QUANTITIES L'Invitation au Voyage..................................................................3 Sandusky-New York.......................................................................5 DAMAGES A Far Cry After a Close Call............................................................11 Seeing Cousin Phyllis Off...............................................................13 Bonnard: A Novel........................................................................15 The Author of Christine.................................................................18 And Old Dancer..........................................................................21 UNTITLED SUBJECTS 1801: Among the Papers of the Envoy to Constantinople...................................25 1851: A Message to Denmark Hill.........................................................28 1881: A Beatification...................................................................33 1889: Alassio...........................................................................36 1824-1889...............................................................................42 November, 1889..........................................................................44 1890: Further Echoes of the Late Lord Leighton..........................................57 1891: An Idyll..........................................................................59 1897....................................................................................63 1907: A Proposal from Paris.............................................................67 1915: A Pre-Raphaelite Ending, London...................................................73 FINDINGS Beyond Words............................................................................81 From Tarragona..........................................................................83 Giovanni Da Fiesole on the Sublime, or Fra Angelico's Last Judgment.....................86 From Beyoglu............................................................................88 TWO-PART INVENTIONS After the Facts.........................................................................95 Infirmities [from Talking Cures]........................................................104 The Lesson of the Master................................................................114 A Natural Death.........................................................................137 FELLOW FEELINGS Decades.................................................................................157 Personal Values.........................................................................162 Howard's Way............................................................................164 The Giant on Giant-Killing..............................................................169 Vocational Guidance.....................................................................172 Venetian Interior, 1889.................................................................176 Purgatory, formerly Paradise............................................................180 MISGIVINGS Thebais.................................................................................187 A Commission............................................................................191 Homage to Nadar.........................................................................194 Charles Garnier.........................................................................194 Sarah Bernhardt.........................................................................195 Victor Hugo.............................................................................197 Honoré Daumier 198 Jacques Offenbach.......................................................................200 Gioachino Rossini.......................................................................201 Richard Wagner..........................................................................203 Charles Baudelaire......................................................................204 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt............................................................206 Gustave Doré............................................................................207 Théophile Gautier.......................................................................209 George Sand.............................................................................210 Nadar...................................................................................212 LINING UP Lining Up...............................................................................217 On Hearing Your Lover Is Going to the Baths Tonight.....................................221 Carrion (continued).....................................................................223 At the Monument to Pierre Louÿs.........................................................226 Ithaca: The Palace at Four a.m..........................................................229 Cygnus cygnus to Leda...................................................................232 Telemachus..............................................................................234 Move Still, Still So....................................................................237 NO TRAVELLER Even in Paris...........................................................................247 Love Which Alters.......................................................................272 Concerning K............................................................................275 Oracles.................................................................................278 LIKE MOST REVELATIONS Occupations.............................................................................303 Poem Beginning with a Line by Isadora Duncan............................................313 A Lost Art..............................................................................316 For Robert Phelps, Dead at Sixty-six....................................................320 Like Most Revelations...................................................................324 Writing Off.............................................................................325 For James Boatwright, 1937-88...........................................................329 For David Kalstone, 1932-86.............................................................332 Homage..................................................................................336 To the Tenth Muse.......................................................................338 TRAPPINGS Dorothea Tanning's Cousins..............................................................345 Nikolaus Mardruz to Ferdinand, Count of Tyrol, 1565.....................................347 Mrs. Eden in Town for the