Where Have You Been?: Selected Essays - Hardcover

Hofmann, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374259968 ISBN 13: 9780374259969

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

Synopsis

An adventure with a roving genius of literary criticism

Michael Hofmann―poet, translator, and intellectual vagabond―has established himself as one of the keenest critics of contemporary literature. Safely nestled between the covers of Where Have You Been?, he offers a hand to guide us and an encouraging whisper in our ear, leading us on a trip through what to read, how to think, and why to like. And while these essays bear sharp insights that will help us revisit writers with a fresh eye, they are also a story of love between a reader and his treasured books.
In the thirty essays collected here, Hofmann brings his signature wit and sustained critical mastery to a poetic, penetrating, and candid discussion of the writers and artists of the last hundred years. Here are the indispensable poets without which contemporary poetry would be unimaginable―Elizabeth Bishop, "the poets' poets' poet," the "ghostly skill" of Robert Lowell, and the man he calls the greatest English poet since Shakespeare, Ted Hughes. But he also illumines the despair of John Berryman and the antics of poetry's bogeyman, Frederick Seidel.
In essays on art that are themselves works of art, Hofmann's agile and brilliant mind explores a panoply of subjects from the mastery of translation to the best day job for a poet. What these diverse gems share are the critic's insatiable curiosity and great charm. Where Have You Been? is an unmissable journey with literature's most irresistible flaneur.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Hofmann is an acclaimed poet, translator, and critic. He has published six books of poetry and has translated more than sixty books from the German, including Gottfried Benn's Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose, as well as works by Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Roth. His criticism appears regularly in the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and Poetry. He currently teaches poetry and translation at the University of Florida.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

BISHOP/LOWELL CORRESPONDENCE

 

Words in Air is such a formidably and dramatically and lingeringly wonderful book, it is hard to know where to begin. Well, begin in the manner of the physical geographer and the embarrassed statistician and the value-for-money merchant, with quantity, though that’s absolutely the wrong place. Here then are 459 letters, 300 of them not previously published, exchanged over thirty years, between 1947 when the two great poets of late twentieth-century America first met—Robert Lowell just thirty, Elizabeth Bishop thirty-six, both with one trade book and one round of prizes under their belts—and 1977 when Lowell predeceased his friend by two years; covering all told some nine hundred pages from Bishop endpapers—one hand-scrawled, one typed—to Lowell endpapers—one in his laborious, also not greatly legible child-print (“I know I’m myself beyond self-help, and at least you can spell”), one typed. The apparatus of footnotes, chronology, and compendious glossary of names—take a bow, Saskia Hamilton—is modest, helpful, and accurate. At this point in our postepistolary (no joke), postliterary, almost postalphabetical decline, we would probably receive any collection of letters with a feeling of stupefied wistfulness and a sigh of valediction, but Words in Air is way beyond generic. It feels like a necessary and a culminating book, especially for Bishop. To read, it is completely engrossing, to the extent that I feel I have been trekking through it on foot for months, and I don’t know where else I’ve been. “Why, page 351,” I would say. “Letter #229; March 1, 1961. Lowell’s forty-fourth birthday. Where did you think?”

But what is it like? How in fact do you read it? “I am underlining like Queen Victoria,” Bishop remarks at one stage. How do you filter, assimilate, crunch it down to the space of a review? Its eight hundred pages of letters—every one of them bearing my ambiguous slashes of delight, interest, demurral, startlement—still left me with eight sheets full of page numbers of my own. It’s like starting with a city and ending up with a phone book—hardly useful as a redaction. Really, I might as well have held a pencil to the margin and kept it there, for bulk reread.

It’s an epistolary novel, if not a full-blown romance, then at least at moments an amitié amoureuse. It’s a variation on García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Or it’s an Entwicklungsroman in later life, both parties already poets but perhaps more importantly still on the way to becoming poets, as perhaps one only ever and always is becoming a poet. It’s an ideally balanced, ideally complex account of a friendship, a race, a decades-long conspiracy, a dance (say, a tango?). It’s a cocktail of infernal modesty and angelic pride. It’s a further episode in Bishop’s increasingly sweeping posthumous triumph over her more obvious, more ambitious, more square-toed friend. It’s a rat-a-tat-tat Ping-Pong rally, an artillery exchange, a story told in fireworks, a trapeze show. One can read it for gifts sent up and down the Atlantic, from Lowell’s traditional northeast seaboard to Bishop’s serendipitously arrived-at Brazil, where she mostly lived from 1951, having disembarked from a freighter for a short visit; for projects completed, adapted, revised, abandoned, published, and responded to; for blurbs solicited, struggled with, and delivered to greater or lesser satisfaction; for houses bought and done up and left; for other partners encountered and set down; for visits and time together passionately contrived, put off, and subsequently held up to memory or guiltily swept under the carpet; for gossip and the perennial trade in reputations; for a startlingly unabashed revelation of mutual career aid (“we may be a terrible pair of log-rollers, I don’t know,” writes Bishop in 1965, having asked Lowell for a blurb for Questions of Travel after he had asked her for one for Life Studies); for loyalty and scruple, independent thinking and prudent silence, insistent generosity and occasional self-seeking; a longing to submit to the other’s perceived discipline and a desire to offer unconditional admiration; for personal, professional, and public events. One can read it for movements of place, gaps in time, and discrepancies and disharmonies in feeling or balance; for the dismayed Bishop’s agonized criticism of aspects of two of Lowell’s books, the rather coarse free translations in Imitations of 1961, and the use of private letters from his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in The Dolphin of 1973; for various other crises and cruxes: their heady, teasy-flirty mutual discovery of 1947, Bishop’s difficult visit to a near-manic Lowell in Maine in 1957, Lowell’s visit to Brazil and another manic episode in 1962, the death by suicide of Bishop’s companion, Lota de Macedo Soares, in 1967, Bishop’s uneasy return to Boston (to fill in for Lowell’s absence, if you please), and Lowell’s ultimate shuttling between wives and countries of the late 1970s. It’s social history, comedy of manners, American dissidence, the search for a style. It’s not least a gender myth more astute about men and women than that of Atalanta and Hippolytus (in any case, I always think Atalanta, like Bishop, should have won—she should have been provided with the apples, and Hippolytus, the ambitious, distractable male, goofed off in their pursuit, rather than the other way round). He is her anchor, she his kite.

