Poets' Notebooks
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
\\ftitere&y\friting POETS' NOTEBOOKS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELi JL. he task of a poet is the search for a timely truth, not a general truth," Eugenio Montale announced in an interview ("Intentions,"...
...The wisdom of age helps Montale accept what he cannot understand, and he is rather relieved at being himself too insignificant to be singled out in a world where special notice often spells disaster...
...For a truer portrait of Louise Bogan, the reader would do well to turn back to her last book of poems, The Blue Estuaries, reissued by the Ecco Press in 1977...
...Ever since his first volume, Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925), Montale has displayed an extraordinary gift for embodying his poetic vision in concrete figures...
...Montale is led to a perception of "precariousness [as] the muse of our time...
...I would add, from my own contact with her, that she also had "the faculty of loving...
...I look back but see neither bird sanctuaries nor shelters...
...Montale's reflections have increasingly dealt with time and its passing, culture and its decay...
...t V?r,cc Bogan, born in 1897 (one year later than Montale), died in 1970...
...These shards of memory with their surrounding absences are nevertheless worthy of preservation in Montale's poetic journal...
...The spectacle is not pleasant, and I question its necessity...
...Learning to read was "the beginning of a new Life...
...Bogan's private notebook jottings are musty with defeat...
...A very slight part of this book, though, recounts "vulgar facts," and most of these concern the poet's unhappy childhood, punctuated by violence between her parents...
...My father had his job, which kept him in touch with reality____My mother had nothing but her temperament, her fantasies, her despairs, her secrets, her subterfuges...
...In an attempt to retrieve as much of the past as possible and relate it to the present, he observes, "Memory/is a wick, the only one left us" that can fuel the imagination...
...Unquestionably, Bogan did not intend to tell the story of her life, except as she transformed it into her art...
...This testament of old age (the laureate was 82 at the time of the Italian publication three years ago), confronts life's ironies with a reporter's eye for detail heightened by a poetic sensibility...
...A tired or perhaps a lame duck may have passed...
...Limmer has disregarded this wish...
...But if the singing is muted, the precision of the imagery still comes across to us...
...Montale's lyricism is easily lost in translation...
...He absorbs it, along with life itself...
...This is all that my simple notion of language amounts to, this god cut down to size who doesn 't lead one to salvation for he knows nothing about us and obviously nothing about himself...
...His recollections are marred by blank spots: It bothers him that, of a dog he owned as a boy, "only that leap and that yelp re-main,/nor does much more remain of great loves./unless they signify desperation and death...
...With her high Irish wit??that sometimes, it must be confessed, drew blood??Louise Bogan was one of the most amusing people of her time...
...Illness, old age, and death??subjects as ancient as humanity??these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak...
...She radiated gra-ciousness...
...No tears...
...I wouldn't be able to decipher that language even if I were Chinese...
...As short pieces in the New Yorker, some of this material seemed effective, but it simply refuses to carry the weight that Limmer's padding and rearranging has placed upon it...
...With similar sagacity he caustically blasts the spiel of a Jehovah's Witness: "If the thought of death was sad,/the thought that All will last/is the most frightening...
...It isn't true that Nature is mute...
...in "Hypocrite Swift" she displays the rapier wit Limmer admits is missing from Journey Around My Room...
...As he muses on extinct species of birds, for example, the poet jumps ahead to contemplate the eventual demise of mankind and uses the occasion to comment wryly on the putative "immortality" of art in the face of annihilation: Perhaps poetry will still be saved by some rare phantom wandering mute, unseen, and unaware of itself...
...Consider "At the Seaside (or Almost)": The last cicada chirps on the yellow bark of the eucalyptus the children gather pine seeds indispensable for the galantine a bulldog barks from behind the railings of a villa now deserted the villas were built by the fathers but the sons didn't want them The catalog of particulars builds into a picture of desolation and decay: dying insect, sere tree, meat preserved in aspic, the younger generation ignoring the work of their elders...
