Trustees of Boston University

Quietus in Memoriam, William Arrowsmith, February 20, 1992Author(s): Rosanna WarrenSource: Arion, Third Series, Vol. 2, No. 2/3 (Spring, 1992 - Fall, 1993), pp. 294-299Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163555 .

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Rosanna Warren

QUIETUS IN MEMORIAM, WILLIAM ARROWSMITH, FEBRUARY 20, 1992

A Ae has absented himself, turned suddenly mor

tal. We are left with our incomprehension, our mutterings. "I

don't believe it." "I wasn't prepared." "What about his work?"

And it will take days, weeks, months, for the vacancy to settle in, the pain to declare itself; and then for Bill gradually to make his

way back to us in those "presentiments/ of what the dead keep,

living still," in Hart Crane's phrase. But something of Bill fil

tered back even the first night after his death, in a dream.

We ?an indeterminate small group ?had gathered on a prai rie. We built a high platform of sapling boughs and stripped

bark; we were to lift Bill up on it, and it would be his pyre under

the wide gray sky, in this lonely expanse of ragged, tufted grass land. He seemed at home here.

Then I was in the midst of a number of people who seemed to

know Bill. We were camping in tents scattered along a river bank

by a bluff. Someone put into my hands a paper creation of Bill's, an intricate miniature model of a stage set, three dimensional,

with interiors glimpsed at odd angles through half-interiors, a

secret world opening in and in upon itself through ingeniously

snipped ogive windows, portholes, paper trap doors. As I held it

in my hands it began to fall apart; Scotch tape loosened at the

corners; I tried to tape them back and hold the creation together. I was sitting under a tree, and Bill appeared. He wore his black

turtleneck sweater and gray pants, and he looked well, even

hearty. He asked how I was: I was not surprised to see him. And

that was our farewell, I suppose.

The first of many; are we not always saying goodbye to our

teachers, and carrying them on in us? Bill was, among his other

manifestations, a supreme teacher. How often have I sat on the

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Rosanna W?rren 295

edge of my chair in his classroom, pen skittering furiously over

the notebook page to keep up with the surge of his thought, the

neural connections firing through Eliot to Ruskin to Dante to

Plato till my own brain fibers glowed and ached. In our last wak

ing conversation, the morning he died, he said he was still

"blocked" on the Introduction to his translation of Montale's

Ossi di seppia. "Best to get to work on one small passage," he

said. "Yes, the blessed particulars," I replied, in reminiscence of some remark of his, and he repeated it.

He left "particulars" that will keep us busy and delighted for

years. M?ntale, Euripides, T. S. Eliot, Nietzsche, Antonioni,

Aristophanes, Petronius: in one way or another, we'll be peering

through his windows, into his intricate paper stage sets, for the inner worlds that open and connect once the perspective has

been framed.

ARROWSMITH'S PAVESE: REBELLION AND MASTERY

When Hard Labor, William Arrowsmith's translation of Ces are Pavese's Lavorare stanca, appeared in the United States in

1976, the "war of the anthologies" had settled into a confused lull as the country itself grew into its not-quite-peace and not

victory after the paroxysm of Vietnam. The poetic field was lit

tered with the remnants of battle; the "tyranny" and "ortho

doxy" associated with Eliot and the New Criticism had, it

appeared, been dislodged, and partisans of Projective Verse and the Deep Image and Confessional Poetry had set up camp hap hazardly but enthusiastically amidst the wreckage. Away with

decorative, familiar, antiquarian, formalist, escapist, "time

worn, pre-existent patterns," Robert Kelly had proclaimed in his

Postscript to A Controversy of Verse (1965); we would have "new forms," "radical newness," "the tradition of the immedi

ate." For his part, Robert Bly, in Steve Berg and Robert Mezey's 1969 anthology Naked Poetry, was calling for a new "freedom of

association" in "the corridors to the unconscious," and con

demning not only T?te and Ransom but also Olson as "jailers," academics guilty of "the middle-class worship of technique." As

the frenzy for the merely new subsided toward the close of the 1960s and powerful poets like James Wright, James Merrill, and

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296 WILLIAM ARROWSMITH: AN AFTERWORD

William Merwin were observed plying their various arts with a

high degree of formal conscience and inventiveness, the polemi cal distinction between "formalist" and "anti-formalist" poetics

wilted into its own absurdity. Sober intelligences surveying the scene had to fall back on less melodramatic statements. John

Hollander, in 1967 in Poems of Our Moment, pointed apprecia

tively to the "range of metrical possibilities" in the period; Don

ald Hall, in the second edition of Contemporary American

Poetry, reported in 1969 the displacement of the old "ortho

doxy" by "a new convention, an orthodoxy of fantasy"; and

M. L. Rosenthal in 100 Postwar Poems (1968) saw no very sharp breaks between the poetry before World War II and the poetry

following it, but simply the extension of certain earlier modes

("sensibility under pressure," "formal experiment," surrealism

and the colloquial) along with the introduction of new tones of

frankness and despair and an openness to psychoanalytic material.

