Cultural Amnesia (24 page)

One night in Florence in the early eighties, my wife and I accompanied Contini to the opera. He was
already pretty frail by then and you got the sense that he was choosing his remaining nights out for their concentration of the qualities: nothing was being left to chance. He had certainly
judged well that night. The opera was
Adriana Lecou vreur
, conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni. For Contini as for his friend Eugenio Montale, Gavazzeni was
the ideal maestro. After the performance it was raining so heavily that Contini accepted a lift home, with my wife at the wheel of our worn-out Mini. He was in the front passenger seat and I was
folded in the back. They talked scholarly stuff. As a
continiana
of impeccable credentials, my wife was well qualified for the colloquy, but she was no
better than anyone else at driving blind. The rain was so heavy that we ended up going the wrong way. I remembered, and recited, a tag from Dante:
Ché la
diritta via era smarrita.
Because the right way had been lost. Contini smiled from ear to ear, and when I added my regrets that I hadn’t written the line myself, he laughed aloud. My
timing hadn’t been
that
good, but the pedagogue had been pleased to the depths of his soul. This was what he had been in business to do all his life:
spread the word about culture across cultures. And one of his aesthetic beliefs, acquired as an inheritance from Croce, was that Dante had been in business to do the same. It was the universal
conversation, conducted through memory, and it had happened right there beside the Arno, in the dying echo of the music.

Though it can be overdone, there is nothing like a trading of quotations for bringing cultivated people together, or for
making you feel uncultivated if you have nothing to trade. Nowadays very few people can quote from the Greek or would think to impress anyone if they could, and even quoting from the
Latin—still a universal recognition system in the learned world when I was young—is now discouraged. Quoting from the standard European languages is still permissible at a suitably
polyglot dinner table: I was once at a dinner in Hampstead with Josef Brodsky when we both ended up standing on restaurant chairs clobbering each other with alexandrines. If the audience (they
had started off as our dinner companions, but had grown resigned to being an audience) had been mainly monoglot, the performance would
have been less forgivable. But even if
all present understand only English—even if the day comes when the whole world understands only English—memorized poetry would still be the surest way of signalling a love of
language.

The proof that the English critic Frank Kermode and the Australian poet Peter Porter inhabit the same
mental world—the same civilized tradition and the same literature—is in the treasure chamber of memorized poetry that each carries with him, in the number of valuable items that each
gazofilacio
holds in common with the other. Either of them could supply the next line to any poem by Auden or Empson or Wallace Stevens that the other
quoted. It is on the basis of such universally shared memories that a generation builds its range of allusion. One of the most conspicuous differences between the British and American literary
worlds is that the American periodical editors discourage the assumption of a range of allusion shared by the readership, even when they themselves—the editors—do share it. The
American editors are not necessarily wrong to have their eye on democracy. There is such a thing as putting the frame of reference at a height where preciousness drives out plain sense. Before
World War II, learning poetry by heart was a requirement in American schools. Steadily, between 1945 and 1960, that requirement vanished from the culture, as far as the common run of pupils was
concerned. But the uncommon run, those interested in literature, remained; and on the whole it is surely better if writers and editors can trust the reader to be as well informed as they are. In
English, a general familiarity with the poetic heritage ought not to be too much to assume. After all, no language in the world is as richly blessed.

It certainly ought not to be too much to assume among poets. But sometimes you wonder. The only thing I have to say
against most modern poetry is that so much of it avoids all verse conventions without rising to the level of decent prose. Decent prose has a rhythmic pulse which, if it comes in the first
instance as a gift, must be schooled to attain reliability, and there is no way to school it except to take in the rhythmic resources of the language as they have already been discovered by the
poets over the course of centuries. By reading and memorizing their predecessors, the poets are set free from the standardized contemporary patterns in which meaning is bonded to syntactic forms.
They might not even especially remember what someone once said. What they remember is the pace and lilt of how he said it: what they retain is more likely to be a rhythmic
measure than a paraphrasable expression. In this manner, a poet studies his own language as if it were a foreign one. Eliot found out a lot from Donne because Donne was more foreign to him than
Shakespeare: the lines and phrases went in directions he did not expect and could not predict. When Eliot said that good poetry in a foreign language could communicate before it was understood,
he probably meant, or meant at least partly, that the movement in the lines of the French poets after Victor Hugo was opening up new patterns to him in his own language. (Dr. Leavis, through
being reasonable for once, thoroughly misunderstood Eliot’s seeming preference for Dante over Shakespeare, and said that Eliot had underestimated what Shakespeare had to offer him. Eliot
would have agreed that Shakespeare had a lot to offer, but might have said that only a foreign writer can offer you a lesson in how your own language is put together at a deep level.)

Reading Shelley, you can see that in the last of his few allotted years he had saturated his rhythmic
sense with the forms of Dante and Petrarch. He doesn’t echo their meanings: he echoes their structures. Similarly, Racine absorbed the structures of Latin poetry; and it is a nice question
whether he is closer to Catullus, some of whose lines he mirrors property for property, than to Virgil, whom he does not materially transpose so much as imitate in his pulse and balance. These
sonic templates, as they might be called, are transferable through time even when an instigator is unknown to a beneficiary. Dante gets effects from Virgil that Virgil got from Homer, but if we
didn’t know that Virgil had come in between, we would have to swear that Dante knew the Homeric poems intimately, whereas he couldn’t, in fact, read them. It is doubtful whether
poets, in order to know each other at this level, need to set out to memorize poems. The memorizing comes automatically with the intensity of engagement. And so, ideally, it ought to do with all
of us. We memorize something because we can’t help it, and the thing we memorize was written with that result in mind. Poetry is written the way it is in order to be remembered.

