The qualities that distinguish the poetry of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) - accessibility both formal and syntactical, traditional meter and rhyme - practically guaranteed two things: popularity with a public, most of whom never liked poetry (or never read it), and a difficult relationship with literary critics and scholars, many of whom equate accessibility with a lack of discipline and rigor. The facility with which the average reader can enter a Larkin poem in no way makes it easy to maneuver within the poem and find everything of value there. It is precisely the kind of problem faced by Robert Frost and by those who find greatness in some of his poetry. Frost was long thought to be an unofficial Poet Laureate. Larkin was actually offered the post when John Betjeman died, but turned it down.
Most great poets restrict themselves to certain subjects that become their métier. With Larkin they were solitude and non-conformity (both as sources of sorrow and strength), life as ultimately disappointing, the unfair tradeoff of youth for wisdom, the inability to find fulfillment in women or in love. I think of "Reasons for Attendance":
The trumpet's voice, loud and authoritative,
Draws me a moment to the lighted glass
To watch the dancers - all under twenty-five -
Shifting intently, face to flushed face,
Solemnly on the beat of happiness.
- Or so I fancy, sensing the smoke and sweat,
The wonderful feel of girls. Why be out here?
But then, why be in there? Sex, yes, but what
Is sex? Surely, to think the lion's share
Of happiness is found by couples' sheer
Inaccuracy, as far as I'm concerned.
What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell
(Art, if you like) whose individual sound
Insists I too am individual.
It speaks; I hear; others may hear as well,
But not for me, nor I for them; and so
With happiness. Therefore I stay outside,
Believing this; and they maul to and fro,
Believing that; and both are satisfied,
If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied.
30 December 1953
But Larkin occasionally tackled subjects that were otherwise outside his purview, like the long tour de force, "Show Saturday," "Faith Healing," or poems that are uncharacteristic of him, like "The Trees," "First Sight" the late poem "The Mower," or "An Arundel Tomb," with its most incongruous (for Larkin) last line, "What will survive of us is love." Really? Many another Larkin poem would beg to differ.
I think most would agree on what I think are his best poems, "Church Going," "The Whitsun Weddings," "Dockery and Son," "The Old Fools," and "Aubade."
Larkin simply wasn't difficult - or difficult enough - to impress the "new" critics who happened along in the Sixties just when he was hitting his stride. His problem was similar to Frost's, although Larkin didn't live long enough to become a parody of himself. As Randall Jarrell said of the late Frost collection, Steeple Bush:
"Steeple Bush" is no book to convert intellectuals to Frost. Yet the ordinary "highbrow" reader is making a far greater mistake when he neglects Frost as commonplace, than the academic reader makes when he apotheosizes him, often on the basis of his most complacent or sentimental poems.
After Larkin's death, a one time friend, Andrew Motion, published a biography of Larkin that made his detractors hate him even more and gave them a completely unjustified sense of vindication: it turned out that Larkin was a frightful Tory, held racist and sexist views, and had a definite taste for bondage pornography. No wonder his poetry was liked by so many!
What made matters worse was how succinctly and beautifully Larkin defended his own poetic practice:
"It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance; the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The stages are interdependent and all necessary. If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing. If the second stage has not been well done, the device will not deliver the goods, or will deliver only a few goods to a few people, or will stop delivering them after an absurdly short while. And if there is no third stage, no successful reading, the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all."
The most remarkable thing about Larkin today is that, though it has been 33 years since his death, and his Collected Poems has been compiled and published, new poems continue to be discovered and authenticated. One such, called "Unfinished Poem," was left in typescript at his death:
I squeezed up the last stair to the room in the roof
And lay on the bed there with my jacket off.
Seeds of light were sown on the failure of evening.
The dew came down. I lay in the quiet, smoking.
That was a way to live—newspaper for sheets,
A candle and spirit stove, and a trouble of shouts
From below somewhere, a town smudgy with traffic!
That was a place to go, that emaciate attic!
For (as you will guess) it was death I had in mind,
Who covets our breath, who seeks and will always find;
To keep out of his thought was my whole care,
Yet down among the sunlit courts, yes, he was there,
Taking his rents; yes, I had only to look
To see the shape of his head and the shine of his book,
And the creep of the world under his sparrow-trap sky,
To know how little slips his immortal memory.
