Passing Through Porlock
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing PASSING THROUGH PORLOCK BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Coleridge must be the patron saint of literary procrastinators, given how much ingenuity he devoted to coming up with...
...Throughout most of the book Wilson's character sketches radiate wit, charity, even affection...
...Ultimately, winding up the affairs of those we have lost turns into an attempt to stay close to their absent lives for as long as we can...
...But Unfinished Painting defrtly embodies the imperfect, the dilemma of loss, the fragility of accomplishment...
...Beneath their polished surface, her verses teem with insights and ideas...
...Wilson confesses, "How easily one understands the temptation, not merely to open the door to the person, but to link arms with him, abandon home and stroll back to Porlock for an extended holiday...
...She rarely put / the final touch on anything / when he was young...
...According to Wilson, the essays and reviews collected in his latest volume, Penfriends from Porlock (Norton, 278 pp., $19.95), helped him delay finishing his novels and biographies...
...But what the essay really explores is the inspiration that seems to rise from the Venetian lagoons and capture the imaginations of traveling authors...
...Wilson shows us how Browning's narrative poem In a Gondola—"a lyric shrieking and writhing to be turned into something else, a novel perhaps"—andHenry James' TheAspernPapersand The Wings of the Dove grew almost "organically" out of the city in the sea...
...The book's most striking poem is the title piece, describing a portrait a woman painted of her young son: "a drape/behind him opens on a wall / she'd painted with a roller once...
...only Cecil Beaton and Oswald Mosley appear contemptible...
...A brilliant historian of Elizabethan and Restoration theater, an occultist, pornographer and pederast, and adisciple of Oscar Wilde, Summers was also a Roman Catholic priest...
...Rather, they form another absorbing chapter in a talented author's unfolding story...
...thengoes on: —And how the room, importunate as a church, leans as if reading me.· the three windows in the shape of a bishop's cap, and twenty girls jutting from the walls like gargoyles or (more kindly) guardian angels that peer over the shoulder, straight into the heart...
...Salter brilliantly balances the twin emotions of irrevocable loss and the survivor's desire to bring back the deceased, or at least explain her death, by replaying the past...
...His most famous excuse puts the blame on an anonymous "person from Porlock," who supposedly interrupted the composition of "Kubla Khan" by dropping in for a visit just as the poet was in the midst of transcribing his opium-induced vision...
...Other familiar figures, from C.S...
...Elegies for Etsuko" mourns for the poet's friend, a young Japanese wife and mother who killed herself...
...The book pivots around memorial pieces...
...Throughout the nine sections of the poem, Salter tries to make sense of such a shocking defection: Begin with that last and unrecorded scene— how rashly, with a length of rope, she'd gather up an end to hope...
...he saw in his flushed face how she' d re-created there what rose and fell in hers...
...Then there is his sympathetic treatment of the more outré Montague Summers...
...The finest sketches in Penfriends concern such cerebral figures as the theologian Dean Inge...
...Dead Letters" begins with the poet trying to contend with mail addressed to her late mother: receipts for bills (" a decimal and double?'s / like pennies no one placed upon your eyes...
...reminders to appear for medical checkups...
...Her debut volume, Henry Purcell in Japan (1985), displayed unusual facility with complex, formal prosody...
...Above all, he is a man of ideas...
...Lewis to Lyndon B. Johnson, similarly come into focus more sharply than ever through Wilson's lens...
...Writers & Writing PASSING THROUGH PORLOCK BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Coleridge must be the patron saint of literary procrastinators, given how much ingenuity he devoted to coming up with explanations for not completing his major works...
...Penfriends opens with a two-part essay about the enchantment Venice has worked on poets and novelists...
...His ecclesiastical status and function not surprisingly remained obscure, yet despite his excesses he was buried by the Church in full vestments—along with the coat of his recently expired dog, Tango...
...No wonder he considers architects who build noble edifices to be heroes, and reveres the Anglo-Catholic slum priests who, in the late 19th century, constructed magnificent churches for society's paupers and outcasts...
...Even Salter's pilgrimage to Emily Dickinson's room in "The Upper Story" is a way for her to postpone bidding farewell to a very different poet she nevertheless so greatly admires...
...But what saved Salter from sounding as if she were a throwback was her skill at conveying the immediate experience of a Westerner's life in anon-Western land...
...Wilson's reviews describe their subjects so vividly you could recognize them on the street...
...It seems that bringing/ the real boy up had taken time/ from painting him...
...As Coleridgedemonstratedin"Kubla Khan," a strong poem does not always require a conclusion...
...Everything made at home— / she made the drapes, she made the boy,/and then, pure joy, remade him in/apose to bear his mother's hope...
...We can taste the city's illicit lowlife pleasures through excerpts from Byron's letters to his friend and fellow poet Tom Moore, gain a sense of its Renaissance pageantry in Robert Browning's verse, discover its idiosyncratic architecture in John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice...
...And as he conjures up famous palazzi, transports us across the Bridge of Sighs, or evokes "Wagner's funeral barge swooping down the Grand Canal," we realize that he too is clearly working toward some fictional treatment of Venice...
...Moreover, the time Wilson spent passing through Porlock has resulted in some of the most entertaining commentary on literature and its various contexts since Auden's The Dyer's Hand...
...solicitations from charities...
...Yet the son, now grown, finds his dead mother most clearly delineated in the incomplete work:"thesuninherthat now is set, / her eyes that took him back, and in, / squinting as he squirmed, appraising / praising him again...
...Or unravel these six years To where my life first tangled up with hers...
...and the dehumanizing rites of death in the modem age of hospitals and mortuaries...
...No less than her husband, the poet and novelist Brad Leithauser, she has absorbed a vast body of diverse cultural reference...
...with Ruskin he holds that ugly or meretricious art degrades our souls...
...His novels frequently break off in mid-story to permit the narrator to philosophize—a privilege once claimed by Dickens, Trollope and George Eliot...
...Salter's grasp nearly obstructed her reachinher first collection...
...A similar preoccupation crops up in "Doubles...
...Indeed, his description of the irrepressible G.K...
...A widow discovers a recent snapshot of her late husband and herself at a tennis match and suddenly feels that her photographic image is a rival who has snatched her partner away...
...Neither of these essays that continually oppose the sublime to the banality encircling our lives, nor the ones preceding them, are merely the "occasional pieces" from Porlock—written for magazines and Sunday papers—that they appear to be at first glance...
...More likely, as is so often the case, the Porlockian visitor was embraced...
...But only the head is finished...
...Skillful young poets often refine their verse until perfection turns to artificiality...
...THINGS incomplete, left undone or broken off, form the subject of Mary Jo Salter's second verse collection, Unfinished Painting (Knopf, 70 pp., $18.95...
...To be devastating without malice—to be funny without whimsy or coyness—surely these are all great qualities of an essayist...
...In "Reading Room," set in the Mount Holyoke College library, thepoet thinks, "Oh, whatlhaven'tread...
...Wilson's credo recalls Dostoevsky's belief that the world will be redeemed by beauty...
...On one level, Wilson provides a kind of verbal travelogue...
...Phillip Larkin is "the Eeyore of the Brynmor Jones Library...
...laughs a lot and enjoys bad jokes," though "at the same time she is passionately serious, and her bright, penetrating eyes are often filled with sadness" —a description that nicely fits a reader's impression of the author of A Severed Head and The Book of the Brotherhood...
...Many of theindividual verses employ elaborate rhyme schemes...
...Her new book avoids the pitfall of overloading a small poem with disproportionately large emotional freight that her first occasionally fell into—like drawing the crucifixion on a lady's fan, or writing a popular ballad about the Holocaust...
...Chesterton might stand as a self-portrait: " Reliably amusing, reliably opinionated and quirky, he could fashion his essays and thoughts into delightful shapes for almost any occasion or purpose...
...Iris Murdoch has "the face of a benignant and beautiful nun...
...Salter suffers a modem tinge of Dickinson's characteristic terror, sensing that "time is forever running out," that even when we eschew Porlock, we will never accomplish all we set out to do...
...A delicate, sometimes arch sensibility reminded one of the porcelain perfection of stanzas by Elinor Wylie or Leonie Adams...
...The religious solemnity of the library causes her to remember that Emily Dickinson attended school there...
...Still under 40, this young Englishman has already produced 11 well-received works of fiction, biographies of Sir Walter Scott, John Milton, Hilaire Belloc and, most recently, Leo Tolstoy, plus a remarkable polemic in defense of traditional religion...
...The elegiac themes of Unfinished Painting are well-suited to Salter's playful profundity...
...It would be unfair, however, to depict Wilson as specializing in description or characterization...
...The section in which the poet recalls her growing fears during the months of not hearing from Etsuko is composed as a villanelle, with its repetitive rhyme scheme and refrains buttressing a mood of anxiety, then panic...
...Appropriately, the book concludes with two starkly contrasting meditations on "last things": the heavenly and earthly cities of Jerusalem as symbols of our deepest longings for harmony...
Vol. 72 • July 1989 • No. 11
