Cette vie est un hôpital où chaque malade est possédé du désir de changer de lit. Celui-ci voudrait souffrir en face du poêle, et celui-là croit qu'il guérirait a côté de la fenêtre.

—Baudelaire

Since the Pulitzer Prize—winning volume At the End of the Open Road (1963) through Adventures of the Letter I (1971) and Searching for the Ox (1976), Louis Simpson has been quarreling with America and questioning the possibility of happiness, or looking for, as he says in this latest book, a “life in which there are depths / beyond happiness.” Simpson's poetry has been characterized by a strong narrative impulse, open form, a fine mix of the dramatic and the discursive, literary and colloquial diction, dream imagery, a mastery of the working line, and, with increasing frequency, personal subjects such as ancestral Russia, childhood in Jamaica, soldiering in World War II. His new book, perhaps his richest yet, is vintage Simpson and provides the reading we have come to relish: freshness of sensation, telling detail, an ability to accommodate the humorous, the terrible and the lyrical almost simultaneously. Simpson implicitly describes his own work in “Why Do You Write About Russia?”: “So it is with poetry: whatever numbing horrors / it may speak of, the voice itself / tells of love and infinite wonder.” Voice, an incredibly natural voice, is part of the triumph of Caviare at the Funeral.

There are thirty-three poems in this volume of four sections, and at least two—thirds are more than a page in length. Subject matter varies: the Australian outback, Chekhov, an icemaker, a Magritte, an old graveyard, a car stalled on the highway, New York suburbia, malls, trade publishing, Russia, guests at an out-of-season hotel, soldiers on furlough. Boredom and one of its other faces, restlessness, are major themes and from poem to poem we see people change houses, cars, wives; they vacation in Bermuda, shop for the sake of shopping; they watch TV while their children cruise about in the family car. These are human poems, seldom self-centered; they exhibit a strong interest in the lives of others and the vital signs of the nation generally.

Continuing the personal inquiry of the Russian poems appearing in his last two books, Simpson begins Caviare at the Funeral with a poem about Jamaica and his childhood there. “Working Late” is positive yet elegiac like the book's wonderful title (taken from Chekhov's “In the Ravine”); it also announces the themes of longing and restlessness. The recollected Jamaica of this poem is variously illuminated, first by light in the study where Simpson's father, a lawyer, worked late preparing cases. But we also see harbor lights, a lighthouse, “drifting offshore lights,” and the terrible longing light of the moon that has “come all the way from Russia,” his mother's homeland, “to gaze for a while in a mango tree / and light the wall of a veranda / before resuming her interrupted journey. …” Once the father and son sat silently and listened to the surf and the pleasant creak of coconut boughs. But there is also a darker memory, one of his father using a plaster head and brass curtain rod to show a jury “the angle of fire— / where the murderer must have stood.” Subsequently the son has recurring visions of a “dead man's head / with a black hole in the forehead.” But this poem is a luminous one and Simpson's act of recovery glows with acceptance. “Working Late” ends as it began—with light—and the whole memory is haloed:

And the light that used to shine
at night in my father's study
now shines as late in mine.

Typical of Simpson's less personal, more socially critical poetry is “The Beaded Pear,” a triptych of American boredom wherein middle-class comfort and soullessness (not simply shallow consciousness) is detailed with such subtle accuracy that a reader hesitates between laughter and tears. The first part, “Shopping,” is about a suburban family's excursion to a mall where “by actual count / there are twenty-two stores selling shoes”; Simpson provides an unholy Whitmanesque litany to underscore the absurdity and obscenity of such abundance. The family splits up to shop in different directions after agreeing to meet later at the “fountain”:

The Mall is laid out like a cathedral
with two arcades that cross—
Macy's at one end of the main arcade,
Abraham and Straus at the other.
At the junction of transept and nave
there is a circular, sunken area
with stairs where people sit,
mostly teenagers, smoking
and making dates to meet later.
This is what is meant by “at the fountain.”

