On Poets and Others

Octavio Paz, Michael Schmidt

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781628723922
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

The Nobel Prize–winning poet and man of letters Octavio Paz was also a brilliant reader of other writers, and this book selects his best critical essays from over three decades. In the sixteen pieces collected here, Paz discusses a wide range of poets and writers, both American and international, from Robert Frost and Walt Whitman to William Carlos Williams; from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Luis Buñuel to Alexander Solzhenitsyn; and from Charles Baudelaire to Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, and Henri Michaux.Paz writes, "I believe that a writer's attitude to language should be that of a lover: fidelity and, at the same time, a lack of respect for the beloved object. Veneration and transgression." When this original thinker meets these writers, each essay is an adventure of the mind.

LUIS CERNUDA: THE EDIFYING WORD

I

In 1961 the Mercure de France devoted an issue to Pierre Reverdy, who had recently died. Luis Cernuda wrote a few pages valuable not so much for what they say about Reverdy as for what they reveal, obliquely, about Cernuda himself: how he identifies poetic conscience with ethical purity, his taste for the essential word, which, not always justly, he set against what he called the sumptuousness of the Spanish and French traditions. But I recall that article not to stress the affinities between the French and the Spanish poet—though the influence of Reverdy on Cernuda would be worth pursuing—but because what Cernuda wrote three years ago on the destiny of dead poets seems today to have been thought and said about his own death: “What country suffers its poets with pleasure? Its living poets, I mean, since there is no country which doesn’t adore its dead poets.” Spain is no exception. Nothing is more natural than that the literary journals of the Iberian peninsula should publish homages to the poet: “Since Cernuda has died, long live Cernuda”; nothing is more natural, again, than that poets and critics, all together, cover with the same gray sediment of praises the oeuvre of a spirit which with admirable and inflexible obstinacy never stopped affirming his dissidence. When the poet is buried, we can discourse without risk about his work and make it say what it seems to us it ought to have said: where he wrote separation, we will read union: God where he said devil; homeland, not inhospitable land; soul, not body. And if “interpretation” is impossible, we will erase the forbidden words: rage, pleasure, nausea, boy, nightmare, solitude. . . .I do not want to suggest that all those who praise him try to whitewash what was black, nor that they do this entirely in bad faith. It’s not a deliberate lie but a pious substitution. Perhaps without being aware, moved by a sincere desire to justify their admiration for a work which their conscience reproves, they transform a particular and unique truth—sometimes unbearable and repellent, like all that is truly fascinating—into a general and inoffensive truth, acceptable to all. Much of what has been written recently on Cernuda could have been written about any other poet. There have even been those who affirm that death has returned him to his native land (“When the dog is dead, rabies are at an end”). One critic, who claims he knows Cernuda’s work well and admires it, does not hesitate to write: “The poet had a tragic fault: the inability to recognize any other kind of love but romantic love; thus conjugal love, paternal and filial love, were all closed doors for Cernuda.” Another critic is of the view that the poet “has found a world in which reality and desire are in harmony.” Has that writer asked himself what that paradise would be like, and what its angels and divinities would be?

Cernuda’s work is an exploration of himself; a proud affirmation, in the last account not without the humility of its irreducible difference. He said it himself: “I have only tried, like every man, to find my truth, my own, which will not be better or worse than that of others, only different.” To serve his memory, it is useless to build him monuments which, like all monuments, conceal the dead, but rather it is necessary to go deeply into that different truth and set it against our own. Only then will his truth, because it is distinct and irreconcilable, come near to our own truth, which is neither better nor worse than his, but our own. The work of Cernuda is a road toward our own selves. That is what gives it its moral value. Because, despite being an excellent poet—or, more accurately, because he was one—Cernuda is one of the very few moralists Spain has given us, in the sense in which Nietzsche is the great moralist of modern Europe and, as he said, “its first psychologist.” The poetry of Cernuda is a criticism of our values and beliefs; in it destruction and creation are inseparable, since what it affirms implies the dissolution of what society regards as just, sacred, or immutable. Like Pessoa’s, his work is a subversion, and his spiritual fecundity resides in the fact that he puts to the test the systems of collective morality, both those established on the authority of tradition and those which social reformers propose to us. His hostility to Christianity is no less intense than the repugnance he feels for political utopias. I am not suggesting that one has to agree with him; but I do say that, if we really love his poetry, we must hear what he is actually saying. He does not seek a pious reconciliation with us; he expects of us that most difficult thing: recognition.

