Airmail (5 page)

Write, man! My address till December 1 is still Roxtuna Linköping. Monica sends love.

your friend         Tomas T.

1 Dec., ’65

Dear Tomas,

I’m sitting in a little house in New Concord, Ohio, the house where Jim Wright’s parents live. Also born in this town was—of all people—John Glenn. Jim is upstairs, writing a poem about Sinclair Lewis. I wanted to tell you why I’ve been so close-mouthed. I’ve just finished my new book of poems! I’ve been working on it incommunicado, and just finished it on Monday. On Wednesday I left for the anti-government demonstrations in Washington. (There was a convention there too, to organize the anti-Vietnam-war groups into a national group.) So on Saturday, we all went out and paraded around the White House. It was interesting. There were 20–30,000 people, an amazing number of them 50–60 years old, also a lot of entire families pushing baby carriages. The mood was not angry, but the people seemed confident, particularly over the number of people that had come from all parts of the country. We sent two busloads, nearly a hundred people, from Minneapolis.

The next day I went up to New York, and Monday night went to a fine reading in NY—John Logan and Galway Kinnell read. I stayed with Christina and Rolland, and yesterday morning saw Leif Sjöberg for fifteen minutes. He gave me a copy of that mad article he wrote about you, saying poetry didn’t sell, even though you dressed like a Mad. Ave executive. Sjöberg has a curious attraction to money, like the Congo natives’ attraction to crocodile meat.

He told me of a wild issue of
Ord och Bild
that has enraged the King for some reason. Can you send me a copy of that? I should think the King would be getting fairly immune to outrage these days.

Yesterday I took a bus out here to Ohio, and today Jim & I have been jabbering about Jim Dickey and you and other subjects. Jim is on a Guggenheim this year, so he doesn’t have to teach. He spent about 6 weeks with us on the farm, and now has come here for a couple of months with his parents. He’s still thinking of coming to Europe about March 1st.

Tomorrow we’re going up to Kenyon to see John Crowe Ransom, and then I have to give a couple of readings at Cleveland Univ. & Oberlin, and so home! Jim sends his very best. He got a letter from Beatrice Roethke last week, and she mentioned meeting you in N.Y. last year.

Let’s see what gossip I heard in N.Y. Randall Jarrell is thought
not
to have committed suicide, but to have been hit by a reckless driver on a lane that had no streetlights. John Logan, who has 9 children, is in the process of declaring bankruptcy. For the last two months he has been living in Oakland under the name of Leopold Bloom to get some peace from his creditors, but it hasn’t worked. Don Hall has done a fine play, made up of Frost poems, interspersed with comments from Frost letters. Christina and John Logan and I saw it Sunday. Fine thing.

I’ve translated your poem called “After a Death,” and it looks very well. I’ll send you a copy when I get home. “Three Presidents” is about to be published in
Nation,
and I’ll send a copy of that too.

Jim feels very strong now, and very happy about poetry. I am too. How wonderful to be able to live in a time when something fresh can be written! There are endless fields of flowers—many of them are black flowers—on all sides.

Thank you for “Under tryck”! I’m going to translate that too! Could you ask Lasse Söderberg to send me a copy of
Clarté
? I’ll have to think a little more about “Condition of the Working Classes” before writing you, but many lines seem to me much like the English, even in tone. I have a new political poem I think you’ll like. It has Rusk, McNamara etc. gathering in the woods at night, like the Puritan witches.

Much affection to Monica, whose fine face I remember with joy, and to you—

As ever, Robert

Roxtuna 12-10-65

Dear Robert,

thanks for your letter, which cheered me up. That march on the White House assumes even more personal import for me, when I hear that not only Doctor SPOCK (who has contributed to my children’s care from afar), but also you, were in it. The event was covered in the papers here as well, though they dwelt a good deal on the fact that the bus drivers were unhappy about having to drive so many bad Americans around. The picture that ran with the story was the same in all the papers—it showed a Rockwell Nazi going around passing out free gasoline and matches. The coverage somehow implied that the demonstration had been one of peaceful strength, which warmed many hearts over here.

My life will undergo a brutal change next week, when I move to Västerås. Here is my new address: Infanterigatan 144 Vasterås Sweden. All through the fall I’ve been working two days a week in Västerås and then driving back here. Winter has arrived abominably early, which has meant a constant sliding hither and thither on ice-covered roads, in snow and fog. For me it will be nice to move, but Monica is sentimentally attached to the bungalow here. Then too, I’ll have economic problems. The new job is only half-time, which as you can figure out pays only half a salary. The idea is that I’ll have time to finish my book, and that it will come out in 1966. I’ve already begun to be in debt, but not yet so deeply as to think of moving somewhere under the name of Leopold Bloom.

