Known and Strange Things Read online

  Walcott was born in 1930 and began writing young. His first poem appeared in a local paper when he was fourteen, and his first volume, 25 Poems, was self-published when he was eighteen. “Everyone wants a prodigy to fail,” Rita Dove wrote. “It makes our mediocrity more bearable.” Walcott did not fail. His early poems were expert, and, even though they bore traces of his apprenticeship to the English tradition (in particular W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas), they were to prove thematically characteristic. Right from the beginning, he was keen to use European poetic form to testify to the Caribbean experience. This commitment made him a part of the boom in twentieth-century Caribbean literature, a gathering of talents that included Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Aimé Césaire, and Maryse Condé on the French-speaking side; and Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, and C. L. R. James from the English-speaking islands, as well as V. S. Naipaul, with whom Walcott was one of the Caribbean’s two Nobel Prize winners for literature.

  The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 does not contain all of Walcott’s poems, nor is it the first edited selection from his oeuvre. Collected Poems 1948–1984 was a midcareer reckoning. The three-hundred-page Selected Poems might have seemed, on its publication in 2007, a summation. The present volume doubles that page count. It includes many more of the earliest poems, a strong selection from White Egrets, Walcott’s 2011 volume, and in general more poems from every phase of his sixty-five-year career. The notable exception is the epic poem “Omeros,” which was presumably omitted to avoid having to break its narrative flow.

  Walcott pays indefatigable attention to the look of things, and writes with a spendthrift approach to the word-hoard. These lines from “The Prodigal” are typical:

  The ceaseless creasing of the morning sea,

  the fluttering gamboge cedar leaves allegro,

  the rods of the yawing branches trolling the breeze,

  the rusted meadows, the wind-whitened grass,

  the coos of the stone-colored ground doves on the road,

  the echo of benediction on a house—

  This is poetry written with a painterly hand, stroke by patient stroke. Walcott’s early ambition was to paint, to inhabit the “virginal, unpainted world” of the Caribbean and take on, like some latter-day Adam, the “task of giving things their names.” He learned the basics of watercolor painting, and it became his most serious pastime; his book jackets through the years have featured his gentle and competent paintings of tropical country scenes. But poetry was the deeper and more substantial practice. He brought the patient and accretive sensibility of a realist painter to his poems. They are great piles of intoxicating description, always alert to the demands of meter and form, often employing rhyme or slant rhyme, great layers of adjectives firming up the noun underpainting. He names painters as his exemplars more often than he names poets: Pissarro, Veronese, Cézanne, Manet, Gauguin, and Millet roll through the pages. And he embraces the observed particular as ardently as any Flemish painter might. As he wrote in the poem “Midsummer,” only half jokingly, “The Dutch blood in me is drawn to detail.”

  From time to time, this love of description can strike false notes. “The Man Who Loved Islands,” from the 1982 book The Fortunate Traveller, is marred by poor attempts at American vernacular. Early volumes like The Castaway and The Gulf would have benefited from some compression. But far more often, the writing leaves mere lyricism far behind to rise to the level of prophetic speech, as in the extraordinary poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace.” One inescapable conclusion from reading hundreds of pages of Walcott at once is the feeling that this is the lifework of an ecstatic. What if the descriptions do go on a bit? What else would one rather be doing?

  Something of spiritual import did happen to the young Walcott, an experience he set down when he was older, in the seventh chapter (curiously omitted from the present book) of the autobiographical book-length poem Another Life:

  About the August of my fourteenth year

  I lost my self somewhere above a valley

  owned by a spinster-farmer, my dead father’s friend.

  At the hill’s edge there was a scarp

  with bushes and boulders stuck in its side.

  Afternoon light ripened the valley,

  rifling smoke climbed from small labourers’ houses,

  and I dissolved into a trance.

