"Mahler," Jonathan Williams (1969): The ability to respond

Before the old year disappears altogether it's good to acknowledge the publishing anniversary, by Cape Goliard Press in 1969, of Mahler, Jonathan Williams's beautiful poem cycle written in accompaniment to the composer's ten symphonies. His literary cohort and often-collaborator Guy Davenport called the forty poems composed while listening to the music of Mahler "one of the really lovely things of our time."

In May, 1966 Williams wrote that "the Austrians know little of Mahler ... he is much too much for them, and still is." And while more than 40 years have passed since that observation, Williams's poetic cycle is as vibrant as the music it celebrates.

Unavailable for many years until resurfacing in the collection Jubilant Thicket (2005), Williams's Mahler poems respond to the music of Mahler, but are not deliberate interpretations. The poet agrees with Paul Stefan in Mahler: A Study of His Personality and Work: "In general, the hearer who interprets rather than listens likes nothing better than to investigate what the composer 'meant' by his works. Of course, he meant nothing whatsoever."

In a note dated December 8, 1967, the poet writes of these poems: "they were written only during the duration of each movement, lest the com-posing (sic) get too elaborated." He goes on to compare the compositional practice to that of an artist who might "draw with the eyes shut, using only the motor faculty while listening with closest attention." Here is the poet listening to the fourth movement of Symphony no. 1, the "Titan": the section is marked, Stormily agitated.

The things seen, the
intervals, and the noises
are nature's, Dr.
Williams:

"Measure serves for us as the key:
we can measure between objects;
therefore we know that they exist."

lichens on aspens
seen in green
lightning

the crack of perception isn't too quick,
the cuckoo's call is tuned by
adrenalin glands,
clouds linked to the world
by lightning and tuning -- it cracks the
stones and melts the heart

the cuckoo takes heart, eye-bright
in blue air, lightning
hits it

Spontaneity was key, and observation paramount; the poet and the artist, seeing with eyes closed, witness more than the world can offer. Did Mahler intend a cuckoo's call, or linking cracked stones and melting hearts? It's romantic imagery fit for a poet, hardly what a composer of symphonies might intend, but the music conjures such ideas when the mind is surprised by the moment of perception. How does the poet put it? The listener observing as sharply as the cuckoo "eye-bright / in blue air."

Williams was a keen observer of nature, and human nature both. He traveled to Innsbruck, Salzberg, Linz, sites linked with Mahler, Bruckner, Webern, Berg, and other Austrian composers -- and found the worldly (and Jewish) Mahler almost an outsider in his own country, better understood "on the Thames or the Hudson, at Portmeirion or in the Rockies," than in his homeland. Williams remarks in his introduction that Mahler was a composer "in whom a very un-Austrian, cosmopolitan, Freudian daimon existed." This dislocation must have appealed to an artist like Williams, who spent a lifetime's career in the North Carolina hills valuing the unexpected, the individual creating art against the grain of expectation.

At end, of course, Mahler's symphonies and Williams' poems share worlds of experience: the visions of William Blake as well as the linden in summer, both the emotion and the intellect (as Williams writes: the commonplace takes us farther and farther / from ourselves / but we are brought back to ourselves / by solitude, / and from ourselves to God / is only a step.) The writer of verses and the composer of symphonies, though they never met, share with us more than they know. From "Primeval Light" (scored "very solemn, but simple"):

... While we slept these kept with us:
the grosbeak's breast in the early sun,
the wood thrush's notes, ants
in the leaves,
mallows in the wind and
dogwoods opening

the world of the little hears little Mahler,
but while we slept
these kept with us

(photo of Jonathan Williams: Dobree Adams, 2003)

Jean Cocteau and "The Difficulty of Being"

Sometimes a writer needs to read (and heed) the printed word of those gone before, and who better to point the way than Jean Cocteau and the wisdom of Charlie Chaplin? Those long-gone, black-and-white days are hard to heed these days, but they are still vibrant for those with an ear to listen. From The Difficulty of Being by Jean Cocteau, and translated by Jean Sprigge (1995, Da Capo Press), here is a paradigm of personal style.

"I am neither cheerful nor sad. But I can be completely the one or the other to excess. In conversation, if I am in good form, I can forget the sorrows behind me, a pain I am suffering from, forget myself, so greatly do words intoxicate me and sweep ideas along with them.They come to me far better in solitude and, often, to write an article is torture, whereas I can speak it without effort. This frenzy of speech brings an impression of a facility I do not possess.

... The white paper, the ink alarm me. I know they are in league against my will to write. If I succeed in conquering them, then my engine warms up, the word drives me and my mind functions. But it is essential that I should interfere as little as possible; that I should almost doze over it. The slightest consciousness of this process stops it.

And if I want to get it going again, I have to wait until the machinery chooses, and not try to persuade it by some trick. One must not confuse intelligence, so adept at duping its man. with that other organ, seated we know not where, which informs us -- irrevocably -- of our limitations. ...



It is the power to revolve within this space that talent reveals itself. ... So long as what 's to be said is said, it's all one to me. All the same I have my method. This exists in being hard, economical in words, in rhyming my prose, in taking aim regardless of style, and hitting the bull's-eye at whatever cost. ...

I have heard Charles Chaplin deplore having left in his film The Gold Rush that dance of the bread rolls for which every spectator congratulates him. To him it is only a blot that catches the eye -- I have also heard him say (on the art of decorative style) that after a film he 'shakes the tree.' One must only keep, he added, what sticks to the branches."


As a writer I only hope to retain "what sticks to the branches," like leaves after an afternoon rain and the western wind in May.