12-14

The day before moving day. They’ve given a speech for me—the representative of the guards’ union spoke for his staff, and it emerged that I “have always shown understanding concerning the problems of the personnel.” The inmates have been nice too. Monica is moved to tears by the farewells of the children’s playmates. It’s terribly cold and snowdrifts obscure the view in all directions. The snow is utterly blue. I wander around, shaking hands.

12-18

Established in Västerås. Every time I sit down, I get out this wrinkled sheet of paper to finish my letter to you. Yesterday I saw Ho Chi Minh on TV. An English reporter (who incidentally was the brother of Graham Greene!) interviewed him, and Ho read his answers from a piece of paper. He seemed moth-eaten, unassuming and imperturbable. I see in the papers where a poll has revealed that more than one in three Americans wants atomic weapons to be used in Viet Nam immediately. My God, one in three. You ride an elevator with three Americans and one of them wants nukes to be used immediately.

Changing the subject, I can’t find any copies of that issue of
Ord & Bild
you inquired about. Naturally it’s sold out. It must have been the notorious SEX-issue. Deathly serious essays on pornography, illustrated with girls out of porn magazines. I have a hard time believing that the king was furious—the story must have been edited for the American public. It’s not entirely out of the question though, the king is one of the financial benefactors of that venerable magazine.

What I have to do now is get going with the poems again. I’m so glad Jim Wright is in good shape. It would be great if he could send me a cartload of poetry again, as testimony that the ground is still fertile and that everything in the world doesn’t come wrapped in plastic. I read the Eisenhower poem in Norrköping last fall, as an illustration of how political poetry ought to sound, by contrast with all the damned rhetoric—it was at a recital, as a matter of fact. I’ve had another reading also, at the University of Stockholm. That one cheered me up a good deal, since four times as many people came as the organizers had planned for—most of them had to stand up for three hours in tropical heat (the ones who fainted were allowed to remain lying down). The organizers made a lot of money for the university by selling cold beer at the event.

Otherwise I’ve nothing to brag about. Merry Christmas, let’s hear from you, and send poems to these arctic regions.

Love from Monica

    Tomas T.

1. The Swedish Council for Personnel Administration.
   

   back
   

14 Jan., ’65 [66]

Dear Tomas,

Here it is, a fine snowy morning! I’ve been thinking of you both and thought it was a good day to write you!

All goes calmly here. I am working on a long poem, and translating Arosenius’s
Kattresan
for Mary and Biddy. Photographs enclosed show us in the grip of icy winter!

Thank you for your good letter, and the photograph of that fat American. I’m glad I saw your other little house before you moved—it did have a sweetness. And that strange lake! Now you must write like blazes. We expect poems to flow from you in a never ending stream. As for me, I am getting more and more fond of sleep. A Chinese poet said, “The greatest happiness in life consists in playing jokes on small children.”

I am enclosing a copy of a poem I wrote at the Peace March, listening to Martin Luther King talk. Doctor Spock
was
there, and spoke very well! He is a favorite of my wife’s. I don’t think Johnson really has the guts to pull out. People are wrong though when they think this is the first battle of World War III—it is the last battle of World War II. The white race feels guilty and wants to waste now all the riches it took from the Orient, and if it can do so and at the same time kill large numbers of yellow people, so much the better. We are determined to disgrace ourselves, and nothing will stop us. We are doing it
instead
of the Europeans
for
them. The Europeans have disgraced themselves so much, they are satisfied now. But we still hunger for disgrace—we
howl
for it.

In the old days nations were proud of themselves, as men are. But what will foreign politics be like when nations do not respect themselves?

With these sad thoughts, I stop. Please write soon.

With affection from us all,

  Robert

P.S. A question: In “Nocturne” (driving through a village): the melodramatic color—is that from a forest fire or a fireplace?

Västerås 1-30-66

Dear Robert,

thanks for a very stimulating assemblage of words, photographs, poems. Is that the lopsided barn that moves toward the reader at the end of “Snowfall in the Afternoon”? The gable has a face:

The poems were fine, of course. Only it’s too bad that “redwood” is one of those American trees that can’t be translated (like boxelder for instance). You can’t translate a whole flora. A kangaroo is comprehensible to a Swede, but a RED WOOD TREE or, even worse, SEQUOIA, never. Naturally I was myself working on a poem about Lofthus when your letter came. However it’s not about a waterfall, but about a person who once lived there, namely Grieg. (I’ve never been there myself.) I see to my relief that Grieg doesn’t appear in your poem, so I can immerse myself in its slow downward falling, so beautiful.

