In opening the Sewanee Writers' Conference in July, Wyatt Prunty read an eloquent tribute to Howard Nemerov, who had been so prominent and benign a presence at the 1990 conference and had been scheduled to teach again at this one. The most dramatic moment of the conference occurred when Mona Van Duyn, Howard's close friend and neighbor, closed her reading by telling how her own fine poem, “Endings,” provoked Howard's last poem, “The End of the Opera,” and then by reading both poems very effectively. Though extremely moving, her commentary was wholly unsentimental: her point was that strong dislike of her poem was Howard's inspiration for writing his own. “The End of the Opera” appeared in the New Yorker on June 24. It begins: “Knowing that what he witnessed was only art, / He never wept while the show was going on. / But the curtain call could always make him cry …” and ends: “As we applauded us: Ite, Missa est.”

Nemerov's connection with Sewanee was long and highly valued. He contributed poems, stories, essays, and reviews to the Sewanee Review from 1946 until the recent past, and he often visited Sewanee to give readings and lectures. In 1952 the Review published “The Scales of the Eyes,” his most ambitious poem up to that time, accompanied with a commentary by Kenneth Burke. For the Review's special issue for Allen Tate's sixtieth birthday in 1959, Howard let me reprint his Furioso essay on Tate's poetry, “The Current of the Frozen Stream” (1948). In dedicating his Reflexions on Poetry and Poetics (1972) to Tate, he addressed Allen affectionately as “dear master” and signed himself “your friend and faithful scholar.” At Allen's seventy-fifth birthday celebration in Sewanee, Nemerov read his strange and fascinating poem “Einstein and Freud and Jack” (published in the Review the next year), which ends: “What God wants, don't you forget it, Jack, / Is your contrite spirit, Jack, your broken heart.” (The poem seems to be a reaction against religiosity, perhaps provoked by Tate's conversion to Catholicism; it marks one more stage in Nemerov's lifelong concern, and often quarrel, with religion.) In 1987 he was honored at Sewanee as the first recipient of the Aiken Taylor prize for poetry, awarded by the Sewanee Review and the University of the South.

This [Howard Nemerov] Reader has been edited, silently but expertly, by Beverly Jarrett and William Mills. It contains a well-chosen selection of his poems, short stories, essays, and novels; and were it not for the fact that the inclusion of a whole novel leaves too little space for a fully adequate representation of the other genres, it could tenably be called The Best of Nemerov.

Nemerov wrote his honors thesis at Harvard on Thomas Mann, and he discovered Proust while in training for the Canadian air force. In the early stages of his writing career his ambition seems to have been as much to be a novelist as to be a poet. Journal of the Fictive Life (1965) tells how and why he gave up his ambition. This work, which seems to be very little known, is one of his most impressive accomplishments: a psychological self-analysis of astonishing candor and penetration, together with an equally brilliant aesthetic analysis of the complex and slippery relations between fiction and autobiography, truth and lying, imagination and reality. Furthermore the form of the Journal itself, which starts out as a novel and winds up as autobiography, enacts and demonstrates the issue being discussed. Unfortunately there are no selections from it in the Reader, presumably because brief ones would be misleading. I cannot resist giving one small sample, an aphorism: “It is according to the nature of life that Papageno should be helped on his way by a hideous old crone on condition that he will marry her. And it is according to the nature of love that when he agrees she will turn into a beautiful young girl. But it is according to the nature of art that both the hideous crone and the beautiful girl are played and sung by the same moderately pretty woman of a certain age, who has spent her youth learning music.”

Of his three novels, Federigo, Or, the Power of Love was the right choice to reprint here. (I am delighted to hear that the University of Missouri Press will soon also be reprinting the other two, The Melodramatists and The Homecoming Game.) Federigo is as fresh and delightful as ever: as witty, amusing, and ingeniously plotted as any Restoration comedy, it is a sophisticated satire of young urban intellectuals and a psychologically profound parody of psychoanalysis, involving much dazzling interplay between dream and fact, inside and outside, internal and external “reality” (which the analyst, among others, proves unable to tell apart). Julian, the hero, invents (or discovers within) a double, Federigo, who writes him anonymous letters hinting at his wife's infidelity. (But another Federigo already exists in fact.) Marius, the Catholic intellectual who almost becomes Julian's wife's lover, turns out not to believe in God. And so on through many disguises and discoveries. The dénouement sorts out the two couples in the mode of bedroom farce, but in a resolution that is also meaningful and emotionally satisfactory.

The short stories are, for my taste, the least memorable part of Nemerov's achievement, though, as soon as I say that, I feel misgiving: the stories are unique, provocative, and often funny. Three strange, quasi-allegorical, fantastic stories are here preserved (“Yore,” “A Commodity of Dreams,” “The Ocean to Cynthia”), together with the brilliant academic satire “The Idea of a University” and the charming “Digressions around a Crow.”

