Down There with E. A. R.: Amaranth
[In the following essay, Cassity argues that Amaranth is “the superior of [Robinson's] medieval poems, and possibly his masterpiece.”]
Encouraged, or rendered avaricious, by the success of Tristram in 1927—it sold over 60,000 copies—Edwin Arlington Robinson devoted the remaining years of his life to bringing out a long poem almost annually: Cavender's House (1929); The Glory of the Nightingales (1930); Matthias at the Door (1931); Talifer (1933); Amaranth (1934); and, posthumously in 1935, King Jasper. None was the financial equal of the Arthurian narrative, but each of them enjoyed sales that were by any other standard impressive, and I am prepared to argue that Amaranth is the superior of his medieval poems, and possibly his masterpiece. Certainly, in subject matter, it is the most Robinsonian of Robinson poems, a full-scale treatment of artistic, personal, and professional failure, as monumental as O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, which may owe something to it, and as purely American.
Taken as a group, the late narratives comprise a very curious body of work. Seamless in their prolixity, they occupy a full third of the 1500-page Collected Poems. So far as the tone is concerned, one can hardly tell where one poem ends and the next begins. These are obviously the work of a man who hated to finish a poem. It only meant searching for a new subject and starting over. The prolixity is line to line as well as in the overall concept:
An hour or so
Away from Sharon, none of the few faces
That were abroad so early would be one
To recognize, or to be reckoned with
In terms of amiable embarrassment
Begotten of mischance; and it was good
When he could say that such an hour or so
Was dead and well behind him. It was early.
(from The Glory of the Nightingales.)
To advance the story line, all we need is “It was early.” Like most poets, Robinson seemed to find it embarrassing to write a scène à faire. The usual method at that time was to suppress such transitions and hope that the resulting obscurity would pass for symbolism. Robinson is not guilty of that; at least by intention he is realistic, but his notion of realism is Henry James. The amount of mind reading that goes on among the characters accounts for much of the inordinate length. Mind reading is always speculation, which always involves alternatives and justifications. What someone really knows, or really says, can usually be stated briefly. Society would otherwise exist in a state of paralysis, as in The Golden Bowl it does.
The end will wait
For all your most magnificent and protracted
Progressions and expansions, and be still
Sufficiently far away.
(from Matthias at the Door)
When the poems finally do come to an end, Robinson is tempted to the grandstand finish. The rhetoric heightens; the rhythm becomes stately and/or funeral, the diction portentous.
Here was a place where gold would buy no sorrow,
And the embellished rhetoric of regret
Would soon be words forgotten, and no more.
There was nothing left of Nightingale but silence,
And a cold weight of mystery that was man,
And was no longer man—as waves outside
Were cold and still, and were no longer waves.
(from The Glory of the Nightingales)
The passage is not successful as the once famous flashing of the white birds at the end of Tristram is successful, because the level of description is not as high. To use the current buzz word, closure is overdetermined but undersupported.
The subject matter of the poems is as diverse as the tone is uniform. It is rather as if William Faulkner had been put through a blender. Cavender's House is a ghost story; Nightingales is a vengeance tragedy; Matthias at the Door is a transcendental allegory; Talifer is a comedy of manners, a genre for which Robinson had about as much talent as Faulkner; King Jasper is a social allegory. I shall discuss Amaranth in detail later. What the poems share is an absolute lack of pace. One wonders, and I am speaking quite seriously, if Robinson ever saw a film. One would think the most inattentive reading of, say, a Dickens novel would have made the poet see that his own work is not movement but glaciation. Robinson is said to have enjoyed the theater, and wrote two plays himself, Van Zorn (1914) and The Porcupine (1915), both in prose. Compared to the narratives they move at a breakneck speed. Their real problem is that, like Guy Domville, they are too stagy, without being stagy enough. Similarly, one can say of the poems under discussion that they have adopted the principle of the “blest novella” and transformed it into Extreme Unction. The division into scenes results in something approaching total stasis. Robinson admired Wagner, whose notions of pace are also idiosyncratic. To repeat, if you cannot write a scène à faire you are going to have great difficulty moving a narrative along. It is no shame to summarize from time to time, and nobody before James supposed that it was. Homer's instincts in this matter are probably more dependable than James's. The attempt to provide suspense by withholding essential information ends, predictably, in simple puzzlement—of the writer, one sometimes suspects, as well as of the reader.
In spite of what I have said, the poems have their virtues. Although, ultimately, they disappoint it, they fully engage the intelligence, and there is not one without passages that would make the reputation of a lesser poet.
There's an elected remnant,
A scattered one, a small one, far to seek,
On whom accomplishment, as the word goes,
Might be a blemish—like a price-mark scratched
On a jade vase. They are themselves enough.
Their being alive is their accomplishment.
(from Talifer)
The metrical resources developed over a lifetime are in those lines, which are really about the use of monosyllables. Notice how in the middle four lines the accents build toward the end. The surest mark of an unimaginative metrist is to concentrate the rhythmic interest invariably in the first half of the line. What the passage says is mildly interesting; the metrical language in which it says it is masterly. As often as in Dryden, it is meter to the rescue.
Amaranth is something else. In a shift as surprising as an enharmonic change, the weaknesses of the preceding poems turn each into strengths: the slowness, the introspection, the inaction, the obfuscation. The handling of the meter is secure but subdued. The ending does not play to the gallery.
Fargo, a painter, realizing he has talent but no genius, some years before the poem opens has burned all of his paintings except one, and now makes his living installing water pumps. The suggestion of throwing cold water on creative frenzy is unmistakable. He falls into a dream and finds that he must relive his decision, in the “wrong world,” among other failures and misfits.
Dream narratives are cliché; Jung and Freud have not made them less so. This one is startlingly fresh, because one realizes it is no more hallucinatory than, for many years, Robinson's actual life was. We have not surrealism but superrealism. Further, the mechanism of the dream accords with his habitual slow motion; transitions not only can be arbitrary but should be.
The setting of the vision seems to be a harbor town somewhere, and it is described in terms strongly reminiscent of Crabbe.
Where he stood
He could see wharves and ships that he had seen
Somewhere before, where there were lights and sounds
And stars, and the cold wash of a slow tide
In poetry no one negotiates the underworld without a guide—that may be the perfectest hell of it, for the reader—and very soon Fargo encounters the title character of the poem. Amaranth is an egregiously symbolic figure, but it is difficult to say what, exactly, he represents. The other characters spend a great deal of time arguing about it. Probably as close as one can come is to say he represents true self-knowledge as distinguished from the mere absence of self-deception. He appears, not coincidentally, at the precise moment when Fargo is confronting the possibility of suicide. Or rather, facing the fact that he once considered suicide. Eerily, almost all the events and the choices in the poem are coming around a second time. It is a quietly desperate plea against learning nothing and forgetting nothing.
I have come down
To tell you that I cannot let you sink
So quickly and so easily from my sight.
I have come down here to the end of things
To find you, as I found you here before—
Before you heard my voice. Why are you here,
When you must know so darkly where you are?
Why, friend, have you come back to the wrong world?
The travelers call at the Tavern of the Vanquished, where they meet Evensong, a musician of appallingly moderate gifts. He is possibly the best character in the poem.
I am one Evensong, a resident
For life in the wrong world, where I made music,
And make it still. It is not necessary,
But habit that has outlived revelation
May pipe on to the end. Listen to this.
Later he says, of a dirge of his composition:
It is not long, and it is not immortal;
It is not overwhelming, or supreme.
Listen to this.
His listeners know all too well what to make of his talent:
Evensong played his elegy
With earnest execution to an end
That was a rueful silence, and then sighed.
“It is not seizing, it is not celestial.”
The tavern scenes gloomily foreshadow Harry Hope's saloon in The Iceman Cometh, although there is nothing in Robinson as memorable as that transcendent moment when Hope decides to boot out his derelicts and shape up his establishment and announces “This dump is going to be run like other dumps!”
Much of the clientele at the Tavern of the Vanquished drinks heavily, but alcoholism is nowhere a subject of the poem, nor is drug addiction, although in his life and in his work Robinson had unflinchingly faced each. For Pink the Poet, Atlas the Painter, Figg the Lawyer, Flax the Clergyman, and Styx the Doctor the problem is not substance abuse but the attraction of the insubstantial: what O'Neill calls, and Robinson mercifully does not, “Pipe-Dreams.”
As long as his attention is on the creative artists, that is, those who regard themselves as that, Robinson's writing is convincing. Pink the poet is satirized rather conventionally, with a swipe at the fashions of the '20s, and Atlas the painter could be transferred to Haight-Ashbury in the high '60s. With the men in the professions the touch is less sure. There is an arbitrariness about their presence in the wrong world. The fact is, people do not fail in the arts for the same reasons they fail in the professions, and in the text there is no acknowledgment of a difference. Very few of us become artists because our parents pushed us in that direction (the stage mother has an entire literature to herself, but she is the exception that proves the rule). Very many of us become doctors or lawyers because they did. Quacks and shysters also tend to be more obvious than copycats and plagiarists, the level of charlatanry in the arts being higher.
