W.H. Auden

W.H. Auden is my favorite poet. Unfortunately, Poem Hunter only has one of his poems online, obviously dictated by copyright laws. The other major poetry database, Poetry Foundation, only has a handful. This motivated me to buy a used copy of the Collected Poems, a 915 page Vintage paperback for only $14.99. I turned through the pages a few minutes ago and picked out this quintessential 1939 poem that reflects his political sensibility–so far from the “proletarian” dictates of the Communist Party. There is no need to puzzle over its meaning. It speaks for itself.

When he was at Oxford, became part of the “Oxford Group” that was also called the “Auden Generation.” Stephen Spender, another favorite of mine, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice were also members. The Oxford Group was influenced by Marxism but as should be obvious from the poem below, with a distinctly Brechtian sardonic outlook.

The Unknown Citizen

(To JS/o7/M/378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation,
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

Deborah Eisenberg

You couldn’t miss the arrival of Deborah Eisenberg’s latest short story collection titled “Your Duck is My Duck” if you are into socially aware, well-written fiction. The NY Times review of September 25^th stated:

In a classic Deborah Eisenberg short story, “Holy Week,” a travel writer visiting an unnamed country in Central America complacently compiles adjectives as he reviews a restaurant: “relaxed,” “intimate,” “romantic.”

This being Eisenberg, things take a turn. A very different set of words are required to actually summon the day; let’s say, “anxiety,” “empire” and “guns.” These might be the same words we would compile to describe a visit to the world of Eisenberg.

Apparently, the new collection is not quite as explicitly political as those in “Under the 82^nd Airborne”, a 1989 collection that referenced the wars in Central America. In the new collection, she remains political but more obliquely so. Once again from the review:

The later work is about emerging from isolation and complacency, about larger questions of what it means to live an ethical life — and, as Eisenberg has said, whether such a thing is even possible for an American. These stories emerge from the ashes of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, out of despoliation and environmental plunder.

Eisenberg was in the back of my mind when I came across a long and fawning profile of her in yesterday’s Times magazine section titled “Deborah Eisenberg, Chronicler of American Insanity”. It turns out that she has been living with Wallace Shawn for forty years. Shawn is the son of William Shawn, the long-time editor of The New Yorker Magazine under whose stewardship veered left on a fairly consistent basis. After his departure, it shifted to the right although you can find an occasionally trenchant analysis amidst the liberal dross.

I don’t want to call this nepotism but Eisenberg first got published in The New Yorker. I suspect that her writing was publishable even if the reviews over the years would have you believe that she is the second coming of Anton Chekhov.

The magazine profile describes the couple as elderly radicals just like me but certainly without a Trotskyist past. When he isn’t acting in Hollywood movies as an impish figure such as Vizzini in “The Princess Bride”, Shawn is mounting off-off-Broadway productions of his leftist plays. The 1996 “Designated Mourner” depicts, according to Wikipedia, “an unnamed Western country that is undergoing political conflict similar to what occurred in many Latin American countries during the Cold War: a ruling oligarchy with fascist tendencies, threatened by a communist guerrilla movement based in the lower class, is imprisoning and executing anyone suspected of subversion, including writers and intellectuals who have no direct connection to the guerrillas.” I refrained from spending $40 for a ticket to see the play since it was too close to my lived experience.

Reading the magazine section profile on Eisenberg left me with the impression that the couple was like many in Manhattan’s bourgeois (I use the word advisedly), bohemian left. The second sentence: “She works at a desk overlooking the gently curving stairwell in her spacious, light-soaked Chelsea apartment.” In case you aren’t up on New York real estate, this is the most expensive neighborhood in the city.

Wallace Shawn’s plays are distinguished by their hectoring tone. Americans are beasts who are responsible for the country’s ills. In “Aunt Dan and Lemon”, a play with two female characters, Lemon comes to the realization at the play’s end that ordinary people owe killers like Hitler and Kissinger a debt of gratitude for making their self-deceit possible. Was Shawn connected to the SDS Weathermen? Not as far as I know but the ideological affinities are obvious.

