Where Have You Been? (21 page)

This is only a note

To say how sorry I am

You died. You will realise

What a position it puts

Me in. I couldn't really

Have died for you if so

I were inclined. The carn

Foxglove here on the wall

Outside your first house

Leans with me standing

In the Zennor wind.

And so on. One can understand Graham; to someone who makes things out of words, all one's successful productions are, so to speak, equivalent. They are all, as it were, one's children, and one loves them all. Everything written about is ennobled—an island, a fishing expedition, a walk, a shave, a friend. But the costliest, and perhaps the hardest of these, is the friend. It is like a jeweler standing by all of his work, even if some of it is from semiprecious materials and some from rubies. Still, it is very rare to have feeling in poetry talked about directly at all. No less an authority than Ezra Pound—and in some ways no more unlikely an authority than Ezra Pound—knew that what matters in poetry is emotion.

*   *   *

One of W. S. Graham's most passionate and prominent supporters was Harold Pinter. “I first read a W. S. Graham poem in 1949,” he writes on the jacket of the
Collected
. “It sent a shiver down my spine. Forty-five years later nothing has changed.” They are the oddest of pairings, but yet it makes fascinating sense. Both are their own creations. There is Pinter, the liberator of undertones in—especially British—English, of sinister aggression and hatreds, and Graham, who dwells in pleasantness and eerie brusqueness, who talks to himself as I suspect no one else—not even Yeats—has ever talked to himself, and who creates in words gossamer, almost theoretical attachments, to the absent, the sleeping, the dead, the speechless. It is almost Jekyll and Hyde. But none the less persuasive for that.

Pinter puts in an appearance toward the end of
The Nightfisherman
, as an admirer of Graham's work, as a public reader and supporter of it, and as a private patron. God knows Graham needed him, or needed such a figure, his life was one of the most poverty-stricken of any of the great twentieth-century British poets'. First and foremost, I think the letters should be read as a chronicle of this poverty and its effect—and indeed, lack of effect—on the man who so unquestioningly bore it. Near the beginning of the book we find Graham in Cornwall. It is 1943, and he is twenty-five: “It's raining now on the roof. I'm living in a caravan a friend's lent me in Cornwall, lonely and by the sea. I fish and gather mushrooms and write and cook.” He was to stay, under only slowly evolving circumstances, for more than forty years. The caravan, punningly, is later referred to as “my poor arkvan.” Finding a usable lemon on the beach rates a couple of mentions. He writes to friends—often the painter John Minton—to borrow money or to discuss the modalities of its repayment. The sums are often tiny, and it is an indication of his poverty that he is driven to ask for loans only at some future date, to be certain that the money will be spent on whatever thing he has in mind, often bills or medicine. (If it came earlier, it would just be spent.) He seems always to be cheerful; he is, after all, at some level living the sort of uncompromised life he wants. “I'm writing every day and the good weather's begun and we have a goat.” That's some sentence. To go to London or Scotland, he has to hitchhike. He asks friends for old boots and clothes. They move to a condemned coastguard house on the north coast of Cornwall. “I measure out my life in paraffin gallons,” he writes in 1958. A visitor records: “We lived on flour-and-water pancakes cooked on a primus stove, and, when the paraffin was finished, over a driftwood fire. Sydney and Nessie [Nessie Dunsmuir, his wife] also used to collect limpets [mussels?] off the rocks and cook them, but only the cat would eat them, and even then not always.” Graham visited Iceland in 1961, and Crete in 1964. In 1965, a friend offered them the use of a small cottage in the town of Madron, rent-free. When Graham won a literary prize in 1970, he used it to get an indoor toilet put in.

At many turns, the life of Graham reminds me of that of Malcolm Lowry (1909–1957), which is something I never thought I'd be able to say of anyone. Lowry, admittedly, was (in the British sense) middle class and occasionally received remittances from his family, but in the 1940s and '50s, his life in the squatter's shack in Dollarton, British Columbia, resembled Graham's, remote from metropolitan centers and “civilization,” a life lived often outdoors, among simple people, without money. Like Lowry, Graham was heavily influenced by Joyce—again, I never thought I'd come across anyone who would match Lowry for Joycean puns, “too-loose Lowry-trek,” “Lowry's and Penates,” “delowryum tremens,” but Graham does—and, like Lowry, he liked a drink. From time to time, I even had the ghostly sense I was reading Lowry: “Yes, somehow, Robin, assailed by our acquaintances and a friend here and there, and dodging the sometimes too-thoroughly felling arms of Bacchus and the baying slavering hounds of angst that howl from the hydrophobic dark and——” It was life in the wilderness, for the sake of writing. In Lowry's case, it was crowned with brilliant triumph and tragedy; in Graham's, a more bearable and sustained slower-burning success.

