Where Have You Been? (7 page)

All of Hamilton's poems are moments of equilibrium in dramatic or even fraught contexts. Sometimes the contexts can be made out, or they are revealed in the notes (though neither notes nor poems are indiscreet): they are a father's death, or a wife's derangement. Sometimes they remain mysterious, though just as urgent. Their tragedy is expressed in the absolute separation of the pronouns in these “I-you” poems: the helpless “I,” the afflicted “you,” the fictive “we.” “The usual curse” it says in “Ties”: “His, yours, theirs, everyone's. And hers.” The poems stop and turn; there is something pivotal and sculptural about them, but also something instantaneous—almost the best comparison is with Bill Brandt's statuesquely tubular black-and-white sixties nude photographs (with the addition, in Hamilton, of occasional little spots of color) (“Trucks”):

Aching, you turn back

From the wall and your hands reach out

Over me. They are caught

In the last beam and, pale,

They fly there now. You're taking off, you say,

And won't be back.

It is so vivid, it is almost theatrically or mythologically present, this shaped snapshot. Each scene has something of beacon or semaphor: built up from the short words and artful repetitions of Frost, the contracted verbs (often, as in Larkin, couched in the negative), and the teetering piles of adjectives (the triads borrowed from Lowell) or else Hamilton's personal trademark adverb-plus-adjective pairing: “monotonously warm,” “this shocked and slightly aromatic fall of leaves,” “one hand in yours, the other / Murderously cold,” “the delicately shrouded heart / Of this white rose,” “semi-swamps / Of glitteringly drenched green,” “The river weeds / […] A shade more featherishly purple,” for buddleia or rosebay willowherb. (These extraordinarily effective, really rather glamorous adverbs aside, Hamilton's poems have a modest and restricted vocabulary: it's hard to imagine him doing anything as officious and showy as naming plants.)

The opening poem—not so in
The Visit
but from
Fifty Poems
on—is “Memorial”:

Four weathered gravestones tilt against the wall

Of your Victorian asylum.

Out of bounds, you kneel in the long grass

Deciphering obliterated names:

Old lunatics who died here.

That's the whole thing, a miracle of balance and implication. The “you” is addressed, I take it, to Gisela Dietzel, Hamilton's first wife, who became schizophrenic. There are two word groups, one subtly expressing (Pound's word!) long standing—“weathered,” “Victorian,” “long,” “obliterated,” “old,” even, at a pinch, “tilt”—and the other, dementia—“asylum,” “lunatics,” and, arguably, “tilt” again, and “out of bounds.” The stones are characterful from the beginning, like British teeth, pitched between the two interesting, almost flavorful words “weathered” and “tilt,” one governing surface, the other angle. (I'm reminded of an astonishing Egon Schiele painting
Four Trees
, each one a distinct, spindly personality.) It's no surprise to have them brought out at the end in the personal, matey, borderline slang of “old lunatics” (a tone, by the way, of which Hamilton had an absolute mastery, as witness his essayistic prose, or a couple of broader poems, “Larkinesque” and the lit. crit. skit called “An Alternative Agenda”). The impersonal Pevsnerish handling of time in “weathered” has morphed into the simple personal of “old.” (“We are all old-timers,” says Lowell in “Waking in the Blue,” a poem Hamilton will have known and, I believe, liked.) That tone—distinctly warmer, more spoken, more intimately joshing than anything else in the poem—prepares us for its last word, “here.” There is a conflict, as there often is in Hamilton (and I struggled with it before, with my likenesses of photographs and sculptures), between movement and stasis: this is one shot, one frame, but with a zoom. It is the zoom that gives the poem its fear (oddly coincident with its warmth): the fear that the “you” will never leave “here”—that “here” that was once “out of bounds”; that the tenderness of a chance, meaningless occupation (“kneel” of course has something erotic about it) will turn out to have been ill omened or predictive; that the interest evinced will have become excessive and fateful; that ultimately we are attending at something symptomatic and morbid, for which there are hurtful colloquial designations, like “old lunatics.” The poem is graced by all sorts of other details and symmetries: its two dynamic verbs, “tilt” and “kneel”; the way the sound of “tilt” seeds “obliterated” and that of “Victorian” “lunatics”; the play of “Deciphering”—to do with revealing figures—and “obliterated,” which is destroying letters; the sinister implication of having five lines about four stones. Then “Memorial” starts to recede. It becomes what the art critics call a “
mise en abîme
” dramatizing the theme of attention (“the natural prayer of the soul,” as Paul Celan liked to say): it is Hamilton kneeling at what has become his wife's grave; and then it is ourselves, as it were on our knees before this “memorial.” It is, after all, a poem about reading.

