Reliable Essays (20 page)

Being that, it would be an interesting book even if Wilson’s verse were negligible – interesting for the sidelight it threw on the mind of a great critic. But in fact Wilson’s verse is far from negligible. Just because Wilson’s critical work is so creative doesn’t mean that his nominally creative work is a waste of time. Even without
Memoirs of Hecate County
and
I Thought of Daisy
, the mere existence of
NoteBooks of Night
would be sufficient evidence that Wilson had original things to say as a writer. It is a deceptively substantial little book which looks like a slim volume only by accident. There are more than seventy pages of solid text, with something memorable on nearly every page. Thirty pages are given to prose fragments and the rest to poetry. It isn’t major poetry, but some of it is very good minor poetry – and in an age of bad major poetry there is very little good minor poetry about.

Wilson was no shrinking violet, but he knew his limitations. He knew that his touch with language wasn’t particularly suggestive so he went for precision instead. He possessed a lot of information to be precise with. Where his verse is excessive, it is the excess of the seed catalogue – a superfluity of facts. He never usurps the lyrical genius’s prerogative of saying more than he knows. Nor did he ever consider himself talented enough to be formless – his formal decorum always reminds us that he stems from the early 20th-century America which in retrospect seems more confident than Europe itself about transmitting the European tradition. The work is all very schooled, neat, strict and assured. And finally there is his gift for parody, which sometimes led him beyond mere accomplishment and into the realm of inspiration. In ‘The Omelet of A. MacLeish’, for example, the talent of his verse is reinforced by the genius of his criticism, with results more devastating critically than his essays on the same subject, and more vivid poetically than his usual poems.

In
Note-Books of Night
the poems are arranged in no chronological scheme. From the rearrangement in
Night Thoughts
it is easier to puzzle out when he wrote what, but even then it is sometimes hard to be sure. Eventually there will be scholarly research to settle the matter, but I doubt if much of interest will be revealed touching Wilson’s development as a writer of verse. After an early period devoted to plangent lyricism of the kind which can be called sophomoric as long as we remember that he was a Princeton sophomore and an exceptionally able one into the bargain, Wilson quickly entered into his characteristic ways of seeing the world. Like other minor artists he matured early and never really changed. Indeed he was writing verse in the Thirties which forecast the mood of the prose he published in the early Seventies, at the end of his life. The desolate yearning for the irretrievably lost America which makes
Upstate
so sad a book is already there in
Note-books of Night
, providing the authentic force behind the somewhat contrived Arnoldian tone of poems like ‘A House of the Eighties’.

Wilson’s poetry of the Thirties frequently deals with houses going to rack and ruin. The houses are in the same condition that we find them in forty years later, in
Upstate
. They are in the same places: Talcottville, Provincetown, Wilson’s ancestral lands. Houses pointing to the solid old New England civilization which once found its space between the sea and the Adirondacks and was already being overtaken by progress when the poet was young. In his essays of the Thirties (notably ‘The Old Stone House’ collected in
The American Earthquake
) Wilson wrote optimistically about an America ‘forever on the move’. But if his essays were true to his then-radical intellect, his poetry was true to his conservative feelings. His dead houses are metaphors for a disappearing way of life.

The poem is called ‘Nightmare’. As we know from his great essay of 1937, ‘In Honour of Pushkin’ (collected in
The Triple Thinkers
and rightly called by John Bayley the best short introduction to Pushkin – a generous tribute, considering that Bayley has written the best long one), Wilson was particularly struck by the supreme poetic moment in
Evgeny Onegin
when Lensky is killed in a duel and his soulless body is compared to an empty house, with whitewashed windows. The image is one of the climactic points in all poetry – it is like Hector’s address to Andromache, or Eurydice holding out her useless hands, or Paolo kissing Francesca’s trembling mouth – so it is no wonder that Wilson should have been impressed by it. But you also can’t help feeling that the image was congenial to his personal psychology. Although in books like
Europe Without Baedeker
Wilson did his best to secede from the weight of the European heritage, the fact always remained that by his education – by his magnificent education – and by his temperament he was inextricably committed to an American past which owed much of its civilized force to the European memory. This was the America which was dying all the time as he grew older. One of the several continuous mental struggles in Wilson is between his industrious loyalty to the creative impulse of the new America and his despairing sense – which made itself manifest in his poetry much earlier than in his prose – that chaos could in no wise be staved off. The decaying houses of his last books, with their cherished windows broken and highways built close by, are all presaged in the poetry of his early maturity.

But in some respects maturity came too early. Coleridge, perhaps because he had trouble growing up, favoured a slow ripening of the faculties. There was always something unsettling about the precocity of Wilson’s mimetic technique: his gift as a parodist was irrepressibly at work even when he wanted it not to be, with the result that his formally precise early lyrics tend towards pastiche – they are throw-backs to the end of the century and beyond. The tinge of Arnold in ‘A House of the Eighties’ – the pale echo of his melancholy, long withdrawing roar – is compounded even there, it seems to me, by memories of Browning. At other times you can hear Kipling in the background. Wilson’s attempts at plangent threnody call up the voices of other men.

