SOURCE: Pettingell, Phoebe. “Knowledge Turning into Dream: Recollections of Howard Nemerov.” Sewanee Review 100, no. 4 (1992): 706-15.

[In the following essay, Pettingell, a former student of Nemerov's and the wife of his colleague Stanley Hyman, offers both a review of Trying Conclusions and personal recollections of Nemerov.]

We stand now in the place and limit of time
Where hardest knowledge is turning into dream,
And nightmares still contained in sleeping dark
Seem on the point of bringing into day
The sweating panic that starts the sleeper up.

—“Magnitudes,” Trying Conclusions (1991)

As with a dream interpreted by one still sleeping,
The interpretation is the next room of the dream.

—“To Clio, Muse of History,” The Next Room of the Dream (1962)

That Howard Nemerov chose to make his exit from poetry with a pun comes as no surprise. In his final collection, Trying Conclusions, he manages to pack multiple associations into two words. We pick up at once on the note of aggravation, of having one's temper “tried,” and think, yes, cancer (which killed him) is certainly a frustrating illness with its unexpected remissions and metastasis. The knowledge that one will die wars with the unpredictability of how soon or painfully the body may be released. A more archaic usage is hinted at: the tempering of metal, as in Shakespeare's “The fire seven times tried this [gold];” or the adage about “proving your metal,” as in the Bible's “the trying of your faith worketh patience.” Perhaps the most obvious meaning lies in the notion of an attempt, or even “trying on” various possibilities to see which works best. The word conclusion carries the sense of an ending as well as the resolution to something long pondered. The selection from three decades of work gathered here includes numerous examples to illustrate all these meanings.

Nemerov's delight in puns was not invariably shared by his readers. Over the years, reviewers have groused about such sassy examples of paranomia as

A sandwich and a beer might cure these ills
If only Boys and Girls were Bars and Grills.

—“Love”

or wiseacre syllepses like “Don Juan to the Statue,” in which he has the rakehell say to the father's monument: “Your daughter's the cause of this & that erection.” How jarring it is to run across these little squibs he called (in another pun) “gnomes” when they jauntily share page space with meditative lyrics of great power and beauty. It is like finding a cockroach on a painting by Memling. Their squat, cynical forms look even more out of place in a posthumous anthology. We want to remember him as the philosopher of autumn who could “marry weather with the soul / Which would have its seasons if it did exist / And sing its songs among the falling leaves” (“Walking Down Westgate in the Fall”). It would be hard not to admire the imagination that can make an injured mud turtle stand for our primitive instinct to armor the fragile self against intrusion, even a helpful one: “Bearing his hard and chambered hurt / Down, down, down, beneath the water, / Beneath the earth beneath. He takes / A secret would out of the world” (“The Mud Turtle”). Above all we love the fervor of a poet who can write: “Finding again the world, / That is the point, where loveliness / Adorns intelligible things / Because the mind's eye lit the sun” (“The Blue Swallows”).

Yet, however much we deplore those gnomes, their silliness rubs shoulders with nature lyrics and Coleridgian conversational poems because Nemerov reveled in odd juxtapositions. His essays teem with them. Even the serious poems indulge this obsession: “by law / Any three things in the wide world / Triangulate: the wasp, and Betelgeuse, / And Our Lady of Liberty in the harbor; if / It's any comfort to us, and it is” (“By Al Lebowitz's Pool”). He considered puns to be like Freudian slips—the sentinels of the unconscious had let down their guard for an instant, allowing us to glimpse the deep associations hidden under logic and rationality. The essay “Bottom's Dream: The Likeness of Poems and Jokes” dissects the ability of both forms to act as “a magical device for dealing with time as though it were eternity, a way of doing two things—at least two!—at once, a way of handling appearance and reality as mirror images of one another.” In the same way, he prized dream narratives, where “the net of association, for a responsive intelligence, is endless and endlessly intricate” (Journal of the Fictive Life). The notion that the unconscious spins out parables about our selves intrigued him enough to make it the basis of that book.

Some of his most captivating poems are set in the form of fables, and relate closely to his beliefs regarding jokes or dreams. Take “The Makers,” a myth about “the first poets, / The greatest ones, greater than Orpheus” from the dawn of human prehistory:

They were the ones that in whatever tongue
Worded the world, that were the first to say
Star, water, stone, that said the visible
And made it bring invisibles to view
In wind and time and change, and in the mind
Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world
And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers
Of the city into the astonished sky.
They were the first great listeners, attuned
To interval, relationship and scale,
The first to sit above, beneath, beyond,
Conjurers with love, death sleep, with bread and wine,
Who having uttered vanished from the world
Leaving no memory but the marvelous
Magical elements, the breathing shapes
And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

I suspect this parable sprang from a gnome (not in Trying Conclusions) in which the poet asks “the Old Ones deep in the graves” about the origins of language. “‘We got together one day,’ they said, / ‘And talked it over among ourselves.’”