The other chief or recurring Hamilton subject is the death of his father, when he was thirteen. Here, again in its entirety, is “Birthday Poem”:

Tight in your hands,

Your Empire Exhibition shaving mug.

You keep it now

As a spittoon, its bloated doves,

Its 1938

Stained by the droppings of your blood.

Tonight,

Half-suffocated, cancerous,

Deceived,

You bite against its gilded china mouth

And wait for an attack.

This poem is strung up on one rhyme, on the letter
t
and a long preceding vowel: “tight … bloated … eight … tonight … suffocated … bite … wait.” A second series, this time of short-
t
syllables, makes itself felt alongside: “spittoon … its … its … its … attack.” There is something queasy and labored about the long syllables—especially “bloated”—and then the short, pedantic cymbal stroke of the
t
: it demands the careful British dental
t
, not the drawled American half
d
. The
t
is the frontier, it enacts the spit, between one “mouth” and the other, one “mug” and the other. The poem is in iambs throughout, but with striking and dramatic trochaic inversions at the beginning (“Tight in”) and halfway (“Stained by”), though that hardly does justice to its supple variety. The last line, for instance, “And wait for an attack,” is three iambs, but each of a completely different quality, the first, if you like, normal strength, the second almost Pyrrhic (those two unimportant words, gulped down), the third almost a spondee. I don't know why the poem is called “Birthday Poem”; either it happens to be the birthday of the father (or the son); or, a little more obscurely but sensibly, it's a reference to the year of the poet's birth, 1938, the same year as the Empire Exhibition, held in Glasgow, the city of his father and mother, which they had recently left. The year 1938, the year of the Munich agreement, of “I hold in my hand a piece of paper” and “peace in our time” and Sudetenland, and the last year of a more general “waiting for an attack,” is of course far from innocent (therefore no “doves,” or only bloodstained ones, “deceived” ones, if you like). But then so is Empire (shouldn't it really be “Expire” and “Expiry Inhibition,” the effort to hold in one's death?), which was also awaiting its end, while still recalling those—bloated?—“distensions of Empire” that Pound's Sextus Propertius refuses (natch) to “expound.” The poem moves from defense—that “tight” appears all the time in such soccer locutions like “keep it tight” or “playing it tight”—to the helpless “wait for an attack.” Its climax, its knot, where one repeatedly looks to, is the triad of adjectives, brutally sectioned off by the line break, “Half-suffocated, cancerous, / Deceived”: how the “you” feels, how he is, and how he reconciles the two conditions in his mind. With its undependable
c
's, now soft, now hard, and the soft puffing ff's replaced by a long screaming
e
vowel and a slicing
v
, the combination of sounds is of a deadly masterful suggestiveness.

The poems in
The Visit
are wonderful and unequaled by any of those that so painfully slowly came later. “Memorial” and “Birthday Poem,” plus “Pretending Not to Sleep,” “Father, Dying,” “Last Respects,” “Epitaph,” “Admission,” “Last Waltz,” “The Visit,” and “Now and Then” all come from the first thirty-three, along with others almost as good, as intensely pitched, as eerily balanced and mysteriously stocked with quiddity. Hamilton—of course, of course—knew this: “In fact, I'd now say,” he writes in the 1988 preface to
Fifty Poems
, “that these later poems are bruised rewrites of what I'd done before.” To say there is anything like a falling-off would be like saying there was a falling-off in the work of T. E. Hulme. The poems still partake of and contribute to the same harrowed atmospheres, the same persistently denatured nature (“I sit beneath this gleaming wall of rock / And let the breeze lap over me”—in the poem called “Nature”), and harshly lit studio rooms, with curtains, neighbors, and cars outside only momentarily distracting the archaically helpless antagonists within from their drama. While almost completely neglecting the sixties—one song title, one mention of Vietnam—and with no topical nouns, no consumer language, nothing street or
veriste
, it is uncanny how much these poems are able to evoke the textures and comforts of their time. But perhaps that's one vestige of the perverse way in which, to begin with, I tried to read him, almost as a war poet, for drama and substance; whereas now I see him as the Mallarmé-like technician of stresses and syllables that in fact I think he did become, a little mannered, a little hallowed and sacerdotal, a little too self-aware, a little too good at doing without, a little too coolly canny (“Vigil”):

These ancient lamps, diminishing each day,

Will never taste the dark worlds they whimper for.

