The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos - Hardcover

Carson, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375408045 ISBN 13: 9780375408045

Publisher: Knopf, 2001

Synopsis

The Beauty Of The Husband is an essay on Keats’s idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in 29 tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.

This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice–29 “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects–love–and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.

About this title

About the Author

Anne Carson lives in Canada.

From the Back Cover

"In the world of people who keep up with contemporary poetry, Anne Carson has been cutting a large swath, inciting both envy and admiration. . . . I don't think there had been a book since Robert Lowell's Life Studies that has advanced the art of poetry as radically as Anne Carson is in the process of doing. Carson's peers might bristle at the grandness of her ambition [but] it seems to me that there is only one relevant question to be posed about her writing. What her fellow poets would do well to ask themselves is not whether what Carson is writing can or cannot be called poetry, but how has she succeeded in making it–whatever label you give it–so thrillingly new?"

–Daphne Merkin, New York Times Book Review

"Brilliantly captured . . . Reading her is to experience a euphonious, mystical sort of perplexity . . . punctuated by what the husband himself calls "short blinding passages," which in this book consist of moments of almost unbearable poignancy. . . . We read conversations that show the unbridgeable distance and unbreakable intimacy of the lovers, caught in the dance of beauty and destruction, at the same time. . . . In a few swiftly cut lines, her 29 tangos, Ms. Carson tells what might be seen as a pedestrian love story: a marriage, a divorce, a sad life left behind. But there is nothing pedestrian about the way her verse pierces the mind with a laserlike light." —Richard Bernstein, New York Times

"This poet's voice is so strange, so unique, so wholly her own that it seems a paradox that she already has such a wide audience. And the message of her seventh book is another paradox: that sexuality–both the body's intellect and the mind's desire–is thinking."–Talk (Talk 10 list, March)

"Impressive. . . . [Carson's] references to or quotes from the likes of Homer and Jane Austen and Beckett are kept in a vibrant present with infusions of a jazzy language that has come to define our age and our relationships. . . . With swift strokes depicting the illusions and disillusions of a marriage gone sour, Carson has managed to make the intellectual life hip. In her hands, a quote from Plato seems as natural as a pop reference. . . . Then there are the lines of sheer lyricism, lines that send us spinning back to idea of beauty, of truth. . . . This new work, while resembling poetry, still has that edge, that charming threat of becoming at any moment something other than what we expect. . . . A single light does not illuminate this volume. It is as though individual candles were strategically placed throughout the length of the marriage, highlighting essential moments. . . . The Beauty of the Husband is an essential song, fully aware of all the perils and brave enough to play itself out."–Dionisio D. Martinez, Miami Herald

"In Carson's most welcoming and intimate work to date, she loosens the robes of erudition that cloaked Men in the Off Hours in an aura of wry intellectualism. Here the tango provides inspiration for lashingly precise yet sultry and graceful poems that depict the eroticism and possessiveness, competition and resentment of a marriage in dissolution, a process envisioned as both an elaborate dance and vicious warfare....With Keats as her touchstone, Carson—audacious, funny, poised, and extraordinarily smart—considers our often contradictory needs for beauty and love....[A] piquant inquiry into the nature of desire far beyond familiar parameters."
—Booklist

"[T]hough she spangles her work with the costume jewelry of literary and historical allusion, challenging the reader with ... puzzles, [Anne Carson] also evinces a rare grasp of emotional chemistry. This "fictional essay" on marriage and adultery...cuts more truly, more deeply than any plain-spoken confessional monolog, dramatizing inner and outer conflict with a precise, knowing wit. . . . Rooted in a literary consciousness at once Romantic and ironic, this is as fresh and compelling a poetic treatment of a familiar subject as one is likely to find in any century."—Library Journal

Reviews

After the Canadian classicist, polymath and MacArthur "genius grant" winner's much-acclaimed verse-novel Autobiography of Red (1997)Aand exactly a year after Men in the Off HoursAcomes a second book-length, mostly-narrative poem: this charming, edgy, insistently intertextual and finally heartbreaking sequence about unlikely courtship, modern marriage, divorce and "primordial eros and strife." The 29 short chapters Carson calls "Tangos" imagine and analyze, in jaggedly memorable verse, the ill-starred romance between the narrator and her charismatic, needy and unfaithful husband, who writes her romantic letters in her teenage years, introduces her to his tragic friend Ray, cheats on her with women named Merced and Dolor, takes her on a tour of the Peloponnese and begs her to reverse her decision to leave him. The plot emerges through Carson's meditative, elusive fragments, mysteriously isolated couplets, excerpts from versified conversations and letters, interior monologues and (as Carson's readers have come to expect) digressions on matters of classical scholarship. This kind of thing is imitated badly and often by others, but Carson's phraseology within poems remains her own: "Rotate the husband and expose a hidden side," she urges early on; later, "words// are a strange docile wheat are they not, they bend/ to the ground." And if some of Carson's devotees seek just such cryptic moments, others will want, and get, more direct shows of emotion: "Proust/ used to weep over days gone by," she asks the reader, "do you?" (Feb.) Forecast: Carson was the subject of a New York Times Magazine feature this yearAshe is one of the very few poets writing now to cross over into trade-like sales. The wave of publicity may have crested, but this book should be well reviewed, and name recognition should kick in if the book is displayed along with current fiction, which the subtitle obviously encourages.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This new poem by the well-known classicist is at once the story of a failed marriage and an exploration of Romantic notions of beauty and truth. But Carson's idiosyncratic voice and her punchy declarative style––"You want a clean life I live a dirty one"––quickly make it clear that hers is a thoroughly modern take on the intimate cruelties of married life. And this is the primary pleasure of her writing: it is both entirely new and strangely familiar, like remembering a private language we thought we'd forgotten.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