After visiting Central America in the 1980s, the two got into the habit of guilt-baiting those liberals who enjoy the same kind of privileges. The Times reports:

Back in New York, Eisenberg and Shawn had trouble persuading people of the full extent of what they’d seen. “There was no faster way to shut down a dinner party,” she told me.

Out of curiosity, I decided to have a look at the short story “Under the 82nd Airborne” that provides the title for her 1989 collection. I generally don’t spend much time reading fiction because I have my hands filled reading history and political analysis but reading Eisenberg’s short story was useful since it gave me insights into the mindset of a high-profile and acclaimed writer of the American left, who like her counterparts would never dream of writing anything so gauche as “Grapes of Wrath” or “Bread and Wine”. Oh, did I mention that gauche is the French word for left?

The first two sentences are not very auspicious from a stylistic perspective:

Two pallid eggs, possibly the final effort of some local chicken, quivered on the plate as the waitress set it in front of Caitlin. The waitress raised her canted black eyes, and behind her. Caitlin saw Holly entering at the far end of the room, flanked by two men.

I could probably write five hundred words about the clumsiness of this prose but will let this suffice. What is a “pallid” egg? If the eggs were scrambled, they’d be yellow. If they were sunny side up, they’d be white circles with a smaller yellow circle in the middle. Pallid leaves the reader questioning what kind of egg that would be unless Caitlin ordered fried egg whites as part of a health-conscious diet. As for the “final effort of some local chicken”, did the dying chicken lead to the “pallid” egg because it had chicken leukemia or something? And how does an egg sitting on a plate “quiver” unless it was an egg Jell-O omelet? As for “canted” black eyes, I felt put off by having to consult an online dictionary to understand what this means? Okay, let me look it up. I have nothing else better to do. So, it turns out that canted means at an angle. What are angled eyes? Is that a less racist way of saying “slant-eyed”? Was the waitress Asian? What was Eisenberg trying to say? The hell if I know.

Okay, enough about style. Let me turn to the politics.

Caitlin is a stage actress in her forties who is having trouble getting a part. Holly is her daughter who absolutely hates her. When Caitlin gives her a phone call, Holly asks, “Did someone just dump you, Mama? Is that it?” Holly was the result of a one-night stand with a fellow actor named Todd. Not long after Holly was born, the couple split up.

Anxious to see a daughter who obviously can’t stand her, Caitlin invites her to come to New York so they can hang out. Holly replies that she can’t make it because she is going on a business trip with her fiancé Brandon. The engagement was news to her mother, another sign of their distance. Showing an uncanny inability to pick up on her daughter’s cues to get lost, Caitlin invites herself along on the business trip, which turns out to be to Honduras just before the arrival of paratroopers intervening on behalf of Ronald Reagan and the contras.

This allows Eisenberg to tell a familiar story about an innocent American plunged into a hellish landscape. Done right, as in the travelogues of Paul Theroux and the novels of Graham Greene, this can make for compelling literature. In Eisenberg’s clumsy hands, however, the results are anything but. Every paragraph screams at the reader that Honduras is hot, ugly and poor. Not a single Honduran character appears in the story except a street vendor who is there as a symbol of the country’s Third World grubbiness:

She joined the grimy crowd and saw at its center a man sitting on a blanket, surrounded by small heaps of dried plants, a large trunk, and jars of smoky liquid, inside of which indistinct shapes floated. Of course, Caitlin couldn’t understand what he was saying, but his voice rose and fell, full of crescendos and exquisitely disturbing pauses, and his eyes glittered with irony as he gathered up all the vitality that had dissipated from his dusty audience and their torpor burned off in the air crackling around him.

The women in the crowd giggled and tilted their heads against one another’s shoulders; the men squirmed and smiled sheepishly. Suddenly the man on the blanket went still. He stared, then lifted his arms high and plunged them into the trunk, from which he raised, as the women screamed and scattered, a great snake that seethed luxuriantly in his hands. Caitlin found herself clinging to a barefoot woman, who smiled to excuse herself, and then, as the crowd drew together again, the man on the blanket placed the twisting snake around his shoulders and reached into the trunk for a second time. This time what he drew forth was a small white waxy-looking block. The crowd peered and craned. The man looked sternly back and silence fell. He passed his hand across the block, and as the crowd sighed like a flock of doves rising from a tree, the block began to foam.