These wounds,

Though we have nourished them for years,

Will be the freshest of sweet tears

Tomorrow. And the lost will not be found.

The enzyme that converted pain to poetry went away or gave up. The thing is, there was something not just poetry-minded, but also simply and truly high-minded about Ian, which meant that he had a horror of exploiting those around him: Lowell, whose life he wrote, and of whom he will have seen a fair bit in London in the late '60s and early '70s, appalled him with his personal fusses and pitiless production. The cards he was left with—seventy-nine poems, not so many more than a deck—were paucity and brevity. I realize I am paraphrasing the sentence with which Alan Jenkins opens his introduction, quoting Dan Jacobson: “So far as they can be said to be famous at all, Ian Hamilton's poems are famous for being small in size and few in number.” Accordingly, he wrote hundreds of reviews and essays, and eventually a subtle and simply written and enchanting group of prose books that discreetly revolved around the question that so preoccupied Hamilton of what writers did when they stopped, in any vital sense, writing. First, there was the autogyro Lowell. Then the opposite case, J. D. Salinger, the greatly loved author who “had elected to silence himself. He had freedom of speech but what he had ended up wanting more than anything else, it seemed, was the freedom to be silent.” There were books on writers in Hollywood (a sort of posthumous condition), and on writers' estates (those really had put down their pens). There was Paul Gascoigne, the most gifted footballer of his generation (and a Tottenham player!), who burned out on silly drink and bad food and personal excesses, and Matthew Arnold, a Victorian slave to duty and social good. I don't think Ian chose—though of course he didn't actually choose, there wasn't a choice—any worse than any of these. Last of all there was a book called
Against Oblivion
, a set of lives of twentieth-century poets, a pendant to Dr. Johnson, agnostic, cool, sometimes drily wounding. All that I think is nacre; the pearls are the poems.

 

JAMES SCHUYLER

Not first sight, often enough, but a second look—it is a mysterious thing with poetry that it finds its own moment. The poets that have meant most to me—Lowell, Bishop, Schuyler—all, as it were, were rudely kept waiting by me. I had their books, or I already knew some poems of theirs, but there was no spark of transference. Then it happened, and our tepid prehistory was, quite literally, forgotten—beyond a lingering embarrassment at my own callow unresponsiveness. It was as though they had always been with me, and I found it difficult, conversely, to remember our first encounter. It is a slight relief to me that James Schuyler, who writes about reading almost as much as he writes about seeing, confesses to a similar sluggishness of feeling (“Horse-Chestnut Trees and Roses”):

Twenty-some years ago, I read Graham Stuart Thomas's

“Colour in the Winter Garden.” I didn't plant

a winter garden, but the book led on to his

rose books: “The Old Shrub Roses,” “Shrub Roses

of Today,” and the one about climbers and ramblers.

It is this dilatory or sidelong compliance I am talking about. There follows my own belated winter garden to the American poet James Marcus Schuyler, pronounced Sky-ler, (1923–1991).

The first time I was aware of James Schuyler was in one of those shrill American “Best of” annuals. At the back of the book, the poets comment on their own poems, in every shade of vainglory and modesty, pretentiousness and aw, shucks! The only comment I can remember from a decade's worth of these books is Schuyler's, to the effect that while his poems were usually the product of a single occasion looking out a window (his version of the unities!), the poem in question (I think it was “Haze”) departed from this, by using more than one window and more than one occasion. “I do not normally permit myself such licence,” the poet sternly ends. This stood out: for its idiosyncrasy and scrupulousness, for its thoughtful rebellion against unthinking unassumingness, for its (I am somehow convinced) borrowed plumminess. There's something enjoyably performed and bewigged about it. That was in 1994. From then I date my public espousal of the “poem out of the window”—though that's an old cause with me—and a little later, I finally began to read Schuyler.