(BellemeadeBooks will return in December. This post originally appeared in May, 2009.)

Reynolds Price: "Clear Pictures" (1989)

November: the days darken, nights get longer, cold clouds gather. Beyond the warmth and brightness that is Thanksgiving -- the beginnings of a season of sanctioned overindulgence, such an American holiday -- even Louisa May Alcott soured against the cold and dark, writing "November is the most disagreeable month in the entire year." I expect what old and dour Nathaniel Hawthorne might have written about a brittle New England autumn, but such harsh words from the author of Little Women are a surprise. The most optimistic of us are bound to be flattened by a nighttime's darkening before 5 o'clock in the afternoon, even with the prospect of a dressed twenty-pound turkey on the dining-room table as a leavening agent to our gloom.

What to read in a month like November? I tried settling in with some of the things I had been promising to read (and putting off reading) since summertime when flies were buzzing at the screen door. No luck with such good intentions; old books, new books -- nothing stuck. November, it turns out, is a tough read. (Should I really open Gustave Flaubert's November this month? The title alone puts me off. I still haven't found the right time of year for it, after I found this copy for a quarter at the library two years ago. I haven't tried January yet, though.) I got 50 pages of Junot Diaz and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) behind me, and that still wasn't working, either. Eh -- maybe I'll find it's a springtime novel.

There is Reynolds Price, however. Years ago I discovered Clear Pictures, his memoir of a North Carolina boyhood in the 1940s. Wit, sharp detail, youth observed as translucent as if it happened yesterday, and memories plucked up from the stream as by a hawk. Here he is describing his father's "welcome scourge" of practical jokes:

"From cradle to grave, Will's practical jokes were the welcome scourge of his friends, kin and in-laws. In that less analytical time, nobody asked if a concealed hostility was at work in his impenetrable disguises, ruses, forged letters and convincing crank-phonecalls. If there was veiled anger in his motive, then it seems realistic to see also what an imaginative and entertaining way he found to vent it -- our own home-theater, complete with regular catharsis. No one was ever so much as bruised; and no one ever expressed resentment, neither on the spot nor in after years. Those were tougher spirits in general then, not trained to expect kid gloves, day or night.

... Everyone was skittishly resigned to a turn as the object of one of Will's long-planned hoaxes. What removed all whiff of cruelty was his clear intention to amuse and everyone's delighted response, even the victims', and the fact that the victims promptly began to plot a turnabout, if he or she had the wits to catch Will unawares. In that crew of expert comedians, some did."

"Those were tougher spirits then": whatever nostalgia remains for mid-twentieth-century America from a childhood in the South, Price is bluntly honest about its bleaker aspects: there was war, poverty, deprivation. There's also surprise in the black humor of an early holiday memory: I can also see our black terrier, dead under the tree on a Christmas morning (the only explanation I ever heard was that Will dropped a laxative pill the night before and was unable to find it; but the dog succeeded, ate it, lay down to rest in the tree's cotton snow and died in the midst of my Santa Claus)."

Price, 65, continues to teach at Duke University after being diagnosed with spinal cancer in 1984, and continues to write; he's another in the lengthening line of "regional writers" who have made prolific writing careers, although he's careful about placing too much emphasis on being a Southern writer: as he says, "I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern." Still, he's been in some good company; Eudora Welty helped get his first books published. Like many writers, he's made a public career without much public ado -- an observation he would find dryly humorous if it weren't for the literary accolades his work has received. Clear Pictures was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1989; in 1986 his novel Kate Vaiden won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and there have been many others.

Reynolds Price

Price has a wry sense of writing's place in American culture, or the very lack of one. In Feasting the Heart, his 2000 book of essays for National Public Radio, he writes about the growing number of British adaptations of English novels on American television and the movies, while noting our country's own "baffling neglect ... of the waiting riches of American literature." From his essay "Native Orphans":

"Look down the American fiction and drama shelves of your nearest library; locate the absolute first-class titles from James Fennimore Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, on through Willa Cather, Eugene O'Neill, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald to Tennessee Williams, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, and their live-and-kicking peers. Search your memory for a single example of a first-class film adapted from any classic American novel or play -- a first-class film, now ...

My own recent search turns up only three such unassailable achievements -- Sidney Lumet's version of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), John Ford's version of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and Michael Mann's recent version of Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1992). Period.

Oh, I may have forgot a contender or two ... I'm well aware of the many dozens of films made from lesser novels -- films like Gone With the Wind and The Big Sleep -- but I don't expect to hear a chorus of reminders of the brilliance I've neglected to mention."

He goes on to a list of intriguing contemporary possibilities, from Robert Stone's "parable of American havoc overseas," A Flag for Sunrise, to William Kennedy's Albany novels, "onward through a multitude of stories for the next millennium." These films will not be made, at least not by Americans. What causes this neglect? For Price, it's a familiar and disheartening litany that includes minuscule arts budgets slashed ever further in every legislative session, school systems without the arts, a failure of nerve in the face of popular culture. He -- and we -- wait.

Meanwhile, Clear Pictures remains on the bedside table, good enough as holiday reading to keep me awake propped up in bed until at least 10 at night -- a respectable enough hour to call it a day in late November, even if that's an hour considered too early in summer. Since I first read Clear Pictures ten years ago I've discovered Price's other writing, a prolific output of novels, short stories and essays: there's an over-abundance of Price's 23 novels and collections, going back to 1962. That is certainly something to look forward to during fall's dark and stormy nights.

(BellemeadeBooks is on a short break through November. This post originally appeared in November, 2008)