BOOKS:
Hahn, John Heidenry, Claire
BOOKS If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade WARREN HINCKLE Putnam, $8.95 JOHN HEIDENRY Warren Hinckle possesses few of those qualities which would make him a man for all seasons. His intellectual...
...It was an astonishing performance...
...He has bit every millionaire's hand that fed him after having first, with a shameless bar-room bravado, kissed another part of their anatomy to ensure the funding of his radical-slick magazine Ramparts...
...These poems are, as he tells us, "a love poem se-quence...
...Who could en-dure much of this...
...Hinckle and his friends were to be tested at the very same conference roundtable where Mexico's fashionable rich paid $1000 for the honor of joining in seminars with the author of The Art of Loving (the thinking man's Kahlil Gibran...
...The long introductory poem, "Tendril in the Mesh" with its heavy thump of alliteration, affected diction, and ba-roque metaphors reads like a bad translation of some fourteenth century Northumbrian verse...
...Here Everson is master of his craft...
...These are lovely poems, light-filled and delicate...
...His intellectual appetites are to be measured by the fact that he chose an advertising ex-ecutive to be his philosophical mentor...
...The agony that pulses just beneath the sur-face of his work establishes a rhythm that is dangerous, threatening, but con-trolled...
...Whether he knows it or not, Hinckle, such a very talented and likable man, is now in the line of work of some-body like, say, Art Linkletter, namely, being funny...
...Sis-ter Maura groups her verses together thematically...
...His poetry was powerful and moving as it stood alone on the printed page...
...This volume is comprised, he says, "of troubled verse...
...He is at once a deeply concerned religious person and a skilled craftsman of verse, combining Sister Maura's control of meter and metaphor with the passion-ate vitality of William Everson...
...The funniest story of all is that Ramparts came to be founded in the first place...
...Being unreasonable means being mean and persistent about the truth...
...Although the paperback makes the volume seem slim, there are close to eighty poems bound together here...
...But is it possible, in the contemp-orary world, to write balanced poetry concerned with the mystical experi-ence...
...On about the third curve Keating got nauseous-like any millionaire who has just wasted all his money-and was thrown out...
...Sister Maura's special gift is for the descriptive metaphor...
...we gather through some of the poems that it is hard won...
...Little did founder Edward Keating suspect that he had hired a very Holden Caulfield himself, right out of college and the editorship of the University of San Francisco Fog-horn and looking for the chance-as they say in Catholic circles-to test his vocation...
...John Moffit can be a wry comedian as in "The Itch Mite," and he can write the most tenderly worldly love lyric since Auden's "Lay Your Seeping Head My Love...
...Later he was rehired and it was a roller-coaster ride all the way...
...And the saddest part is that what started out as a serious Catholic liter-ary magazine had to have so many provincially-minded converts serving as publisher and editors...
...So ends this review...
...At times she seems as much impressionistic painter as poet...
...Moffit's tone, for all its range and variety never becomes shrill, never cloys...
...In his "Sacrament," Moffit preserves that precarious balance seen by Auden between total accept-ance of human mortality and the full value of human experience...
...With an understated quiet he accepts in "The Flowering Corpse" the contrary yearnings of man's nature and the signs of Divine affirmation of this dichotomy: Frilled orchids feed on sickly aid And spend their rareness for the elect...
...The final section "Not Entirely about Miracles" concerns the mystery of the human encounter with God in another, instants of revelation when, We turn like stars and shine on each other...
...They form leaves for holding in tension other aspects of man's reali-zation of life-violence, humor, tender-ness...
...Moffit, a convert to Catholicism, was for twenty-five years a monastic mem-ber of the order of Ramarkrishna...
...Perhaps it is in the title poem of the volume, "Escape of the Leopard," that Moffit makes his most serene, mature poetic evaluation of the meaning of freedom...
...Newman, $1.75 (paper) Escape of the Leopard JOHN MOFFIT Harcourt Brace, $5.95 CLAIRE HAHN About ten years ago I sat in a Yale auditorium and listened to William Everson, then Brother Antoninus, O.P.,, read his poems...
...From a close-up night-mare of groin and sweat, the reader moves into a world of walled gardens, icons of Mary, and Advent wreaths...
...Feeds its magic on a corpse That floated leafage veils from night...
...Sleepily they retrace their paradise which, like Dante's, is flower-ing dance in light...
...man's word, "Yes...
...Party games including exposing the CIA, the FBI, the State Depart-ment, the Warren Commission, the Bolivian junta, Cardinal Spellman, and American involvement in Vietnam...
...I remember hearing, during one long pause in the poet's reading, the distinct tapping of snowflakes on the auditorium windows...
...As for Hinckle's moral deportment we have his own word-the whole book is practically a deposition to the effect -that he is a scoundrel...
...What trans-formed Ramparts from a quarterly thick with pious epic poetry on special cream paper and articles attacking the immorality of J. D. Salinger was solely Hinckle's personality...
...The feverish Leopard paces the limits of his cage until a bird's voice calms him with "a leap of vision:" And all at once he swings his eyes From the fixed stripings of the cage -While the bird sings on heed-lessly- Toward the bare center of his space, Then, with a slow, superior grace Turning his body round one point, Lolls in the center and is free...
...Most con-temporary readers are sophisticated enough to accept with equanimity the transition of a monk to the lay marital status...
