The novel is not a novel, of course, but a hallucination, its scenes bursting as lurid flashes of light and feeling. It had the fluid linear form and endless embellishments of an alien expression, like Arab lute music itself. It seemed to me that he had entered into the deep, subterranean flow of landscape, an intuitional complicity which operates upon us as an electrical force field disturbing in some as yet unexplained way the “internal” senses. Hence his light-flashes are not really descriptions. In all of Prokosch’s books, these moments of illumination appear as surges in a mysterious flow of intuitive impression which is never stable or solid.
In Storm and Echo, for example, we find this glimpse of an alien territory: “On and on. The light of the moon seemed to penetrate the waste, to grind it into something shrill and homicidal. It wasn’t land we were crossing, it was some awful spiritual concoction, an embodiment of bitterness and pain, a scene of pure melancholia.”
Well, I took The Asiatics with me to Ouazazarte and on to the oasis village of Tinerhir, a surreal eighth-century village made of thousand-year-old mud where I read it walking up and down through a spectral Atlas landscape on my way to the nearby Gorges du Todra. It seemed to me that I was in a purely Prokoschian place. The same crazy outcasts sleeping in dried oueds, the same oases and plantations, the same disorientated Westerners and fluid, rapierlike interactions between strangers wandering along decrepit roads. In fact, I think of The Asiatics as the first road movie, and by far the most interesting. “Nothing is as beautiful as a road,” George Sand once said, and I think of it as Prokosch’s motto. He is a sly late Sufi wandering alone along roads where he might find fiery miracles, visions, sudden encounters, mystical friendships and perhaps even the severed head of the venerable Shams so ecstatically imagined by Rumi.
Both The Asiatics and the later memoir, Voices, are built around sudden encounters with strangers, meetings as epiphanies that arise, reach a quick crescendo of intimacy and illumination, then melt away into a formless flow which the writer disdains to turn into anything cumulative. The result is something curiously archaic, like Buddhist fables or the eighteenth-century conte philosophique. It has also earned Prokosch a certain amount of rebuke, with a predictable string of accusations: “precious,” “self-glorifying,” “contrived,” etc. No doubt there are moments when the process fails. The meetings in Voices with a galaxy of the great, worthy and wise do seem a little fable-like and precious at times, as if the habit of writing down every conversation in progress, as a bemused André Gide points out to his young interviewer, had become a peculiar, voyeuristic tic.
But the center of gravity in Prokosch is his solipcism, which dispenses with any pretenses to writerly “relevance” to historical realities. Here, it is the quest of the writer that matters, nothing else. Thus, every vibrant encounter with other “voyagers” has a self-evident profundity. As Prokosch looks back to his childhood, we see Thomas Mann’s leonine head through his eyes, framed by misty hockey fields as he visits the Prokosch home (Prokosch’s father was a famous professor of Indo-European linguistics). We see, too, the young Frederick creeping up behind James Joyce at Sylvia Beach’s bookstore in Paris, noticing the grubby elegance and the mode of handling a teacup. Auden in a Turkish bath in New York looking like “a naked sea beast” with his “embarrassed-looking genitals,” Lady Cunard and Hemingway dueling it out in Paris to the thunder of Hemingway insights such as “There’s a pro and a con to Russia, as with all these fucking countries.” “There are three different kinds of happiness,” intones Peggy Guggenheim in one chapter, and proceeds to tell us what they are, though without much effect. In an excruciating interview with Virginia Woolf, the young American poet is made to feel flylike as he sits in a lugubrious room facing what must have been a withering and aloof stare, which nevertheless does not obscure her “exquisite beauty.” It is all part of a deliberately Twainlike peregrination overflowing with canny naïveté and acid detail.