I keep returning to the gnomes because I suspect that these gritty kernels, annoying as they may be, help us to read Nemerov properly. He is, at heart, a prickly writer, even in his most expansive and generous moods. Sometimes, as in Auden's remark on the death of Yeats, that “the words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living” sounds like a modernist aphorism about how a poet's work becomes internalized in the psyches of readers. It is unsettling, however, to find yourself shamelessly doing just that to a poet who has been your mentor and friend—as Howard was mine for a quarter of a century. The first time I read through Trying Conclusions, I automatically softened my memory of him. In this metamorphosis he became a benign magician, like Prospero, who worked only white magic. But the mean satirical wit kept popping out, forcing me to recall how funny it could be when used against worthy antagonists, how cruel when aimed at students or friends. Forgetting the orneriness is a way of forgetting a person's humanity. To ignore a poet's hard edges, his peculiarities and mistakes, is to read his verse as if it were no more than the platitudes printed on an inspirational calendar. In Nemerov's case it would play into the hands of his detractors, who claimed that he wrote pastiche of Yeats, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, and Auden smoothed out like blended whiskey. I want to preserve the peat in Howard's living voice.

My initial encounter with it was at Bennington College. I came as a freshman in the academic year of 1963-64, during the sunset years of its great literature department. Until recently Kenneth Burke and William Troy had taught in it. It still boasted such luminaries of the era as Bernard Malamud, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Ben Belitt, and Howard Nemerov. Howard had just returned from a year in Washington, D.C., as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. His colleagues in the division shook their heads over the depression and writer's block he was rumored to be grappling with. Older students reported that his frustration often boiled over into caustic outbursts in classes. My roommate and I—aspiring poets both—pondered this dark side of a writer's life. Evenings we took turns reading his latest book, The Next Room of the Dream (1962), aloud to one another, looking for clues to what makes a poet tick, but also trying to make sense of the stories floating around campus. We noted the sarcasm of “Santa Claus” where “this annual savior of the economy” becomes at Easter “just one of the crowd lunching on Calvary.” But wasn't that vision related to his disappointed idealism which he dissected so skillfully in “To Clio, Muse of History”? Subtitled “On learning that The Etruscan Warrior in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is proved a modern forgery,” the poem begs:

But tell us no more
Enchantments, Clio. History has given
And taken away; murders become memories,
And memories become the beautiful obligations:
As with a dream interpreted by one still sleeping,
The interpretation is only the next room of the dream.

As a matter of fact my first conversation with him happened to be on the interpretation of dreams. I was sitting in our commons lounge, being lectured on Freud by Stanley Hyman, when Howard strolled by and asked to join us. He was trying to break through his writer's block by keeping a record of dreams, and he related several recent specimens as funny self-mocking anecdotes. One of these was recorded in Journal of the Fictive Life (1965), but its tone there is dark and disturbing. One would never suppose it could have been presented so amusingly in conversation.

The next year, I chose him as my “counselor”—Bennington's grand term for a faculty academic adviser. Howard preferred to take one walking outdoors during the prescribed weekly conference. He felt less claustrophobic that way, since small talk made him nervous, and he didn't want to risk the chance of having to hear about personal or amatory crises. Nature provided ample distractions. Thus, in almost any kind of weather, we would set off toward one of the campus's views of Vermont's worn-down mountains. Howard walked slowly, looking upward at birds, trees, horizon or clouds (one might deduce as much from his verse). Autumn especially moved him:

The sumac's candelabrum darkly flames.
And I speak to you now with the land's voice,
It is the cold, wild land that says to you
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

One learned to live with his peculiarities, such as his insistence that one walk on the grass, rather than the path, even on muddy ground. Another was that he refused to start the conversation, and would keep mum if he didn't like the topic you had chosen. If he thought you were being fatuous, he shot back deflating comments. “You have baby fat on the brain,” he once told me, after I'd made some half-baked comment about Thomas Mann. Some students passed their sessions with him in almost total silence. He didn't much like this, either. It made him anxious. “Talk, damn you,” he muttered one day, when I had run out of things to say. What worked best was to chatter enthusiastically about interesting incidents in one's classes, or a book one found exciting. Usually this sparked his interest, and gradually he would take over the conversation. Luckily I happened to share his fascination with natural sciences: he enjoyed discussing insights gleaned from popular books on the subject, recommending ones, or taking suggestions. He taught me to identify trees by their shapes, and we both tried to learn to recognize the silhouettes of different birds, but made scant progress because we both found ourselves distracted by “poetic” details, which made us ignore the guide's pointers:

Thus helplessly the mind in its brain
Weaves up relation's spindrift web,
Seeing the swallow's tails as nibs
Dipped in invisible ink, writing …

—“The Blue Swallows”

When he was feeling particularly unselfconscious, he'd often tell stories about his childhood. These tended to portray him as awkward and shy. As he observed in Journal of the Fictive Life, “the memory of pain is not painful, of pleasure not pleasurable. The memory of embarrassment is embarrassing, though.” He was sensitive to one's own humiliations: when I had been savaged by another teacher, he reacted with sympathetic indignation, and he intervened on my behalf (though I wouldn't have dared ask him to do so). It didn't seem to occur to him that his own sarcastic comments shamed others. Though he carefully preserved an aloof façade, his instincts toward his counselees were actually solicitous, and he attended to us more responsibly than most faculty advisers did.

By spring the depression had broken. He was writing again. Once he called to postpone our session because he was working on a story. But by midafternoon he caught me coming out of a class, and he asked me if I'd read it and give him my opinion. “It's your right,” he told me. “You gave me the time.” When he was composing, things moved very quickly. “It's all or nothing, with me,” he often said. That term he introduced me to some of his favorite poems: Robert Graves's “To Juan at the Winter Solstice,” Yeats's “cold and rook delighting heaven”; Wyatt's “They flee from me that sometime did me seek”; George Herbert's “Prayer,” “Love Unknown,” and “Affliction I,” in which he pointed out the graphic portrayal of depression. When I was having trouble writing a paper on Robert Herrick, he remarked that there were poems one could take apart, like watches, study their works, then reassemble. Others were indivisible like stones or jewels.

When the weather was too awful even for him, we would join Stanley Hyman, in the commons. Stanley's infectious enthusiasm made these hours lively, indeed. Both men had come to Bennington in the forties, brought by Kenneth Burke, a mentor to both. Initially they viewed each other suspiciously. Howard had written a devastating review of Stanley's The Armed Vision. They liked to tell how, when Howard first arrived on campus, he was informed that Stanley carried a sword cane (true), so felt terrified of meeting such a bloodthirsty opponent. They soon became the closest of friends, however, working as a team in division meetings. They read all each other's manuscripts, and socialized in rowdy faculty poker games. Stanley believed deeply in Howard's worth as a poet and tirelessly encouraged him. In Poetry and Criticism he argues that the critic can, and should, provide a literary climate favorable to his favorite poet (as Coleridge did for Wordsworth). This was actually the role he hoped to perform (and to some extent did) for Howard.

By the summer of 1966 the Nemerovs had decided to leave Bennington. After eighteen years there Howard felt it was time for a change, so accepted a post at Brandeis. Stanley and I were married later that year. His failing eyesight necessitated that I take over his correspondence. The epistolary bond I formed with Howard continued some years after Stanley's sudden death in 1970. By this time Howard had moved on to Washington University. I moved to the Chicago area, so we saw each other every time he came to town for a lecture or a reading.

Though Vermont's maples and mountains vanished from his poems of that era, to be replaced by chestnuts and city streets, ghosts from Bennington persisted in his work for some time. Gnomes & Occasions (1973) broods over the deaths of Stanley, and another friend from the college, the artist Paul Feeley. Paul is the dedicatee of “The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House.” To circumvent emotional inhibition, which plagued him when talking too personally about those close to him, he chose to make the poem's ostensible subject Paul Klee,

Whom I have thought of, for the wholeness of his mind,
As the painter dreaming in the scholar's house,
His dream an emblem to us of the life of thought,
The same dream that then flared before intelligence
When light first went forth looking for the eye.

This tribute, the most complex and moving Howard ever wrote, is central to his philosophy. His reading of scientific books had convinced him that the universe may well be completely random and disordered. But language, in his view, helps us see patterns, which, though quite possibly figments of our imagination, help us function, and even feel interconnected with our surroundings. Few twentieth-century poets have paid much attention to science, though its metaphors control the tenor of our daily lives. Howard recognized that the scientific perspective had brought on a kind of cultural and intellectual depression: “In this bad time when faith in study seems to fail, / And when impatience in the street and still despair at home / Divide the mind and rule it.” Poetry, however, might provide a kind of cure, because its appeal reaches beyond logic to dream or magic, where a synergy exists between our thoughts and our surroundings (“Could we reflect, did water not reflect?” he asks elsewhere). “The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House” stands in the philosophical tradition of Coleridge's Dejection ode or Wordsworth's “Resolution and Independence.”

For such a man, art is an act of faith:
Prayer the study of it, as Blake says,
And praise the practice; nor does he divide
Making from teaching, or from theory.
The three are one, and in his hours of art
There shines a happiness through darkest themes,
As though spirit and sense were not at odds.