Wilson’s elegaic lyrics are never less than technically adroit: their high finish reminds us forcibly not only of the standards which were imposed by Christian Gauss’s Princeton (standards which we can see otherwise in the poetry of John Peale Bishop) but of a whole generation of American poets, now not much thought about, who had complete command of their expressive means, even if they did not always have that much to express. Edna St Vincent Millay and Elinor Wylie have by now retreated into the limbo of the semi-read – Eleanor Farjeon and Ruth Pitter might be two comparable examples from this side of the water – but when you look at the work of Elinor Wylie, in particular, it is astonishing how accomplished she was. Wilson’s criticism helped American writing grow out of its self-satisfaction at mere accomplishment, but he knew about the certain losses as well as the possible gains. In his poetry he committed himself to the past by synthesizing its cherishable tones, but he paid the penalty of mimetic homage in not sounding enough like himself. In ‘Disloyal Lines to an Alumnus’ he satirized the poetry of Beauty –

But his own lyric beauty was not different enough from the Beauty he was satirizing. These lines from ‘Riverton’ take some swallowing now and would have needed excuses even then.

Give me then the art, indeed. He had the artifice, but the art was mainly that of a pasticheur. When consumed by Yeats’s business of articulating sweet sounds together, Wilson was the master of every poetic aspect except originality. Listen to the judiciously balanced vowel-modulations in ‘Poured full of thin gold sun’:

A virtuoso is only ever fully serious when he forgets himself. Wilson is in no danger of forgetting himself here. In his later stages, which produced the technical games collected in
Night Thoughts
, his urge to jump through hoops clearly detached itself from the impulse to register feeling; but it should also be noted that even early on the division existed. His penchant for sound effects, like his ear for imitation, usually led him away from pure expression. On occasions, however, when consciously schooled euphuistic bravura was lavished on a sufficiently concrete subject, Wilson got away from tricksy pastoralism and achieved a personal tone – urban, sardonic, tongue-in-cheek, astringent. The consonant-packed lines of ‘Night in May’

were a portent of what Wilson was able to do best. Such a line is the harbinger of an entire, superb poem: ‘On Editing Scott Fitzgerald’s Papers’, which first appeared in the preliminary pages of
The Crack-Up
and stands out in
Note-Books of Night
as a full, if regrettably isolated, realization of the qualities Wilson had to offer as a poet.

Speaking personally for a moment, I can only say that it was this poem, along with certain passages in Roy Campbell’s bloody-minded satires, which first convinced me that the rhyming couplet of iambic pentameter was still alive as a form – that in certain respects it was
the
form for an extended poem. Wilson, like Campbell, by accepting the couplet’s heritage of grandeur was able somehow to overcome its obsolescence: once the effect of archaic pastiche was accepted, there was room for any amount of modern freedom. In fact it was the fierce rigour of the discipline which made the freedom possible. And Wilson was more magnanimous than Campbell: his grandeur really
was
grandeur, not grandiloquence.

The heroic tone is there from the first line. (It is instructive, by the way, that only the tone is heroic: the couplets themselves are not heroic but Romance – i.e. open rather than closed.) It would have been a noble theme whatever form Wilson had chosen, because Wilson’s lifelong paternal guardianship of Fitzgerald’s talent is a noble story. Fitzgerald was the Princeton alumnus who
didn’t
benefit from the education on offer. From Wilson’s and Fitzgerald’s letters to Christian Gauss we can easily see who was the star student and who the ineducable enthusiast. But Wilson, like Gauss, knew that Fitzgerald was destined to make his own way according to a different and more creative law. Wilson called
This Side of Paradise
a compendium of malapropisms but knew that it had not failed to live. When the masterpieces arrived he saw them clearly for what they were. Much of his rage against Hollywood was on Fitzgerald’s behalf: he could see how the film world’s sinister strength was diabolically attuned to Fitzgerald’s fatal weakness. He understood and sympathized with Fitzgerald even in his most abject decline and guarded his memory beyond the grave.

Such a story would be thrilling however it was told. But the couplets are ideal for it: the elegaic and narrative strains match perfectly, while the meretricious, Condé Nast glamour of the imagery is entirely appropriate to Fitzgerald’s debilitating regard for the high life – the well-heeled goings-on to which, as Wilson well knew, Fitzgerald sacrificed his soul but which he superseded with his talent. Hence Wilson evokes the memory of Fitzgerald’s eyes in terms of a
Vogue
advertisement. Passing their image on to what they mint, they

The consummately cut emerald is obviously
The Great Gatsby
; the half-cut emerald is probably
Tender Is The Night
; and we suppose that the tinsel zircons are the hack stories Fitzgerald turned out in order to pay his bills. But apart from the admittedly preponderant biographical element, what strikes you is the assured compression of the technique. In lines like ‘Tight phials of the spirit’s light mixed liquors’ Wilson was forging a clear, vital utterance: that he was to take it no further is a matter for regret. In this poem his complicated games with language are confined within the deceptively simple form and serve the purpose. Here is the public voice which Wilson so admired (and by implication adumbrated for our own time) in the artistry of Pushkin. In ‘On Editing Scott Fitzgerald’s Papers’ his playfulness, his seriousness, his severe humour and his sympathetic
gravitas
are all in balance. The proof of Wilson’s mainly fragmentary achievement as a poet is the conspicuous force he attained on the few occasions when his gifts were unified. The artist who is all artist – the artist who, even when he is also a good critic, is nevertheless an artist first of all – can recognize this moment of unity within himself and lives for nothing else but to repeat it. Wilson had too many other interests: which, of course, it would be quixotic to begrudge him.