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As I was riding the bus to Mitla and gazing at the graded, layered mountain ranges, and the peasant plowing the field with two white oxen next to a disused tractor, I thought of how few works of art really stayed with me. And I remembered the injunction of Malcolm Lowry’s contemporary Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise, that an artist's sole responsibility was to create a masterpiece and that nothing else was worthwhile.
The way to go about writing a masterpiece is not necessarily by fixing the locus of the pressure on each line of a poem or each sentence of a novel. But Hart Crane and Malcolm Lowry consumed and tormented themselves daily with this task and considered themselves to be failures: not failures in comparison to their contemporaries, but in relation to the work which they had planned but could not execute. This would not be such a delicate and difficult matter had they not each produced masterpieces, works head and heels above those of their less ambitious, somewhat “saner,” more tractable contemporaries, like Graham Greene and Archibald MacLeish. These works were masterpieces which they knew they could never exceed, only equal. (Yes, Crane might write a long poem that bettered The Bridge, but could he better, on their own terms, his best short and shorter poems, like “Legend,” “Black Tambourine,” “Repose of Rivers,” “My Grandmother's Love Letters,” “Praise for an Urn,” and “0 Carib Isle”?) Perhaps it was this sense of failure they were trying to assuage which took the form of a thirst--a thirst alcohol only magnified.
*
The conflicts of a life show up on the litmus of form. I pose the question: did the “problems” of Hart Crane and Malcolm Lowry result more from accumulated desperation, or from a failure to find, in the long run (and for W, significant forms as artists? Or, to put it another way, did Crane and Lowry drink as they did because they were mysteriously tormented, battered inwardly by sexual confusions and unremitting longings for something more than “existence as sold” to them (Lowry's phrase, my emphasis), or because, as artists, or poets and novelists, they failed to find forms that allowed them to go on without extended blockage, hiatus?
*
Hart Crane went to Mexico in 1932 on a Guggenheim Fellowship ostensibly to write a history of Mexico in verse: a spectacularly unrealistic project. He barely had time to get settled and write letters and a few poems before the year was out.
Malcolm Lowry (following in Crane's footsteps and aware of Ambrose Bierce’s mysterious disappearance) wrote most of Under the Volcano in Mexico and conceived a trilogy (The Voyage that Never Ends) to rival Proust, Joyce, Mann and Musil in its architectonic complexity.
*
What drew Lowry and Crane to Mexico? Certainly one reason was that it was possible to live more cheaply on a modest income there than in the United States or Europe: Crane could stretch his fellowship and Lowry his small allowance from his father.
Mexico offered “a collective desolate fecundity,” which Lowrysought and Crane evoked in his last and perhaps greatest poem, “The Broken Tower.”
Mexico was a kind of solution to the problem Henri Lefebvre sets forth in Everyday Life in the Modern World: “our aim is to prove that a system of everyday life (in America and Europe) does not exist, notwithstanding all the endeavours to establish and settle it for good and all, and that there are only sub-systems separated by irreducible gaps, yet situated on one plane and related to it.”
~
I have been walking for days in Oaxaca, the valley of the acacias. As you go higher, the town thins out and the air gets clearer. Each day I climb a little farther into the hills. I watch the clouds darken over the mountains. There’s the sense of a city in flotation, of a place not fully of the world, a presence bordering on the magical, the marginal. The architecture is not so different from what it was 500 years before. Steep streets sweep downward toward the zócalo and upward toward the mountains, mountains that hold the valley gently, mountains that build up the wall of the sky. There’s mystery in the play of light-shadow over the landscape.
In the evening, we go to a Spanish restaurant whose balcony overlooks the zócalo. A demonstration which had been going on in the streets all day, on the Avenues Juarez and Constitution, has moved to the center of town. They are demonstrating for more money for teachers and freedom of expression: jViva La Libertad de Expresi6n! As we watch the demonstrators congregate, the sky turns black, lightning begins to flicker in the hills above the city and thunder rumbles. It is as dark and ominous a sky as I have ever seen. It would have needed an El Greco or Albert Pinkham Ryder to do it justice. But the demonstrators seem oblivious to the symbolism of the weather and in spite of the imminent deluge, continue to shout through megaphones.
*
Outside the bus depot of the Hotel Meson del Angel a dark-eyed child is bottle-feeding an infant. She looks up as if to say, do you think I was born to do this? The woman beside her on the street has set out half a dozen straw baskets brimful with dark roots and branches. ...
For the complete essay please click on the Prose tab
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From Publishers Weekly,
Starred Review
"We are drawn
toward journals out
of a craving for the
authentic, for the
uncensored word and
thought," Rudman
( The Nowhere Steps
) says in an essay "On
Notebooks." Whether
discussing random jottings
or a poet's most significant
works, he searches
for the unclothed self,
starting with his own.
Rudman begins this
volume with a 28-page
journal, written as
he walks through New
York City, juxtaposing
childhood memories
with buildings and
people he passes. This
same search informs
his astute criticism: "Imagine
a poet's life-work
as marginalia: his
real thoughts, against
the ones he puts forth
publicly tempered by
a stance, a mask. .
. ." (on Robert
Duncan).
Such
attempts to infer the
life from the writing
might seem presumptuous,
but Rudman's are so
discerning it scarcely
matters. And his probe
into a writer's life
is never derogatory:
all the essays selected
for this collection
pay homage to the authors
he's discussing. A
respected translator
of Russian poetry,
Rudman is particularly
insightful when addressing
works in translation.
Willing to risk a far-fetched
opinion, his views
make readers double
back and rethink
From Library
Journal
Rudman is a
New York poet, translator,
critic, editor, and
essayist. The present
title collects 18
previously published
essays that focus
or touch on poets
and poetry. The essays
appeared previously
in literary magazines
such as the American
Poetry Review. One
poet mentioned in
several essays is
Boris Pasternak, of
whom Rudman has done
an excellent translation.
One essay discusses
the process of translating
poetry. The subject
of poetry crops up
even in rambling essays
that concern going
for a walk or writing
letters. The range
of Rudman's knowledge
is impressively broad--Homer
to Czeslaw Milosz
and Robert Duncan.
> Click here to purchase Diverse Voices: Essays on Poets and Poetry
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