Your translation of “After Someone’s Death” had such a persuasive tone that I’d like to give it the green light at once. After a closer reading, however, I’m doubtful about some of the details. “It bothers us” line 3: “hyser oss” means “keeps us,” in other words we’re like prisoners, like inhabitants of the attenuated comet’s tail, we’re still in it. Admittedly “keeps” doesn’t sound too good in and of itself. The Swedish word “hyser” is a bit old-fashioned. Line 6: “Through woods” sounds too big to me. “Dungar” are small thickets of trees or bushes and “the leaves” that are still hanging are quite few. “Where some last-years leaves / still / hang on” would be the literal sense. Finally, “your heart” in line 9 could be misunderstood as “ditt hjärta,” which it is not. Does “one’s heart beat” sound clumsy? But otherwise the grasp of the whole and the concentration seem perfect—crikey, that poem has to be published for the American people sometime, it seems more persuasive somehow in American than it does in Swedish.

They’ve been saying for a week now that the halt in the bombing will end. But all we hear, still, is the distant whining of hawks and doves. Hawks and doves...They say Rusk is a hawk now. Of course General Wheeler is a hawk. Mr. Mansfield is a dove. I think people in general hope that the biggest dove is actually Lyndon Johnson himself. That’s a dove that is so big it looks exactly like a hawk. It has also changed its appearance of late, after having lived on a diet of meat. What to say about Mr. McNamara? He’s neither a hawk nor a dove. He is presumably an airplane.

2-1

(The bombs are tumbling down again.) Did I mention in my last letter that I’ve made contact with another Swedish poet and essayist, Göran Printz-Påhlson, who was a professor at Berkeley (and presumably knows Simpson)? I thought we might do the American anthology together. Printz-Påhlson has translated Wilbur, very beautifully. I thought we could include Wilbur and Lowell, as representatives of a somewhat older “academic” generation, and then run the line out to you. Lowell-Wilbur(Simpson?)-(Stafford?)-(J. Dickey?)-Wright-Bly. This isn’t a representative anthology, of course, but better that the few poets we include have at least five poems each than if we just set up a lot of calling cards with names on them! I’ve started reading Lowell’s
For the Union Dead.
Have you got any advice to offer—is there someone who is BEST? You promised once to send me Dickey’s first book—it’s twice as important now since his book no. 2 disappeared in the move from Roxtuna to Västerås. In return, you’ll get
China in Crisis
by Sven Lindqvist, an old school friend of mine who studied in Peking for two years and speaks Chinese like a Mandarin. He very much wanted to give you the book, and I’m sending it along by surface mail. Some philosophy books (in Swedish) by the same man are coming in the same shipment, extra copies sent to him by the Press when the books came out in mass-market editions. He is a most serious fellow but nowadays also friendly and genial, and has a wife who can play Chinese instruments and cook superbly!

On the subject of ELDSKEN. The reader may decide whether he wishes to understand it as a glow from a campfire or a wildfire.

How is Jim Wright doing? What’s his address? I would like to send him a few lines and a book. Has he written any good poems lately? (I would actually much rather translate him than Lowell etc.) If we were to put my Wright translations and Printz-Påhlson’s Wilbur translations together, we would have a good title for an anthology: POETRY IN THE AIR—WILBUR WRIGHT’S BEST PIECES.

Now I’m going to drive many miles up through the woods to attend a conference on the treatment of CP (cerebral palsy)—a job that occupies me at my present workplace. It’s about finding suitable tests for them. We’re meeting at a remotely located institute where these unfortunates are stored and trained. When you first go in you get a powerful shock, but you soon get used to it! The atmosphere is almost religious. All the best from me and Monica.

Tomas.

7 Feb, 66

Dear Tomas,

Many thanks for your letter just received today. Your notes on “Efter nagons dod” are very helpful, and I will do a new draft. The wires, the luftledningarna—I have them as telephone wires. Should they perhaps be what we call “high-tension” wires, that is wires carrying 220 volts of
electricity,
for commercial and home circuits?

I’m enclosing your draft of the Working Class poem, I think “trapped” should undoubtedly be “fangada.” “himlarna” maybe should be “himlen.” I’m not sure: what I mean is the sky simply, not really the “heavens,” which suggests something spiritual in English. The cards are all thrown down
at one time
at the end of the night, usually by the player who dealt the last hand; and he puts them back in a box, closing the flap—more like
låsa.
By stages I didn’t mean to suggest the pads from which the rocket rose, but rather the three long parts of which the rocket is made, any one of which is long and narrow like the center aisle of certain long churches.