It can’t always be remembered precisely, which is still the best reason for writing it down. Robert Robinson, one of
the last of the
over-qualified presenters to grace BBC television in its best years, once contributed to a BBC2 TV programme about Auden (those were the days) with a recital
of “The Fall of Rome.” Reviewing the programme, I could tell that Robinson had recited the poem from memory. In the most beautiful stanza of one of the most beautiful poems in modern
literature, the stanza about the reindeer that, “altogether elsewhere,” move across the golden moss, Robinson said “run” instead of “move.” The misquotation
illustrated our common habit of literalism, which will often, in the memory, substitute a concretely specific word just when the poet wants to be abstractly vague. (Auden himself worked against
the tendency when a misprint in proof gave him “the ports,” instead of “the poets,” having “names for the sea.” He found the mistake more interesting, and let
it stand.) It seems a fair guess that the capacity to remember always entails a certain amount of adaptation to set mental patterns. Robinson had made his error out of a trick played by
familiarity. I twitted him about it in my column, and when we next met he told me that he had at first not believed that he could have made a mistake about something he knew so well, but that he
had looked it up and been mortified to find out that he had got it wrong. The excellence of his memory had caught him out.

Leaving aside the occasional freak cursed with total recall, a good memory is in the possession of a personality, not of a
machine, and personalities impose their own perceptions, altering their recollection of even the most cherished things in order to fit inner critieria. Italo Calvino traces the process
enchantingly in his book
Why Read the Classics?
Impeccably translated by Martin McLaughlin,
Why Read the Classics?
is
not only the best single book for approaching Calvino, but might well be the best single book for approaching the whole idea of reading for pleasure at a high level. One could praise the
book’s virtues for pages on end, but perhaps the best way to demonstrate them would be to single out the first of its two essays on Eugenio Montale. In that essay, Calvino shows why, as a
student, he found Montale’s poetry impossible not to memorize—and also shows why it was hard to memorize accurately. The reader’s mind has its expectations, which the poet will
play upon in order to defeat. Somewhere in that interplay of expectation and contrary strategy is the reason that scholarship had to evolve the principle of
lectio
dif ficilior
—the idea that in any crux, the more difficult reading is likelier to be the true one. Calvino’s reminiscences about the workings of his own
memory—remember that I have remembered—have many implications, but the one we need to make explicit here, for the benefit of our children if not ourselves, is that the
future of the humanities as a common possession depends on the restoration of a simple, single ideal: getting poetry by heart. Far from democratizing poetry, there can be no surer way of reducing
it to the plaything of an elite that to write it and read it as if it made no claim to be remembered. A man like Gianfranco Contini studied poetry at the very highest level, but could do so
because of his ear for its primal movement: for him, the subtle heartbeat in the eleven-syllable line was like the movement of the music I once watched him listening to in the opera house in
Florence. He knew what was coming next—he had known that music all his life—but you could tell by the tiny noddings and shiftings of his head and shoulders that he was hearing it
afresh. If he had not, it would not have been art, which would have a hard time surprising us if it did not first give us something easy to remember.

The departure point for inspiration is the obstacle.

—GIANFRANCO CONTINI,
Varianti

This idea, variously expressed, comes up in almost every article Contini wrote about Dante. The
emphasis is on a principle: that lyricism, for Dante, was the opposite of an indulgence. Though the principle is especially true of
The Divine Comedy
,
Contini isn’t just saying that for Dante the
terza rima
was a necessary discipline. Contini means that for Dante the whole business of writing poetry
was a discipline. In Italian a rhyme scheme, even a constantly demanding one like the
terza
, is no great challenge, because Italian is so rich in rhymes. An
English poet who tries to write even a short stretch of
terza rima
in his own language will soon find out how poor in rhymes it is: even Louis MacNeice, an
awesomely competent verse technician, was driven to the half rhyme in his long
terza rima
composition
Autumn Sequel
.
His results were distressingly approximate. He would have done better to stick with the flexible forms, firmly based on classical measures, that he developed for his earlier work
Autumn Journal
, but perhaps they were too demanding to be repeated.
Autumn Journal
, which he wrote in the year following the
Munich crisis, is the best thing of its kind in the twentieth century, and one of the reasons for its supremacy is the confidence of
its interior movement, which depends
entirely on a seemingly free choice of rhythms being held together overall by a classically trained sense of form. No discursive poetry has ever seemed more liberated, or been less loose. The
whole poem, in all its richness of incident and observation, fully conforms to Eliot’s proviso that no verse is entirely free to someone who wants to do a good job.

In saying that, Eliot could have been answering Robert Frost, who said that poets who wrote free verse
without rhyme were playing tennis without a net. Philistines understandably elevated Frost’s aphorism to the status of unarguable truth. (An aphorism is never that: unless there was a
genuine collision of views, nobody would be moved to a calculated terseness.) Not only by redneck editors but by desperate academics self-assigned to hold the fort against modernism, Frost was
thought to have pinpointed the line of division between discipline and anarchy. But the division is purely notional. There have been poets who wrote in strict rhymes and yet were slack in all
departments—from the Victorian through into the Georgian era, the dullest poetry was remarkable only for its technical proficiency—and there have been poets who, without rhyming at
all, achieve an alert tension in every line and an unfailing sense of coherence in the strophe. As Philip Larkin fondly recorded in his introduction to
The North
Ship
, Vernon Watkins once said that good poetry doesn’t just rhyme at the end of the lines, it rhymes all along the line. He thus left the way open for the possibility that lines
might not rhyme at their ends at all, yet be so calculated, in all their parts, as to contribute to a form, or at least not detract from it.