The middle part, “Why don't you get transferred, Dad?” finds the American family at home, momentarily, for teenage Jimmy and Darlene are about to go out with friends, Darlene pausing long enough to ask Dad why he, like her friend Marion's father, doesn't get the company to transfer him. His answer is appropriate for an American Dreamer: “I'd like to … / I'd also like a million dollars.” As he has previously, Simpson ponders the mad and bewildering movement that America has become. Here, answers to the family's frequent where-else-would-you-like-to-live game partially explain this disturbing movement.

Darlene likes California—
“It has beautiful scenery
and you get to meet all the stars.”
Mom prefers Arizona, because of a picture
she saw once, in Good Housekeeping.
Jimmy doesn't care,
and Dad likes it here. “You can find anything
you want right where you are.”
He reminds them of The Wizard of Oz,
about happiness, how it is found
right in your own backyard.

In the third part, “The Beaded Pear,” after dinner, after the children do the dishes and go out again, after Mom and Dad watch “Hollywood Star Time” and Dad is faced with the serious decision of whether to watch a horse race film or “an excellent melodrama of the Mafia,” Mom decides she has had “enough television for one night” and will work on

A “Special ＄1.88 do-it-yourself Beaded Pear.
No glueing or sewing required.
Beautiful beaded fruit is easily assembled
using enclosed pins, beads, and decorative material.”
She says, “It's not going to be so easy.”
“No,” he says, “it never is.”
She speaks again. “There is a complete series.
Apple, Pear, Banana, Lemon, Orange,
Grapes, Strawberry, Plum, and Lime.”

The situation and dialogue stir memories of absurdist drama. There is little authorial control over reader reaction. Malicious laughter or sympathetic moans are both possible. It is hard to say what texts are behind this poem or many other Simpson poems where people are distracted from distraction by distraction but one might think of Dostoyevsky's Zossima and his fiery denunciation of materialism, or of Pascal's dread-producing pensée: “La seule chose qui nous console de nos misères est le divertissement, et cependant c'est la plus grande de nos misères.” Malls that may be twentieth-century man's only cathedrals, Mom/Dad clichés posing as thought, decisions that do not dignify the word, the mindless dream of California, wisdom in The Wizard of Oz—surely there is an existential dirty joke in all of this. In A Dream of Governors, when still working with meter and rhyme, Simpson wrote:

Some day, when this uncertain continent
Is marble, and men ask what was the good
We lived by, dust may whisper “Hollywood.”

(“Hot Night on Water Street”)

Though his vision of contemporary society is sharply critical, Simpson's satire is never pitiless. If we laugh at the situation and behavior of the family described above, we had best beware. The closure of another poem, “A Bower of Roses,” I think, easily applies to the reader of “The Beaded Pear”:

He supposed this was what life taught you,
that words you thought were a joke,
and applied to someone else,
were real, and applied to you.

In a finely unified volume such as Caviare, one expects poems to comment on each other, and they do. “A River Running By,” for example, deals with a possibly adulterous situation in which the speaker contemplates marriage, fading passion, inevitable loneliness. His thoughts sharpen our perception of the couple in “The Beaded Pear”:

                                                            The trouble with love
is that you have to believe in it.
Like swimming … you have to keep it up.
And those who didn't, who remained
on the sofa watching television,
would live to wish that they had.

Hemingway, in a letter to Edward J. O'Brien, said that he was trying “to do country so you don't remember the words after you read it but actually have the Country.” Simpson, too, would like the words to disappear and one never finds in his work images or similes that are suspiciously stunning. What we have instead are wonderfully natural figures that never upstage the poem as a whole. Consider:

There stands my wife, in the garden
gathering lilacs … reaching up,
pulling a branch toward her,
severing the flower with a knife
decisively, like a surgeon.

(“Unfinished Life”)

Or:

The air was aglimmer, thousands of snowflakes
falling the length of the street.
Five to eight inches, said the radio.
But in the car it was warm;
she had left the engine running
and sat with both hands on the wheel,
her breast and throat like marble
rising from the pool of the dark.

(“A River Running By”)

Even the discursive moments of these poems have something pleasantly unforced about them, but are richly suggestive and resist the intelligence almost successfully:

Poetry, says Baudelaire, is melancholy:
the more we desire, the more we shall have to grieve.
Devour a corpse with your eyes; art consists
in the cultivation of pain.
… … … … … … … … … …
Restlessness is a sign of intelligence;
revulsion, the flight of a soul.