The great snake seethed luxuriantly in his hands? How did it seethe? Like King Lear in Act Five? And why use a puzzling adverb like luxuriantly, one that might more appropriately be used to describe the life style of a Saudi prince? The New Yorker magazine became notorious for its minimalist short stories under William Shawn’s reign. Perhaps he decided to publish Eisenberg to give purple prose equal time.

As the story unfolds, Caitlin keeps running into the kind of characters found in Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American”. Either they are CIA agents or people operating in Honduras to make a fast buck like Brandon, her future son-in-law who pilots a plane delivering war material to an American base.

A man named Lewis, who is pals with Brandon, is predictably evil. He tells Caitlin: “Oh, we all know each other down here. Not like Guatemala. Here, everything’s under control. A place for everyone, everyone in his place. Small operation, enough pie to go around; smoothly functioning system of checks and balances”.

While not so nearly as compromised as Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon, Caitlin can’t seem to grasp what is going on all around her. Her wandering about Tegucigalpa has led her to a hotel filled with spooks, including a man who informs her that “The White House has announced that Nicaragua has invaded Honduras last night”. She responds cluelessly:

“Oh, that’s what it is,” Caitlin said, trying to remember. “Honduras and Nicaragua are at war—”

In a Brooklyn Rail article on Eisenberg, Andrea Scrima writes: “Eisenberg’s characters frequently possess no more than a faulty understanding of current events. She shows Americans as they all too often appear: lacking a basic grasp of political context and without a working knowledge of the cultures and histories of even the countries closest to them.”

That might be the case but any of them unfortunate enough to stumble across an Eisenberg short story in a copy of The New Yorker in the reception area of a dentist’s office will likely have even less of a working knowledge after reading it.

Paul Pines’s “Trolling with the Fisher King: Reimagining the Wound” is a work of staggering erudition and deep spiritual insights. This twilight memoir incorporates a lifetime of engagement with a wide variety of thought and deeds. Terrence’s words kept occurring to me as I read it: “I am human, and I think nothing that is human is alien to me.” Paul (I will use his first name since he is a friend as well as a writer under purview) weaves together many elements from sports fishing to quantum mechanics as if the performance by a master conductor.

The legend of Parsifal, and particularly the version known as Parzival written by Wolfram von Eschenbach over 700 years ago, informs this book. The eponymous Fisher King is Anfortas, who was charged with the duty of preserving the Holy Grail. Known also as the wounded king for a wound in his groin that defied a cure, he became a symbol of the damaged psyche of a humanity taking many forms for Paul, including the post-traumatic stress of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.

As just one example of Paul’s expansive reach, he starts with a meditation on this ancient tale and then connects it with the 1991 film “The Fisher King” starring Jeff Bridges as a radio shock jock who has become suicidally despondent after one of his on-air comments leads to a listener killing himself. One night, he is rescued from suicide himself by a homeless man played by Robin Williams who is on a deluded mission to discover the Holy Grail.

The Holy Grail, sometimes conflated with the Holy Chalice that Christ drank from at the Last Supper, is supposed to provide happiness. As a psychotherapist (a day job for Paul that clearly reinforces his writing unlike Wallace Stevens working for an insurance company), this Arthurian tale is something that obviously resonates with Paul and that serves as a leitmotif throughout the memoir. Like the various knights who come to cure Anfortas of his incurable wound, Paul  has spent a lifetime working, if not to provide happiness, to at least convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness—as Freud once put it.

Paul’s approach to psychotherapy is influenced by Carl Jung, whose theory of the collective unconscious meshes with Paul’s life-long fascination with the Parsifal tale. King Arthur’s court is a virtual treasure-chest of archetypal themes that can be the foundation for poems written in any age, from the 13^th century to the twenty-first. Discussing some of his patients, he finds the fisher king a useful periscope into their subconscious.

