.
I don’t know how far it is from Oslo to Västerås, but it’s probably more than a day’s drive! So it would be easy for us to drive on the 20th. Please let us know—looking forward very much to seeing all of you again!
Yours, Robert
Runmarö 7-12-68
Dear Robert,
I’ve come back to Runmarö now after having left Mamma in the hospital in Stockholm. In other words, for the next few days things are under control. When I came out here your most recent letter was waiting. It’s a good plan to come on the 19th or 20th! I’ll call Sørkedalsveien sometime on the 17th and we’ll fix the details. I hope my sad and stress-fraught note from Stockholm didn’t scare you off!
I enclose a letter from Mr. Hall which has been injured—not by the FBI but by me—it got mashed in my briefcase.
Jan Erik Vold has sent greetings to me on two occasions. He rides a motorcycle and wears a complete diving suit—he looks—from a distance—like a minor character out of some James Bond movie. When he has taken off his motorcycle outfit, he’s pure friendliness. Awhile back he wrote some good poems but I don’t connect with his latest phase at all—his texts make me feel so troublesomely old-fashioned.
It’s rainy and windy out here. I’m devoting myself to escapism on the sofa, reading Sherlock Holmes—the great comforter. Regression!
Till we meet again! See you in a few days
Tomas
Runmarö, undated [August 8, 1968]
Dear Bly’s! (because I write by hand I try some English—to make life less complicated for you and the FBI-people—if Louis Simpson too is under supervision). Oh we miss you! The cave is almost empty but summer goes on. Paula is fat as a broiler and Emma learned to swim yesterday. I have been back to Västerås and working with a few unreal city-clients for 2 days, then returning to the island. In the mail I found a large swarm of letters for you (which I will forward to Madison) and the magazine Motor for me. Passing Stockholm I visited Bonniers and handed over the list of books—they will send you soon I hope. I got some news about Martinson—he is not so ill after all—he was ill this winter but has recovered and would probably be interested in getting some support—send him Unicorn! Address is simple: Gnesta, Sweden. They did not know about your translations except for the Ekelöf book—Bonniers is of course interested in novel translating primarily, businessmen as they are. But they should know! They always say that there is no interest in Swedish poetry abroad. So send them a Unicorn too.
In Västerås I watched television from Miami Beach for hours. A paradise of fools! but the small excerpt from Lindsay’s speech was not bad. The rest was more terrible protoplasm of stomach-and-muscle rhetoric, which causes severe attacks of suffocation among nervous-system-listeners.
Mother feels a little better now. But she is losing her hair. “Hair does not want to stay on a sick person,” she said.
5 hugs to all of you from us!
Vännen Tomas
[on envelope]
THE WIND SHAKES CATERPILLARS
DOWN FROM THE TREES—ONE
LANDS ON MY SHIRT.
Västerås 2 Sept. 68
Dear Robert,
first a catastrophic message from Lars Gustafsson—he has been instructed to start setting up your book “within 14 days” and it’s therefore necessary that you send the poems to me, or to Bonniers, in the order you want them—and that you send them by air. Preferably with a foreword—though I think the foreword can be sent a week or two later if you haven’t had time to write it.
I’ve sent the “three presidents” to the Finland Swedish magazine Horisont but haven’t heard back from them yet.
As you will understand, I’ve spent a great part of the past 24 hours in front of the TV and seen tanks roll by from morning till night. I’ve been able to follow the Czechoslovakian drama from hour to hour—it has made an enormous impression here—I doubt whether you in the U.S. have experienced the events more than 25% of what the Europeans have experienced. Honorable leftists of Sonnevi’s type must be having a very hard time. Communists loyal to the party have solved the problem in a radical way by wholeheartedly condemning what’s happening—Hermansson, the party leader, requested that we recall our ambassador to the Soviet Union! (No other party has requested that.) Among the NLF groups a number of members have requested that the movement be expanded so as to oppose the Soviet Union. In other words it would be an anti-U.S.–anti-Soviet movement. From the humanitarian point of view such a thing would be perfectly logical, but from an ideological one it would be absurd (you know North Vietnam’s position). The whole thing is a boiling cauldron.
In Västerås the flag is at half-mast.