Some of the most enjoyable episodes are those that deal with his hushed encounters with cultural high priests like F. R. Leavis and fellow lepidopterists like Nabokov. “Eliot?” snaps Leavis at high tea in Cambridge. “He is gratuitously and fortuitously obscure. Obscurity has been known to conceal an inner vacuity.” Nabokov we see in a darkened and gloomy Swiss hotel sitting mysteriously in a large armchair. “I felt a dark suspense, as though confronted by an oracle.” Nabokov tells him that he has tried to see the world through the eyes of an insect; they discuss the Agrias butterflies of the Amazon, the exile’s voice “stained by a harrowed anonymity,” and Prokosch tells of how he climbed a mountain in Corsica mentioned in a Nabokov book in order to pursue Europe’s rarest butterfly, the Papilio hospiton, the Corsican Swallowtail. The beast’s color, he observes quietly, is not quite that described by the brilliant stylist of Glory.
In this same passage, Nabokov tells Prokosch that “America is in a continual state of trance. Even the mountains and the forests have an air of the hallucinatory.” And that the artist is inevitably an exile, whether externally or internally being largely a matter of the complexion of each individual. “And the exiles end by despising the land of their exile.” For Prokosch too, perhaps above all, nostalgia, roaming quest, immersion in the hallucinatory pervade the writer’s inner air. As Nabokov settles in Lucerne, Prokosch gets a little house for himself in Grasse in southern France. “How glorious,” he writes, “to grow old!” Exile, oblivion and contentment consonant with an overwhelming recognition of the endlessness of all roads. A spirit of mystical spontaneity could demand nothing less.
In his preface to his early novel The Seven Who Fled, Prokosch tells how he came to imagine seven Western fugitives on the highroads of Asia, shadows who imprint their meanings “on the deserts of Asia like shapes on a film.” Coming out of “a marvellous dream” filled with burning mountains one night in 1935 in Mallorca, he looks down at the Bay of Alcudia “black as the fur of a yak” to see seven fishing boats with seven torches burning on the horizon. Some meaning, “a flaw in a twilit crystal,” sets his reverie in motion and he begins to walk along seven roads “in a fit of love.” The result is a typical Prokosch book: a fantasy of escape edged with the hardness of an eye which tirelessly hardens its otherworld with glass-bright imagery and sulphurous fear.
Do these peregrinations acted out with the pen and not the feet have the power to compete with those of Marco Polo or Bernal Diaz? We will not really know. It is clear only that Prokosch was himself one of those who fled, who sought “a mysterious and revelatory depth” on roads that can only be invented and who became as he went one of the rarest and most agile butterflies of an Amnesia which no longer collects.
Emily Dickinson. Daguerreotype, circa 1847. The Granger Collection, New York.
To Dickinson
Diane Williams
SERIOUSLY AND POLITELY I tell the story to persons of the loss of you.
It was good to see you. It was really good to see you. Oh, you are lucky.
If the pleasant world contains, as we hope it does, anything of lasting value, which was once mine, I believe you have it.
In anger, therefore, in anger, I send documents in the midst of this ritual as I tell the story of the loss of you. This is the delayed discovery of you somewhere mysterious here in New York City, then the disappearance of you again and again!—is it that you do not approve of me? That’s what I think.
I will not say anything bad about your rebellion. Your unceasing progress, your reforms, your improvements of every kind, in every way—you may be the best person who has ever lived.
Robert Duncan. Photograph by Jonathan Williams. Courtesy Robert Kelly.
Robert Duncan & The Right Time
Robert Kelly
1.
I AM LOOKING AT a picture. It is a large color photograph of Robert Duncan, and it came at just the right time. The right time is the deepest, most pervasive and (to me) the most salvific keynote of Duncan’s poetics. And Duncan’s instrumentality in the world.
> 2.
The right time. I had been asked to contribute to this assembly of memorials and témoignages, and three poets at once stood forth in my mind (like the past Masters of music who beautifully and eerily address Palestrina in Pfitzner’s great opera, at last to be done this very summer in New York).
Charles Olson. Robert Duncan. Paul Blackburn.
