Reliable Essays (21 page)

There are other narrative poems by Wilson but they lack the transforming discipline of the couplet. Similarly he has other strong subjects – especially sex – but as with most revelations their interest has become with time more historical than aesthetic. Yet other poems are full of named things, but the names deafen the vision. Three different kinds of deficiency, all of them interesting.

The first deficiency is mainly one of form. Wilson’s narrative poems are an attempt at public verse which certainly comes off better than comparable efforts by more recognized American poets. Nobody now could wade through Robinson Jeffers’
Roan Stallion
, for example. Wilson’s ‘The Good Neighbour’ is the story of Mr and Mrs Pritchard, who become obsessed with defending their house against invaders. Wilson guards against portentousness by casting the tale in hudibrastics, but the results, though very readable, are less popular than cute. The technique is too intrusive. Another narrative, ‘The Woman, the War Veteran and the Bear’, is an outrageous tale of a legless trapeze artist and a girl who married beneath her. It is full of interesting social detail but goes on too long: a glorified burlesque number that should have been a burlesque number. The stanzas are really ballad stanzas, but the poem wants to be more than a ballad. ‘Lesbia in Hell’ is better, but again the hudibrastics are the wrong form: they hurry you on too fast for thought and leave you feeling that the action has been skimped. Doubly a pity, because the theme of Satan falling in love with Lesbia involves Wilson in one of his most deeply felt subjects – sexual passion.

It still strikes the historically minded reader that
Note-Books of Night
is a remarkably sexy little book for its time. Wilson, we should remember, had a share in pioneering the sexual frankness of our epoch.
Memoirs of Hecate County
was a banned book in Australia when I was young. Wilson lived long enough to deplore pornographic licence but never went back on his liberal determination to speak of things as they were. Poems like ‘Home to Town: Two Highballs’ convey something of the same clinical realism about sex which made Wilson’s prose fiction extraordinary and which still gives it better than documentary importance. In
Memoirs of Hecate County
Wilson drew a lasting distinction between the high society lady, who appealed to the narrator’s imagination but left his body cold, and the lowborn taxi-dancer who got on his nerves but fulfilled him sexually. The chippie seems to be there again in ‘Two Highballs’.

Paul Dehn, mentioning this passage when the poem was reprinted in
Night Thoughts
, found it ridiculous, but I don’t see why we should agree. Wilson’s attempts at a bitter urban poetry—

are at least as memorable, and certainly as frank about experience, as the contorted flights of Hart Crane. Of Crane, when I search my memory, I remember the seal’s wide spindrift gaze towards Paradise and the bottles wearing him in crescents on their bellies. There were things Crane could do that Wilson couldn’t – the wine talons, the sublime notion of travelling in a tear – but on the whole Wilson did at least as good a job of reporting the city. And in matters of sex he was more adventurous than anybody – ahead of his time, in fact.

But if you are ahead of your time only in your subject, then eventually you will fall behind the times, overtaken by the very changes in taste you helped engender. So it is with Wilson’s sexual poetry: all the creativity goes into the act of bringing the subject up, with no powers of invention left over for the task of transforming it into the permanence of something imagined. Ideally, Wilson’s sexual themes should have been a natural part of a larger poetic fiction. But as we see in ‘Copper and White’ (not present in
Note-Books of Night
, but
Night Thoughts
usefully adds it to the canon) what they tended to blend with was greenery-yallery
fin de sìecle
lyricism.

It is as if Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson had been asked to versify Edith Wharton’s discovery of passion as revealed in her secret manuscript
Beatrice Palmato
. The very tones of out-of-dateness. But the informing idea – of loneliness in love – is still alive. It should have been the poem’s field of exploration, but Wilson was content to arrive at the point where his much admired Proust began. Wilson was protective about his selfhood, as major artists never can be.

As to the naming of names – well, he overdid it. Great poetry is always full of things, but finally the complexity of detail is subordinated to a controlling simplicity. Wilson wrote some excellent nature poetry but nature poetry it remains: all the flowers are named but the point is seldom reached when it ceases to matter so much what kind of flowers they are. In ‘At Laurelwood’, one of the prose pieces in
Note-Books of Night
, he talks of how his grandfather and grandmother helped teach him the names of everyday objects. His range of knowledge is one of the many marvellous things about Wilson. In poems like ‘Provincetown, 1936’ he piled on the detail to good effect:

But in the long run not even concrete facts were a sufficient antidote to the poetry of Beauty. Humour was a better safeguard. On the whole, it is the satirical verse which holds up best among Wilson’s work. Quite apart from the classic ‘The Omelet of A. MacLeish’, there are ‘The Extrovert of Walden Pond’ with its
trouvé
catchphrase ‘Thoreau was a neuro’ and ‘The Playwright in Paradise’, a minatory ode to the writers of his generation which borrows lines from ‘Adonais’ to remind them that in Beverly Hills their talents will die young. In these poems Wilson’s critical intelligence was at work. If he had possessed comic invention to match his scornful parodic ear, he might have equalled even E. E. Cummings. But ‘American Masterpieces’ (which makes its only appearance in
Night Thoughts
) shows what Cummings had that Wilson hadn’t: in mocking the clichés of Madison Avenue, Wilson can win your allegiance, but Cummings can make you laugh. At the last, Wilson’s jokes are not quite funny enough in themselves – they don’t take off into the selfsustaining Empyrean of things you can’t help reciting. His humour, like his frankness, ought ideally to have been part of a larger fiction.