One patient named Perry complains about feeling empty. Nothing seems to last. Nothing of value. Since Perry is a real estate broker, one can certainly understand how such feelings can overcome him especially when he goes to a workshop led by a famous motivational speaker who asks the gathering how they would see themselves at the height of their success and what they would do with their money. In the age of Donald Trump, one can understand how any person in the field endowed with a soul would feel empty. Listening to Perry made Paul reflect “I hear Parzival suddenly aware that he exists in a Wasteland”.

Hovering over the entire book is the presence of Charles Olson, the dean of Black Mountain College and the founder of the new poetry associated with the school, including Robert Creeley and Paul Blackburn. When I was a freshman at Bard in 1961, I became obsessed with their work and those of the other streams that converged in the mighty river known as the New American Poetry. In addition to the Black Mountain poets, there was the San Francisco Renaissance led by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beats championed by Allen Ginsberg. All of them were collected in Donald Allen’s book of the same name that could be spotted on many bookshelves in Bard College dorm rooms next to Albert Camus’s “The Rebel” and James Frazier’s “The Golden Bough”.

The connection to Olson is made through his landmark poem “The Kingfishers”, whose first two sections are included in the appendix to “Trolling the Fisher King”. The first line is referred to throughout the book, serving once again as a kind of leitmotif as in Wagner’s “Parsifal”: What does not change/is the will to change. Did Charles Olson have the psychotherapeutic search for happiness in mind when he wrote these words? We do know that he, like Paul, was influenced by Jung. After reading Jung and Carl Kerenyi’s “Essays on a Science of Mythology”, Olson became convinced that mythology could become a science and was not dissuaded by Robert Creeley describing the phrase “science of mythology” in a letter to Olson as “crap”.

I suppose Olson is as important to Paul as Leon Trotsky was to me when I was developing intellectually as a young man. There certainly was enough of an affinity for Olson when I was young to have made him number one for me as well. When I went out to San Francisco in the summer of 1965, my intention was to be a poet not a revolutionary politician and programmer. It was best for me and the world that if noting else the war in Vietnam put an end to my literary aspirations (pretensions, really) since it would have taken me 10,000 years to become half the writer Paul Pines is. It is no exaggeration to say that if he is not the sole surviving practitioner of the New American Poetry, he certainly is the best.

Besides the shared affinity for Charles Olson, Paul’s book is filled with lovely recollections of a life spent as a sports fisherman. As someone who enjoyed ecstatic moments fishing in Sullivan County’s freshwater ponds and the Neversink River that flowed through it when I was young, I was returned to those days by reading Paul’s recollections:

In my Fisher King dream I’m using my childhood rig. Not the earliest one, a stick with a line and a hook, but a small fiberglass rod and spool reel. In those days I dug up night crawlers for bait in a section of Prospect Park where the earth was always damp. I later learned to handle a spinning reel, set the drag and cast and drop lures attached to a float. It was the middle rig I used in my dream, the one on which I hooked crappies (small sunfish) in Prospect Park Lake at the end of Harry S. Truman’s second term.

Just a few years after Paul was trolling Prospect Park, I was fishing alongside my father at Silver Lake in Woodridge, New York for what we called “sunnies”, another name for crappies, as well as bigger fish like the ferocious pickerel. I will never forget the day that my father took me to his secret worm-gathering cache, which was on the side of the road leaving Woodridge toward the Neversink River. He brought along a shovel and I toddled after him. Into a copse of trees, he began digging and quickly discovered pay dirt. He picked up a clump of very moist and very dark loam that was suffused with night-crawlers. He smiled and said, “We will fish with this”. For me, that was a Holy Grail of happiness that occurred only that once. It was too bad that his own Anfortas type psychic wounds suffered in the Battle of the Bulge prevented us from ever bonding like this again.

“Trolling with the Fisher King” can be purchased online from Chiron Publications.

Star-Nosed Mole

by Anne Sexton