So it was stale time then, day in, day out,
Blue fug in the room, nothing to do but wait
The start of his feet on the stair, that sad sound
Climbing to cut me from his restless mind
With a sign that the air should stick in my nose like bread,
The light swell up and turn black—so I shammed dead,
Still as a stuck pig, hoping he'd keep concerned
With boys who were making the fig when his back was turned;
And the sun and the stove and the mice and the gnawed paper
Made up the days and nights when I missed supper,
Paring my nails, looking over the farbelow street
Of tramways and bells. But one night I heard the feet.
Step after step they mounted with confidence.
Time shrank. They paused at the top. There was no defence.
I sprawled to my knees. Now they came straight at my door.
This, then, the famous eclipse? The crack in the floor
Widening for one long plunge? In a sharp trice,
The world, lifted and wrung, dipped with remorse.
The fact of breathing tightened into a shroud.
Light cringed. The door swung inwards. Over the threshold
Nothing like death stepped, nothing like death paused,
Nothing like death has such hair, arms so raised.
Why are your feet bare? Was not death to come?
Why is he not here? What summer have you broken from?
I'm not sure why this was left unfinished or called "Unifinished Poem." It reads as a complete poetic statement. Perhaps Finis (The End) was intended?
In 1951, the Cannes film festival was the setting for one of the most surprising resurrections in movie memory. Luis Buñuel, who was last heard from in Europe in the mid-1930s as the director of Las Hurdes, a documentary about the poorest region in Spain, and as co-director (with Jean Gremillon) of an abortive "comedy" about the Spanish army called ¡Centinela, alerta!, reappeared with a new film made in Mexico called Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones).
Only later would we learn about Buñuel's wilderness years in America, his working for the Museum of Modern Art in New York until a book by Salvador Dali exposed him as an atheist and he was fired, and his fruitless sojourn in Hollywood, working clandestinely on Robert Florey's The Beast With Five Fingers (1946).
In 1946, just when Buñuel thought that his filmmaking days were over and he was about to apply for American citizenship, the producer Oscar Dancigers somehow persuaded him to go to Mexico and direct movies for him. It was not, of course, anything like his avant-garde days in Paris - the films he would make in Mexico over the next twenty years were, with a few exceptions, commercial work for a mass movie market.
His first film, Gran Casino, was a musical - not exactly the most auspicious way to restart one's filmmaking career. "I hadn't been behind a camera in fifteen years," Buñuel wrote years later, "and if the scenario's not particularly gripping, the technique, on the other hand, isn't half bad."(1) The film floundered and Buñuel waited two years before Dancigers entrusted him with the star vehicle El Gran Calavera in 1949. "I agreed to do it, and although El gran calavera was impossibly banal, it made a lot of money." So Dancigers suggested to Buñuel that he make a "real" movie next. Italian neo-realism was creating all the buzz at film festivals around the world. It inspired Kurosawa to make Stray Dog, which is a kind of Japanese Bicycle Thieves, but with a stolen gun instead of a bicycle. Neo-realism also inspired Satyajit Ray to make his Apu Trilogy a few years later. Buñuel knew and admired Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine, so he decided to make a film about Mexico City's slum children. De Sica's film - and neo-realism in general - had been drawn from the devastation of Rome by the war. It's social criticism was tempered by the effects of an historic disaster. There had been no war in Mexico, unless one counts the deeply-rooted class war that condemned a majority of Mexicans to poverty.
Already in 1950, Mexico City was one if the most densely-populated cities in the world. Poor Mexicans in the regions surrounding the city who moved there in pursuit of job opportunities found themselves in overcrowded shanty towns where living conditions were hazardous at best. It was Dancigers who suggested to Buñuel that he make a film about the city's slum children. Disguised in threadbare clothes, he toured the shanty areas, noting down incidents, listening to people's stories. From these he cobbled together a script, with Luis Alcoriza, every detail of which he claimed was true to the lives he was portraying. The result was a pitilessly clear picture of the effects of poverty on the most vulnerable among us - the children.