The essays are magnificent: as critic Nemerov has a range and depth, an unpretentious authority and candor, together with a charitable wit, that put him in a class by himself. At least three of those essays here reprinted seem to me among the best of the kind ever written, fascinating in themselves and wonderfully illuminating both in relation to Nemerov's work and to literature in general. “The Swaying Form” deals with the relation between poetry and religion; “Bottom's Dream” with “the Likeness of Poems and Jokes.” “Attentiveness and Obedience,” in which Nemerov answers the questions he has asked other poets, is a personal apologia and credo, including an ars poetica. I wish “The Muse's Interest” and many others had been included, for his critical output has been large and of uniformly high quality; but certainly all the essays here collected are superb, and the three mentioned are truly classics.

I had missed The Oak in the Acorn: On “Remembrance of Things Past” and On Teaching Proust, Who Will Never Learn (1987) until I found the preface and conclusion reprinted here. The Oak in the Acorn, containing Nemerov's lectures on Proust from 1968, is fascinating for its intrinsic value as interpretation of Proust, for its autobiographical glimpses, and for its documentation of what a splendid teacher Nemerov was.

The selection of Nemerov's poetry in the Reader is excellent, though brief (fifty-eight pages). The early volumes are severely pruned, though such triumphs as “Runes” and “The Goose Fish” are retained; from the 1962 volume on they are more generous. In “Attentiveness and Obedience” he describes the changes he sees in his own poetry: first, the increased importance he gives to the natural world, and, second, “a growing consciousness of nature as responsive to language, or to put it the other way, of imagination as the agent of reality. This is a magical idea and not very much heard of these days even among poets … but I am stuck with it. … To put this another way: having a dominantly aural imagination, I not so much look at nature as I listen to what it says.” In the Journal he says that “poetry for me is not primarily ‘imagery’ but a sequence of sounds which with their meanings form the miraculous equivalent of something existing in nature.” His view of poetry as a form of askesis, of vision and prophecy, in “The Swaying Form,” certainly goes far beyond the rational.

The selection seems to me to emphasize his resemblance to Auden. In poetry as in criticism they are alike in wit, general intelligence, awareness of science from psychology to physics, and willingness to sacrifice their own dignity (see Nemerov's “Walking the Dog”). Like Auden he can write poems on public occasions that are both funny and deeply meaningful (“To Clio, Muse of History”; “On an Occasion of National Mourning”) and poems that are marvelous compact essays, critical or biographical. (Contemplating Philip Larkin's death, he imagines Larkin “With Auden, with Hardy, with the other great and dead, / Dear Larkin of the anastrophic mind, / Forever now among the undeceived.”) Both Nemerov and Auden address the ordinary reader, and both range easily from popular culture to the most difficult and esoteric matters. Both unite highly national, witty, and comic talents with a deep feeling for what is beyond reason, and with persistent religious preoccupations.

Like Auden, Nemerov is classical in his acceptance of limitations, his belief in the intellect, in clarity, in the importance of form. Life, he said, is both hopeless and beautiful. But he is also fully aware of what is beyond reason, of mystery, madness, darkness; he knows how thin the layer of civilization and rationality is, and how precarious. Nemerov liked to describe himself as a middle-class Jewish Puritan, or sometimes as a Bible-reading Jewish atheist. Deeply rational and sceptical, he was also, to use Robert Penn Warren's word, a yearner.

The other aspect of Nemerov's poetry that the selection makes prominent is its strongly autumnal theme and elegiac tone. The October theme resounds throughout the poetry, from “Summer's Elegy” and “A Spell before Winter” (printed with his own commentary in the essay “Attentiveness and Obedience”) to “Again”: “Again, great season, sing it through again / Before we fall asleep, sing the slow change / That makes October burn out red and gold / And color bleed into the world and die.” There is, as one might expect, an increasing mellowness, a stronger note of acceptance of the human condition. But this classical acceptance may be interrupted at any moment by an angry interjection or witty protest.

The final poem in the book, with the wryly ambiguous title “Trying Conclusions,” shows the poet confronting his own death and reacting in two characteristic ways: the first angrily denouncing human irrationality in hoping for life after death, the second accepting this hope as part of the human condition. The poem is in two parts, the first suggesting that the pious will be punished by being sent to be born again, and the second conceding that, however irrational it may be, we all cling to the “inveterate infantile hope / That the road ends but as the runway does.”

Nemerov's last poem, “The End of the Opera,” quoted at the beginning of this review, offers a conclusion less trying in its image of the curtain call as the occasion for happy tears, after which we depart as from a mass. Let us hope that it will be added to future editions of this wonderful book.