  I was seized by a pity more profound

  than my young body could bear, I climbed

  with the labouring smoke,

  I drowned in labouring breakers of bright cloud,

  then uncontrollably I began to weep,

  inwardly, without tears, with a serene extinction

  of all sense; I felt compelled to kneel,

  I wept for nothing and for everything

  The power of the passage is not only in its strong evocation of an instance of sublimity, but also in the modulation of the recollection: the Dantean opening, the apt but unexpected split of “my” from “self,” and the uncontrolled syntax of “then uncontrollably I began to weep.” Epiphany became Walcott’s favored mode, his instinct, even as he struggled to satisfy each poem’s competing demands of originality and necessity. In White Egrets, a supremely controlled collection dominated by an elegiac mood, a welcome epiphany intrudes, often heralded by the word “astonishment” or “astonished”:

  The perpetual ideal is astonishment.

  The cool green lawn, the quiet trees, the forest

  on the hill there, then, the white gasp of an egret sent

  sailing into the frame then teetering to rest

  Walcott has few equals in the use of metaphor. In his imagination, each thing seems to be linked to another by a special bond, unapparent until he points it out, permanently fresh once he does. Most of these metaphors he uses just once, brilliantly, discarding them in the onrush of description. The fine surprise in White Egrets of how “a hawk on the wrist / of a branch, soundlessly, like a falcon, / shoots into heaven…” is not easy to forget. Nor is this, from “Midsummer”:

  the lines of passengers at each trolley station

  waiting to go underground, have the faces of actors

  when a play must close…

  Other metaphors he repeats with Homeric confidence through the years, and they are like irregular watermarks that place a subtle proprietary brand on his work: the night sky’s similarity to a perforated roof, the coinlike glimmer of rivers or seas, the way city blocks bring paragraphs or stanzas to mind.

  But best of all are those metaphors he grounds in the rudiments of his craft, in grammar and syntax: when “dragonflies drift like a hive of adjectives,” when he imagines his late father pausing “in the parenthesis” of the stairs, or when “like commas / in a shop ledger gulls tick the lined waves.”

  The reader imagines Walcott, as he sets these striking images down, mentally shuttling between the fact of the world and the fact of the poem. Often, he is evoking the sea’s activity, or the sky’s, and making analogies with his own practice of describing it.

  And so it is that in the last poem on the last page of this largehearted and essential book, the two realities finally merge. The natural poet dissolves, astonished, into nature, “as a cloud slowly covers the page and it goes / white again and the book comes to a close.”

  Aciman’s Alibis

  WHEN, IN 2005 and 2006, a mysterious sweet smell wafted across Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, it discomfited already jittery New Yorkers. The same thing happened again three years later. Finally, the smell was identified: fenugreek, carried on breezes from a New Jersey flavor and fragrance factory. The incident reminded me of a passage in André Aciman’s fine 1995 memoir, Out of Egypt, in which he writes about the fragrance of hilba, fenugreek. Arab Egyptians drank it for its curative powers, and reeked afterward, but for many Alexandrian Jews who aspired to being European, nothing could be more déclassé than the smell of hilba. Aciman’s father called it une odeur d’arabe, an Arab smell, and hated any trace of it in the house or
on his clothes. But, Aciman points out, “all homes bear ethnic odors,” and from the various smells of foods and perfumes the stories of communities and persons emerge. The opening chapter of Alibis, Aciman’s beautiful new book of essays, is an extended aria on the sense of smell.

