Because he is the most gracious of poets – the unquestioned king of the generous jacket blurb, worded just vaguely enough so that you’re never quite certain if he’s read the work – and perhaps because his own verse is filled with indirection if not active misdirection, fabulous wanderings off topic into lush, witty digressiveness, sometimes never to return, John Ashbery the person has remained above the petty poetry wars of his generation, beloved by post-avants & quietists alike, save for a churlish few who mutter into the margins about some need for direct statement. Thus, just possibly the most wonderful thing about Other Traditions, the little critical volume Ashbery has constructed from his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, is that he picks a fight.
Actually, he picks more than one – and the ones he picks & how he does this cast considerable light back on both person & poet. Other Traditions consists of six lectures given at Harvard a decade earlier, each examining the life & writing of an Ashbery influence who has received, in Ashbery’s opinion, less attention than he or she warrants: John Clare, Thomas Love Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, Laura Riding, John Wheelwright & David Schubert. That’s an interesting group of writers. Clare & Schubert died in asylums, Beddoes & Roussel committed suicide, Riding or (Riding)
Anyone who has read Ashbery at all closely over the past half century will recognize that these are all important influences on his own writing, which he readily acknowledges. All also tend to fall outside of the parameters of the received canon. Even Harold Bloom, Ashbery’s primary advocate in L'école de Quietude, fails to include Riding & Schubert in his Western Canon. Ashbery in is own way is arguing for the inclusion of each. His own way however is the softest advocacy imaginable, self-deprecating & acknowledging at the outset how hard it is to figure these outsiders in. At least so it seems until Ashbery arrives at his final poet, Schubert. Ashbery writes “I myself value Schubert more than Pound or Eliot,” and cites a previously unpublished letter from William Carlos Williams to Ted Weiss in which Williams declares Schubert “fit for a new anthology – where neither Eliot nor, I am afraid, Pound belong.” It’s not clear when Williams actually wrote that letter or whether he’s referring to simply his old complaint about the failure of modernist expats to extricate themselves from a European heritage that the Doctor seems to have regarded as just so much imperialism. There are, I should note, ways in which I think Williams may be arguing exactly the point Ashbery would like him to be making – that Schubert points toward a postmodern writing, to use that ungainly formulation, that modernists like Ezra & Eliot could never have foreseen. It’s an argument that would have been a whole lot clearer, I think, if Ashbery could have located Schubert more clearly with three other modernist masters, Stevens (whom Ashbery notes Schubert admired), Frost (who actually support Schubert financially for a time, and would have done so longer had not Schubert’s mental illness intervened), and Stein, about whom Ashbery says nothing, but who in many ways seems the modernists “most like” Schubert.
This, I think, is the fight Ashbery is picking, a refiguring of literary history itself toward the marginal as a, how can I say this, central theme. But the fight he actually declares is another one altogether:
How then does one discuss Schubert, or more precisely, how does one read his work? Not, I think, in the way of Irvin Ehrenpreis….
Ehrenpreis, who, as Ashbery then notes “contributed the longest essay to Works and Days,” the special issue of The Quarterly Review of Literature (QRL) in which Schubert’s collected poetry, selected letters and a handful of valedictory critical comments, including a two-page piece by Ashbery himself, appeared in 1983, was a well-known Swift scholar who occasionally wrote reviews of contemporary Quietists. Ehrenpreis has attempted to construe the inscrutable, making sense of Schubert’s poems through an application, as fanciful as it is forced, of the parsimony principle. One poem Ehrenpreis has thus read is “Kind Valentine,” the very first text in the QRL gathering:
She hugs a white rose to her heart –
The petals flare – in her breath blown;
She’ll catch the fruit on her death –
The flower rooted in the bone.
The face at evening comes for love;
Reeds in the river meet below.
She sleeps small child, her face a tear;
The dream comes in with stars to go
Into the window, feigning snow.
This is the book that no one knows.
The paper wall holds mythic oaks.
Behind the oaks, a castle grows.