The haunting issue in these letters is how much the vast difference between their authors brings them together and how much it pulls them apart. Because that Lowell and Bishop are unmistakably and unignorably and quite intractably dissimilar, of that there can be no doubt. The letters might as well have been printed in different type or different colors, so little is there ever any question of who is writing. (Which, if you think about it, is rather striking over some eight hundred pages of often close personal communication.) Even when, in the manner of friends, Lowell mimics Bishop, or Bishop teases Lowell, there is no real blurring of identities. The attraction of opposites is a simplification in this context, but the Lowell-Bishop association does bring to mind the school construction of a molecule: the proton (Lowell) massive, positively charged, hugging the center, and the electron (Bishop) almost weightless, negatively charged, speedy and peripheral and orbiting.

All this is exacerbated, of course, by the way one reads, which is to question, to cross-refer and compare, to doubt, to go behind the back of words, to tap for hollowness and cracks and deadness. One reads not with a vise or glue, but with a hammer and chisel, or an awl. It’s not—or at least not by intention, or not immediately—a consolidating or fortifying activity, but more like looking for safe passage across a frozen river. Hence, the very form of this book—not one voice, but two voices, and then such different voices and such completely different temperaments—inclines one to further doubt. It’s as though two incompatibles had rebased themselves and in some Nietzschean way sworn undying loyalty. The loyalty, whether unspoken or occasionally voiced along the lines of “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” one tends to disregard—it makes, as it were, the hard covers for this book—while the reader is again and again made aware of the incompatibility, which is everything in between.

The thought came to me early on that this is a dialogue of the deaf, or to put it in the way I first conceived: it’s like an arm writing to a leg. It’s all a matter of what you want to do: tickle or walk. Bishop is acute, Lowell obtuse; Bishop sensitive, solicitous, moody; Lowell dull, sometimes careless, rather relentlessly productive; she is anxious, he, when not shockingly and I think genuinely self-critical, insouciant; she is open to the world, whereas with him—and this is an understatement—“sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing”; her poems in her account of them are fickle, small scale, barely worth pursuing—and how many of them seem to get lost in the making—whereas his are industrial-scale drudgery and then quite suddenly completed. It seems symptomatic that as these letters begin, Lowell is working on his long poem, “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” “12 hours a day—it’s now 24 sections of almost 400 lines, and I think it may go to about 50 sections,” only for that to be followed by his prose memoir in the ’50s, various translations and dramatic adaptations in the ’60s and ’70s—Imitations, The Old Glory, Oresteia, Phaedra—and the several versions of another “section” poem, Notebook, followed by another long poem, The Dolphin. He writes like a man consumed—and not at all made happy—by his own industry, a sort of tin Midas: “I have a four hundred line sequence poem which might make a book, twenty pages on a New England essay, and my obituary on Randall. Thank God, we two still breathe the air of the living.” If Lowell proceeds like a bricklayer—you see the string and the plumb line, everything is so and so many courses of bricks—Bishop is like a butterfly hunter, now one, now another, in pretty pursuit, a little forlorn, and likely to come home at night with nothing to show for a day’s gallivanting. (Strange to think that they were both fisherfolk, and on occasions fished together.) She is much more protective of her poems too, either not mentioning them at all, or else habitually deprecating them: “I have two new ones I’ll send you when I get back, but not very serious ones I’m afraid.” Even length—and the term is relative—is not comforting to her, but rather the opposite: “However I have just about finished a long & complicated one about Key West.” The poem in question is “The Bight,” which is all of thirty-six lines.