In Carson's most welcoming and intimate work to date, she loosens the robes of erudition that cloaked Men in the Off Hours [BKL Mr 1 00] in an aura of wry intellectualism. Here the tango provides inspiration for lashingly precise yet sultry and graceful poems that depict the eroticism and possessiveness, competition and resentment of a marriage in dissolution, a process envisioned as both an elaborate dance and vicious warfare. Most poems are written in the voice of the wronged wife, who answers the question, how could she love such a selfish man, by saying, "Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty. / As I would again." With Keats as her touchstone, Carson--audacious, funny, poised, and extraordinarily smart--considers our often contradictory needs for beauty and love. She adeptly marshals images of cleanliness and dirt, the story of Persephone, considerations of the intensity and frivolity of game playing, and the dynamics of dialogue to push her piquant inquiry into the nature of desire far beyond familiar parameters. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

A professor of classics at McGill University and the author of Autobiography of Red, a National Book Critics Circle nominee, Carson has rapidly become one of North America's most acclaimed academic poets. But even though she spangles her work with the costume jewelry of literary and historical allusion, challenging the reader with obscure, referential puzzles, she also evinces a rare grasp of emotional chemistry. This "fictional essay" on marriage and adulteryDreally an impressionistic poetic meditationDcuts more truly, more deeply than any plain-spoken confessional monolog, dramatizing inner and outer conflict with a precise, knowing wit. The husband holds "Yes and No together with one hand/ while parrying the words of wife." The wife marvels "at her husband's ability to place the world within brackets." Sensibilities unravel and reassemble as contradictions beget tautologies: "If I could kill you I would then have to make another exactly like you./ Why./ To tell it to." Rooted in a literary consciousness at once Romantic and ironic, this is as fresh and compelling a poetic treatment of a familiar subject as one is likely to find in any century.DFred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

II. BUT A DEDICATION IS ONLY FELICITOUS IF PERFORMED BEFORE WITNESSES--IT IS AN ESSENTIALLY PUBLIC SURRENDER LIKE THAT OF STANDARDS OF BATTLE

You know I was married years ago and when he left my husband took my notebooks.
Wirebound notebooks.
You know that cool sly verb write. He liked writing, disliked having to start
each thought himself.
Used my starts to various ends, for example in a pocket I found a letter he'd begun
(to his mistress at that time)
containing a phrase I had copied from Homer: 'entropalizomenh is how Homer says
Andromache went
after she parted from Hektor--"often turning to look back"
she went
down from Troy's tower and through stone streets to her loyal husband's
house and there
with her women raised a lament for a living man in his own halls.
Loyal to nothing
my husband. So why did I love him from early girlhood to late middle age
and the divorce decree came in the mail?
Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty.
As I would again
if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible.
Beauty makes sex sex.
You if anyone grasp this--hush, let's pass

to natural situations.
Other species, which are not poisonous, often have colorations and patterns
similar to poisonous species.
This imitation of a poisonous by a nonpoisonous species is called mimicry.
My husband was no mimic.
You will mention of course the war games. I complained to you often enough
when they were here all night
with the boards spread out and rugs and little lamps and cigarettes like Napoleon's
tent I suppose,
who could sleep? All in all my husband was a man who knew more
about the Battle of Borodino
than he did about his own wife's body, much more! Tensions poured up the walls
and along the ceiling,
sometimes they played Friday night till Monday morning straight through, he
and his pale wrathful friends.
They sweated badly. They ate meats of the countries in play.
Jealousy
formed no small part of my relationship to the Battle of Borodino.

I hate it.
Do you.
Why play all night.
The time is real.
It's a game.
It's a real game.
Is that a quote.
Come here.
No.
I need to touch you.
No.
Yes.

That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attempted
although married six months.
Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not sure
we got it right.
He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.
Early next day
I wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had published
in a small quarterly magazine.
Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.
Or should I say ideal.
Neither of us had ever seen Venice.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375408045
• ISBN 13: 9780375408045
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160