We often think of you and miss you.
Love to Carol!
Your friend T
18 Sept, ’68
Dear Tomas,
Sorry I’ve been away! Part physically & part spiritually! I didn’t realize deadline was so close! Enclosed find poems with order indicated, approved STAMP
I’m working on foreword, it will appear in 10 days or two weeks (I’ll bet!)
Love to you and your beautiful, graceful, bird-like
branch-like wife and family!
Robert
21 Oct, ’68
Dear Tomas,
I’m sending some literary curiosities here in an old New World Writing (1959!) with my first political (glumpf ) (and my last, some would say) poems. Also a little book of interviews from 1963 that has had a lot of influence one way or the other. A new Stand with some of my ranting, and two Kayaks. #12 has my criticism; and I’ve asked George to send you #13, which has the critcism of me for my criticism!
I got a lovely bunch of books from Bonniers—the only thing they didn’t send were the prose books I needed to get an owl eye view of you African-Swedish poets. For example there was one paperback on poets of the ’50’s with an article on you, and another paperback I think with an article on your parachute poem. How could I (sob) get copies of those?
I had a marvellous week alone by myself in the woods, and I wrote some moonlight poems I’ll send you this winter—and I wrote an outhouse poem the other day! But now I have to put my harness on, stick the bit in my mouth, and start pulling the manure spreader. Tomorrow I start off on a long tour to get money for us through the winter. I decided to put all readings into the fall this year, so I will have Dec, Jan, & Feb all to myself, utan program!
Then we’ll write long letters to each other, and “settle all difficult interpretations.”
(I did a draft of the introduction last night and will send it to you from my tour.)
Love to you and Monica
and Pa
ula and Emma! from usn’s
Robert
Västerås 10 dec. 68
Dear Robert, Caruso of 78 RPMs,
I’ve received a strict order from Bonniers to write to you immediately and remind you of THE FOREWORD TO THE BOOK. I’ve gotten the proofs, but the foreword, where is that? We now have to have it by January 1. You are good at forewords (Take for example Neruda). Or shall we ask Carolyn Kizer to write it? I saw in the paper that she was here recently making a good-will visit to Swedish writers and institutions.
These last few days the most wonderful pieces of mail have been dancing down into my mailbox. Ah what a lot of fun I’ve had with Kayak and with various books. Most of all I like the letters from The Sixties readers. Harry Smith takes the cake. I will beg a few publishers for some books to send you, a CHRISTMAS PACKAGE, which by the usual swift surface mail can be expected to arrive around March. (The Cutty Sark isn’t running any longer.)
[------]
In November—right after I’d gotten myself back together after the damned Presidential election—I went to Berlin for an “author symposium” with Professor Walter Höllerer. We sat and philosophized around a long table for four days: Lars Gustafsson, I and two Swedish prose writers and 30 German docents and professors and authors and thinkers and linguists and observers from the Swedish Institute etc. etc. I didn’t even understand the title of the conference! Erklärbarkeit und Nicht-Erklärbarkeit der Welt als Axiom für die Literatur? The food was good. Afterwards there was a reading: I had bad German translations with me. They were improved by a bunch of Dichter und Denker and were finished 5 minutes after the reading was supposed to begin. I stumbled out of a taxi and up to the podium and read “Nach einem Tod” so that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. “Im Freien” was read by a Mr. Jürgen Becker. Nothing by one of the novelists (Enquist) got read, the other, Jersild, got a terrible presentation by his translator who after having read (in a pathetic voice) for 40 minutes suddenly broke off and said with an anguished expression on his face: “Ach meine Damen und Herren, Entschuldigung, the text is just too long, I’ll have to skip over part of it”—whereupon he skipped to three lines from the end and fell across the finish line. It went in other words the way it usually goes when Swedish literature is presented abroad. Even so we are considered to have had a certain success—especially Enquist whom the audience escaped hearing: his book was purchased direct. I myself was courted by Professor Höllerer’s poetry series editors, by Rundfunk and by Akzente. I’m even going to appear in Suhrkampf. It’s my (problematic) translator who tells me this—what do I know? I do hope so, I do absolutely want a reason to travel down to the continent again soon and eat Sauerkraut.