Comparing Los Olvidados to Shoeshine would be unproductive. But De Sica had the advantage of a genius for directing child "non-actors," as he had already shown in his fascist-era film, The Children Are Watching Us. But Buñuel had an advantage as well. In his interview with Charles Thomas Samuels in Encountering Directors, Samuels asked De Sica why he avoided the subject of homoeroticism among the shoeshine boys. "Because the subject revolted me," he replied. On the evidence of his films alone, Buñuel appears to be attracted to precisely the things that the rest of us find revolting. In Los Olvidados, Buñuel included a scene in which Pedro (Alfonso Mejía) is propositioned for sex by an older man in the street outside a shop. (The scene is shot through the shop window, so we can't hear the dialogue, but the intentions of the man are unmistakable.) Pedro is about to leave with the man when a policeman causes them to scarper. Buñuel always had a natural fearlessness when it came to such "sensitive" subjects. Of course, it was one of the scenes that outraged Mexican critics, who thought that Buñuel had insulted the honor of Mexico.
What its detractors found most disturbing about Los Olvidados was the total absence of redemption or even remorse. El Jaibo (Roberto Cobo) and his gang attack and rob a blind man (even the blind man is a loathsome monster who fondles young girls and whose eyes look like they're glued shut) and a legless beggar; Pedro, who is rejected by his own mother, at least attempts to do the "right thing" according to society's standards, but he becomes implicated in the murder of another boy by El Jaibo. The message of the film, if it can be said to have one, is that Pedro is damned from birth by a society that will not permit him to find, let alone travel, the right path in his life.
There are telltale surrealist touches throughout the film: after the attack on the blind man, Don Carmelo (Miguel Inclán), he lies on his stomach in the dirt, and Gabriel Figueroa's camera pans to reveal a chicken (which, of course, he cannot see) in front of his face; one of the boys suckles a goat; Pedro dreams that the boy El Jaibo murdered is laughing under his bed, that his mother loves him, embraces him, and offers him a huge steak - but El Jaibo appears and steals it. As he is dying, El Jaibo dreams of a dog running down an endless street. The dreams were shot in slow-motion to heighten their nightmarish qualities. Surrealism always had a powerfully subversive subtext, as Buñuel's films make abundantly clear.
Over a lifetime of filmgoing, Los Olvidados was always one of those films I had always wanted to see, but never had an opportunity until quite recently. The reason for this is obvious: it is, after all, such an unpleasant subject for a film. Buñuel gives us a guided tour through one of the most uninviting worlds ever caught on film. Shoeshine had at least the comfort that we were in the hands on a filmmaker who cared deeply for the fates of the boys whose stories he was telling. With Buñuel, de Sica's compassion is replaced by a kind if cruel fascination.
There is no comfort to be found in Los Olvidados, except perhaps in the satisfaction of being shown the truth about the lives of the boys Buñuel follows. I wrote five years ago that, "To be sure, Buñuel wasn’t born to reassure us that we live in best of all possible worlds." Pedro struggles to free himself from being implicated in El Jaibo's crime, but fails and he is murdered by El Jaibo. The police arrive, too late as usual, and gun down El Jaibo. The end of Pedro, his body thrown onto a garbage dump, recalls the end of the Geoffrey Firmin in Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano: "Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine."
Despite the outrage and protests of Mexican authorities, Oscar Dancigers got Los Olvidados
a screening at Cannes and Buñuel won the Palm d'Or for Best Director. Miraculously, all of the film's enemies changed their minds about Buñuel and his career in Mexico flourished.
(1) All quotations are from Buñuel's autobiography, My Last Sigh (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1983).
Since the 19th century, has anyone made a good living writing poetry? Thomas Hardy, who was one of the most prolific poets of his time, had to make a living writing novels. Robert Graves once told an interviewer that he only earned enough money from his poetry to "keep me in cigarettes."