Day...........................................................354 Homage to Antonio Canaletto.............................................................356 Family Values I.........................................................................360 Family Values II........................................................................363 Family Values III.......................................................................366 The Job Interview.......................................................................369 For Mona Van Duyn, Going On.............................................................372 Lee Krasner: Porcelain, a Collage.......................................................375 A Sibyl of 1979.........................................................................377 The Manatee.............................................................................379 Les Travaux d'Alexandre.................................................................381 Among the Missing.......................................................................383 Our Spring Trip.........................................................................384 Henri Fantin-Latour: Un Coin de table, 1873.............................................388 At Sixty-five...........................................................................390 TALKING CURES Close Encounters of Another Kind........................................................395 Knowing When to Stop....................................................................397 Colossal................................................................................401 Success.................................................................................403 The Masters on the Movies...............................................................405 Now, Voyager (1942).....................................................................405 Lost Horizon (1937).....................................................................406 Woman of the Year (1942)................................................................408 King Kong (1933)........................................................................409 Queen Christina (1933)..................................................................410 Keeping.................................................................................412 Portrait in Pastel of the Volunteer Friedrich-August Klaatsch, 1813.....................414 Hanging the Artist......................................................................417 Elementary Principles at Seventy-two....................................................420 Index of Titles and First Lines.........................................................421
L'Invitation au Voyage
Wandering with you the shore That parallels our river Like a second thought, Singular and sad I wore The habit of a lover Almost inside out. Night in its black behaving Muffled every lamp and dyed The wooly season, Pig-iron boats were leaving For the lake, slowly the loud Bridges had risen: A landscape for the lonely Or the lewd, as you observed, When of a sudden Something steep and with only Momentary warning moved Out of the hidden Harbor. It was a dark boat And Cytherea it said Low on the long bow. "A cabin for two," cried out A voice, and I saw a head That I thought I knew- "Fifteen days to the Island: We sail tonight with the tide!" I remember now, Turning, how your face went blind. The river sighed in its bed And although a few Gulls were loud in their abuse You did not once look up. When To their obloquy No protest was made, I chose To learn what I've always known: We shall never go.
Sandusky-New York
Ohio from a train Looked always other; half his way across The unimportant chain Of Alleghenies that intended east. An early morning rain Made dubious the sky and in its stead, As if all hope were gone Of reckoning climate by his calendar, Ran April like a stain Across the glass-unfinished, unfulfilled And frankly alien. As in the past, today Landscape and weather were his enemies; It seemed unlikely they Would yield. But if in answer to their terms Of terror he could say For sure how mountains fell from monstrous size To minor lumps of clay Behind his eyes, how every season turned Within his heart to gray: This once, perhaps, the darkness too would fall In less pronounced a way. He thought how many times He had construed the weather like a verb, Declined the rain, that comes As water will-unasked, but a forgiven guest- And even in his dreams Had pressed a grammar on the land. Somehow They were important themes, Such wet beginnings as he knew, this earth That April never seems To satisfy, the sullen passage of His unprotesting homes. Distance made the weather Disappear. The clouds that filled the sky Conformed until they were Illustrious with being. Time was before Him, no need to hurry Understanding. Where the towns had loomed Dark with incoherence Of houses, the primary colors, after rain, Startled him to praise. Here The land grew lovely in the stillness of Accumulated air, As one would have it first, Not later hope occasionally; here The sun, that had abused His eyes a moment by the distances Of moving mountains, placed Perspectively the shoulders of the earth, Discovered as he passed The conscquentialities of weed And water moving west Against his progress, while his purpose grew Within him like an East. Such travelling was true In parallel. Along the simple tracks Which accurately flew Beneath, he followed himself away, away From weather came into That unconditional country of his blood Where even landscape grew Dim as he had never dared to hope, And when he breathed he knew The air as sick men breathe and know the spring: Cold still, but coming to. Now, the train running on, He clambered up the enterprising bones His body reached him down So carefully for the ascent, he climbed The scaffold skeleton Up shoulders to the summit of his skull (Past marshes overgrown And hollows filled by sudden rubbishes) Until he stared upon The shore of all his history, as it Would look when it was done. The clumsy body, where He had before been always caught, imposed An image of its care Upon the country's custom, made him feel (Generous in passing for Pausing in passing): only when you leave Will you know where you are. He travelled, putting distance into sense. The mountains fell, and far Ahead he thought he saw the sea. What if It was, if it was there? Then that was where, tonight, He wanted to arrive. Thus he would leave The suburbs of his heart, Would come to the capital city where it was. The sun became as bright Above him as the sight could bear. He knew It then, that he would find The fabulous city and the fact of seas Already in his mind, And only there: the landscape lived in him As he might live in it.
A Far Cry After a Close Call
For if they do these things in a green tree what shall be done in the dry? -Luke 23:31
Nuns, his nieces, bring the priest in the next Bed pralines, not prayers for the next world, But I've had one look myself At that one (looking Back now, crammed in the convalescent ward, With the Invisible Man opposite Sloshing most of the Black Sea Around in his lungs, While the third patient coughs and borrows Time). No one turned over when I was wheeled in; The efficient British nurse Snipped off my soggy Trousers and put me right, "sure as Bob's your Uncle." The water roared and ran away, Leaving only words to stock My mind like capsules Crowding a bottle. Then the lights blew up, Went out, someone was going through My Things While I routed-rowed for my life Down the rubber floor- But the waves failed me. The hallway heaved where I Foundered and turned in my doctor's dry hands To sovereign selflessness: Meaning had melted. "Mon corps est moi," Molière said. They're more than that, This monster the body, this miracle Its pain-when was I ever Them, when were they me? At thirty-three, what else is there to do But wait for yet another great white moth With eager, enlarging eyes To land on my chest, Slowly, innocently choking me off? The feelers stir while I lie still, lie here (Where on earth does it come from, That wind, that wounding Breath?), remembering the future now, Foreseeing a past I shall never know, Until the little crisis Breaks, and I wake. For as Saint Paul sought deliverance from The body of this death, I seek to stay- Man is mad as the body Is sick, by nature.
Seeing Cousin Phyllis Off
The SS France, Second Class, Cabin U-20
Few sights were lovelier Than my watch laved in the brut champagne Exploding from a jiggled magnum. Your foreign cabin-mates' Schadenfreude Helped them help each other To more caviar, and your handsome Husband brushed me off, as handsome does; Wizened by a decade of adultery, You whispered some final Instructions under the din, patted Your graying bun: for a dozen years The Sacred Fount had been flowing in his Favor, and you knew it. In Paris, a daughter was pregnant, Unmarried, impatient for your next Round of meddling to begin. The cycle Of all our messy lives Alters so little from war to war I wonder how any of us Dares to hope for a private happiness. Wilde said what we want is Pleasure, not happiness-it has more Tragic possibilities. Your caviar Must be second-class too: I miss the old Normandie, Narrenschiff Of our fashionable thirties. Now The diesels suddenly start to throb In a sickening vibrato that drives The implacable screw Up through even the Pont Supérieur. My stomach turns, but all the champagne Is gone, except for the foam in my watch. I nod at the nightmare Of a class that we both belong to: Repetition, and hurry away To give your worried lover messages. My poor mad Cousin Phyl, No use trying to drown time on these Harridan voyages of ours-once They called them maiden-not by wet watches Or even dry champagne.
Bonnard: A Novel
The tea party at Le Cannet. Just as we arrived it began, a downpour, and kept on. This might have been the time before: Charles-Xavier playing Scriabin études, all the others at the open window. A landscape-lawn, garden, strawberry patch, Japanese footbridge, barges moving on the river beyond-as in Verlaine, behind a mist of rain, and the regular noise of the rain on tens of thousands of leaves: such is the prose that wears the poem's guise at last. White cats, one in almost every chair, pretend not to be watching young Jean worry the dog. Sophie, damp, dashes in dishevelled from the forest, dumping out a great bag of morels on the table: the white cloth will surely be spoiled, but the mushrooms look iridescent, like newly opened oysters in the raindark air, blue by this light. Calling it accidental is only declaring that it exists. Then tea downstairs, Jean opening the round pantry window: the smell of wet soil and strawberries with our cinnamon toast: all perception is a kind of sorting out, one green from another, parting leaf from leaf, but in the afternoon rain signs and shadows only, the separate life renounced, until that resignation comes, in which all selfhood surrenders ... Upstairs, more Scriabin and the perfect gestures of Sophie and Jean playing ball with the dog. All the cats are deaf. Steady rain. The music continues, Charles-Xavier shouting over the notes, ignoring them: "Beatitude teaches nothing. To live without happiness and not wither- there is an occupation, almost a profession." Take the trees: we could "contrive to do without trees," but not leaves, Charles-Xavier explains from the piano, still playing, "we require their decorum that is one of congestion, till like Shelley we become lewd vegetarians." Apprehensive about the rain, I ask Jean to order a closed carriage for Simone. The doctor frowns-a regular visitor these days?-and frightens her, eyeing Sophie's mushrooms; his diagnosis: toadstools. Scriabin diminishes. Is the dog lost? Jean rushes outside. Punishment of the dog: he is forbidden the strawberry patch. Darker now. One candle is found for the piano, and the music resumes with Debussy, a little sphere of yellow in the sopping dusk. The river's surface looks- is it the rain?-like the sea in shallows: this moment is an instance of the world becoming a mere convenience, more or less credible, and the old questions rise to our lips-but have we spoken a word?- before we remember, prompted by the weather probably, or the time of day, that we already know something: we are not newborn, then. What is it that we know? The carriage comes at last, but it is an open carriage, merely hooded. We crowd under, fending off the last drops with a violet golf umbrella Charles-Xavier has somehow managed for us. A slow cold drive under the trees, Simone balancing the suspect mushrooms in her lap. I tell her it is not dangerous: we cannot die, but are in this light or lack of it-trees dripping, the sky fraudulent- much less individuals than we hope or fear to be. Once home, we shall have a little supper of Sophie's fresh-picked morels.
The Author of Christine
for Sanford Friedman
Often waking before the sun decreed the kind of day this one would be or by its absence left the verdict up to him, he gazed in doubt at the blank slate and wondered, blue or gray, what he might leave scribbled against the time the darkness came for good; that was his text. The trouble was, he realized, to choose. He roused the rooms, walking around the house that had to share the day with his despair, raising each blind as if it were the dead, the morning light a record of his progress in sudden shafts of dust. The trouble was in trying so: imagining Christine to be this way or that. Reality had to be happened on, one had to find, not create it. There is always life itself beyond the prose that declares it to us, life being an absolute we aspire to, bliss, but surely cannot reach. Today he would write more, creating in Christine his hopes of what was real, blowing 'the real' by what becomes of it and of ourselves. Dust was his proof: the life we know we live is simply not enough: the work dissolves, leaches into the medium and is lost there like water; the words sink into sand, dust dances in the sun. Christine was chaos, parcels of his own childhood where the past appeared to be no more than behavior, merely authority. Take the big scene when Giorgio, leaving the attic, hobbles down and asks Christine about the box, she pales and follows him back-why? "The novelist seldom penetrates character, the mystery remains intact." Thank you, Thomas Hardy, sighing over the mess you made for her vet asking, "Where was Tess's guardian angel then?" He much preferred Hardy the poet now, that doubting Thomas who when Swinburne died declared him "the sweet rival of the waves and once their peer in sad improvisations" That was character. To make Christine out of what was not his choice, participate in what would change her, like the waves, and him ... Shoving his desk outside into the sun, he decided Christine could not be written from his waking hopes: by will to set himself or the reader apart from what the world might be without the waves, bereft of wet and wilderness. No, he would have to let the weeds of wavering flourish, rehearse to both of them, the reader and himself, not ways that help us on but that will help acknowledge our defeat in getting on- that would be Christine, his novel, and Christine be him.
An Old Dancer
Because there is only one of you in all of time ... the world will not have it ... -Martha Graham
Your props had always been important: Preposterous poniards, rings and thorns, Things without a name you fell upon Or through. Now they are your props indeed. Take that iron prong you dangle from, Strung up, slung like a sick animal Who used to rise as straight as any tree Without such corporal irony. Propped then, you make no bones, or only Bones, of husbanding your strength. For strength Was your husband, and you're widowed now. The face that was a mask of wonder Wizens into the meaninglessness Of some Osaka marionette, And there is properly little more That you can do for us than think. What thoughts are yours, or were yours when Half-visionary and half-voyeur You tore the veils from Remembered Women, Rarely lovely, except as the space That took them into its hugest mouth Makes any movement lovely: at first It was enough for you to be them, Violent, often vague as they come, Until the years and the work of years Led you beyond being into more Than self supplied: now you must review What you have been and let the others Do. What you were a whole theater Has become. What have you lost by that Exchange, save as the tree loses by Giving up its leaves and standing bare? O Dancer, you have lost everything, Shuddering on your iron gallows-tree. Bane, bone and violence, you answer Yeats in kind, unkindest witch of all: "We know the dancer from the dance" by age, By growing old. The dance goes on, The dancers go, and you hang here Like stale meat on your dead steel branch.
Excerpted from INNER VOICES by RICHARD HOWARD Copyright © 2004 by Richard Howard. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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INNER VOICES