Download Versuche (Tries)

Introduction

T. S. Eliot

μέγα βιβλίον μέγα κακόν¹

—Callimachus

An introduction to a volume of verse exists chiefly to absolve the reader of the obligation to read it. I propose to disappoint that expectation. I have read these poems — with admiration and unease both, the unease the genuinely contemporary always provokes in one long since at peace, such as it is, with the dead. And the dead are very much our business. That I should be summoned from a damp corner of England to judge the juvenilia of a Californian is a peculiar summons; only a peculiar curiosity could have answered it. I have answered. For Mr. Stefans could not have written a line of this book had Donne not died, and Laforgue, and Pound’s troubadours, and a certain gentleman from St. Louis whom he names, in his very first poem, in the same breath as a telephone company — Oh, ATM. Oh AT&T. One is invoked, it seems, as a kind of public utility, somewhere between cash machine and long-distance carrier. The impertinence is not his worst vice. It may be his best.

I

He calls the book Versuche — Tries, Attempts — after Brecht; and the modest title conceals a whole theory of poetry, though not mine. The classicist holds that a poem is not an attempt but an arrival: an object as impersonal and final as a well-turned urn, in which the labour and the diabetes and the Section 8 flat and the squandered student loans have no part, having been, in the only sense that signifies, used up. Mr. Stefans knows this — he has read his Pound, his historical sense is morbidly acute — yet persists in calling them tries, dating nothing, confessing the depression and the typewriter all the same. He wants it both ways: the impersonality of the modern poem and the warm hand of the man who made it; to be the cocotte and the British Museum assistant at once. It is the wish of his époque. The nineties craved to be sincere and ironical in one breath — a pococurantism that begs forgiveness for both, and generally contrives to get it.

II

To the difficulty, then — which, as I have said, is in our civilization no defect in poetry but a condition of it. There is here a sequence of homophonic translations of Rilke: the Sonnets to Orpheus rendered not into the German’s sense but its noise, so that “Unfasten Mad Chen wars aging heretofore / out-dieseled Heinekens” stands where a tree once climbed into the ear. (The present age does the same and calls it autotune — the voice kept, the singer thrown away.) I am not unmoved; the line lives in the mouth. But is this the auditory imagination liberated, or merely etiolated — blanched of the sense and feeling that once kept it company? In Donne, thought and feeling and music arrived fused, before the dissociation of sensibility set in. Here that dissociation is no calamity but a technique elected, performed with the clinical pleasure of a boy taking a clock apart to hear it tick. The dissociation of sensibility raised to a programme — and a programme, however ingenious, is a colder thing to love than a poem.

III

There is a region where my generosity fails. Some poems here do not loosen the sense from the sound but dispense with both — amphigories, the old rhetoricians’ word: nonsense raised with the gravity of architecture: the errata a method, the title itself a typo. In one, “CHEQW!”, one reads Occidnet for Occident and Grreed for greed, and is meant to; the author even furnishes the creed — “the typo that is exact to you” — which I cannot share. I will not praise what I cannot read, and these defeat the eye before they reach the ear. A poem may ask much of its reader; it may not ask him to repair it. One has the effrontery to call itself “a whinier Waste Land” — an adjective I let stand as its own refutation, noting only that the poem so traduced was difficult toward something. There is all the difference between a ruin built stone by deliberate stone, and rubble tipped from a barrow and labelled a ruin. That Mr. Stefans can build the one is why I cannot forgive him the other.

IV

Of wit I must speak carefully, being known to prize it — the tough reasonableness beneath the lyric grace, the alliance of levity and seriousness, rarest of the English virtues, and Mr. Stefans has it in abundance. He commands, indeed, that rarer thing Pound called logopoeia, the dance of the intellect among words. He has, perhaps, too much of it. The cleverness comes so thick and fast — the puns, the brand-names, the Black Dada Nihilismus lifted with a wink from Baraka — that one suspects the irony of standing guard over a feeling he dares not expose. The nineties made an armour of irony; the bravest moment here is when it slips. In “Now,” the man awake after two aspirin, allergic to his cat, sets down — Not good matter for poetry, but / whatever is / deserves to be chucked — then, defying his own sentence, keeps it. There is the objective correlative the book elsewhere holds at arm’s length: insulin, umbrella, cat, cold dawn. He found it the old way, by attending to a morning. I wish he trusted that morning more.

V

Yet he is no mere collector of effects; the tradition is the very water he swims in. Mr. Ashbery is the presiding ghost here, my feeling toward him the most divided I shall own. He learned, as I did, from the French — from Laforgue, from the hope that a poem signifies by music and association — and carried it further than I dared: a verse all middle, all transition, that never consents to arrive. I held that the modern poet must dislocate language into his meaning; Ashbery perfected the dislocation, and I cannot always find the meaning he dislocated it toward — whether the indirection points at last at something, or has itself become the poem: the finger, and no moon. It is the epigone’s peril, which “After Ashbery” frankly admits — the manner acquired before the matter. And yet the gift is real. Those unanchored pronouns perform the extinction of personality I once preached, save that I surrendered the self to an order older than the man; here it disperses into none. He has inherited the dispersal before settling what it disperses toward.

VI

So to the dedication. The book is Mr. Bernstein’s — captain of the language writers, who made dismantling the lyric self a doctrine. I came braced for an antagonist and found a cousin. They preach the extinction of the expressive voice, the suspicion of the confessing I, the poem as a made thing, the reader as producer of its sense — half of what I maintained in 1919. We part over the end. I surrendered personality to Tradition: that ideal order the new work both enters and alters, the present directed by the past, the past by the present. They turn my impersonality and difficulty against tradition — against “official verse culture,” against the canon — making the historical sense a historical suspicion. The method is mine; the end its reverse. Yet these are no barbarians; the quarrel is not ignorance but which tradition, to what end. Into this Mr. Stefans was delivered. He has, he admits, “most stolen from” these poets. To steal is easy; to assimilate, till the seam cannot be found, is a lifetime’s labour — the labour these tries are still trying.

VII

A last word on history — which I raise reluctantly, knowing well the charge that a poet brackets the world to perfect his ear. Mr. Stefans’s mother was born into an occupied Korea and lived through the war her son calls, in a phrase I reproduce against every instinct of my breeding, “about as deep as the shit pit got.” His father reported for the army there, then gave up the trade for the writing of banks — a defection I, who kept my own at Lloyds, am the last to reproach. The catastrophe sat, in story and silence, at the family table. He confesses he had no felt knowledge of it young, admiring the poets who bore it before he could. It is the right confession. One thing to theorise the catastrophe; another to feel its stakes for the unregarded soul — for one soul more, as his line has it. These poems do not attempt that weight; they are Lehrstücke — scales, not sonata. But the capacity is in them, a ground bass beneath the wit, and a fit reader will hear it.

— ❖ —

So I commend the book — with reservations, since an introduction that conceals its reservations is a fraud upon author and reader alike. These are tries. Some fail, and the author would be the first to say which. But a failure honestly attempted instructs more than a success arrived at by formula, and the title’s humility is a thing the finished and the famous might borrow. Festina lente. He was making haste slowly; the haste shows, and so does the slowness — and between them, here and there, on a cold morning or under a trembling temple of hearing, a poem.

I am very glad to have read them. I am gladder still that he kept the cat.

1. “A big book is a big evil.” ↩︎