 As
Reviewed By: |
The Naturalization of Anne Stevenson
|
As
Reviewed By: |
The Naturalization of Anne Stevenson
|
In
his essay, “What’s Become of Wystan?”, Philip Larkin imagines an
encounter between two readers—one acquainted with all the works of W. H.
Auden before 1940, shortly after the poet immigrated to the U.S., and the
other reader familiar only with the poems that came later. After
an initial agreement by adjective—“Versatile,” “Fluent, “Too
Smart Sometimes”—a mystifying gap would open between them, as one
spoke of a tremendously exciting English social poet full of energetic,
unliterary, knockabout and unique lucidity of phrase, and the other one of
an engaging, bookish American talent, too verbose to be memorable and too
intellectual to be moving. And not only would they differ about his poetic
character: there would be a sharp division of opinion about his poetic
status. No
matter how you view Larkin’s assessment—fair or unfair—his imaginary
encounter offers a tempting metric for evaluating ex-pat poets. Setting
aside judgments of quality or “poetic status,” as Larkin terms it, we
may consider their works as falling into two distinct halves. Under this
model, one cross-section of poems clings to a native code, as yet unmixed
with foreign elements, while the other half cleaves away, having weathered
years of accommodation to an acquired locale. For such poets, cultural and
linguistic deposits assume the same iconic value as Auden’s craggy face
in photographs. With Anne Stevenson, the analogy must be modified. Most of her poems began appearing in print only after she moved to Britain at the age of 21. The case is further complicated by the fact that throughout her childhood and adolescence, she inhabited the U.S. partly as an outsider. She was born in Britain to American parents. For all those distinctions, the Auden test still can be applied to trace her development. In contrast to Larkin’s critique of his subject, however, I see that development as steadily progressive. Take Stevenson’s “Reversals,” from her second book, which sports the same title. “Reversals” captures a shift of understanding—a dislocation of character, if not of geography—that would be dramatized differently in later poems, splitting her work in two. Clouds—plainsman’s mountains— islands—inlets—flushed archipelagos— begin at the horizon’s illusory conclusion, build in the curved dusk more than what is always imaginary, less than what is sometimes accessible. Can you observe them without recognition? Are there no landscapes at your blurred edges that change continually away from what they are? that will not lie, solid, in your clenched eye? Or is love, in its last metamorphosis, arable, less than what was sometimes imaginary, more than what was usually accessible, full
furrows harvested, a completed sky. This
sonnet is frankly contemptuous of the showy. It takes an indifferent view
of conventional rhetorical devices: the rhythms are undistinguished, the
imagery spare, and few poetic figures are deployed. Although the poet is
writing of clouds in the sky, the scene is far from breathtaking: clouds
are compared with “plainsman’s mountains,” and “plain” are the
metaphors that follow. Clouds are “islands—inlets,” and we get a
mere glimpse of the exotic with those “archipelagos.” The word
“illusory” is dropped into the third line, as if deliberately to wake
us from dreaming. And yet the poem has barely begun! One might add that at
the time of writing “Reversals,” Stevenson’s career had
barely begun, and already she has hit upon a keen-eyed distrustfulness,
which, while it later will prove indispensable, a hallmark of her better
poetry, just now threatens to subvert that very career, even as the word
“illusory” undermines her lyricism. The sonnet itself is cleaved in half—like the hypothetical works of an ex-pat poet. The last line of the first septet asks whether the listener has the restraint to view the sky without embroidering it; to acknowledge the clouds’ neutrality without infusing them with fancy or conjecture; without spotting cloud-shapes in them. Can you observe them without recognition? Are there no landscapes at your blurred edges that change continually away from what they are? that will not lie, solid, in your clenched eye? This
challenge echoes Richard Wilbur’s question at the end of “Praise In
Summer,” where “obscurely yet most surely called to praise,” the
speaker scolds himself for extravagant terms and settles for more modest
