Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, Collaborations With Artists, and Interviews (61 page)

and I wish to God he would fall down

and break his neck.

I just hate him.

I just shiver when he touches me.”

“Andy, I am going to write a letter that may seem

hardhearted:

you know that I do not love you

as I should

and I know that I never can.

Don’t you think it best

to give me a divorce?

If you do,

I will not have to sell the house in Denver

that you gave me,

and I will give you back the ranch in Delta.

After we are divorced,

if you care for me and I care for you,

we will marry again. Polly.”

*

Jessie was eleven years old, though some said fourteen,

and had the care of a child

just beginning to walk—

and suddenly pulled off the child’s diaper

and sat the child in some hot ashes

where she had been cooking ash cakes;

the child screamed

and she smacked it on the jaw.

It would be difficult for a poet to make himself more invisible than Reznikoff does in this book. To find a comparable approach to the real, one would have to go back to the great prose writers of the turn of the century. As in Chekhov or in early Joyce, the desire is to allow events to speak for themselves, to choose the exact detail that will say everything and thereby allow as much as possible to remain unsaid. This kind of restraint paradoxically requires an openness of spirit that is available to very few: an ability to accept the given, to remain a witness of human behavior and not succumb to the temptation of becoming a judge.

The success of
Testimony
becomes all the more striking when placed beside
Holocaust
, a far less satisfying work that is based on many of the same techniques. Using as his sources the US Government publication,
Trials of the Criminals before the Nuremberg Tribunal
, and the records of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Reznikoff attempts to deal with Germany’s annihilation of the Jews in the same dispassionate, documentary style with which he had explored the human dramas buried in American court records. The problem, I think, is one of magnitude. Reznikoff is a master of the everyday; he understands the seriousness of small events and has an uncanny sympathy with the lives of ordinary people. In a work such as
Testimony
he is able to present us with the facts in a way that simultaneously makes us understand them; the two gestures are inseparable. In the case of
Holocaust
, however, we all know the facts in advance. The Holocaust, which is precisely the unknowable, the unthinkable, requires a treatment beyond the facts in order for us to be able to understand it — assuming that such a thing is even possible. Similar in approach to a 1960s play by Peter Weiss,
The Investigation
, Reznikoff’s poem rigorously refuses to pass judgment on any of the atrocities it describes. But this is nevertheless a false objectivity, for the poem is not saying to the reader, “decide for yourself,” it is saying that the decision has already been made and that the only way we can deal with these things is to remove them from their inherently emotional setting. The problem is that we cannot remove them. This setting is a necessary starting point.

Holocaust
is instructive, however, in that it shows us the limits of Reznikoff’s work. I do not mean shortcomings — but limits, those things that set off and describe a space, that create a world. Reznikoff is essentially a poet of
naming
. One does not have the sense of a poetry immersed in language but rather of something that takes place before language and comes to fruition at the precise moment language has been discovered — and it yields a style that is pristine, fastidious, almost stiff in its effort to say exactly what it means to say. If any one word can be used to describe Reznikoff’s work, it would be humility — toward language and also toward himself.

I am afraid

because of the foolishness

I have spoken.

I must diet

on silence;

strengthen myself

with quiet.

It could not have been an easy life for Reznikoff. Throughout the many years he devoted to writing poetry (his first poems were published in 1918, when he was twenty-four, and he went on publishing until his death in early 1976), he suffered from a neglect so total it was almost scandalous. Forced to bring out most of his books in private editions (many of them printed by himself), he also had to fight the constant pressures of making a living.

After I had worked all day at what I earn my living

I was tired. Now my own work has lost another day,

I thought, but began slowly,

and slowly my strength came back to me.

Surely, the tide comes in twice a day. 

It was not until he was in his late sixties that Reznikoff began to receive some measure of recognition. New Directions published a book of his selected poems,
By The Waters of Manhattan
, which was followed a few years later by the first volume of
Testimony
. But in spite of the success of these two books — and a growing audience for his works — New Directions saw fit to drop Reznikoff from its list of authors. More years passed. Then, in 1974, Black Sparrow Press brought out
By The Well of Living & Seeing: New & Selected Poems 1918 –1973
. More importantly, it committed itself to the long overdue project of putting all of Reznikoff’s work back into print. Under the intelligent and sensitive editing of Seamus Cooney, the sequence so far includes the two volumes of
Complete Poems, Holocaust, The Manner Music
(a posthumous novel), the first two volumes of
Testimony
, and will go on to include more volumes of
Testimony
and a book of
Collected Plays
.

If Reznikoff lived his life in obscurity, there was never the slightest trace of resentment in his work. He was too proud for that, too busy with the work itself to be overly concerned with its fate in the world. Even if people are slow to listen to someone who speaks quietly, he knew that eventually he would be heard.

Te Deum

Not because of victories

I sing,

having none,

but for the common sunshine,

the breeze,

the largess of the spring.