As well as this story, you get a very good set of a very good writer's letters. Graham was bracingly frank to his correspondents about their work, and, to some extent, his own. The blunt criticism of David Wright (“I find the last seven lines thin for you to be writing”) and of a shoddy review of his own work, late on, by Michael Schmidt (who publishes the book, and publishes the letter, brave man) are quite shocking. The sentences are often wonderful, whether one run together on Tibet (“Tibet is a strange place and I read a lot about it”) or two split off about the United States (“The drink here is fantastic. What strange people.”). There are fine puns (“tritametre,” “grahamiphone”) and not such fine ones (“The bard will have flown”). Above all, in a group of letters to Roger Hilton, now recognized as having been among the best postwar British painters, there are some extraordinary documents of friendship and solicitude. Hilton was alcoholic and severely depressed in the mid-1960s when Graham met him, a tormented and tormenting man. In 1966, he was sent to prison for drunk driving. Graham sent him an astonishingly, almost insanely boisterous letter. It seems like bad taste at first, but then one sees in the manic punning the utmost expression of personal devotion in mimicry, distraction, banter, affection:

Can you hold this paper with your manacled hands? Shall I parachute down to see you from the flying machine and say hello? Shall I start an underground tunnel here from Gulval? Shall I drop you a case of blondes? […] What terrible drivel from so great a poet as me. Forgive me, Rog. The juices of dusk are flowing and the autumn rooks are calling like breaking stones. Lift me your eyebrows. Count a hundred. Santa Claus is coming doon the chimney. Could you maybe get your various veins seen to and your divers wounds of your rough life and Daniel Druff and your hammer-claw toes? My fetishes are sweating in the darkened ward of my brain. I face the stretching Rogerless night. […] O hogtied friend, keep the fort. I can't think how to write properly to you yet. Be tolerant. Take it easy (How easy to say). Are you allowed to write back? If you can reply reply.

When Hilton died in 1975, Graham was given his watch. He wrote “Lines on Roger Hilton's Watch.” Like a lot of Graham's work, the inspiration is communication, is dialogue. Sometimes the poet speaks, sometimes the watch:

He switches the light on

To find a cigarette

And pour himself a Teachers.

He picks me up and holds me

Near his lonely face

To see my hands. He thinks

He is not being watched.

The simplicity of this, the heartbreak, the jokey puns, the tenderness, the chugging
tch
sounds, the successive sentences all beginning “He,” you might think of a Paul Klee drawing or something, but I don't know of anything like this in poetry. It is—was (“Tenses are everywhere”)—the sound of W. S. Graham, 1918–1986.

 

ZBIGNIEW HERBERT

Zbigniew Herbert died in 1998. He was a very great and idiosyncratic poet—something in me wants to say a peerless poet—and, it is reported, a perennial Nobel bridesmaid. It was ironic—and no doubt wounding—that during the period of his expectations, in 1980 and 1996, two other Poles of, as I see it, manifestly lesser gifts and importance, Czes
ł
aw Mi
ł
osz and Wis
ł
awa Szymborska, were chosen by the academy and decorated by Carl Gustav.

I had been waiting for his
Collected Poems
from the time of Herbert's death, if not even longer. Frankly, in view of some bruited complications (related below), I thought it would take rather longer than it did, and its eventual coming caught me by surprise—as perhaps things do when you wait for them hard. While waiting, I kept my hand in by buying up spare copies of his individual volumes,
Report from the Besieged City
(1985),
Mr. Cogito
(1993), both
Selected Poems
(the one from 1968 and, confusingly, a completely different book from 1977), and others; if nothing else, it was handy practical instruction in the ways of the price-supply curve. I have the German translations and read them. I can't read Polish, but I have Herbert wherever I go. He is the first poet I ever read. The poem was “From Antiquity”; I was eight. Probably he is as near to sacred to me as anything in or out of poetry is.

