Reviews and Features
Eva Salzman With Regrets
DEREK WALCOTT
White Egrets
Faber £12.99
Last year’s election for the Oxford Poetry Professorship prompted the kind of media coverage the literary world covets. Ruth Padel resigned from the post within days when evidence suggested she had strategically timed and primed a third party to dredge up the sexual harassment cases that had blighted the teaching career of Derek Walcott, her rival nominee. The initial reports on the alleged charges had already given Walcott the benefit of the doubt. So Walcott’s walking away from the débâcle with dignity spared him uncomfortable questions. The accounts opponents drew attention to claimed that Walcott had previously been shielded by institutions’ sophisticated mechanisms for defending their reputations. Apart from the entertainment of a refreshingly earthy scandal within the ivory towers, such episodes remind us what we already know from reading the diaries and letters of Woolf, Wagner and Larkin; we may love the art yet be uncomfortable with the artist.
Internationally acclaimed, Derek Walcott long ago entered the pantheon of literary eminent statesmen, oracular poets. His latest publication, White Egrets, a Poetry Book Society Choice, coincided with a visit to England for an extended teaching stint at Essex University. I negotiated a reading for him at Goldsmiths during this time, which gave me the opportunity to reflect on my experience of Walcott as a teacher and a poet. Studying with him at Columbia University in the 1980s had been a mixed experience for me. Arriving straight from an undergraduate degree course to Columbia’s MFA programme with its all-star staff lineup – Stanley Kunitz, C K Williams, Jorie Graham, Elizabeth Hardwick, Carolyn Kizer, and Edmund White – I found many mature students who had been out in the world, some already published. Under any circumstances Joseph Brodsky and Walcott, friends and colleagues, would have been an intimidating two-pronged intellectual force. The poet Sarah Arvio, also at Columbia then, recalls the two poets ‘quipping and telling jokes with hand gestures’; she saw them around New York, often together, for years. Brodsky charged us with memorizing large chunks of Frost and the unfashionable Auden; in fact, his essay ‘On “Sept. 1st 1939” by W H Auden’, from Less Than One, is derived from a class he taught, spending an entire term on this poem, according to my possibly hyperbolic memory of it. His essay on Walcott ‘The Sound of the Tide’ from this same book – in which he quotes his friend ‘either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation’ – indicates these two poets’ likeminded preoccupations: politics inextricable from literary tradition, and the vast scope of their shared territory in all the fine arts. What keeps finite civilizations from disintegration, the essay begins, is ‘not legions but languages’ and the job of ‘holding at such times’ is done by ‘men from the provinces, from the outskirts’: a place like Saint Lucia. Walcott writes ‘the sun, tired of empire, declines’ and as it does so, Brodsky continues ‘it heats up a far greater crucible of races and cultures than any melting pot north of the equator’, invoking a ‘real genetic Babel’. Walcott’s birthright is both the voice of empire and its harshest critic, his mixed dictions a characteristic amalgam of the ‘scorn for the very locution typical of the master race and the pride of the native in receiving that education’.
Walcott would sit us in an empty theatre for lessons on poetry as a spoken, performative art. His was an intimidating, almost adversarial style of teaching. On-the-spot class writing assignments were issued as imperatives and challenges. I attended his and Brodsky’s classes religiously, both fearful of and responsive to an urgency that accorded with my passion for literature. A book can own you, says Walcott and from my earliest memories literature owned me. Arvio recalls his recipe for authorial integrity: ‘If we are going to call ourselves poets, we should know the canon. If you say ‘horse’, for example, you should be able to name any number of poems with a horse in it and quote the lines’.
It makes sense that the Russian Brodsky, at odds with his repressive society, and Walcott, with his commitment to western literature in the context of a European sensibility, were discordant with the politicized ideology of open form: a badge sported to demonstrate an author’s understanding of and allegiance to a distinctive American voice liberated from the ways of the old world. These two poets’ drills in tradition and craft added ammunition to the stockpile of those of us gearing up to oppose their experimentalist predecessors, but Walcott’s view of rhyme as a test of ability would have seemed unacceptably sportsmanlike, competitive and cold to others. Yet, explaining the perfect harmony of a rhyming couplet, he invokes two lovers and compares poetry’s communion between writer and reader to prayer. If ritual and convention distil through containment the profoundest feeling and thought, one can trace a link from a love of rhyme and metre to Walcott’s belief that the core of identity in poetry is disappearance; its strength is in silence and anonymity.
Walcott’s public persona during a question-and-answer session at Goldsmiths on his recent visit is charming and generous. ‘Wry and affable’ is how Arvio describes him. He lists poets he admires – Edward Thomas, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin and Charles Simic – and traces his motivation back to an early desire to continue the work of his dead father who also wrote. The response to the inevitable student question about computers is that he has an important relationship with the pen and values the physical act of writing. Bad art swerves towards the prophetic, racial or nationalistic, while great art is distinguished by moral power and modulated by honesty. Perhaps above all else it is a consolation, or else would not be created by people in great pain. The solution to writer’s block? Suicide. I also felt in accord with his frank remark that negotiating one’s literary world entails much kissing-of-ass.