Useless to carp. A minor artist Wilson remains. But it ought to be more generally realized that he was a very good minor artist, especially in his poetry. Of course,
Night Thoughts
didn’t help. Inflated with juvenilia and senescent academic graffiti even duller than Auden’s, the book blurred the outlines of Wilson’s achievement – although even here it should be noted that its closing poem, ‘The White Sand’, is one of Wilson’s most affecting things, a despairing celebration of late love so deeply felt that it almost overcomes the sense of strain generated by the internally-rhymed elegiacs in which it is cast.

What has worked most damagingly against Wilson’s reputation as a poet, however, is his reputation as a critic. It is hard to see how things could be otherwise. As a critical mind, Wilson is so great that we have not yet taken his full measure. He is still so prominent as to be invisible: people think they can know what he said without having to read him. When he is read again, it will soon be found that he saw both sides of most of the arguments which continue to rage about what literature is or ought to be. Among these arguments is the one about modern poetry and its audience. Nobody was more sympathetic than Wilson to the emergence of a difficult, hermetic poetry or better-equipped to understand its origins. But equally he was able to keep the issue in perspective. First of all, his standards were traditional in the deepest sense: knowing why Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare and Pushkin were permanently modern, he knew why most of modern poetry was without the value it claimed for itself. Secondly, he had an unconquerable impulse towards community. All his writings are an expression of it, including his verse. He would have liked to read fully intelligible works while living in an ordered society. As things turned out, the works he admired were not always fully intelligible and the society he lived in was not ordered. But at least in his own creative writings, such as they were, he could try to be clear. So his poems are as they are, and the best of them last well.

1977: previously included in
At the Pillars of Hercules
, 1979

Postscript

Edmund Wilson is a city, of which his poetry is only an outer suburb, but with a direct subway line to the downtown district. When I was young he filled a lot of my sky. Later on – and partly through following up the trails of reading he had opened to me – I found that not even so voracious a mind as his could take in the whole world. Politically he was an isolationist by temperament, with Marxist overtones: two different ways of getting things wrong both working at once to undermine his social commentary. (
Europe Without Baedeker
was enough to prove that he had barely understood even World War II.) After his death, the diary volumes kept on coming out: reminiscence packaged by the decade, their unsympathetic streak made him look steadily less monumental. Perhaps that was his original plan in writing them at all: a kind of edifying self-sabotage. If so, it was too successful. Wilson began to disappear, buried under his own books. I hated to see it happen. When his name was minimized at a literary lunch table, I always made a point of recommending
The Shores of Light
and
Classics and Commercials
as the books that gave you the essential man, who was essentially a critic. The way he would learn a new language, forge on into a new literature – the fearless gusto of his approach still seems to me the finest example in modern times of what a critic should have by nature, the quality that the mighty philologist Menendez Pidal called a spontaneous yearning after the totality of knowledge. The totality can’t be had, of course: but the yearning can.

Even in that department, however, Wilson had his blind spots, and at least one of them was disabling. It was all very well for him to say that he had never ‘got around’ to reading
Middlemarch
: George Eliot had enough admirers not to need the endorsement. But he was shamefully feckless in not bothering to learn Spanish. He could hardly plead that he didn’t have the time: though learning Hebrew – a hard nut to crack – might have brought results, did Hungarian really repay the effort? He could have mastered Spanish with a tenth of the sweat, but he thought there was nothing to read. (Mercifully Cervantes was no longer around to hear him say so.) Thus the whole story of what was going on in Latin America in his lifetime – a story whose political aspects alone, by the target they offered, would have suited his isolationist convictions down to the ground – escaped him, and we lost the clarifying intelligence he might have brought to it. There was also the story of how the writers in the Spanish homeland reacted to the bountifully accumulating literary achievement in the Americas. He would have found Unamuno a man after his own heart, and would have been able to contend with Ortega’s critical writings on the level at which they were composed, with a poet’s judgement of weight and balance. For Wilson, Spanish was the road not taken. But the roads he took are enough to be going on with, and poetry was one of them. Not many full-time poets write even one poem that will live. Wilson’s verse tribute to Scott Fitzgerald still brings at least one reader to the point of tears with its opening line: ‘Scott, your last fragments I arrange tonight . . .’ Prosaic perhaps; forgettable never.

2001

British Airways were justifiably proud of getting your correspondent to Rome only three hours behind schedule. After all, Heathrow had been in the grip of those freak snow conditions which traditionally leave Britain stunned with surprise.

In England, British Rail loudspeakers had been smugly announcing prolonged delays due to locomotives coming into contact with inexplicable meteorological phenomena, such as heaps of water lying around in frozen form. Airport officials were equally flabbergasted to discover more of the same stuff falling out of the sky. But now my staunch Trident was leaving all that behind. In a dark but clear midnight, Rome lay below. Those strings of lights were roads all leading to the same place.

All my previous visits to the Eternal City had been done on the cheap. In those days I was still travelling on the weird escape routes frequented by students. Some of the students turned out to be eighty-year-old Calabrian peasant ladies carrying string bags full of onions. The charter aircraft belonged to semi-scheduled airlines whose pilots wore black eyepatches and First World War medals. Their point of arrival was Ciampino, Rome’s no. 2 airport – an inglorious military establishment ringed with flat-tyred DC-4s and Convair 240s too obsolete for anything except fire drill.

I used to live in the kind of cold-water
pensione
on the Via del Corso where the original rooms had been partitioned not only vertically but horizontally as well, so that the spiral staircase beside your bed led up to a bare ceiling. You had to apply in writing to take a bath. Lunch was half a plate of pasta on the other side of the Tiber. Dinner was the other half.