Over the door, and over her
(She dies! she wakes!) the steeds gallop.
The child stirs, hits the dumb air, weeps,
Afraid of night’s long loving-cup.
Into yourself, live, Joanne!
And count the buttons – how they run
To doctor, red chief, lady’s man!
Most softly pass, on the stairs down,
The stranger in your evening gown.
Hearing white, inside your grief,
An insane laughter up the roof.
O little wind, come in with dawn –
It is your shadow on the lawn.
Break the pot! and let carnations –
Smell them! they’re the very first.
Break the sky and let come magic
Rain! Let earth come pseudo-tragic
Roses – blossom, unrehearsed.
Head, break! is broken. Dream, so small,
Come in to her. O little child,
Dance on squills where the winds run wild.
The candles rise in the warm night
Back and forth, the tide is bright.
Slowly, slowly, the waves retreat
Under her wish and under feet.
And over tight breath, tighter eyes,
The mirror ebbs, it ebbs and flows.
And the intern, the driver, speed
To gangrene! But – who knows – suppose
He was beside her! Please, star-bright,
First I see, while in the night
A soft-voiced, like a tear, guitar –
It calls a palm coast from afar.
And oh, so the stars were there
For him to hang upon her hair
Like the white rose he gave, white hot,
While the low sobbing band – it wept
Violets and forget-me-nots.
Of this, Ehrenpreis attempts to construct a coherent narrative. Ashbery, on the other hand, sides with Rachel Hadas, who later took Ehrenpreis to task in a piece in Parnassus for telling “us more than we need to know, quite possibly more than is here.” Ashbery underscores the point by offering his own close reading of sorts. It’s Ashbery at his Professor Irwin Corey-best:
“Kind Valentine” seems to me not a poem about the stages of life awaiting a young girl [Ehrenpreis’ reading], but an address to a girl who is slipping in and out of dreams by a poet similarly afflicted. Much of its effect comes from slight dislocations of grammar, so that one’s expectations are constantly in a tense state. For example: “This is the book that no one knows. / The paper wall holds mythic oaks, / Behind the oaks a castle grows.” (Is this an allusion perhaps to the growing castle in August Strindberg’s Dream Play, whose subject is the failure of communication between men and gods?) And then: “Over the door, and over her / (She dies! She wakes!) the steeds gallop.” We might expect the steeds to gallop through the door and over her, but dreams, nightmares no doubt in tis case, have their own rules of dimension and perspective and their own inscrutable reasons for having them. In any case, the steeds’ disorderly and hence disturbing arrival in the room foreshadows the quite possibly sinister nature of the contents of “night’s long loving-cup.” The poet then commands Joanne to live “in yourself!” In a letter to Ben Belitt, Schubert wrote: “Frost once said to me that – a poet – his arms can go out – like this – or in to himself; in either case he will cover a good deal of the world.”; perhaps Schubert feels at this point that Joanne will cover the world most effectively by living “into” herself. The rest of the stanza, in which Joanne is told to count buttons to the tune of a childish rhyme and then pass down the stairs and onto the lawn, hearing “an insane laughter up the roof” – here again the phrase is slightly askew, as though the laughter were coming from someone not on the roof but perhaps wedged under it and who was insane enough to set the roof slightly ajar so as to be audible to someone on the ground below – the rest seems to me, pace Ehrenpreis, not a further stage in Joanne’s maturing into a girl dangerously in love but merely an extension of the dream, which is plotless like all dreams.
Like Ehrenpreis, Ashbery is able to generate a narrative. Only his succeeds by not making sense. Or, more precisely, through creating a plausible context for not making sense. At the least, there is, in Ashbery’s version, no requirement for a continuous figurative and temporal landscape projected by the text. Ashbery goes so far as to underscore the points at which the parsimony principle takes leave of the text itself for pure speculation: he uses the word perhaps. In fact, what Ashbery is doing here is actually offering Harvard students a demonstration in how to read.
What Ehrenpreis would have made of this we’ll never know. On
