Narcissism, American Style

When I was a kid, a spring scale stood in every airport and railroad station waiting room. Two coin slots—penny and nickel or nickel and dime—invited the traveler to learn his weight or, for a fee, his “Wate and Fate.” I didn’t trust machines or prophets even then, so I never tempted fate and tried the larger coin. Even now, I wonder if fatter people got different fortunes from those light on the scales. More than likely the scales were, like a fortune cookie, blind to the reader.

Because he can only be in one place at one time, and because his works if not himself have to inspire some kind of love, an author can ill afford to be blind to the other.

And what is an author? In the minds of many he is a romantic figure, inspiring envy. An actor/director told me that writers were lucky, because all they needed to work was a pencil and paper. He later struck gold writing parodies of mail-order catalogues. For other people, authors are fortunate because they don’t have bosses, because they are doing what they want to do, because they get to hang around the house, because they set their own schedule. The literary life is blessed with whatever you can imagine as someone else’s freedom.

Success does not mean that the writer is at one with self and career. It’s hard to say just what a successful poet would be, although it is easy to figure out why poets aren’t happy once their youth is spent. They’ve got to wonder what it all was for, when for everyone else the answer is easy: money. After helping John Ashbery home from a party for Harold Brodkey several years back, Robert Atwan told me, “It’s no fun being the poet at the novelists’ party.” Unlike novelists, poets (at least in this century) are always out of office. Poetry has no place or natural occasion in public discourse except the poetry reading, the prize ceremony, the inaugural. The late Meyer Schapiro once remarked that uselessness was poetry’s greatest strength, because it could only be done for God.

Why a prosperous novelist would turn to poetry is a harder question. Maybe it’s bravado, the “I can do anything” state of mind. But how much pleasure can be taken when those poems made it into print only because they were paid for in advance, with prose? How else to explain John Updike’s poems, for example, which have all the polish and none of the urgency of his larger fictions. They exist by grace of his stories and essays. Tom Disch is nowhere near as famous as Updike but easier to account for. His formal verse is an instrument of literary criticism and public discourse that exceeds most critical prose in sensibility and delight. Paul Auster turned out several volumes of hermetic poems in the French manner, but that was before he wrote his celebrated mysteries. Ford Madox Ford composed poems;

so did Herman Melville. G. K. Chesterton penned religious verse. D. H. Lawrence’s Big Bertha volume of collected poetry is pretty good, but it rides on top of Lady Chatterly’s Lover.

Kenneth Koch once told a class of undergraduates at Columbia University that the difference between prose and poetry was like the difference betwen men and women: if you couldn’t tell, then it didn’t matter. Novelists have larger egos than poets, who have to contend with the fact that they are an embarrassment and reproach to most everybody. Where novelists under contract produce hundreds of thousands of words, poets work against what Marianne Moore called their natural reticence. A long poem is 1,000 lines. A long novel, 1,000 pages.

*April*
National Poetry Month

There’s a moment in The Armies of the Night when Norman Mailer catches sight of Robert Lowell. He pays Lowell homage as poet, which, on Mailer’s literary scale, is higher than a writer of prose. Novelists may be Promethean, but they still would like to steal the gods’, the poets’ fire. Prose is a strategy, poetry is a position. Established novelists who write poetry are like movie stars who really want to direct. Like mafiosi making large gifts to the church, they seek an esteem without price.

Which brings me to Reynolds Price’s Collected Poems, a 472-page volume beautifully designed and printed by Scribner. Price’s early novels made a splash in the 1960s, and he has continued to publish well-reviewed novels and story collections in the 30 years since. I’m not familiar with them. After plowing through the poems, I feel overfamiliar with their author.

Written as a kind of personal journal, largely unrevised, and arranged in a large outline that implies order if not development, the poems present their writer as the hero of his own David and Christ stories, as lover, as teacher, as imitator and taster and tester of life. They recall his public achievements and his intimate encounters. Reading the poems as a reviewer (who had to read them all) was like being trapped in a cross-country express train with a stranger who felt compelled to tell every detail of his past, his loves, his appetites, his illnesses, his dreams—and thinks that’s art.

Now, if personality and poetry are the same thing (and I don’t think they are), then there’s no place for criticism or even discussion, because there’s no art, only gabble. And if there is no art, only soliloquy, how can one account for anybody’s poetry? Opportunity? Obligation? Politics? Friendship? Whatever the rationale, the works can only be an imposition and their publication an aspect of tyrrany.

Based on the models Price chooses to imitate—Hšlderlin, Rilke, Baudelaire, Catullus, Valery—he and I share a taste in lyric poets, but little else. His lapses in literary decorum, as when he has Joseph say of Mary (in “Reparation”)

That her body, small for her age though sturdy,

Was an adequate hive for making the boy

I’d failed to make on my late dry wife

or when in “Jonathan’s Lament for David,” the mourning friend recalls the young David as … rank with the first wild

Stench of manhood roasting your fork

veer wildly between improbable euphemism and purple prose. Price confuses himself with his subject and lingers over his relish like a person dwelling at length upon his food. Thinking too much about food can ruin a person’s appetite.

The Collected Poemsby Reynolds Price Scribner 472 pp.; $37.50, hardcover

I have other problems with this book, but they boil down to this: even the better written poems (and in the last 150 pages or so, they are better written in some creative-writing sense) never once lift their eyes from the mirror, or lower down, to suggest anything beyond intoxication with the self.

Possibly the unfettered freedom of expression granted to writers in the United States can weigh against the horrors of the twentieth century. But does it balance? And repression has been known to excite envy of those who are not its objects. Before he ascended to the papacy, Karel Wojtyla paid an informal visit to New York City, and the Polish Embassy asked the novelist Jerzy Kosinski to show their cardinal the sights.

Kosinski, who lived in a white building on the south side of West 57th Street, used to stop and chat with the Polish news vendor at the kiosk outside Kosinski’s apartment entrance. The author of The Painted Bird and Being There introduced the future John Paul II to the immigrant newsie, who, eager to praise liberty and his adopted country, invited the cardinal to survey the wealth of magazines on sale at his stand. These naturally included a slick journal for every body part, and human taste, and practice.

“Isn’t it wonderful,” asked the capitalist. “In America we have the freedom to sell everything. No one can tell me what to read. You can’t do that in Poland.”

The prelate smiled and walked on with Kosinski. “Yes, thank God. In Poland, the Communists take care of that.”

Laurance Wieder’s selected poems are gathered in The Last Century. He is the editor of The Poets’ Book of Psalms (HarperSanFrancisco) and, with Robert Atwan, Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible (Oxford University Press).