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a double life. How does one reconcile the fact that, while he quietly created a growing body of some of the most critically acclaimed poetry of his time, his day job was a lawyer for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company? Frank Kermode found "vulgarity" in this question, but I find it fascinating. "Stevens did not find that he must choose between the careers of insurance lawyer and poet. The fork in the road where he took the wrong turning is a critic's invention, and there is no point in dawdling there." But even Kermode recognized that Stevens erected a very high and impregnable wall between the two pursuits. It was as if he took up his career as insurance lawyer to satisfy someone else's requirements of him and of his life, but he saved his true self for his poetry. But we have no way of knowing this. Who knows but that Wallace Stevens was at his best behind his insurance desk. We are too used to the Marxist alienated worker who is truly alive only in his off hours. It's tempting to think of Stevens as the one true alienated man, whose life was divided perfectly into two compartments, neither of which had any effect on nor ever touched the other. But we should resist such a temptation, since only one part of Stevens's life matters to us. His poetry has lasted until now, continues to surprise us and delight us.
But Stevens is spread a little thinly, I think, over more than four decades as a dedicated poet. There are differences in temperament, in intensity, and in focus. Consequently, most of his work contributes to the greater body of work rather than standing out as exemplars. As formidable as that body of work is, it is difficult to locate a single poem, or even a handful of poems, that define Stevens. Some of them are beautifully expressed ideas. "Sunday Morning," an early poem, is his most famous, but it can hardly be said to be representative of his poetry. As much as I admire his last poems, including those in The Rock, they lack some of the qualities and the ambitions found in his earlier poems. For instance, concerning his atheism, I find "Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit" more beautiful and more moving than "Sunday Morning." I find in its insistence that, if we must, we should afford god a separateness from us, like light, that has no kinship with us, something like Cézanne's modest approaches to the seen world - not to supplant it with his love but to respect it so deeply and completely that all that remains of our work is a clear and honest image of the world and not what is imposed on it by our love or our intelligence.
If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,
Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost
Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.
He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;
As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.
It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.
It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.
If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,
A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.
Unfortunately, as fine as he occasionally is, Stevens is the victim of some intense overpraise, and what is best characterized as critical logorrhea: 'It’s hard to think of a more vivid illustration of T. S. Eliot’s principle of the separation between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” [For the life of me, I can't think of a more inapposite description of Stevens. The man who suffers, after all, lived a luxe life in Hartford.] For most of his life, Stevens was an elaborately defended introvert in a three-piece suit, working as a Hartford insurance executive. He came slowly to a mastery of language, form, and style that revealed a mind like a solar system, with abstract ideas orbiting a radiant lyricism.'(1) Harold Bloom, who is given to gushing over writers he likes, has had his gush on Stevens.
Like all great poets, Stevens wrote a high number of mightily banal poems. Like most modernist poets, calling him a "stylist" is treacherous at the very least. His best poems cohere under the intense strain of a centrifugal formlessness. It's difficult to explain precisely how, but they cohere. His best poems succeed at being poetry through the cumulative effect of metaphoric invention, not through individual lines or words. In 1951 he was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for The Auroras of Autumn. But there are no two American poets, Stevens and Frost, who are more dissimilar. According to legend, during one of their arguments, Stevens told Frost, "The trouble with you Robert, is that you write about subjects." And Frost responded, "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac." It's obvious why there is so much more academic writing about Stevens than about Frost. On the Poetry Foundation website's introduction to Stevens, the last paragraph concludes that "In the years since his death Stevens's reputation has remained formidable. The obscurity and abstraction of his poetry has proven particularly appealing among students and academicians and has consequently generated extensive criticism." Clearly, something has gone wrong with a poem that requires the intervention of interpreters (like Helen Vendler) between the poet and the reader. An industry has sprung up that tries to convince squeamish readers that George Herbert, for example, is "obscure" and requires extensive interpretation. It is bullshit. It is one of the reasons why readers have turned away from poetry. Any reasonably intelligent reader should have no great trouble finding his own way to the heart of George Herbert and even of Wallace Stevens. If he cannot, it's the poet's, not the reader's, fault.