  The fragrance in this case is lavender. Lavender, first encountered in his father’s aftershave, and then used as a home cure for migraines, is the madeleine—Aciman’s debt to Proust is deep and freely acknowledged—that opens up a cascade of memories. Memories of childhood, youth, marriage, and fatherhood are narrated in counterpoint with a dizzying tour of the varieties of lavender. The essay becomes a story about Aciman’s discovery of different lavenders, lavenders associated with people, places, and half-forgotten encounters. His enthusiasm, expressed in meandering, enumerative sentences, is intense and catching:

  There were light, ethereal lavenders; some were mild and timid; others lush and overbearing; some tart, as if picked from the field and left to parch in large vats of vinegar; others were overwhelmingly sweet. Some lavenders ended up smelling like an herb garden; others, with hints of so many spices, were blended beyond recognition. I experimented with each one, purchased many bottles, not just because I wanted to collect them all or was searching for the ideal lavender—the hidden lavender, the ur-lavender that superseded all other lavenders—but because I was eager to either prove or disprove something I suspected all along: that the lavender I wanted was none other than the one I’d grown up with and would ultimately turn back to once I’d established that all the others were wrong for me.

  After this prefatory inspiration, Alibis exhales into a pursuit of evanescence. Most of its chapters are travel essays, and Aciman is a spirited guide, sensitive to history but alive also to food, sunshine, art, and aimless wandering. The pleasure of reading him resides in the pleasure of his company. He knows a lot, and often gets carried away, but he also knows how to doubt himself. If his destinations seem conventional—Paris, Barcelona, Rome—his engagement with them is idiosyncratic. His mission is to “unlock memory’s sluice gates,” and it is a mission he accomplishes through the art of the essay itself: “You write not after you’ve thought things through; you write to think things through.”

  Aciman returns to memory obsessively, looking for the words that can help him understand it better, finding solace in the idea of being in one place while desiring another, not for the sake of being in that other place, but for the sake of desire itself. Visiting Egypt, he remembers how the smell from a certain falafel place in New York used to fill him with a deep longing for the small falafel establishments he had known in Egypt. But, in the course of this memory, he also realizes that the falafel place in New York matches his dream of Egyptian falafel more closely than can Egypt falafel itself. This displacement of desire is Aciman’s favorite move, one he deploys in several of the essays in Alibis. The imbricated feelings owe something to the ironies of the seventeenth-century roman d’analyse. Aciman cites Madame de La Fayette’s Princesse de Clèves, which was particularly dear to him; in it, a woman who wishes to regain her lover doesn’t merely feign indifference but feigns an effort to mask her feigned indifference.

  But there is something more than mere irony or dissimulation going on in Aciman’s case. In one passage he writes: “What we missed was not just Egypt. What we missed was dreaming Europe in Egypt—what we missed was the Egypt where we’d dreamed of Europe.” On revisiting an apartment building in Rome, he recalls: “At fifteen, I visited the life I wished to lead and the home I was going to make my own some day. Now, I was visiting the life I had dreamed of living.” Of Cambridge, Massachusetts, he writes: “Here, at twenty-five, I had conjured the life I wished to live one day. Now, at fifty, I was revisiting the life I’d dreamed of living.” Writing of Monet’s painting in Bordighera, on the Riviera, he speculates that Monet “realized that he liked painting this town more than he loved the town itself, because what he loved was more in him than in the town itself, though he needed the town to draw it out of him.” And he describes his own experience as a young refugee in Rome thus: “I’d grown to love old Rome, a Rome that seemed more in me than it was out in Rome itself, because, in this very Rome I’d grown to love, there was perhaps more of me in it than there was of Rome.”

  What is one to make of this insistent ostinato? Certainly it gives a picture of Aciman’s mind: his love of recursion and contradiction, of being “elsewhere” (this is how he defines the “alibis” of the title), of cultivating shadow-selves and always feeling out of place. And, certainly, memory is nothing if not repetitive. But it is also evident that some of these repetitions are simply due to the essays’ having been written at different times for different magazines and journals. This leads to some inconsistencies of tone, and some infelicities in the otherwise fine text. For instance, having already written on Monet, Aciman mentions, in the course of another essay, “the painter Claude Monet,” as though we had never heard of him; La Princesse de Clèves is introduced twice; and a metaphor about old houses leaning on each other for support, striking though it is, surely wasn’t intended to show up in an essay about Rome as well as in one about Venice.

