Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

The most entertaining sections of the book are those dealing with his early years of mastering French: Paul Claudel mystifying an audience at the Copley Plaza, his first Parisian pension, (“Mangez-vous les haricots à Chicago?”) the scenes with his diction teacher, Mlle. Fayolle-Faylis. He is capable of seeing a joke on himself, as for example in the account of his sedate evening “on the town” in Paris with a more worldly friend. His unnecessary asthma cure, and his life-long passion for the movies are equally real.

It is in these more casual episodes that the charm of the book lies, and in them Mr. Fowlie is more spontaneous than he gives himself credit for. The story of his work on Ernest Psichari, and his interviews with figures of French literature are laborious in contrast. And he has chosen to interpret his various experiences by means of a mystique of clowns and angels, as the spectator and/or actor, that I find hard to follow. But he has attempted to present or suggest some troublesome frames of mind, and being, as I said, a good New Englander, to give the psalmist an honest answer, even in arrière pensée.

1952

Selected Writings of Jules Laforgue. Edited and translated by William Jay Smith (Grove; $4).

In this book, William Jay Smith, poet and translator of Valéry Larbaud, gives us a judicious sampling of almost everything Jules Laforgue wrote in his tragically short life: a generous number of poems, two of the Moralités légendaires, travel pieces and letters, and excerpts from hard to find or hitherto unpublished “Landscapes and Impressions” and criticism. At the end there is a biographical sketch of Laforgue and a bibliography. Mr. Smith’s introductions to each section are informal but informative; his translations, on the whole, are models of accuracy. The book is obviously a labor of love, and for the reader without French it should make an excellent introduction to Laforgue. The prose reads easily; the poems — but that, of course, is a different matter and perhaps it would be better for both reviewer and the reader new to Laforgue to begin with the prose.

The stories “date” more than the other prose, but they are still good and still amusing. In Hamlet, or the Consequences of Filial Piety (1886) Laforgue achieves what Warren Ramsey in his Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance, calls his “ironic equilibrium.” It is a sort of acrobat’s small landing-stage from which he surveys the scene of past flights of fancy and plans more daring ones — which, alas, he did not live to make. Hamlet says: “To be — well, to be if one must.” He complains: “There are no longer any fine young ladies; they have all taken up nursing.” After the debacle in the graveyard he tells himself, “Ah, how I must work this winter with all this new material!” It is all still recognizable and topical. The earlier story, The Miracle of the Roses, is much slighter, and mainly illustrates the poet’s obsession with death; it prefigures Zuleika Dobson and Firbank. Also — an old argument about translating — should the translator, when possible, limit his choice of words and phrases to the period of the text? I found expressions like “a real son-of-a-bitch,” “a hopeless ham,” “corny,” and “well-heeled,” grating badly on my ear.

In the travel pieces, Berlin, the City, and the Court, Laforgue (who was reader to the Empress Augusta for five years) presents German royalty, militarism, and taste in a set of beautiful neat miniatures, always ironic, naturally. Then comes an article written to introduce a show of French impressionists to Berlin. The banker, Charles Ephrussi, one of the first to encourage the impressionists and collect their paintings, was Laforgue’s friend, and Laforgue knew and understood his contemporary painters better than poets frequently do. (It was Ephrussi who obtained the post of reader for him.) If, as Mr. Smith remarks, Laforgue had odd ideas about the evolution of the eye, never mind — there was nothing the matter with his own. His poetry is filled with the same visual excitement as the impressionists’, and the eight and a half pages of Landscapes and Impressions often sound the way the impressionists look. But these pages also throw light on the poetry. I wanted to quote “Noon”:

One half the earth is lit by the sun, the other half black and spotted with fire, gas, resin, or candle flame.… In one place people are fighting, there are massacres; in another, there is an execution, in another a robbery … below men are sleeping, dying … the black ribbons of funeral processions winding toward the yew trees … endless. And with all this on its back, how can the enormous earth go on hurtling through eternal space with the terrible rapidity of a lightning flash?

This reminds us again that no poet has been so constantly aware of the whole solar system: burning, whirling, immense. Laforgue’s “ironic equilibrium” is like a seesaw; the solar system weights one end and our tiny planet, laden with his clowns, casinos, and pianos, lit by “fire, gas, resin, or candle flame,” the other. He never lets us forget outer space; it is the margin of his staccato lines.

The section of Literary Criticism consists of jottings on Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Corbière. Of Baudelaire: “He was the first to write about himself in a moderate, confessional manner and to leave off the inspired manner.” Add to this his remark in a letter to his sister: “I find it stupid to speak in a booming voice and adopt a platform manner,” and obvious as it may seem, now, one has marked the shift in feeling that did more than anything else to transform English poetry after 1908.

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The letters are so good that I would like to see Mr. Smith translate a whole book of them sometime. But why does he say, “Few young poets have at any time written with such candor and gaiety”? It seems to me a good many have. (But then, I have just been reading Coleridge’s youthful letters, full of candor and gaiety, too, and he, by himself, may seem like quite a few.) At the age of twenty-one, Laforgue, poor and alone in Paris, writes to his favorite sister: “My depression began to constitute a sort of artistic joy.” And, “Life is gross, that’s true — but for heaven’s sake, when it comes to poetry, let us be elegant as the sweet william.…” Shortly after his marriage he writes: “We have a good fire, a lovely lamp, some good tea in the tea set the Empress had [?] given me.” Then, “You haven’t heard anything for a long while about my literary affairs.… you can be sure … that I have the right to be proud of myself; there is no literary man of my generation who is promised such a future.… Alas, how I long to get well.…” A month later he was dead of tuberculosis, at the age of twenty-seven. Because Laforgue is so quiet, so disciplined, so “ironic,” always, it is worse than Keats, almost — and yet one who accomplished so much, who did it so superlatively well, and to whom all modern poets owe such a debt, scarcely needs our pity.

To go back to the poetry. By now everyone knows how to review a book of translated poetry. First, one says it’s impossible. Second, one implies that the translator is an ignoramus, or if that’s going too far, that he has missed the plays on words; and then one carps about the inevitable mistakes. The first objection is still true: it is impossible to translate poetry, or perhaps only one aspect can be translated at a time, and each poem needs several translations. But Mr. Smith has made an exceptionally good try and I think his faithfulness to the French will impress most reviewers. But the quickness, the surprise, the new sub-acid flavor, have disappeared. Mr. Smith is too intelligent not to know this; he says: