All poets, whatever they
may seem to others, die young.
Tennessee Williams
Suddenly Last Summer.
You might say of certain literary outpourings refined by a classical education that there’s a recognisable constant observable in the writer’s cleverly wrought symmetry where a drama features the explication of a verse to parallel the plot or, correspondingly, the gestation of a poem provides impetus to the action.
The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan springs to mind. And let us not forget Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle, One Art, when stumblingly reciting by Cameron Diaz in the movie, In Her Shoes (2005); or even those memorable WW2 epigraphs, Johnny-head-in-air by John Pudney (heard in the film, The Way To The Stars) and The Life That I Have by Leo Marks (issued as a code-mnemonic for SOE secret agent heroine Violette Szabo and recited in the movie, Carve Her Name with Pride).
In this overcrowded genre, the masterly poet Roy Fuller’s novel The Carnal Island (1970) should not be forgotten. I suspect Robert Graves is the model for Fuller’s fictional poet and the poetry pastiched in this (I assume) reworking of The Aspen Papers by Henry James (a doomed visit to the shrine of venerated poet) leads me to this view. (A specimen poem, entitled In a Barn near Beugny, adds substance to this conjecture and the birth year of the poet, 1890, makes him, like Graves, a member of the Lost Generation who came of age during WWI).
The instances of this literary form are legion . . .
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Poetry as a Propellant of Plot:
Deborah Kerr as Hannah and Cyril Delevanti as Nonno
in The Night of the Iguana. |
Echoes of the absurd . . . The Night of the Iguana.
Take, for instance, The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams. A highly suspenseful device in the drama is the unfinished poem by Nonno, the elderly poet grandfather of Hannah, an itinerant artist, who like the washed-up Episcopal priest, the Reverend Shannon, finds herself stranded as a guest in a seedy hotel on a remote Mexican beach, where this introduction is made:
Revd Shannon: ‘And Gramps?’
Hannah: ‘He’s the world’s oldest living and practising poet . . . Do you
know, he’s started a new poem. For the first time in twenty years he’s
started another poem.’
Revd Shannon: ‘He hasn’t finished it yet?’
Nonno: ‘Did someone call for a recitation?’
Hannah: ‘No, Nonno . . . Just rest for a few moments, Nonno.’
Nonno: ‘How calmly does the olive branch* observe the sky begin to
blanch, without a cry, without a prayer, with no betrayal of despair.’
(The tremulous speech trails off.)
What immediately strikes the discerning listener, however, in appreciation of Nonno’s verses, is how risibly their iambic quadrimeter resembles Lewis Carroll’s How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail, itself a parody of Isaac Watts’s didactic poems for children, How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour.
Did Tennessee Williams nod, we wonder, when putting Nonno’s words on the ancient poet’s lips, or was the triumph of Nonno’s completion of his poem moments before his death an ironic hollow victory (by the playwright) over the pathetic fallacy?
How differently, though, these absurd echoes of the pedagogic homily could have been resolved with the merest tweaks.
So calmly sure, the olive branch.
So calmly sure, the olive branch
observes the sky begin to blanch
without a cry, without a prayer
with no betrayal of despair.
Some time while light obscures the tree
the zenith of its life will be
gone past forever and from thence
a second history will commence . . .
•
A Metrical Duel . . . Cyrano de Bergerac.
Of course, this lietmotif of the genesis of a poem emergent from dramatic action has a recognised precursor in Cyrano de Bergerac and his celebrated metrical duel :
Cyrano: ‘While we fence, presto! all extempore I will compose a
ballade . . . Three eight-versed couplets. . . And an envoi of four lines . . .
I'll make one while we fight; and touch you at the final line . . .
(the refrain) . . . À la fin de l’envoi, je touche!’
Elegiac verses evoking Nabokov’s lost homeland.
To my mind, however (within, of course, the delimited horizons of my own reading), only one poet – an incomparable master of two languages – has evoked with nigh sorcerous alchemy the process of a poem’s gestation as a parable of the eternal émigré’s homesickness of the dispossessed.