(“Peter”)

Although restlessness is a sign of intelligence, the often aimless movement Simpson describes in a number of these poems is more a sign of ennui, especially when the movement involves automobiles. “American Classic,” a bitingly humorous poem, begins the second section of the book and is about a couple who are ashamed and embarrassed because their car has broken down on the highway for all to see, making them outsiders to the automotive part of the American Dream that goes whizzing past.

In the fume of carbon monoxide and dust
they are not such good Americans
as they thought they were.
The feeling of being left out
through no fault of your own, is common.
That's why I say, an American classic.

Cars appear frequently throughout the rest of this section. The last poem, “Unfinished Life,” is about writing and publishing but it is not without screeching tires and the diminishing ring of a wobbling, postcrash hub cap. For Simpson, cars are most often emblems of boredom, and in and through them drivers are brought no nearer to the happiness they are seeking.

In “Lines Written near San Francisco,” last poem in At the End of the Open Road, Simpson wrote, “The land is within. / At the end of the open road we come to ourselves.” In our time few take the road of inwardness, and travel is often simply another form of distraction, of delivery from the empty self. But travel is desirable if one knows how to—as the epigraph to the last section of Caviare indicates—“voyager loin en aimant sa maison.” Travel, in this instance, is a sign of persistence at the highest human endeavors. Simpson has traveled to Australia and has given us a number of fine place poems, and a lyrical essay entitled “Armidale” which tries to understand why we often turn both from ourselves and from nature:

In American from the beginning when people were dissatisfied they were able to move to a better place. But there is no better place in Australia—the first was best, around the edge, where colonies were planted. Outback is desert and rocks. The Australian psyche answers to this geography. People don't want to venture inland—they don't want to explore the Unconscious, they know it will be a desert. They cling to the coastal rims and towns. They stand elbow to elbow in the public bar and stupefy their senses with beer. They are satisfied with betting on horses or watching football on TV. …

I am not accusing the Australian—he is the white man everywhere, flourishing on the outside and empty within. This continent is like a projection of our inner state. We are all clinging to the edge and asking for distractions. Australia is like a screen on which we see the deserts of the psyche in an age of mass-production.

Simpson points out, of course, that the Outback was not a desert to the aborigine who knew quite well how to live there, who was in touch with the spirits of his ancestors there, who knew where the water was and could harvest the growing things. But the fate of the aborigine is similar to that of the American Indian. In reading “Armidale,” one naturally thinks of D. H. Lawrence's Australian and American writings in which he strongly identifies with primitive peoples and urges a resurrection of the body and the reawakening of a fierce rapport with earth and stars. For Simpson, it is too late for that.

I don't want to live “against nature” like a Symbolist or a Surrealist. But as bureaucracy triumphs over every foot of the earth's surface, and men go to their labor like ants, and huddle in multi-level buildings above ground or in tunnels beneath it, they have to find their happiness in illusions. There will be generations that have never touched a leaf. Millions of people in the United States are already living this way.

But whereas the Symbolists and Surrealists created their illusions, in the future illusions will be provided. The masses will sit gazing at pictures of green hills and breaking waves, with appropriate sounds. They won't even have to applaud—they will hear the sound of applause. Access to the real thing will be prohibited to all but a few thousand members of the ruling political party.

No caviare at this funeral, only popcorn perhaps.

But Simpson's book does not end here. He is less interested in the future than the present, as in the beautiful “Maria Roberts”:

In the kingdom of heaven
there is neither past nor future,
but thinking, which is always present …

And after closing the book, we remember the scope, unity, wit, humor, and complexity of these poems. In this land of the devalued word and of so many “unreal occupations” (“New Lots”), we remember how important is a commitment to words, we remember that what often produces happiness, or the depths beyond it, is perception, imagination, language:

The things we see and the things we imagine,
afterwards, when you think about them,
are equally composed of words.
It is the words we use, finally,
that matter, if anything does.

(“Unfinished Life”)