...It is her verse that sings a song of triumph...
...Timely truths, indeed...
...What we wish to preserve may seem valueless to our successors, while our detritus may be treasured ??a melancholy view of poetics...
...Some of the most poignant poems here lament his inability to recall certain details of his dead wife...
...A talent...
...But then is the art of the written or spoken word accessible to one without voice or words...
...He studies a beach in "After the Rain": On the wet sand ideograms appear like a hen's claws...
...A gift...
...In "The Sleeping Fury" one can feel the tension between Bogan's passionate nature and her tight poetic control...
...The journalistic, quotidian arrangement of It Depends makes possible endless variations on these themes...
...It speaks at random and the only hope is it doesn't bother too much about us...
...Limmer fills us in on the details: an unsuitable first marriage at 19, a second tragic alliance to a fellow-poet, affairs, breakdowns, dependence on alcohol, depressions...
...Aware that few poets remain creative in old age, Montale is obsessed with Memory, which "doesn't always remember itself...
...Montale readily acknowledges that "one pays dearly for a modern soul...
...They do not negate the need for privacy, however: "The poet represses the outright narrative of his life...
...Alas, Journey Around My Room exudes little beside the claustrophobic atmosphere suggested by its title, and the only blood drawn comes from the poet lacerating her own breast to make herself sing...
...Limmer confesses that this pastiche may do the author an injustice: "If distortion there is, it lies in the relative absence of humor...
...One gust of wind will be enough to cancel it...
...While this flight clearly did not entirely free her, she made no attempt to evoke the texture or circumstances of her subsequent life...
...It Depends does not rely on any of the conventional crutches of hope??that our work will be immortal, that the universe is benign, that love outlasts death...
...Eugenio Montale, even in his old age, has not lost his ability to alchemize the dross of this precarious world into lyric gold...
...In poetry/what matters is not the content/but the form" he insists, yet his form is largely expressed through his use of metaphor...
...Brought up in a hell of domestic turmoil, Bogan escaped into books...
...Her late diary, the one most likely to make the reader feel like a voyeur, contains such cries as "Frequently tormented by fears and loneliness at night," or "Some tightness and lowness of spirit, early on...
...It is not possible for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life...
...Now Ruth Limmer, her Literary executrix, has added to these two accounts other miscellaneous jottings, excerpts from letters, diaries, and poems, to create Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan (Viking, 196 pp., $13.95...
...Much space is devoted to Bogan's perception that "poetry must deal with the self that man has not made, but has been presented with...
...Fifty years afterward, she wrote, "I cannot bring myself to describe the horrors of the pre-1914 lower-middle class life, in which they found themselves...
...Italy's Nobel Prize-winning poet has been writing verse for over 50 years, and he is more concerned than ever with timely truths in his latest book, translated by G. Singh as It Depends: A Poet's Notebook (New Directions, 158 pp., $4.95...
...But the rough and vulgar facts are not there...
...Journey Around My Room lacks the sure, shaping hand Bogan herself would have brought to bear, knowing that suffering cannot help but grow monotonous when divorced from the events she deliberately excluded...
...The fragments captured in this poet's notebook, however, are an encouraging sign...
...they are a metaphor for the incompleteness of the human condition...
...And of our disjointed and narcissistic civilization, he sadly notes that "We now have reached the stage of group solitude...
...Singh's accurate English sounds flat and prosaic next to the facing Italian text...
...he task of a poet is the search for a timely truth, not a general truth," Eugenio Montale announced in an interview ("Intentions," 1946), adding, "I've had a sense of today's culture, but not a shadow of the culture I'd have wished for, and with which I probably never would have written a line...
...Formuch of her life she was the poetry critic of the New Yorker, where she published two short autobiographical pieces (one consisting of excerpts from her journals) that tried to explain how life turned her toward poetry...
...Actually, I have written down my experience in the closest detail...
Vol. 64 • January 1981 • No. 2