Not for victory

but for the day’s work done

as well as I was able;

not for a seat upon the dais

but at the common table.

1974; 1976; 1978

2. “
IT REMINDS ME OF SOMETHING
THAT ONCE HAPPENED TO MY MOTHER …”

In 1974, I was invited by Anthony Rudolf to contribute an article to the London magazine,
European Judaism
, for an issue celebrating Charles Reznikoff’s eightieth birthday. I had been living in France for the past four years, and the little piece I sent in on Reznikoff’s work was the first thing I wrote after coming back to America. It seemed like a fitting way to mark my return.

I moved into an apartment on Riverside Drive in late summer. After finishing the article, I discovered that Reznikoff lived very near by—on West End Avenue—and sent him a copy of the manuscript, along with a letter asking him if it would be possible for us to meet. Several weeks went by without a response.

On a Sunday in early October I was to be married. The ceremony was scheduled to take place in the apartment at around noon. At eleven o’clock, just moments before the guests were due to arrive, the telephone rang and an unfamiliar voice asked to speak to me. “This is Charles Reznikoff,” the voice said, in a sing-song tone, looping ironically and with evident good humor. I was, of course, pleased and flattered by the call, but I explained that it would be impossible for me to talk just now. I was about to be married, and I was in no condition to form a coherent sentence. Reznikoff was highly amused by this and burst out laughing. “I never called a man on his wedding day before!” he said. “Mazel tov, mazel tov!” We arranged to meet the following week at his apartment. Then I hung up the phone and marched off to the altar.

Reznikoff’s apartment was on the twenty-second floor of a large building complex, with a broad, uncluttered view of the Hudson and sunlight pouring through the windows. I arrived in the middle of the day, and with a somewhat stale crumb cake set before me and numerous cups of coffee to drink, I wound up staying three or four hours. The visit made such an impression on me that even now, almost a decade later, it is entirely present inside me.

I have met some good story-tellers in my life, but Reznikoff was the champion. Some of his stories that day went on for thirty or forty minutes, and no matter how far he seemed to drift from the point he was supposedly trying to make, he was in complete control. He had the patience that is necessary to the telling of a good story—and the ability to savor the least detail that cropped up along the way. What at first seemed to be an endless series of digressions, a kind of aimless wandering, turned out to be the elaborate and systematic construction of a circle. For example: why did you come back to New York after living in Hollywood? There followed a myriad of little incidents: meeting the brother of a certain man on a park bench, the color of someone’s eyes, an economic crisis in some country. Fifteen minutes later, just when I was beginning to feel hopelessly lost—and convinced that Reznikoff was lost, too—he would begin a slow return to his starting point. Then, with great clarity and conviction, he would announce: “So that’s why I left Hollywood.” In retrospect, it all made perfect sense.

I heard stories about his childhood, his aborted career in journalism, his law studies, his work for his parents as a jobber of hats and how he would write poems on a bench at Macy’s while waiting his turn to show the store buyer his samples. There were also stories about his walks—in particular, his journey from New York to Cape Cod (on foot!), which he undertook when he was well past sixty. The important thing, he explained, was not to walk too fast. Only by forcing himself to keep to a pace of less than two miles per hour could he be sure to see everything he wanted to see.

On my visit that day, I brought along for him a copy of my first book of poems,
Unearth
, which had just been published. This evoked a story from Reznikoff that strikes me as significant, especially in the light of the terrible neglect his work suffered for so many years. His first book, he told me, had been published in 1918 by Samuel Roth (who would later become famous for pirating
Ulysses
and his role in the 1933 court case over Joyce’s book). The leading American poet of the day was Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Reznikoff had sent him a copy of the book, hoping for some sign of encouragement from the great man. One afternoon Reznikoff was visiting Roth in his bookstore, and Robinson walked in. Roth went over to greet him, and Reznikoff, standing in the back corner of the shop, witnessed the following scene. Roth proudly gestured to the copies of Reznikoff’s book that were on display and asked Robinson if he had read the work of this fine young poet. “Yeah, I read the book,” said Robinson in a gruff, hostile voice, “and I thought it was garbage.”

“And so,” said Reznikoff to me in 1974, “I never got to meet Edwin Arlington Robinson.”

It was not until I was putting on my coat and getting ready to leave that Reznikoff said anything about the piece I had sent him. It had been composed in an extremely dense and cryptic style, wrestling with issues that Reznikoff himself had probably never consciously thought about, and I had no idea what his reaction would be. His silence about it during our long conversation led me to suspect that he had not liked it.

“About your article,” he said, almost off-handedly. “It reminds me of something that once happened to my mother. A stranger walked up to her on the street one day and very kindly and graciously complimented her on her beautiful hair. Now, you must understand that my mother had never prided herself on her hair and did not consider it to be one of her better features. But, on the strength of that stranger’s remark, she spent the rest of the day in front of her mirror, preening and primping and admiring her hair. That’s exactly what your article did to me. I stood in front of the mirror for the whole afternoon and admired myself.”