  Nevertheless, Aciman’s deep fidelity to the world of the senses, and to the translation of those sensations into prose, makes Alibis a delight. We enjoy, with him, the satisfactions of coincidences, and (to put it as he might) of dreaming of pasts in which we dreamed of the future from which we are now dreaming of the past. Aciman writes of Proust that “memory and wishful thinking are filters through which he registers, processes and understands present experience.” The same has long been true of Aciman himself, and this fragrant book further bolsters his reputation as one of our best wishful thinkers.

  Double Negative

  SAUL AUERBACH, THE great fictional photographer at the heart of Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative, is more meticulous than most. The unhurried processes and careful results of his photography, work made on the streets and in the homes of the people of Johannesburg, provide the calm pulse of the novel. Photography is a fast art now, except for those who are too old-fashioned to shoot digital. But for most of the art’s history—until about fifteen years ago—most photographers had no choice but to be slow. Film had to be loaded into a camera, the shot had to be taken with some awareness of the cost of materials, the negative had to be developed, and the print had to be enlarged. A certain meticulousness was necessary for photographs, a certain irreducible calmness of temperament.

  The narrator of Double Negative is Neville Lister, Nev to his friends and family, a smart young college dropout when we first meet him. He is anything but calm. Nev’s life story, detailed in a discontinuous narrative from his youth to his middle age, is the main material of the novel, but it unfurls to the steady rhythm of Auerbach’s photographs: Nev anticipating the photographs, witnessing the places and persons involved in their making, remembering the images years later, and remembering them years later still. Like every worthwhile first-person narrator, Nev has a suggestive and imprecise identification with his author. Meanwhile, the fictional Saul Auerbach has a real-life cognate in David Goldblatt, the celebrated photographer of ordinary life in South Africa during the last three decades of apartheid and the first two decades since its end. The temptation is to think that Nev and Auerbach are a pair of photographic positives printed from Vladislavić and his sometime collaborator Goldblatt. But this is a book that is obsessed with imperfect doublings, and it comes with its own caveat emptor: “Stratagems banged around the truth like moths around an oil lamp.” Things are not what they seem, and this is not a roman à clef, though it has been expertly rigged to look like one.

  With a language as fine-grained as a silver gelatin print, Vladislavić delivers something rarer and subtler than a novelization of experience: he gives us, in this soft, sly novel, “the seductive mysteries of things as they are.” At heart, the novel is about an encounter between two intellects in an evil time. It is an account of a sentimental education,
though there’s a quickness to the narrative that allows it to elude such categorical confinement. The skeptical, hot-blooded, and quick-tongued younger man and the reticent, unsentimental, and deceptively stolid veteran navigate their way through a brutal time in a brutal place. Neither of them is politically certain—that rawness of response is outsourced in part to a visiting British journalist who goes on a shoot with them—but both are ethically engaged, and both realize how deeply perverse their present order (South Africa in the 1980s) is. “It could not be improved upon,” Nev says of that time, looking back; “it had to be overthrown.” This young Nev is direct but unsteady on his feet. We are reminded, subtly, that he is, as his name tells us, a Lister. He pitches forward. “I felt that I was swaying slightly, the way you do after a long journey when the bubble in an internal spirit level keeps rocking even though your body has come to rest.” Vladislavić’s prose is vibrant: it is alert to vibrations, movement, and feints, as though it were fitted with a secret accelerometer.

  Double Negative is in three parts, dealing respectively with youth, a return from exile, and maturity. The plot is light: through the drift of vaguely connected incident, all set down as though remembered, Vladislavić draws the reader into a notion that this is a memoir. But these are invented stories about an invented self interacting with other invented persons. It is not recollection—but it is also not not recollection. It is a double negative. What sustains this enterprise, magnificently, is Vladislavić’s narrative intelligence, which is nowhere more visible than in his language-work itself. We enter incidents in medias res—as though they were piano études—and exit them before we have overstayed our welcome.