The catalog of differences goes on. Not only is Lowell a sort of monad of literature, with little interest outside its bounds—his occasional comments on painters seem dull and contrived, and in music as well he lags way behind Bishop, a one-time music major, who is capable of recommending jazz clubs in Boston, Gesualdo, Purcell, Webern, and Brazilian sambas, all with deep knowledge and understanding—even within it he is drawn with laddish—or loutish—insistence to the monumental, the papier-mâché, the Ben-Hur. The contrast in their reading is illuminating: he comes to her, at various times, with Faulkner, Pope, Middlemarch, Chaucer, Dryden, Tasso, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Macaulay, Dr. Zhivago, “all of Thucydides. Isn’t Molière swell!”; she counters with Marius the Epicurean, Frank O’Hara, Captain Slocum, Mme. de Sévigné (“so much better than most things written on purpose”—which might be an epigraph for the present volume), Sergey Aksakov. It’s not that her writers are impressively obscure or recherché—though they are that, too!—they bespeak a taste as his, frankly, don’t. They are the product of longer and more grown-up searching. This emerges beautifully in one of the most lovely and softly assertive passages of hers in the book, where she is talking initially about an Anton Webern record, then makes this into nothing less than an ars poetica:

I am crazy about some of the short instrumental pieces. They seem exactly like what I’d always wanted, vaguely, to hear and never had, and really “contemporary.” That strange kind of modesty that I think one feels in almost everything contemporary one really likes—Kafka, say, or Marianne, or even Eliot, and Klee and Kokoschka and Schwitters … Modesty, care, space, a sort of helplessness but determination at the same time.

This brave and smart piece of improvisation, on an aesthetic that is not even wholly her own, and fighting contrary tendencies in Kokoschka and Eliot, at least, is surely quite beyond Lowell, whose programmatic remarks in books and interviews are few, lazy, and approximate—which might not seem to matter very much, except that the regrettable “confessional” label has gone by default.

Literary style is another constant source of difference. Bishop has humor—the lovely air of amusement and being amused that plays over almost everything she writes—Lowell has the more deliberate, more solitary quality of wit. I don’t think Oscar Wilde ever wrote or said anything wittier than Lowell’s observation—itself a witty variation on Juvenal—on his friend (and regular bone of contention in this correspondence: he likes him, she doesn’t) Randall Jarrell: “Then Randall thinks nothing adult is human.” Bishop seeks balance and harmony, even in her most far-flung sentences, so that one’s impression is of a chord: “The man wore a very strange buttoned bow-tie, and as a youth he had carried gold, around his waist, for Wells Fargo.” (Who else would have thought to make one sentence out of that?) Lowell is drawn to energy, imbalance, exaggeration, caricature; here he is on his son, aged just one: “We’ll be at Bill Alfred’s sometime after the 15th, though I dread the effect of Sheridan on Bill’s fragile furniture. Unfortunately he has made great strides in the last month and now walks, and I think takes strength exercises. A little girl visited him and he looked in contrast like a golden gorilla.” To such a distanced, perhaps word-bound, way of looking (remember, please, those “great strides” are literal), everything is apt to seem monstrous; and did anyone ever use the little word “girl” with that undertow of sexual speculation with which Lowell always endows it? Bishop noticed it too: in “North Haven,” her marvelous elegy for him, she has, “Years ago, you told me it was here / (in 1932?) you first ‘discovered girls.’” There seem to be almost two competing notions of literature at work here: to Bishop it is seeing everything clearly and fairly and in complicated harmony, through to the horizon; to Lowell it is something compacted and impacted, often a single quality driven in and in on itself, somehow caricatured even when kind. He does have some wonderful passages, but they seem—compared to hers—so utterly planned and worked: the account of a literary conference in New York, the description of a weekend’s sailing in Maine with the Eberharts and others, a piece of passionate recollection of Delmore Schwartz (on July 16, 1966), which reaches the level of his brilliant published memoirs of Randall Jarrell and Allen Tate:

Delmore in an unpressed mustard gabardine, a little winded, husky voiced, unhealthy, but with a carton of varied vitamin bottles, the color of oil, quickening with Jewish humor, and in-the-knowness, and his own genius, every person, every book—motives for everything, Freud in his blood, great webs of causation, then suspicion, then rushes of rage. He was more reasonable than us, but obsessed, a much better mind, but one already chasing the dust—it was like living with a sluggish, sometimes angry spider—no hurry, no motion, Delmore’s voice, almost inaudible, dead, intuitive, pointing somewhere, then the strings tightening, the roar of rage—too much, too much for us!

This is hammer work, a hammer on the piano or a hammer on the drums; Bishop makes writing seem like breathing.

If one leaves the sheltered hunting grounds of literature—as to an extent we have already—then the differences grow still more apparent. Bishop likes strong Brazilian coffee, Lowell drinks American dishwater coffee (or tea, sometimes he’s not sure). Bishop is the one who brings in words—desmarcar, “when you want to get out of an engagement,” or “found a lovely word at Jane Dewey’s—you probably know it—ALLELOMIMETIC. (Don’t DARE use it!),” and she is the one, too, whose work requires a dictionar...

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0374259968
• ISBN 13: 9780374259969
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304