Stevens has written many memorable poems that are hard to quote from memory. But, like almost every other great poet, he is marvelously, succinctly clear. I have quoted some of his poems before, like "The World As Meditation," and "Seventy Years Later." They are both from his last, astonishing collection, The Rock. The truth is that after page upon page of pure rhetoric, the reader of Stevens's poetry longs for - and eventually finds - something of substance. When he was a student at Harvard in 1897-1900, Stevens was introduced to the American philosopher George Santayana, with whom he exchanged poems and corresponded throughout their lives. When he learned in 1950-51 that Santayana had taken up his final residence in a charitable institution for the aged in Rome, he was moved to write "To an Old Philosopher in Rome."
On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street
Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement
Of men growing small in the distances of space,
Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound,
Unintelligible absolution and an end --
The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome
Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind.
It is as if in a human dignity
Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.
How easily the blown banners change to wings . . .
Things dark on the horizons of perception,
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,
The human end in the spirit's greatest reach,
The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme
Of the unknown. The newsboys' muttering
Becomes another murmuring; the smell
Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled . . .
The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,
The candle as it evades the sight, these are
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome,
A shape within the ancient circles of shapes,
And these beneath the shadow of a shape
In a confusion on bed and books, a portent
On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns,
A light on the candle tearing against the wick
To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that of which
Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.
Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.
Be orator but with an accurate tongue
And without eloquence, O, half-asleep,
Of the pity that is the memorial of this room,
So that we feel, in this illumined large,
The veritable small, so that each of us
Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice
In yours, master and commiserable man,
Intent on your particles of nether-do,
Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness,
In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive
Yet living in two worlds, impenitent
As to one, and, as to one, most penitent,
Impatient for the grandeur that you need
In so much misery; and yet finding it
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,
Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead,
As in the last drop of the deepest blood,
As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen,
Even as the blood of an empire, it might be,
For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome.
It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.
And you - it is you that speak it, without speech,
The loftiest syllables among loftiest things,
The one invulnerable man among
Crude captains, the naked majesty, if you like,
Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained-vaults.
The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered.
The life of the city never lets go, nor do you
Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room.
Its domes are the architecture of your bed.
The bells keep on repeating solemn names
In choruses and choirs of choruses,
Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery
Of silence, that any solitude of sense
Should give you more than their peculiar chords
And reverberations clinging to whisper still.
It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,
The immensest theatre, the pillared porch,
The book and candle in your ambered room,
Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.
Isn't it extraordinary that, in this poem written past his 70th year, Stevens, who was for so long such a personal - i.e., self-referential - poet, was moved to write in tribute of an old friend?
(1) Peter Schjeldahl, "Insurance Man: The Life and Art of Wallace Stevens," The New Yorker, May 2, 2016.
Some time around my third year of college I fell under the spell (which is the most accurate way of putting it) of Robert Graves (1895-1985). Poet, essayist, novelist, biographer, mythologist, and creator of his own unique poetical theology based on ancient references to a central, all-encompassing female deity whom he called the White Goddess, his accomplishments, I think, will be chiefly credited to a formidable body of lyric poetry (some if the finest in English) and a rehabilitation of the Feminine in his thoroughly revised versions of familiar mythology.
Some of what he presented in his outline of poetic theory makes sound sense, like the development of writing from the poetical to the factual - from the irrational to the rational. He also presented a theory of the history of human sexual understanding, that the reason why priestesses and goddesses preponderate in the most ancient mythologies (something that even James Frazer was forced to address - even though he denied the existence of what he called a "gynocracy") is due to the simple fact that primitive man failed to connect the sex act with procreation. Women were believed to be the sole creators of life. The proof of this idea is the fact that human beings still have to be taught about sex - the connections have to be explained.
He wrote one of the greatest memoirs, Goodbye To All That, based on his experiences in the Great War in which he was wounded and presumed dead. He had the unique privilege of reading his own obituary in the London Times. But the trauma of trench warfare affected him deeply for several years, and probably had a great influence on his psychic development, of which the White Goddess was a large part. He perhaps only attained sanity through the otherwise inexplicable detours on which his thought were taken. As Randall Jarrell put it, we have reason to be thankful for the White Goddess if it inspired Graves to write such things as "To Juan at the Winter Solstice." "All that is finally important to Graves," Jarrell wrote, "is condensed in the one figure of the Mother-Mistress-Muse, she who creates, nourishes, seduces, destroys; she who saves us—or, as good as saving, destroys us—as long as we love her, write poems to her, submit to her without question, use all our professional, Regimental, masculine qualities in her service. Death is swallowed up in victory, said St. Paul; for Graves Life, Death, everything that exists is swallowed up in the White Goddess."