The other elegies in the book sound more constrained. “To D—, Dead by Her own Hand,” addresses his sister, the photographer Diane Arbus. One can't help feeling disappointed that he passed up the opportunity to tackle their shared fascination with the bizarre or freakish, their common streak of dark humor. “Myth & Ritual,” which takes its title from Stanley's most popular Bennington course, memorializes their friendship by recalling the boisterous, drunken behavior of the poker games. “Not exactly ‘Lycidas,’ is it?” Howard murmured apologetically, when he first showed it to me. From this time onward his poems began to develop a nostalgic music.

From The Western Approaches (1978) through Inside the Onion (1984), Howard's poetry continued to alternate between lyric meditations and jokes or gnomes. It looked as though he'd settled down in a niche. Critics (myself included) talked about how he'd mellowed; even his satire had lost a lot of its bite. Despite many beautiful poems from this period, however, one found oneself missing evidences of the dark side of his imagination, the Freudian spookiness of such early poems as “To Clio” or “De Anima” or “These Words Also.” Nature and painting evoked his contemplative side. Everything else turned into grist for verbal hijinks.

In the late eighties something smashed through the emotional reserve of these poems. At Bennington we'd all heard (though never from him) that he'd spent the war as a fighter pilot posted in England. This information contributed to his romantic aura in our eyes, though we could only speculate on how it had affected him. When he finally wrote about those days in War Stories (1987), much of his fatalism suddenly made sense. It was, after all, the protective device of airmen who knew how little control they and their flimsy planes had over the outcome of each mission. “For a saving grace, we didn't see our dead,” he comments, ironically, displaying a fierce compassion for those downed, “who had no graves but only epitaphs.” No dulce et decorum est pro patria mori for him:

That was the good war, the war we won
As if there were no death, for goodness' sake,
With the help of the losers we left out there
In the air, in the empty air.

The wordplay of the gnomes and essays turns serious here, serious and poignant. Another fine poem of this series, “Models,” offers insight into the romanticism that must have prompted him to volunteer for the Canadian RAF. It opens with the scene of a child constructing balsa wood models of World War i biplanes, moves the scene to the problems of handling a fighter plane during a mission, then concludes with his recollections of what real heroism looked and felt like:

Where the survivors, by their likenesses
Before and after, aged decades in a year,
Cruel-mouthed and harsh, and thought the young recruit
Not worth their welcome, as unlike to last.

Other poems achieve their effects as much by what isn't said as by what is. They adopt the laconic style of soldiers, reluctant to say much about horrors which defy description, anyway. Several make splendid use of his eye for nature. “The Shadow Side” describes the play of light through a window to arouse pity and terror for a newly made widow. Sections of War Stories are worthy to stand beside Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg. Howard's gift for interweaving contradictory ideas and emotions never served him better.

The final years teemed with honors and awards. He was appointed the second poet laureate of the United States, succeeding Robert Penn Warren for a two-year term. Howard actually contributed several occasional poems on such subjects as the first launch of the space shuttle Atlantis, the opening of a Congressional session, and “Kicking Off the Combined Federal Campaign, October 11, 1988.” Writing in a light satiric manner he acquitted himself about as well as such topics probably would allow. In 1990 I heard that he'd undergone major surgery for cancer. We'd been out of touch for a few years, but we arranged to get together at a fall lecture he was giving in Wisconsin at Lawrence University. Beforehand we strolled under the yellowing maples, reminiscing about dead and living friends. I found him unashamedly emotional and direct in a way he'd never seemed before. His speech, “Science and Stories,” again treated his lifelong themes about metaphor, and it was enthusiastically received to the point that he temporarily reverted to his old crustiness when faced with adulation. He seemed so vital that I half believed he might beat the cancer. By July he was dead. Howard had always recognized that some dreams turn into nightmares.

Some of the last poems he wrote try on conclusions about coming to an end. “The Evergreen,” a poignant little Christmas carol, reaffirms his faith in the fundamental human impulse to “Start in joy again / The story of the world: / Though knowing as we do, / Its ending in grief and spring.” Most of the verse reverts to his nostalgic mode, though some gnomes and jokes make their predictable appearance. There is, however, one piece of depth and passion, an elegy for a fellow poet:

Imagine Larkin going among the dead,
Not yet at home there, as he wasn't here,
And doing them the way he did The Old Fools,
With edged contempt becoming sympathy
Of a sort, and sympathy contempt for death.

The poem pays tribute to Larkin as one who “understood us not as we would be / Understood in smartass critical remarks / But as we are when we stand in our shoes and say.” I suspect Howard may have dreamed that he, too, would come to be seen as an “anastrophic mind,” a kind of American Larkin,

Kindly accusing none, forgiving none,
Is just the look upon the face of truth,
Mortality knowing itself as told to do.

In time Howard Nemerov might, indeed, strike us this way.