I thought and thought; to those three men I owe so much—stance and sense of work—both because of the fresh new way, dolce stil nuovo, they developed that renewed American poetry in the 1950s, and also because of life experiences in which they engaged me. They were masters for me, and very generous men. As it happened, I had just written a brief memorial of Blackburn for another journal, and wanted to rest with that a while, before writing a study of one of his early poems that stays in mind. I have long wanted to deal with Olson’s later poetry, talk about the way it connected with the man I knew, the talk I heard, the early work it fulfilled—I wanted to talk about the Olson of Volume III, but didn’t yet feel ready. But I felt it was the right time to talk about Robert Duncan; he stood clearest in my mind, and I wanted to thank him out loud.
3.
I am looking at a picture. It is a color photograph and shows Robert Duncan at the side of the picture, holding, not without a certain amusing awkwardness, a large painting. Duncan seems to be restraining himself from smiling, or his face seems in that mode half clairvoyant half giggling that anyone who knew him must remember as his—the face of Mrs. Maybe, maybe, or the playful spirit medium.
4.
The painting he holds is not shown completely, cut off by the photo’s iron rectangular habits. What we do see is plenty, though. It is Jess’s portrait of Robert’s mind—though that seems too pompous a way of describing this delicious registration of Items in the House: a portrait of Robert himself, younger, and looking more serious (youth is a serious business indeed), paintings, a bookcase, a candlestick in flame (shades of Arnolfini’s wedding—for this also is a portrait of the painter’s mind, the house, life, work he shared for so many years with Duncan, his life companion, and hence a portrait of their marriage, where the shy bride is present as the flesh of the painting itself—and no one has ever used impasto with such intimate, domestic sensuality as Jess has). A hanging Tiffany lampshade before a fragmentary window. A bowl of flowers on top of a bookcase, and some books arrayed: Pistis Sophia, the five volumes of The Zohar, two spines of the three volumes of Thrice Greatest Hermes.
5.
Pictures of pictures. And me looking at a photo of it. It or them? Jess has played, as ever, with the representation of representation. He who has made the greatest collages (in my guess) of our century, or sharing that grandeur only with Max Ernst, is delighted in his own paintings to play the same elaborate ludus—never condescending to trompe l’oeil— of image and representation, the one wrapped within the other, level upon level. His paintings, like Duncan’s poems (but just to breathe this, not to carry on about it), delight in embedding texts and references, the bibelots and hand-me-downs of a well-stocked mind. Redeeming the sparks of the Glory. G. R. S. Mead’s Thrice Greatest Hermes stands on the bookcase, the great turn of the century (that century) chrestomathy of the original Hermetic writings, translated and popularized by Mead, the celebrated Theosophist. It is ardent aspiration towards redemption of (or sometimes redemption through) the material world that animates such texts, and that will again and again occur in Duncan’s writings, from Mediaeval Scenes to the last measures of “The Regulators.”
6.
The right time. Forty years ago I was a young man persuaded of myself and my powers, and knew I could do wonders in poetry. At the time, I was caught up in all the last-gasp formalisms of the 1950s—pallid imitations of Hopkins, Eddie measures, Welsh meters, Auden, blank verse monologues. I felt a certain perverse pleasure in those things, but could smell as well as the next person the mouse-droppings on them, and see the dry pale moth take flight. Some vital spark was missing in the poets I liked and imitated, yet in the other contemporary work I got to see of an anti-formalist inclination, while I found some vigor, it was all yawp and coarse, scarcely deep-funded in the lore of poetry. For I wanted all things—the measure and the immoderate, the archaic trove of all high poetry but also the vivid “language of flesh and blood”—itself a phrase as old as Wordsworth. We keep repeating the same experiment, century after century. It’s clear we all and always need what I needed then—the archaic and the instantaneous, the moment no less than Merlin.
I began to do what I could, to work away from the habits I had learned, and see whether I could find some music in other ways. For all my reading I was terribly illiterate in what was actually happening. Then one day, at the right time, my friend Hugh Smith (himself a poet of the determinedly regular, anglophile, exalté) put into my hands a copy of a book by Jonathan Williams. The very title punned its way through my defenses: The Empire Finals at Verona. This was his Catullus, englished, updated, coarsened, lightened, but also refined, alert, vivid. It was the first book I had seen that suggested to me there was life in an American verse, an American language way. It was the right time.
