#190

The doomed young envy the old, the doomed old the dead young.

It is hard & hard to get these matters straight.

Keats glares at Yeats

who full of honors died & being old sung

his strongest. Henry appreciated that hate,

but what now of Yeats’

lucky of-Fanny-free feeling for Keats

who doomed by Mistress Gonne proved barren years

and saw his friends all leave,

stale his rewards turn, & cut off then at his peak,

promising in his seventies! All fears

save that one failed to deceive. 

I scrounge ensamples violent by choice.

In most what matters, Henry wondered. Let’s lie.

All we fall down & die

after a course worse of a stoppage of voice

so terrible I have no more to say

but best is the short day.

 

Jean Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but he turned it down. His reasoning was that “The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution.” Rather than signing his work Jean Paul Sartre, he in effect would be signing it Jean Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize Winner, which would mean his own opinions and thoughts had become freighted with the broader, probably bourgeois, values of the society which offered the prize. To accept it would imply that he’s in league with its values. No thanks, he said. I’m my own man. In his explanation to the Swedish Academy, Sartre mentions the main conflict of his day, East vs. West—Socialism vs. Capitalism, actually—and since he had distinct Socialist sympathies, he felt it would have been hypocritical to accept the prize, with all the money and public accolades that come with it. I’d have accepted the Nobel Prize myself, but I do think his reasoning has integrity. Berryman, on the other hand, seems pretty invested in the concept of the literary prize competition and the establishment of reputation that follows from winning one. He won two of the biggies, the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and he had no reservations at all about accepting them. In fact, the immortality of artistic reputation is what he was counting on. With that, he spends all kind of Dream Song time pondering what fame means. Fame and attention turn out as often as not to be a pain in the neck, and he’s not shy about complaining about it, in one case ripping off a loud, rude fart of a poem (DS 170) in thanks, as a response to the attention of critics. Somebody might have reminded him that, well, pal, you asked for it. He’s dead now, of course, so it doesn’t matter any longer. But I dove into this blog project because of his literary reputation and the art-ifacts he left behind, so I suppose I’m a conspirator in propagating the dead poet’s literary fame. If that’s all it was, though, some exercise in hagiographic hero-worship (plenty of others have engaged in that, so it’s not as bizarre as is sounds, that big schmuck), I’d have bugged out of this one a long time ago.

This poem is all about the perception of reputation, really, and there’s a weird twist of competitive negativity about it. (Me: I’m thankful for Wordsworth and Keats.) For B, there’s more here than just the simple question of whether it’s better to live hard, die young (or write hard, die young) or else age into an elder statesman. When B. writes, “Henry appreciated that hate,” something else is going on. “Hate” rhymes just right with “straight”, so that may be all there is to it, but I don’t think so. The whole thing is built on this strange intergenerational envy of someone else’s life and reputation: the old guy resents the young dead guy who was lucky enough to die young, the young doomed guy resents the old dead guy who gets to live a long time, and even weirder, more specifically the young, doomed Keats “glares at Yeats”. Keats died at age 25 in 1821, William Butler Yeats wasn’t born until 1865, and died in 1938, age 73. So was John Keats on his deathbed looking ahead to some hypothetical future famous poet who wouldn’t even be born for another 44 years, jealous of the long elder-statesman life he was going to get to live? Um…no, he wasn’t. At best Keats was looking over at his peers, a bit envious of the time they have left for poesy, ale, and nightingales, and mourning the time he would not have to pine over his girlfriend, Fanny, while there he lies unfairly dying young. He did know he was dying, he had the 19^th century death sentence of tuberculosis. So that supercharged his writing for sure. If there’s not much more of life to come, then you invest what you do have into something that lasts. But to envy the oldster to come—seems to me it takes someone like B. who is really hung up on reputational immortality to come up with such a notion.

It’s an entertaining thought, though. In the end, Keats saw his poetic calling as more important than his love for Fanny Brawne. He didn’t marry her because, even in his day when poetry was widely read, loved, and respected, he knew he couldn’t count on making enough of a living by it to support her, and he wasn’t about to give it up. But I don’t believe it was about his reputation and a grasping for immortality. It was the way he lived. It was what he lived. It was his life. For this guy, there was no other option. It’s very Romantic. You do it because it’s what matters to you most, and you don’t expect anything in return. It’s the purest motivation for art, to do it for its own sake and expect nothing in return beyond the satisfaction of the process. You crawl into the bowels of a cave and draw horses on the wall where no one will ever find them. Hey—sounds like me! To be honest, I think I have a lot more in common with John Keats and Cro-Magnon cave painters than I do with John Berryman, or William Butler Yeats for that matter. Berryman wrote because he was a writer and writers write, and he drank in no small part because drink seemed to fire him up and make him more lucid, which made him a better writer. Or at least that’s the way he saw it. Booze dulls and weakens me, and I’m glad about that. If cyanide or strychnine or botulism toxin made certain people unprecedented artistic geniuses in the 15 minutes of lucidity they have left after they swallow it, someone alive would probably go for it. In the end, Berryman also wrote because he was after a reputation, something that would compensate for his wounded, stunted psychology and the humiliating side-effects of all that lucidity-inducing alcohol and the bad choices he made regarding the free-flowing exercise of his libido.

B., by the way, ends with taking a side in the odd, caustic time-warp envy he invents: “a stoppage of voice / so terrible I have no more to say / but best is the short day.” To die, and not be able to write any longer, is so hard to contemplate that it stops the throat. But we all die one day, and in looking hypothetically back from one’s dead future—it’s better to have lived hard and died young, than to get have gotten old and petered out. Which is exactly what he was starting to worry about doing.