imagery: “That trees grow green / and moles can course in clay / And
sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day.” So, too, with Stevenson’s reversal. In the title poem, she switches from lofty island images to the contentment found in accuracy: “Full furrows harvested, / a completed sky.” At the same time, the lines “more than what is always imaginary / less than what is sometimes accessible” are clearly altered in the next septet to endorse a more tenable notion of desire, one ultimately more fulfilling. Incidentally, this musical repetition is a touchstone of Stevenson’s poetry, a bow to nursery rhymes and ballad verse. But for now, it signals an allusion to Frost’s early sonnet “Mowing,” in which the poet experiences an epiphany that anticipates Stevenson’s—the unadorned truth that all grand works and lives are absorbed in people, deeds. and objects for their own sweet sake, and not necessarily for any myths we confer on them. It was no dream of the gift of idle hours . . . . Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows . . . . The
fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. For
the early part of Stevenson’s career—which she has described as
engulfed by domestic turmoil—we see the poet uncomfortable with her
new-found knowledge of her resourcefulness, her self-sufficiency. She has
discerned the perils of self-deception, and, while they remain anathema to
her, she lacks a bracing tonic, a perspective that will lift her from
ironical detachment. During this phase, her successful poems are those that identify with “the body’s ignorant precision,” as in “The Spirit is Too Blunt an Instrument,” a poem that anatomizes her infant, contrasting minute perfection with the clumsiness of our “human passions.” Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent fingernails, the shell-like complexity of the ear with its firm involutions concentric in miniature to the minute ossicles. Imagine the infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments through which the completed body already answers to the brain. Then name any passion or sentiment possessed of the simplest accuracy. No. No desire or affection could have done with practice what habit has done perfectly, indifferently, through the body’s ignorant precision. It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent love and despair and anxiety and
their pain. Other poems are harsher still in their judgment of the fragility of human aspirations. Poems like “The Marriage” and “Pregnant.” I will only quote a short poem, a quatrain entitled “The Mother.” Of course I love them, they are my children. That is my daughter and this is my son. And this is my life I give them to please them. It
has never been used. Keep it safe. Pass it on. In these lines, we have the type of baring one’s soul not really of the so-called confessional school, but closer to Theodore Roethke. The same metrical tightness is shaped by the asceticism of his early poems. You get this stark perspective in a poem like “Open House.” My truths are all foreknown, This anguish self-revealed. I’m naked to the bone, With nakedness my shield. Myself is what I wear: I
keep the spirit spare. Roethke
is also an interesting poet to read alongside Stevenson because of their
shared affiliation with the University of Michigan and their shared
affinity for ballad refrains. At the same time, it is impossible to
contemplate the outlook and the tone of Stevenson’s early poems without
considering the unique milieu she inhabited. I found an essay of hers in
an anthology of feminist writers, where she talks about a cocktail party
or similar event where she was trying to chat up an accomplished male
poet, but was constantly forced to hang back with the poet’s wife in a
sort of “ladies’ circle,” as in high-school dances. Yet in this
essay, lamenting the lost opportunity to converse with a fellow artist,
there is no bitterness, only resignation. (Her contribution to the
anthology is the only one by a poet that denies the importance of
contemporary feminist ideology to her development.) This
claustrophobia resurfaces, but with a renewed sense of vocation, in poems
like “To Write It,” and “The Price,” from the book “Enough of
Green.” (I also want to commend a haunting poem of this period called
“A Summer Place.”) Because such poems baldly state “you must always
be alone,” and describe words as “illicit gold,” it is tempting to
think that writing is everything to Stevenson, that nothing else matters.
But let me quote a startling admission from Dana Gioia: “Poetry is only
one part of life. There are some things more important than writing
poetry.” This is a lesson that Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia
Plath, John Berryman, and others can be said to have learned, but were
constitutionally unable to live by. For Stevenson, and for others of her
generation working in fixed forms, this appears fortunately not to have
been the case. For them, we see more of a willingness to yield to the
world’s sovereignty when it comes to poetic composition. This is no
tyranny of facts, but an ability to convert innate skepticism into a
disinterested search for communion with material objects, and a curiosity
for other people’s lives. The transformative work for Stevenson, in this respect, has to be Correspondences, published in 1974. This Paterson-like fiction, replete with archival material, letters, dates, and, above all, with characters, is, in my opinion, what fully reconciles her to the limits of self-sufficiency. It brought her out of the narrower realm in which she dwelled and which afforded little scope for someone of her observational and metrical skills. This is, in effect, the naturalization of which I speak. Correspondences is presented as “a family history in letters.” Each poem or prose piece is an epistle from a member of the Chandler family, revealed in five generations. Throughout the book are fake newspaper clippings with droll, comprehensive entries such as this one, describing the late Mrs. Neil F. Arbeiter, née Ruth Chandler Boyd, of Clearfield, Vermont: During
the painful years preceding her death, Mrs. Arbeiter courageously
persevered in those works for the public welfare which distinguished her
all her life as a New Englander and a patriot. A founding member of the
Halifax County League of Women Voters, she was three times elected to the
State Board. She was an active supporter of Planned Parenthood, a member
of the Committee for the Preservation of Wild Life, and the author of four
pamphlets in the This is your United Nations series. The sense of something withheld from this woman’s life, for all its zealous activity, emerges profoundly in her notebook jottings and a love letter to an aspiring novelist. Ruth Arbeiter is, it turns out, an unsuccessful poet. Her quiet life of desperation is emblematic of countless sacrifices borne by other Chandler women. (Perhaps the most touching instance is that of Mrs. Reuben Chandler, a Southerner, whose poem-letter is reproduced as torn fragments, the ragged left margin determining the stanza shapes and verse enjambment.) With few exceptions, these women are bound to men who enforce Calvinist piety, provincialism, and the worship of work. The humble triumph of Ruth Arbeiter’s descendant, Kay Boyd, at the end of the book, is expressed by a refusal to return to her father in Vermont. Like her creator at around the same time, Kay is a poet, divorced and living in England. Yet Stevenson proves adept at supplying voices for all her characters, not just those whom she might be expected to sympathize with. In the very next book after Correspondences appears a poem called “The Exhibition”—as if to shun excessive inwardness. It features an amusing conceit. Museumgoers are confronted with their own portraits. She imagines a reunion of subjects who had posed for the very paintings they now see on the walls before them. How can they fail to be flattered, these figures who, in frames, stay distressingly apart from one another,
but when meeting themselves on the walls are so delighted? . . . . Distances between shoulder and shoulder and eye and eye grow wider as the waste lots fill up with workers’ rubble: brokenhearts, hangovers, torn sheets, yards of mattress stuffing, bottles, cigarette butts, used newspapers. Enlightened, momentarily spared, the invited say ‘thank you’ and go in their separate directions. Now the pictures, left holding their bodies and heads, have no chance of changing
things at all by making connections. The need to “make connections,” or correspondences, also runs throughout the 1985 book The Fiction Makers, in a poem like “A Prayer to Live with Real People.” Let me live always and forever among neighbors like these who order their year by the dates of the leek competitions, who care specifically for Jack Russell terriers and pigeons, who read very carefully captions in The Advertiser and Echo which record their successes and successes of teams they support, whose daughters grow up and marry friends’ boys from Crook. O wedding gifts, O porcelain flowers twined on their vases under the lacelip curtains, save
me from Habitat and snobbery and too damn much literary ambition! Finally, one can only speculate how significant was her family life to that naturalization, raising her children and finding lasting love. An early poem, “Pregnant,” hinted of the metamorphosis to come. In “Pregnant,” her “body like a globe” is now “bound to the shape of the world.” And several years later, in “Poem to My Daughter,” she writes: “When we belong to the world / we become what we are.” I quoted both Frost and Larkin at the beginning, and it appears to me that, having traveled great distances to realize its worth, this credo is fit to take its place with memorable, one-line morals by those poets: “What will survive of us is love,” and “We love the things we love for what they are.” |
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