A virtuoso crossword of refrains, rhymes, and highly wrought linguistic puns – for example on the (r)egrets the title headlines – White Egrets exemplifies its author’s famously fierce devotion to craft. A self-deprecating humour leavens these variations on the sonnet, which confront and defy fears about age and loss in order to come to terms with the death of others too. Recalling youth with the wisdom and articulate strength of age renews it, however briefly. ‘The perpetual ideal is astonishment’, he writes. This idea and word is reprised elsewhere:
I am astonished at the sunflowers spinning
in the green meadows above the indigo sea,
amazed at their aureate silence, though they sing
with the inaudible hum of the clocks over Recanati.
Do they turn to face the dusk, just as an army
might obey the last orders of a sinking empire..?
(‘In Italy, X’)
Though chill winds blow in a poem about ex-lovers meeting again in their wheelchairs, there are restorative elements (provided by poetry itself, for example). A sterner tone relents in ‘The Sweet Life Café’:
my hand trembles wildly, but not over this page.
My lust is in great health, but, if it happens
that all my towers shrivel to dribbling sand,
joy will still bend the cane-reeds with my pen’s
elation on the road to Vieuxfort...
An undulating sea-swell of repeated words, and patterns of rhymes, deployed as a unifying and developmental strategy for the various sections, amplifies mortality as a driving force. The repetitions give the collection a circularity (‘treachery’ maybe the strongest link in the chain) suggestive of the complexities of a fugue with its deceptively improvisatory feel. Seemingly casual asides often revealed as the emotional précis and culmination of regretful meditations on which the poems are not permitted to dwell, in the hands of a poet who is masterfully detached interpreter of his own ageing passions. One strength of this book is the way its borderline grandiloquence is tempered by a more vulnerable and personally reflective note, lyricism pausing mid-flight for a starker address underlining its significance: ‘I know what I’ve done, I cannot look beyond. / I treated them all badly, my three wives’. Gentle mockery gives way to self-admonition:
How come, despite all this, you never mention old age,
you grizzled satyr with your bristling sea urchin beard,
and a head grown almost as white as this page,
(‘Sicilian Suite, VIII’)
Candid appraisals of how others view old age lusting after youth informs a meditative critique, where what might otherwise be a swaggering paean to female beauty shows a brutal underside:
What if all this passion is out of proportion to its subject?
An average beauty, magnified to deific, demonic
statue by the fury of intellect…
Where does this sickness come from, because it is
sickness, this conversion of the simplest action
to an ordeal, this hatred of simple delight
in others, of benches in the empty park?
Only her suffering will bring you satisfaction,
old man in the dimming world…
(‘Sicilian Suite, IX’)
Making their first appearance in earlier books, the white ‘sepulchral’ egrets, which are also ‘spectral’ and ‘seraphic souls’ within a few lines of each other, re-emerge in numbers, emblematic visually and bearing a name so close to regret. Described in classic sculpture terms they ‘keep modelling for Audubon … in a book / that, in my youth, would open like a lawn’. The poet’s characteristic allusions to myth and literature, in counterpoint to the exploitations of empire, suggest inescapable analogies with the theme of mortality. An early poem (‘This was my early war…’) unbuttons a fisherman’s epic guise, shedding high-flown rhetoric to express the fury and fear of the diminished self:
You would watch him shrink
into his nickname, not too proud to beg,
who would roar like a lorry revving into the prime of his drink.]
Walcott’s register incorporates dual allegiances, integrating western culture with that of his native land, St Lucia (named after the patron saint of Syracuse in Sicily), each place the understudy for the other. In the same poem, he writes about his ‘early war, the bellowing quarrels, at the pitch of noon, of men moving cargoes’ and indeed a more human scale accentuates the panoramic sweep of his terms: a grumpiness at the dissonance between place and the ideal of its tradition in his homeland: ‘the doomed acres / where yet another luxury hotel will be built’ or in London’s streets ‘begrimed with age / and greasy with tradition’ so at odds with his fifth-form anthology’s representation of this culture. Topical references include elegies for friends, poems commemorating Obama’s election, and ghosts from 9/11 in the section ‘In the Village’. The film noir-ish ‘The Spectre of Empire’ is a central poem in its conceit: the fleeting glimpses of the personification of empire as a spectral figure near ‘the Conradian docks of the rusted port’, disappearing then re-materializing:
to slip into the streets
like a bookmark in a nineteenth-century novel,
scuttering from contact as a crab retreats.
…his fame is bigger
than his empire’s now, its slow-burning conscience.
The evocations of place, women and politics, measured within the grand scheme of things, often seem a function of distance, paradoxically, just as culture is the filter for his own psyche, but then some form of exile may be the poet’s natural and necessary state, mobile and renewable in different guises. Age mythologizes its own past from the outset
The chessmen are as rigid on their chessboard
as those life-sized terra-cotta warriors whose vows
to their emperor with bridle, shield and sword,
were sworn by a chorus that has lost its voice:
no echo in that astonishing excavation.
and is itself another kind of exile, from the youth that is humanity’s default condition. The book’s structure amplifies a valedictory tone already evident in earlier work. Although the powers on display here bode well for more to come, the collection hedges its bets finally with a majestic flourish, in commandingly lyrical style: ‘as a cloud slowly covers the page and it goes / white again and the book comes to a close’.
Eva Salzman’s most recent collection Double Crossing: New and Selected Poems was published in 2007.