And now I have a book that I wasn't expecting at all. Herbert has a new translator, someone I have never heard of. Even that drafty, echoey thing the Internet (our very own updated version of Ovid's cave of rumor) has barely heard of Alissa Valles. This, by the way, is to register my surprise, not some snobbish impulse; Herbert, after all, is surely a sought-after commodity, somewhere near the pinnacle both of Polish poetry and the twentieth century; anyone taking him on should probably come with some sort of track record, not least for their own peace of mind—and even then of course it would be no guarantee of a successful outcome. It's pretty much the last thing I would press upon a young poet looking for a start in life or career, or a middle-aged one looking to diversify. I must now enter certain caveats. As I say, I can't (“can't” seems more honest, more regretful than “don't”) read Polish. My information from the great publishing centers of London and New York is vague and unattributable and thirdhand. It's not a nice thing to bash a young—or an old, or a middle-aged—translator, least of all when one is unable to read the originals. But it remains the case that my strongest feeling about this book is a sort of helpless and bewildered regret.

Practically synonymous with Herbert in the English-speaking world are—or were?—his English translators, John and Bogdana Carpenter. Over more than twenty years and six books—all but the very first
Selected Poems
, which was done in 1968 by Mi
ł
osz (in the days when he still permitted himself to translate his sometime friend, sometime enemy, and sometime fellow Pole) and a Canadian diplomat, Peter Dale Scott—they were responsible for him in English. The noise that we think of as “Herbert” was made by them. Neither of them is known for anything else; he signs as poet and essayist, though I don't know his poems and essays; she, Polish by birth, teaches or taught in the Slavic department at the University of Michigan. A
Collected Poems
done by them would have been the logical culmination of their labors and was something they would have loved, as I understand it, to bring about. Then what? The desire—reasonable? unreasonable?—of the Carpenters to be credited as “editors” of such a book; a falling-out with Herbert's widow, Katarzyna, and his American publisher of forty years' standing (from the very outset), Dan Halpern; the appearance on the scene of an agent; and the instruction of a new translator, Alissa Valles. From the point of view of the Carpenters, I would have thought, a catastrophe; from the point of view of Herbert's English readership, little less than that. And all, I believe, for nonliterary reasons.

Such things do happen from time to time, but rarely at such a high level, rarely with so much at stake. And then there are ways of managing them so that least harm is done. This is not the case here. Obviously, the Carpenters are a hard act to follow. Readers bond with translations in an unexpectedly primary way. “New translation” is never the infallible trump that publishers sometimes wish (do they ever think it?) when they are driven to play it. Old translations hang around, even when they are notionally superseded or replaced, even when they have been discredited, which again is manifestly not the case here. Constance Garnett's Tolstoy, Scott Moncrieff's Proust, Edwin and Willa Muir's Kafka, H. T. Lowe-Porter's Thomas Mann all have their adherents. Notable instances in poetry include the Rilkes of J. B. Leishman or C. F. MacIntyre, and the Cavafy of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. As the song has it, the first cut is the deepest. It is almost unknown for a reader to change allegiance, even to a superior product, and again that is not the case here. Historic translations—like the Carpenters'—acquire their own momentum, their own specific virtue. It is an argument that, ironically, finds acceptance in the context of these
Collected Poems
, which includes all seventy-nine of the Mi
ł
osz/Dale Scott translations. (So much for the claim, on the back cover, that “this outstanding new translation by Alissa Valles brings a uniformity of voice to Zbigniew Herbert's entire poetic output”—which might actually have been worth striving for, though I would have called it something other than “uniformity of voice,” which sounds unhappily monotonous.) Instead, poor Ms. Valles in her four-page Translator's Note is put to the necessity of welcoming the Mi
ł
osz/Dale Scott versions into her book, and even, a little humiliatingly, touting for them: “These fine translations were Herbert's first extensive introduction to the English-speaking world. They have been retained here.” Those of the Carpenters, though, have not, and it seems to me that readers of their work over the past thirty years—and arguably also new readers, now denied the chance to acquaint themselves with it—are owed some sort of explanation. None is offered. There is silence—the airbrush.