...That, too, is a rather small, provincial world...
...The section "We Walk in Miracle," for instance, explores the sudden irruption of Divine light into the ordinary experience of her life as a nun...
...Hinckle has written some very funny pages-and perhaps the best comprise his little memoir of Erich Fromm at the end of the ride, when the Ramparts crew had been invited down to Cuer-navaca by another potential backer and what followed was "an intellectual rabbit shoot...
...I decided that, what the hell, it should be the job of the press-at least some of the press-to be unreasonable most of the time...
...Poems such as these and "The Black Hills" demonstrate that Everson remains an artist with reserves of power he has yet to tap...
...Is there an expression on a re-ligious poet's face that is neither the rictus of William Everson or the statue-like repose of Sister Maura's smile...
...But I am a stubborn reader and en-dure I did for some 280 lines...
...Ulan-Fate WILLIAM EVERSON New Directions, $6.95, $2.75 (paper) Walking on Water SISTER MAURA, S.S.N.D...
...it means screaming like hell...
...In one delightful mo-ment of "Children's Dance Recital," little girls "Renoir-fleshed and sweet," come to the end of their performance: The stage dims...
...Reading her after wrestling with William Everson is an oddly disorient-ing experience...
...and it is perhaps also true that a virtue to be gained from shameless barroom conning of mil-lionaires is that it deprives one of the opportunity of being pompous.* Still, upon closing the book it is hard to forgive Hinckle his flippancy towards serious political issues...
...However, this poem and "Man-Fate" seem to me to be eminently successful works of art...
...And this has led in turn to the style of unreasonable journalism of which I have often been accused, and stand happily guilty...
...Hinckle still sits in the pub, past clos-ing time, cracking jokes to those who will listen...
...My body is written with poems your fingers enscrolled on my flesh...
...This flowering, squandered for the lost...
...This was Howard Gossage, who not only wrote but apparently thought in the neo-Stoicism exemplified by the maxim his disciple has taken as a title...
...The quarterly became a monthly, and the monthly published its own Daily Rampart, and every New Left muckraker in town converged on the Menlo Park offices for the big bash...
...It is probably ungrateful of me to protest at this point that one can be-come surfeited, at least in this world, with so much other-wordly light...
...But the audience, com-prised mostly of Yale students, sat mes-merized...
...Applause-radiant, they stumble into night holding their fathers' hands...
...In the flukes of contortion I fear what I see as I need it...
...It means more than merely telling the truth...
...They flunked- One thing that is nicely ap-parent about Hinckle is that-not to cast aspersions on the memory of Howard Gossage-he has no intellec-tual pretensions...
...The control that Everson exerted was not all dra-matic performance...
...It is not complacent...
...In Sister Maura's poems one is brought face to face with an intense and in-sistent smile...
...He has just written a movie script, which is the perfect thing to write for a journalist who has never had anything of conscience to say...
...After such a buffeting of bathos I probably over-reacted in joy to the quietly lovely "Ebb at Evening...
...Hinckle tested Keating all right, and got fired...
...Its author has done his honest best to make lemonade...
...Now, after a long silence, William Everson offers his readers a collection of poems: Man-Fate, The Swan Song of Brother Antoninus...
...They explore the implications of his break with monastic life and his new union with Susanna and her infant son...
...The poems seethed with a sometimes violent erotic mysticism and the Dominican lay brother seemed to drag each phrase out of anguished personal depths...
...The cones of the temporal and the eternal intersect with deceptive, or perhaps, Divine simplicity.th deceptive, or perhaps, Divine simplicity...
...Sister Maura's characteristic poem is a taut, exquisitely polished lyric...
...John Moffit laughs, suffers, re-joices...
...Or is he only conning himself...
...Brother Antoninus had achieved at this point in his career considerable stature as a poet of the "San Francisco Renaissance...
...Sister Maura, S.S.N.D., writes prayer poems...
...The first and last contain poems of the mystical ex-perience...
...I finally felt its pres-sure and longed for a change of ex-pression, a glimpse beneath the fixed mask, the habit of perfection...
...The larger world awaits, in fact, the Second Coming of another Edward Keating, perhaps a re-formed alcoholic, who is disturbed by the lack of intellectual life in the na-tion's taverns, and proposes to do something about it...
...But he has a wonderful scaffold humor-and on that pinnacle Hinckle managed to last if not many seasons, then at least a magnificent and hilarious hour- What we are treated to here are the pub-talk memories that Hinckle has finally put down in writing...
...But the trouble does not lie with the subject matter, as Everson fears...
...Indeed...
...Moffit's present volume of poems is divided into five sections...
...He even tries to con the reader: "My reaction to journalistic outrage had led others, in turn, to be outraged-often at me...
...Your face is flensed with an awe-some devouring passion...
...His collection of poems, Escape of the Leopard is concerned with the religious experience of the total man...
...If hardly blame-less in so many other respects, Hinckle can never be accused of having been provincially Catholic...
...But, whoever you are, this time when you hire some-body to be your editor, check his cre-dentials thoroughly...
...My quarrel with Everson arises from his squandering of an enormous talent in gusts of undisciplined verse...
...Its thematic center is, as she says, God's word, "Come...
Vol. 102 • May 1975 • No. 4