II

In the following notes I have no intention of running through the entire body of Cernuda’s work. I write without having to hand his most important books, and, beyond what an acquaintance of many years’ standing with his work has left on my memory, I do not possess more than a handful of his poems in an anthology, the third edition of Ocnos and Desolation de la quimera. I once wrote that his development was like the growth of a tree, in contrast to the verbal constructs of other poets. That image was only partly just: trees grow spontaneously and fatedly, but they lack consciousness. A poet is one who is conscious of that fatedness, I mean one who writes because he cannot help it—and knows it. He is an accomplice of his fate—and its judge. In Cernuda, spontaneity and reflection are inseparable, and each stage of his work is a new attempt at expression and a meditation on what he expresses. He never ceases advancing into himself, and at the same time asking himself if he is really advancing. Thus, La realidad y el deseo can be seen as a spiritual biography, a succession of lived moments, and a reflection on those vital experiences. Thence his moral character.

Can a biography be poetic? Only if the anecdotes are transmuted into poems, that is, only if the deeds and the dates cease to be history and become exemplary. But exemplary not in the didactic sense of the term but in the sense of “notable action,” as when we say: unique example. Or: myth, ideal argument and real fable. The poets help themselves to legends in order to tell us real things; and with real events they create fables, examples. The dangers of poetic biography are twofold: the unsolicited confession and the unasked counsel. Cernuda does not always avoid these extremes and it is not unusual for him to stray into confidences and moralism. No matter: the best of his work lives in that real or imaginary space of myth. A space as ambiguous as the very figure it sustains. Real fable and ideal history, La realidad y el deseo is the myth of the modern poet. Though a descendant, a being different from the poet maudit. The doors of hell have shut, and for the poet not even the resource of Aden or Ethiopia is left: wandering the five continents, he always lives in the same room, talks to the same people, and his exile is everybody’s. Cernuda did not know this—he was too intent upon himself, too abstracted in his uniqueness—but his work is one of the most impressive personal testimonies to this truly unique situation of modern man: we are condemned to a promiscuous solitude and our prison is as large as the planet itself. There is no exit or entrance. We move from the same to the same. Seville, Madrid, Toulouse, Glasgow, London, New York, Mexico City, San Francisco: was Cernuda really in those cities? Where are those places in fact?

All the ages of man appear in La realidad y el deseo. All, except infancy, which is evoked only as a lost world whose secret has been forgotten (What poet will give us, not the vision or the nostalgia of childhood, but childhood itself, who will have the courage and the genius to talk as children do?). Cernuda’s book of poems could be divided into four parts: adolescence, the years of apprenticeship, in which he surprises us with his exquisite mastery; youth, the great moment when he discovers passion and discovers himself, a period to which we owe his most beautiful blasphemies and his best love poems—love of love; maturity, which begins as a contemplation of earthly powers and ends in a meditation on human works; and the final period, already at the last boundary of old age, his gaze more precise and reflexive, his voice more real and bitter. Different moments of a single word. In each period there are admirable poems, but I prefer the poetry of his youth (“Los placeres prohibidos,” “Un rio un amor,” “Donde habite el olvido,” “Invocaciones”) not because the poet is entirely in possession of himself in them but precisely because he is not: a moment in which guessing has yet to become certitude, certitude formula. His early poems seem to me to be an exercise whose perfection does not exclude affectation, a certain manneredness from which he never entirely freed himself. His mature books evince a plaster classicism, that is, a neoclassicism: there are too many gods and gardens; there is a tendency to confuse eloquence with diction, and it is indeed odd that Cernuda, constant critic of that inclination of ours toward the “noble tone,” did not perceive it in himself. Finally, in his last poems reflection, explication, and even impertinences take up too much space and displace song; the language does not have the fluidity of speech but the written dryness of discourse. And yet, in all those periods there are poems which have enlightened and guided me, poems to which I always return and which always reveal something essential to me. The secret of that fascination is twofold. We are in the presence of a man who invests himself entirely in every word he writes and whose voice is inseparable from his life and his death; at the same time, that word never renders itself to us directly: between us and it is the poet’s face, the reflection which creates distance and thus permits the true communication. Conscience gives depth, spiritual resonance, to what it says; the thinking unfolds a mental space which gives the word seriousness. Conscience gives unity to this vast and varied oeuvre. Fated poet, he is doomed to speak and to consider what he says. For this reason, at least in my reading, his best poems are those from the years in which spontaneous diction and thought fuse; or those of the moments of maturity in which passion, rage, or love give him back his old enthusiasm, only now in a language that is harder and more lucid.