By the nature of the dream device Robinson avoids providing anyone with a past, as a psychiatrist would understand it, and as readers now expect. All we are told of Styx is, he “might, perhaps, God knows, have been a diver, / A silversmith, or a ventriloquist, / But not, as you behold, what playful fate / Misled him to attempt.” I daresay it was not playful fate. Styx is presumably a portrait of Robinson's brother Dean, to whom the poem is dedicated. He was coerced into medicine by their father, and very soon become a morphine addict. The Reverend Flax has suffered a loss not of faith but of self-confidence. Perhaps in the clergy it comes to the same thing. The attorney, Figg, has only one problem: He is honest. It seems to me that while his honesty may be professionally unwise, it does not constitute flawed character, and that Figg deserves a different treatment, but does not receive it.
The characters may be adrift in someone else's dream, but one has no doubt that in life they were just as isolated. It is hard to think of any social context for them except a boarding house, which is undoubtedly where Robinson, a lifelong boarder himself, found them. One cannot call them misfits; into that milieu they fit perfectly. It also explains their lack of a past. Not infrequently boarders have their reasons for keeping their mouths shut.
Each of the men who has not so far done so will have to look Amaranth in the eyes, that is, confront his own mediocrity. Robinson's imagination is not quite equal to the task he sets himself. In Wagner's Ring, every time the ring, which is to say the power, changes hands the scene is riveting, and every time it is effected through different musical means. Robinson repeats. Atlas and Pink both commit suicide, Pink by hanging himself, Atlas by stabbing, with a knife he has just used to slash his paintings to ribbons. Pink goes right on talking, a tradition perhaps adopted from Italian opera.
The spectacular exit is that of the only woman in the poem, Elaine Amelia Watchman, “who writes, and writes, and writes.” She has a pet cat, and an entirely misplaced confidence in the immortality of her verse.
He opened it, and found between the covers,
Where leaves had been, only gray flakes of dust
That fluttered like thick snow and on the floor
Lay silent. A thin scream came out of her,
And there was nothing more. She was not there.
Where she had been there was a little mound
Of lighter dust, and that was all there was.
One would have liked to be at the MacDowell Colony the week Amaranth was published.
The cat, who has the gift of speech, is named Ampersand, and is treated with a marvelous deadpan, simply as another character, like the orangutan in the Clint Eastwood films. If Miss Watchman had listened, she would have been spared.
I can scent presences that you may not,
And emanations that are menacing;
I can feel peril waiting in this room,
Unless you are discreet. 'Twas so in Egypt.
There are scenes with gravediggers, the symbolism of whom is unclear. Fargo is rescued from them by Amaranth, and their function may be no more than pictorial. The description owes something, I submit, to the Gustave Doré illustrations for the Divine Comedy, and I imagine that Robinson intended us to recognize his source, the Dante if not the Doré. I cannot regard the episodes as very effective, even if one makes the farfetched identification that they refer to critics. The graves themselves are much more memorable.
Now there were graves. There were so many of them
That they were like a city where tall houses
Were shrunken to innumerable mounds
Of unremembered and unwindowed earth,
Each holding a failed occupant whose triumph
In a mischosen warfare against self
And nature was release.
The innumerable mounds of unremembered and unwindowed earth succeed where both the editors and the author of “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” fail. I have always assumed that “the cornice, in the ground” is describing a grave with a stone coping around it, but, as frequently with Dickinson, one cannot be sure. Her editors's “the cornice but a mound” is no better.
Another long passage involves Ipswich, who is described as an inventor, which is less than accurate. If anything, he is a distiller. I have said that alcoholism is not a subject of the poem, and it isn't, but Ipswich may represent the temptation to it. He offers Fargo a drink of forgetfulness.
Since I made this drink,
We are the souls of our misguided selves,
And our lives are no longer our disasters.
We are immortal now, and we are going
Where life will cease to be the long mistake
That we have made of it.
Alone of those in Amaranth, Ipswich seems to have had a domestic life. Fargo discovers him at the grave of his wife, of whom he says:
I loved her more than life, but less than science.
She knew the last; the first I never told her—
In the most powerful single scene in the poem, Ipswich tries to lure Fargo aboard what is obviously the Ship of Fools.
a battered thing
Of rust and iron that had been a ship,
And here in its last port had floated only
Because it had not sunk. Now the smoke rose
And rolled itself into a solid soot
That scattered and spread imperceptibly
Into a distant cloud; and out of cabins,
Which he had fancied might have been the home
Of sleeping demons, there came noisily,
A swarm of superannuated men, and of women,
Obscenely decked and frescoed against time,
Who shrilled above the men deliriously
A chorus of thanksgiving and release.