Cesare Pavese's poetry entered the eclectic scene evolving from the 1960s like a strong magnet introduced to a mess of iron

filings. In Arrowsmith's translation, Pavese stood out as a pres ence as original in 1976 as at the first publication of Lavorare

stanca forty years earlier. An anti-mandarin classicist, a mythic

populist, a realist with a "rage for transcendence," Pavese

imposed himself, above all, as a master prosodist who molded

his free verse lines into severe and massive stanzas. He was pre

cisely that poet the United States needed in 1976, and by an odd

coincidence he brought America home to itself. For it was

through American literature that Pavese had given birth to his

own poetic freedom under Italian Fascism. Recalling his

encounters with Melville, Whitman, Dreiser, and Gertrude

Stein (among others), Pavese wrote,

Around 1930, when Fascism was beginning to be "the hope of the world," some young Italians happened to discover

America in their books_For several years those young

people read, translated, and wrote, with a joy of discovery and revolt that infuriated the official culture; but the suc

cess was so great that it constrained the regime to tolerate it

in order to save face

The expressive wealth of [the Americans] was born ...

from a severe and already century-old desire to compress

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Rosanna Warren 297

ordinary experience in language, without anything left over. From this motive sprang their continuing effort to

readjust language to the new reality of the world, in order to create, in effect, a new language, down-to-earth and

symbolic, that would justify itself solely in terms of itself

and not in terms of any traditional complacency_

The "new" American poetry of the 1960s often had a rather

tentative air, as its practitioners withdrew from rhymed qua trains and pentameters and, in Lowell's wake, tried to find other

principles for training their lines. At their weakest, those

questing poems took refuge in a feverish subjectivity and an

arbitrary, hectic experimentalism. In 1936, in a massive act of

will and vision, Pavese had already recast Italian poetic conven

tion, hendecasyllable, aureate diction, and all, and he had recast

it with total authority and unity of effect. His syntactic struc

tures had classical sweep, grandeur, and clarity; his language was concrete and demotic; his subjects were "ordinary" scenes

of modern life in country and city. Ordinary, but presented in an

elemental glare, so that common matters ?blood, soil, grapes, eau de vie, men, women, goats, snakes, streets ?suddenly took on an aura of living myth.

"My dreams are harsh, but they have a sweetness/all their

own," says the speaker in "Displaced People." That sweetness

and that harshness, a material poetics as opposed to Symbolist

sfumato as to academic archness, William Arrowsmith distilled

into a distinctly American verse. Its art inheres in its very com

monness, the largely monosyllabic lines tautly springing away from the pentameter, the alliteration subtle, the syntax propul sive, the vocabulary pared down to objects and acts:

The man alone thinks about those winter fields, glad to know the plowing's done. In the empty room he tries

singing, softly, and it all comes back ?he sees

along the river's edge, the clumps of brambles, naked now

which were green in August. He whistles to his bitch.

The hare starts from the brambles, the chill is gone.

(from "Simplicity")

If writing Lavorare stanca in the early 1930s was an act

of vision, a Whitmanian dream of re-creating culture,

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298 WILLIAM ARROWSMITH: AN AFTERWORD

translating Pavese into American English in 1976 presents

itself, in retrospect, as an act of correspondent vision. For

Lavorare stanca had been greeted with silence in Italy, and

at his death in 1950 Pavese was known primarily as a novel

ist. Arrowsmith had the penetration to see that if Italy in

the 1930s needed Melville and Whitman, the United States

in the 1970s needed the poetry o? Pavese. Harold Bloom

testified as much when he reviewed Hard Labor for The

New Republic: "Anyone searching for insight into the war

of American poets against their own tradition would benefit

by reading Arrowsmith on Pavese." In Pavese, accom

plished younger American poets like Robert Pinsky and

Frank Bidart recognized an endeavor akin to their own

lonely ventures, and still younger poets found a model of an

ambitious, antilyrical, and rebellious poetry to take the measure of the postwar age: a poetry that accepted its his

torical place and time, that roughed up conventional form

but evinced formal mastery on its own terms, that banished

tremulous subjectivity and presented a full and complex human world ? one is tempted to say, a polis.

At night the traffic doesn't stop, but the cars move quietly, so quietly the mechanic sleeping in the ditch doesn't even

stir.

At night the traffic doesn't raise the dust. In the glare of headlights, you can even make out the words on the big

sign

by the curve. Come dawn, the cars move cautiously, not a

sound,

only the breeze blowing. And once they make it over the

pass,

they disappear, plunging into the valley below, down in the

darkness.

(from "Atlantic Oil")

At a time when the centrifugal forces in American life

threatened to fracture our verse into whirling splinters of

confession and experiment, Arrowsmith brought a mag netic center into the language and a defiant scale of poetic achievement. He soon intensified that challenge through his translations of Italy's other towering, antilyrical poet,

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Rosanna Warren 299

Eugenio M?ntale. But that is another story, one that leads

straight into our disabused fin-de-si?cle from which Wil

liam Arrowsmith has been granted leave.

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