An extraordinary poem, "The Pier Glass," captures the qualities of his nightmarish life during his recovery. They called it shell shock; we now call it PTSD:
Lost manor where I walk continually
A ghost, while yet in woman's flesh and blood.
Up your broad stairs mounting with outspread fingers
And gliding steadfast down your corridors
I come by nightly custom to this room,
And even on sultry afternoons I come
Drawn by a thread of time-sunk memory.
Empty, unless for a huge bed of state
Shrouded with rusty curtains drooped awry
(A puppet theatre where malignant fancy
Peoples the wings with fear). At my right hand
A ravelled bell-pull hangs in readiness
To summon me from attic glooms above
Service of elder ghosts; here at my left
A sullen pier-glass cracked from side to side
Scorns to present the face as do new mirrors
With a lying flush, but shows it melancholy
And pale, as faces grow that look in mirrors.
Is here no life, nothing but the thin shadow
And blank foreboding, never a wainscote rat
Rasping a crust? Or at the window pane
No fly, no bluebottle, no starveling spider?
The windows frame a prospect of cold skies
Half-merged with sea, as at the first creation,
Abstract, confusing welter. Face about,
Peer rather in the glass once more, take note
Of self, the grey lips and long hair dishevelled,
Sleep-staring eyes. Ah, mirror, for Christ's love
Give me one token that there still abides
Remote, beyond this island mystery
So be it only this side Hope, somewhere,
In streams, on sun-warm mountain pasturage,
True life, natural breath; not this phantasma.
A rumour, scarcely yet to be reckoned sound,
But a pulse quicker or slower, then I know
My plea is granted; death prevails not yet.
For bees have swarmed behind in a close place
Pent up between this glass and the outer wall.
The combs are founded, the queen rules her court,
Bee-serjeants posted at the entrance chink
Are sampling each returning honey-cargo
With scrutinizing mouth and commentary,
Slow approbation, quick dissatisfaction.
Disquieting rhythm, that leads me home at last
From labyrinthine wandering. This new mood
Of judgment orders me my present duty,
To face again a problem strongly solved
In life gone by, but now again proposed
Out of due time for fresh deliberation.
Did not my answer please the Master's ear?
Yet, I'll stay obstinate. How went the question,
A paltry question set on the elements
Of love and the wronged lover's obligation?
Kill or forgive? Still does the bed ooze blood?
Let it drip down till every floor-plank rot!
Yet shall I answer, challenging the judgment:—
"Kill, strike the blow again, spite what shall come."
Kill, strike, again, again," the bees in chorus hum.
Subjected to near-constant stress from shelling, soldiers in the trenches often suffered an overtaxing of their adrenal glands, which sometimes led to catatonic states. Graves claimed that it took him several years after the war to catch up on all the sleep he had lost.
His emotional state led him into a labyrinth from which, perhaps, only his personal discovery of the White Goddess could secure his release. Following his Muse led to conflict and unhappiness in Graves's long life, as his long-suffering wives could attest. The ridiculous antics of Laura Riding, a pseudo-poet with whom Graves absconded to Majorca in the late 1920s, established an unfortunate pattern in his life. While Riding abused his devotion imperiously to establish her own credentials as a poet and a scholar, Graves remained productive as both a poet and an historical novelist until their breakup in 1940. His novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God were so popular that an expensive attempt was made to turn the former into a film starring Charles Laughton and directed by Josef von Sternberg. The injury if the leading lady Merle Oberon (who was married to the producer) in a road accident ended the production, the tantalizing promise of which was preserved in the documentary The Epic That Never Was.
Graves continued to write poetry well into his eighties when dementia ended his writing career. He wrote about jealousy and how it is so often misunderstood. The word is derived from "zealous," as in "the Lord God is a jealous God." In the most powerful poem to jealousy ever written, Shakespeare's Othello, Iago warns Othello:
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on: that cuckold lives in bliss
Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger;
But, O, what damned minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!