Each man and woman held a shaking goblet
From which there dripped or spilled a distillation
Of unguessed and unmeasured potency,
Which had already vanquished any terrors
Attending embarkation, and all sorrows
Inherent in farewell.
The ship at once explodes and sinks, eliciting from Amaranth a dry comment.
Their voyage was not a long one,
Though longer than we might have prophesied.
There follows a little exchange of wonderful honesty.
“You would have drunk
Your doom in his invention, had I let you,
And would have gone with him … Are you not glad
That I was here in time?”
“I don't know that,”
Said Fargo, after thought, “If I am here
To stay until I die, and for no reason,
I am not sure that my friend's last invention
Was not the true release he said it was.”
One must say that an entire shipload of failures, even if, in a capitalist society, it is statistically justifiable, is a bit much. Robinson's refusal to enter gainful employment has skewed his sample. He always claimed that he could not do anything except write poetry, but there is not much evidence that he tried. He lived on handouts and sinecures. Knowing a trust fund case when they saw one, his friends, some of whom were wealthy, set up a trust. I should say that not only he but his poetry would have been better off if he had used his experience of the eight-to-five world, but by the end of his life he had acquired additional wealthy acquaintances, and the business types in King Jasper do nothing for my argument. Robinson could have dealt with Howard Hughes in his final period, when the billionaire's living conditions were essentially those of poverty, but ordinary country club comfort was beyond his art as he understood it.
In the first of two concluding scenes, Fargo is compelled to paint again, with as little success as before. If it is not simple repetition, the passage must be saying that hard lessons have to be learned and relearned. Ampersand reappears in the studio and has a devastating aside.
I came to see the picture. Men go hungry,
And travel far, leaving their houses behind them
And their wives eating scraps, all to see pictures
That hungry men have painted. Art is cruel,
And so is nature; and if both are cruel,
What's left that isn't?
Here and elsewhere, the cat, as presented, is a more articulate and satisfactory symbol of self-knowledge than Amaranth is. No one can misconstrue one word he says.
When I can seize the possibility
Of doing what I like best, I always do it.
Figg and Doctor Styx have long monologues of self-examination, without turning up anything that we do not know already. We are given no hint as to whether their careers are financially successful or whether their failure is across the board. Amaranth is about bankruptcy, but Chapter 11 does not enter. To quote “The Flower That Never Fades,” their speeches “Are like small shot that fly with a large noise.”
The final scene is by a graveside: the burial of Atlas. Inevitably, the gravediggers are present. Amaranth denounces them to their faces as “necessary vermin,” an appellation which does not clarify their function in the poem, nor does their exit.
Said Amaranth: “There's work still waiting for you,
And then your pay. There's pay for everything;
And your existence is a part of it—
For you, and for all near you.”
“If you died
Without us, we should hear bells ringing for us,”
Said one, “and we should then have better names.”
Although the Reverend Flax is present, there is no gesture toward a ceremony. Evensong plays an elegy, and that is that. It is not seizing. It is not celestial. Flax does succeed in stating his self-knowledge more succinctly than his fellows.
Theology fell to pieces in my pulpit
Before I learned that I was telling lies
To friends who knew it.
Amaranth also gets his linguistic act together.
To a few
I murmur not in vain: they fly from here
As you did, and I see no more of them
Where, far from this miasma of delusion
They know the best there is for man to know;
They know the peace of reason. To a few
I show myself, but only the resigned
And reconciled will own me as a friend.
With nothing in the way of a peroration, the poem ends. Fargo wakes up.
To readers who had enjoyed Merlin, Lancelot, and Tristram, Amaranth must have been as great a jolt as for Mrs. MacDowell's regulars. It is relentlessly unromantic, unpretty, unpoetic. Like Parsifal (Wagner's), it is not going to hurry. No amount of cutting would quicken its pace. It would have pretty much the same effect if it were much shorter or much longer. The descriptive passages darken rather than lighten. One must not call them leaden, but that is mostly their color. Nature is notably absent. Wharves and pilings, wooden tables and wooden floors fill the foreground. The sea is something to drown in; a drainage ditch would serve as well. All of those twittering birds in Lancelot begin to seem very silly. Animal life is adequately present in the predatory Ampersand, whose observations on the fall of the sparrow say all that need be said. There is too much on the order of not light but rather darkness visible, none of which is necessary. No one could be so imperceptive as to imagine a setting in broad daylight. Amaranth may be said to have invented night people.