Now after all this, I must say that I am dissatisfied with the poem after the 5th line, and I think I am going to try to shorten and rewrite the poem. I’ll send you the new draft, if I succeed! It’s not the translation I’m dissatisfied with, but my own English poem! No,
American
poem! But I’m still dissatisfied with it.

I think your anthology sounds excellent. If you can, I would definitely put in Stafford—the more I read him, the more wonderful I think he is (if you like, I will type up for you the six or seven poems of his I like the best)—the same offer holds for Dickey and Simpson. If you have space to add one more, it should be Creeley. His work is uneven, more so than most poets; but the inclusion of his work would make the anthology absolutely and definitively representative. Maybe I’m wrong: his lines occasionally have great
flavor
in English, but it is done as if by magic, by mirror, and I’m not sure a translation could catch the peculiar throbbing or resonance of his ascetic language. It is like hearing the wavering high pitched song of an old man out in the desert at night alone.

I would like to know which of these books you do
not
have. Those you do not have I will get the American publishers to send you, and it won’t cost either of us anything!

LOWELL

Lord Weary’s Castle
(1946) (his best book)

Mills of the Kavanaghs
(1951)

Life Studies
(1959) next-best book

For the Union Dead
(1964) worst book

RICHARD WILBUR

The Beautiful Changes

Ceremony

Things of This World

Advice to a Prophet
(1961)

WILLIAM STAFFORD

Traveling through the Dark

LOUIS SIMPSON

Selected Poems
(1965)

JAMES DICKEY

Into the Stone
(1960)

Drowning with Others
(his best book) 1962

Helmets
(1964)

Buckdancer’s Choice
(1965)

JAMES WRIGHT

The Green Wall
(1957)

Saint Judas
(1959)

The Branch Will Not Break
(1963)

Just check this list and send it back to me. If you want to read Creeley’s work, it is all collected in one book,
For Love.

As you will see,
For the Union Dead
is uneven. It was described in the United States, in reviews, as if it were the
Iliad.
Lowell’s aristocratic birth and his closeness to the N.Y. reviewers combine with everyone’s longing to have a great poet
living
—now that Eliot and Roethke and Frost are dead—and the result is an unbelievable chorus of praise. I am attacking the book sharply in the next issue of
The Sixties,
and everyone will say: There’s that old grouch again!

I thought there were six or seven good or at least readable poems in the book. The best without question was “The Mouth of the Hudson.” (It is a sort of farewell to Williams, who lived just across the Hudson, in New Jersey, and a sort of rebuke as well to the Beats that grew out of him: “One cannot find America by counting the freight cars.”) Also interesting I thought were “The Old Flame,” “The Flaw,” “For the Union Dead,” and in parts at least, “Water”; “Fall, 1961”; and “Night Sweat.”

The rest seemed to me bombast, like a bad evangelical preacher.

Yes, that barn was the one in “Snowfall in the Afternoon.” The stair in front was added recently. It used to move even better before that! Now the stair looks like its anchor, thrown out before it. I see what you mean about the face. It should have been a face: my father and I built the barn in the ’40s.

Jim Wright is staying with his parents: c/o Dudley Wright, 66 East Main Street, New Concord, Ohio. He is on a Guggenheim. I’ll send along a new poem of his, and a new poem of mine.

Write soon. My fond hellos to

Monica—

  Yours,

    Robert

P.S. How strange about Loftus! We stayed there. It’s across the fjord from the urgammel Bleie gard.

17 Feb., ’65[66]

Dear Tomas,

Christina and I are finally getting ready to print the selected poems of Ekelöf we’ve been working on for five years or so, lazily. I translated some of Lindegren’s essay on him as the main introduction. Then I wrote this little squib to go in the front of the book. Would you glance at it? Does it sound ridiculous or fairly sound?

Yours as ever,

  Robert

P.S. No need to return it—just mention it in your next letter.

P.P.S. My best to Monica!

Gunnar Ekelöf was born in 1907. Many critics consider him the greatest living Swedish poet. He reached out early in his career to two sources outside the Scandinavian tradition: the mystical poetry of Persia in particular, and the Orient in general, and French poetry, especially the surrealist poetry of the late ’20’s. His poetry also has deep roots in Fröding, Almqvist, and the Swedish fairy tales.

In Swedish literature there is a much firmer division between the proletariat and the aristocratic writing than there is in America or England. There have been a succession of great writers in Sweden who took their place naturally in one of these two groups. Harry Martinson is one of the greatest proletarian poets. It is as if in what James Farrell represents there were poets as sensitive as Wallace Stevens. Gunnar Ekelöf, on the other hand, very clearly belongs to the second group, the writers that are aristocratic, intellectual, elegant.