The play abounds in the greatest insights into jealousy, as when Othello, on the verge of murdering the sleeping Desdemona, admits that "this sorrow's heavenly;/It strikes where it doth love."
A poem from one of Graves's later collections, "Prometheus," approaches the subject from an original angle. The modern interpretation of jealousy is entirely negative, a symptom of the fear of being replaced. But more experienced cultures see it as a gauge of one's passion. If there is no jealousy, then the love simply isn't true. In his unique style, Graves enlists the Greek myth of Prometheus in his definition of jealousy. Condemned by the gods to be chained to a rock for eternity while a vulture feasts on his liver, Prometheus asks of the beast just one thing:
PROMETHEUS
Close bound in a familiar bed
All night I tossed, rolling my head;
Now dawn returns in vain, for still
The vulture squats on her warm hill.
I am in love as giants are
That dote upon the evening star,
And this lank bird is come to prove
The intractability of love.
Yet still, with greedy eye half shut,
Rend the raw liver from its gut:
Feed, jealousy, do not fly away--
If she who fetched you also stay.
Anyone who has felt such love - and such jealousy - knows the truth of those last two lines.
The problem with Graves's definition of true poetry was its narrowness - he dismissed Eliot, Auden, and Stevens as non-poets, and worked backwards in the history of English poetry, eliminating Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson and favored other, minor poets like Christopher Smart and John Clare. He would've disapproved of three of the poets I included on my list of favorites. Fortunately, I managed to get out from under the spell that Graves cast over me and embraced differing poetic practices. Graves still looms as an imposing poet, but despite his strict self-imposed codes of conduct. He remains one if the finest lyric poets of the 20th century.
I have in mind a day from twenty-eight summers ago. I was living in a trailer on the edge of a small town called Fallon, Nevada. I was there because the U.S. Navy saw fit to send me to the Naval Air Station to the east of the town.
One weekend afternoon I was watching a video of Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Shakespeare's Henry V with a friend. He was 20 and I was 32. We watched Olivier's clever and colorful (filmed in Technicolor) film, which was deliberately meant to arouse English patriotism just before the Normandy Invasion, all the way to the scene in which Olivier delivers his "St. Crispin's Day" speech.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
Henry is giving words of encouragement to his weary soldiers on the eve of the decisive battle of Agincourt. By now, it's a familiar speech, and Olivier delivers it honorably, in keeping with the style of acting that his film memoralizes. But his delivery seems unbearably declamatory today. Olivier was a master technician, and the next time you look at the scene, pay special attention to his hands. Olivier's Henry is a stalwart warrior, completely lacking anything so modernistic (and natural) as self-doubt or irresolution.
But far from being impressed by the scene, my friend told me about one that he had seen that put Olivier in the shade. I doubted there could be such a performance, but my friend told me of Kenneth Branagh's film of Henry V, and how, on hearing Branagh speak so convincingly the same lines that Olivier had spoken forty-five years before, I would be inspired to join him at Agincourt myself.
I stopped the Olivier video, and together my friend and I drove to a video store in town to look for Branagh's film. We found it and rented it and brought it back to my trailer to watch. When it was over, I had to admit to my friend that, while I regarded - and still regard - Olivier's film to be one of the finest examples of Shakespeare on film, Branagh's film was far more effective, and quite thrilling to watch - something I, honestly, never expected of a film adaptation of Shakespeare.
I have seen them all over the years: Olivier's Hamlet, Richard III and Othello, Orson Welles's Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff (aka Chimes at Midnight), Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando as Marc Antony, The Merchant of Venice with Al Pacino, and even Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Hamlet (with Mel Gibson). And I have also seen the Shakespeare films that Branagh directed since Henry V, including his four hour Hamlet.
The most striking difference between Olivier's and Branagh's films is the treatment of the play's so-called comic characters - Falstaff, Bardolph, Nym, Mistress Quickly, and especially Pistol. Branagh has his actors (Robbie Coltrane, Richard Briers, Geoffrey Hutchings, Judi Dench, Robert Stephens) play their roles "straight," or as close to straight as possible.