Many critics consider Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Gift (1935-1937) as the masterpiece most faithful to the ‘local consciousness’ of his genius as a young man in exile on the brink of world recognition. It is also regarded as the crowning achievement of the first phase of his literary career and the virtuoso swansong of those novels he wrote in Russian.
A reimagining of Nabokov’s own life in Berlin (1922-1937), The Gift tells of a young Russian poet, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, and of his growth as an exiled writer following his family’s flight from the Bolshevik Revolution.
I will conclude, with veneration, by quoting those supersensory passages that chart with astonishing clear-sightedness the evolution of his elegiac verses evoking his lost homeland . . . and that movingly convey the paradoxically ineffable rapture of a writer in the moment of triumphant expression.
 |
Early Snow by
Konstantin Yakovlevich Kryzhitsky (1858-1911) |
. . . Fyodor began pacing the side-walk to the corner and back. The street was echoic and completely empty. High above it milk-white lamps were suspended, each on its own transverse wire; beneath the closest one a ghostly circle swung with the breeze across the wet asphalt. And this swinging motion, which had no apparent relation to him, with a sonorous tambourine-like sound nevertheless nudged something off the brink of his soul where that something had been resting, and now, no longer with the former distant call but reverberating loudly and close by, rang out ‘Thank you, my land, for your remotest . . .’ and immediately, on a returning wave, ‘most cruel mist my thanks are due. . . .’ And again, flying off in search of an answer: ‘. . . by you unnoticed. . . .’ He was somnambulistically talking to himself as he paced a nonexistent sidewalk; his feet were guided by local consciousness, while the principal Fyodor Konstantinovich, and in fact the only Fyodor Konstantinovich that mattered, was already peering into the next shadowy strophe, which was swinging some yards away and which was destined to resolve itself in a yet-unknown but specifically promised harmony. ‘Thank you, my land . . .’ he began again, aloud, gathering momentum afresh, but suddenly the sidewalk turned back to stone under his feet, everything around him began speaking at once, and, instantly sobered, he hurried to the door of his house, for now there was a light behind it.
. . .
A moment later, in bed, just as his thoughts had begun to settle down for the night and his heart to sink in the snow of slumber (he always had palpitations when falling asleep), Fyodor ventured imprudently to repeat to himself the unfinished poem—simply to enjoy it once more before the separation by sleep; but he was weak, and it was strong, twitching with avid life, so that in a moment it had conquered him, covered his skin with goose pimples, filled his head with a heavenly buzz, and so he again turned on the light, lit a cigarette, and lying supine, the sheet pulled up to his chin and his feet protruding, like Antokolski's Socrates (one toe lost to Lugano’s damp), abandoned himself to all the demands of inspiration. This was a conversation with a thousand interlocutors, only one of whom was genuine, and this genuine one must be caught and kept within hearing distance. How difficult this is, and how wonderful. . . . And in these talks between tamtambles, tamtam my spirit hardly knows. . . . After some three hours of concentration and ardour dangerous to life, he finally cleared up the whole thing, to the last word, and decided that tomorrow he would write it down. In parting with it he tried reciting softly the good, warm, farm-fresh lines:
Thank you, my land; for your remotest
Most cruel mist my thanks are due.
By you possessed, by you unnoticed,
Unto myself I speak of you.
And in these talks between somnambules
My inmost being hardly knows
If it’s my demency that rambles
Or your own melody that grows.
Благодарю тебя, отчизна,
за злую даль благодарю!
Тобою полн, тобой не признан,
я сам с собою говорю.
И в разговоре каждой ночи
сама душа не разберет,
мое ль безумие бормочет,
твоя ли музыка растет . . .
According to a number of critics, this poem expresses Nabokov’s own yearning for wider cultural recognition while appreciating the inestimable ‘gift’ bestowed on him by his homeland; that is: his phenomenal memory of the lost domain that was imperial Russia as refashioned and restored by the unique perceptions granted him by his native Russian identity.
*Apparently, the written version of this poem in the original play used an ‘Orange Branch’ rather than the ‘Olive Branch’ included in the movie version; thus: ‘How Calmly Does the Orange Branch’.
•
Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