And then I found—at that little drugstore on Sheridan Square—the small square book that came as close to being a best-seller as anything Duncan ever published: the City Lights edition of Robert Duncan’s Selected Poems. Then on David Ossman’s radio program “The Sullen Art,” I heard Duncan reading his “Poem Beginning With a Line by Pindar.” It struck me then and strikes me now as the richest enactment of poetry I had ever heard with my ears. By ear you could hear new measures of poetry discovering themselves, falling back into traditional metrics, rising into exaltations of formal Shelleyan, Shakespearean language, leveling out into broad powerful music of the sacred ordinary speech of living folk. You could actually hear verse stammer and give way to prose, hear prose in all its difference struggle back towards the towers of verse. It seemed a trove of antique power and a school for sense. Not just the luscious musics of the man, but a music that supported, revealed, exalted the operations of mind.
7.
For I had come to realize that the only gift the poet surely has is to disclose to a patient, quiet, often indifferent audience (the shape God takes in our time) the delicate, complex, total operations of the poet’s mind—and that articulation of knowing is the only music worth attending to. This is what Duncan seemed to be about, and why the “narcissism” and “self-involvement” (that I found people were always quick to blame him for as person and poet) were in fact mere negative labels for an absolutely essential concentration, by the poet, on the only universe the poet truly has to study, observe, report from and come back singing.
8.
What else does the poet have? The world the poet shares with the audience is expressly words. And only by studying the “tones given off by the heart” can the poet have anything worth reporting, worth taking our time. And that is where Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, so utterly different, yet always for me an “ordered pair,” represent the immense possibilities that their masters—Stein, Pound, Lawrence, Williams—had so variously opened.
9.
So there was this Duncan, suddenly, and I realized that (it sounds so dumb to say it, so true, the experience we all have if we are lucky) I was not alone. This man, so unlike me in all his social gesture, his sexual orientation, his sense of order, his poise, his grace—this man was the closest to what I always knew it was possible to become: a poet for whom the old great tradition was still alive, but who still knew the rainy light of Hollywood and the smell of buses, the pervasive, inescapable twist of the beloved through all the day’s conduct, all the chambers of the visual. Who did not busy himself forging fake antiques but allowed the vigor of the old music to hold sway in his mind until he could hear himself think. Who was founding—or was it finding—(who can really ever tell them apart, bird or oboe, tree leaves or rushing water?) our colloquial eloquence.
10.
The right tim
e. I sat down this morning to start writing this homage to my dear friend Robert Duncan. I read the news, and the news told me that the princely Thurn-und-Taxis family was selling their castle at Duino on the Adriatic coast, the castle where Rilke wrote the Elegies. How shocked I was! Not that the family is selling it, but that the castle is actually there, actually surviving. That a castle of the mind is also an object of Italian real estate. That the world exists at all is always the strangest news. That there is, or seems to be, something there when I finally get around to opening my lazy eyes.
11.
I sat down to write about Duncan and stared at the picture. A few days ago, Jonathan Williams (whom I got to know years after The Empire Finals) and Tom Meyer, whose creative union has been a wonder of the commonwealth for thirty years, and whose friendship has been my delight, paid me a visit. They were carrying a red cat from Carolina to Vermont—fit employment for poets in any age. I told them that I had been invited to write this piece, and asked them what they thought. A blessing, I guess I wanted, some kind of go-ahead. I always seem to be asking for permission. Here was I, persistently heterosexual, trying to write a decent homage to the greatest poet I had known, a poet who insisted on being identified as a homosexual, and on locating in his elaborate and excited sexuality the wellsprings of his work. I suppose I was asking them for an idea. Like Mary Baker Eddy, I believe that the real angels are good ideas. Ideas that teach us to go on. To go new.
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