What is most important about Olivier's film is that it was made at a time of national peril. Winston Churchill personally authorized the expense of the production in wartime ($2 million - an enormous sum for a movie in 1944), convinced that it would boost sagging morale in England as the war entered its fifth year.
The place at which both films fail, though for different reasons, is the Big Battle, Agincourt, itself. Olivier shot his battle in neutral Ireland, with hundreds of locals recruited as extras. The tracking cameras and cutting show how much Olivier learned from battle scenes in other films - particularly from Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938). But this is precisely where Olivier succumbs to a common temptation among filmmakers. Writing about Tony Richardson's excellent The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Stanley Kauffmann commented that
"large-scale battle scenes are doomed to remoteness. Whether it's Borodino in War and Peace or Balaklava here, they always seem to reduce to the same shots in differing uniforms: the Alexander Nevsky shot, in which the camera rolls along looking down a line of advancing riders; the cannon exploding in our faces; the quick glimpses of men with lances through their guts; the riderless horses; the ground-level shots of the dead. The big film battle has become a ritual, rather than an experience, often confusing and usually too long. (Having gone to all that expense, they're not going to use only a couple of minutes' footage out of it.) About all that ever really works is the long, wide horizon shot, which conveys only size, not heat."(1)
Kenneth Branagh wanted his Agincourt to look more like real combat (with which most of us are blissfully unacquainted): blood and mud and pain. Instead of the cast of hundreds afforded Olivier, Branagh used perhaps dozens, sticking mostly to close-in shots. Alas, he shifts unnecessarily in and out of slow motion, which ruins the realism. His battle lasts ten minutes, but it could've been as effective in less time.
In France, the "comic" characters Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph are nothing but cowardly thieves. Bardolph is hanged, while Pistol and Nym live up to their job titles as "cutpurses" in the very midst of the battle, stealing everything they can from freshly slain French. Finding Nym has been killed, Pistol speaks his last line in bitter despair, "To England will I steal, and there I'll steal."
In Olivier's film, Robert Newton played a quite traditionally conceived Pistol, about as over-the-top as Newton could reach. But we are supposed to laugh at him. Robert Stephens, in stark contrast, plays Pistol in Branagh's film as a near-tragic bungler. It is a fascinating performance to watch.
That leaves us the two Henrys. Olivier is resolute and noble throughout his film, whereas Branagh is, in his soliloquies, far less sure of himself and much more of a mensch. There is certainly room for either interpretation in Shakespeare's role. Olivier's Henry served its purpose in 1944 as an English zealot, but Branagh's Henry is the more real. And to his credit, Branagh stuck more closely to the play. In the small role of Katharine, Branagh's former wife, Emma Thompson, an invaluable actress and scriptwriter, adds her brilliant presence to her scenes.
Including a scene from Henry IV, Part II in which Hal promises Falstaff that he will abandon him once he is crowned king, Falstaff (Robbie Coltrane) delivers his great line, "We have heard the chimes at midnight. Jesus, the days that we have seen!" But he delivers it to Prince Hal, when it is actually part of a conversation between Falstaff and Justice Shallow:
SHALLOW
Ha, cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that that
this knight and I have seen!—Ha, Sir John, said
I well?
FALSTAFF
We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master
Shallow.
SHALLOW
That we have, that we have, that we have. In
faith, Sir John, we have. Our watchword was 'Hem,
boys.' Come, let's to dinner, come, let's to dinner.
Jesus, the days that we have seen! Come, come.
(Henry IV, Part II, Act 3 Scene 2)
In 1600, when there was no public lighting and the only things that prowled the night were werewolves and men up to no good, it was impressive to be out of doors to hear the chimes at midnight. But my Navy friend and I, having scoured the high Nevada desert of its scant attractions, had heard the midnight chimes and seen the dawn with sleepless eyes and knew the camraderie of fellow sufferers so far from home but even farther from our destinations. He is in St. Petersburg, Russia just now, and I am in the Philippines. Jesus, the days that we have yet to see!
(1) Stanley Kauffmann, Figures of Light: Film Criticism and Comment, Harper Collins, 1971.