The strength of the poem, and it is immense, is in the author's total engagement—one is tempted to say identification—with his subject. Although Amaranth is not in any petty way judgmental, there is nothing detached about it. It is, for all of its unreality, a document. The work of a sophisticated and experienced poet, it has an attractive homemade quality, as if by this late date Robinson was interested only in the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The nods in the direction of Dante and the Narrenschiff are no more than that. Nothing more utterly American was ever written. If you need an antidote to English pastoral or German-Greek, here it is. It is also a rebuke to Baudelaire and Cie. Nothing would have offended E.A.R. more than the notion of introducing Parisian, or even New Orleans, glamour into his underworld. Those who are in the gutter have no nostalgia for it. What the British decadents of the '90s would have done with the material one hates to think. The City of Dreadful Night is by comparison a packaged nightclub tour. Published in the Depression, Amaranth cut the ground right out from under the left-leaning proletarians, making their work seem, in Pauline Kael's phrase, “poverty expensively photographed.”
The Arthurian narratives seem to read more easily, but that is because we are to some degree familiar with the stories, and the psychology of their characters is not nearly so knotty. In the 360 degrees of the Round Table, about 180 were very stupid, and the women were no giant intellects either. Morgan Le Fay, some of whose speeches are interchangeable with Ampersand's, is not on the scene often enough to raise the overall IQ. People whose idea of poetry is conventional will always prefer the Arthurian cycle, and they can make a case. A lifetime of reading could hardly exhaust the metrical splendors, though I doubt that the conventional realize that is what they are responding to. Merlin has worn better than the other two and is a very fine poem. Republicans especially can enjoy the trashing of Camelot. The worst that can be said of them, and it is damning, is that they would find their perfect illustrator in Maxfield Parrish.
In that company Amaranth will look, at first glance, a little awkward. That is measure of its truth; there is nothing suave about it, and nothing is soft-focused. In one respect it is a period piece. No one in it attempts to blame his problems on anyone except himself, or on a very generalized fate. Mother is not to blame, society is not to blame, child abuse is not to blame, white lead is not to blame, The White Rose of Memphis is not to blame, secondhand smoke is not to blame, Secondhand Rose is not to blame. This acceptance may have to do with the conspicuous nonyouth of all the characters, but it imparts a dimension The Ring and The Iceman have and The Lower Depths and Die Weber—there are periods and periods—do not have. The latter is a towering play (as little known now as The Glory of the Nightingales) but something of a tract. The former, in its time the flagship of realism, seems today as stagy as The Lady of the Camellias. Neither is tainted with slumming in the way that Brecht is. It is that which allows his plays their pace. Brecht can always pay up and leave. He does. O’Neill and Robinson, without resources, dwelled in the deeps, and when success extracted them, found that nothing else interested them in quite the same degree. This is not at all the same thing as nostalgia pour la boue. One may be nostalgic about a visit to the sewer; never about a residence there.
The extraordinary poem dates from a time when realism had full confidence in itself, and no one doubted that surfaces are a dependable, if partial, representation of what goes on underneath. Hallucinations were to be described as realistically as anything else. These are the assumptions of Edith Wharton, and if it is possible to find out as much as she found out by unassisted observation, telepathy is superfluous, and so is the stream of consciousness. Both can be untidy, as Mrs. Wharton's mother might have reminded us. If the characters of Amaranth tend to speak too often in the tidy idiom of a catechism, and with as few shades and ambiguities, remember that they are under examination, and that Robinson was not especially interested in regional speech patterns.
Yvor Winters has said that all of those losers are not worth the attention that Robinson gives them. The problems of genius manqué, the critic says, “do not embody a central problem of the spiritual life.” Well, the failed geniuses are paralleled by the failed professional men, to say nothing of the incinerated passenger list, and failure is certainly a central problem of material life, that is to say real life. Platonically, we can all be successes. Or, as Ivy Compton-Burnett put it, more briefly than any philosopher ever would, “We most of us have a working respect for ourselves.” Amaranth is the epic of those who have lost that, and must go on functioning. For triviality, comedy of manners cannot compare with philosophy.
Fifty-five years after Robinson's death, and five into the public domain, Macmillan's handsomely produced volumes of his individual titles sit unread on library shelves, and even in their limited and signed editions seldom bring more than fifty dollars on the antiquarian market. To the present generation even their names are unknown. Amaranth, at least, deserves much better. No poem approximating its length that has been written since is nearly as good, and, given the present high visibility of derelicts, etc., one can say it has contemporary relevance. It also has permanent relevance. We shall never have a world order so brave or so new, nor a psychology so corrective, that failure and self-deception will go altogether away. Like Ampersand, I am not sure that they will go partially away.
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