La realidad y el deseo, biography of a modern Spanish poet, is also the biography of a European poetic conscience. Because Cernuda is a European poet, in the sense in which Lorca or Machado, Neruda or Borges, are not European (The Europeanism of Borges is very American: it is one of the modes we Latin Americans have of being ourselves or, rather, of inventing ourselves. Our Europeanism is not an eradication or a turning to the past: it is an attempt to create a temporal space before a timeless space and thus to embody it.). Of course the Spanish are Europeans, but the genius of Spain is polemical: it fights with itself, and each time it attacks one part of itself, it attacks a part of Europe. Perhaps the only Spanish poet who feels himself a natural European is Jorge Guillen; for this reason, also naturally, he feels himself firmly planted in Spain. By contrast, Cernuda chose the European with the same fury with which others of his contemporaries decided to be natives of Andalusia, Madrid, or Catalonia. His Europeanism is polemical and is tinged with anti-Spanish sentiment. Revulsion for the native land is not exclusive to the Spanish, it is a constant in modern European and American poetry (I think of Pound and of Michaux, of Joyce and of Breton, of Cummings . . . the list would be endless.). Thus Cernuda is antagonistic to Spain for two reasons: because of his polemical Spanishness and because of his modernity. As to the first, he belongs to the family of the Spanish heterodox; as to the second, his work is a slow reconquering of the European heritage, a search for that central current from which Spain set itself apart a long time ago. It is not a matter of influences—though like any poet he has suffered many, most of them beneficial—but of an exploration of himself, not now in a psychological sense but of his history.

Cernuda discovers the modern spirit by way of surrealism. He has often said how seductive Reverdy’s poetry was for his sensibility—Reverdy, master of the surrealists and his own. In Reverdy he admires the “poetic asceticism”—equivalent, he claims, to Braque’s—which makes him build a poem with the minimum of verbal material; but more than the economy of his means he admires his reticence. That word is one of the keys to Cernuda’s style. Seldom have bolder thought and more violent passion made use of more chaste expressions. Reverdy was not the only Frenchman to overwhelm him. In a letter dated 1929 written from Madrid, he asks a friend in Seville to return various books to him (Les pas perdus of Andre Breton, Le libertinage and Le paysan de Paris of Louis Aragon) and adds: “Azorín, Valle-Inclán, Baroja: what does all that stupid, inhumane, rotten Spanish literature matter to me?” Let purists not be too scandalized. In those same years Breton and Aragon found that French literature was equally inhumane and stupid. We have lost that lovely unbuttonedness; how much harder it is now to be insolent, unjustly just, than in the 1920s.

What does Cernuda owe to the surrealists? The bridge between the French avant-garde and Spanish-language poetry was, of course, Vicente Huidobro. After the Chilean poet, contacts increased and Cernuda was neither the first nor the only one to have felt the fascination of surrealism. It would not be difficult to point out in his poetry and even in his prose the traces of certain surrealists, such as Eluard, Crevel, and, though he is a writer at the opposite pole from him, the dazzling Louis Aragon (in his early manner). But unlike Neruda, Lorca, or Villaurrutia, for Cernuda surrealism was something more than a lesson in style, more than a poetic or a school of verbal and imagistic associations: it was an attempt to embody poetry in life, a subversion which embraced language quite as much as institutions. A morality and a passion. Cernuda was the first and almost the only one who understood and made his own the true meaning of surrealism as a movement of liberation—not of verse but of consciousness: the last great spiritual shaking-out of the West. To the psychic commotion of surrealism must be added the revelation of Andre Gide. Thanks to the French moralist, Cernuda accepts himself; from that time on his homosexuality was not to be a sickness or a sin but a destiny freely accepted and lived. If Gide reconciles Cernuda with himself, surrealism will serve him to set his psychic and vital rebellion within a vaster, more total subversion. The “forbidden pleasures” open a bridge between this world of “codes and rats” and the underground world of dream and inspiration: they are earthly life in all its taciturn splendor (“marble members,” “iron flowers,” “earthly planets”) and they are also the highest spiritual life (“exalted solitude,” “memorable freedoms”). The fruit these harsh liberties offer us is one of mystery, whose “taste no bitterness corrupts.” Poetry turns active; the dream and the word cast down the “anonymous statues”; in the great “hour of vengeance, its brilliance can destroy your world.” Later Cernuda abandoned surrealist mannerisms and tics, but his essential vision, though his aesthetic was different, remained that of his youth.

Surrealism is a tradition. With that critical instinct which distinguishes great poets, Cernuda traces the current back: Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Nerval. Though he kept faith with these poets, he did not stop at them. He went to the source, to the origin of modern Western poetry: to German romanticism. One of his themes is that of the poet confronting a world hostile or indifferent to men. Present in his earliest poems, from “Invocaciones” on, it develops with an increasingly somber intensity. The figure of Hölderlin and those of his descendants are his model; soon those images are transformed into another, entrancing and terrible: that of the devil. Not a Christian devil, repulsive and terrifying, but a pagan one, almost a boy. It is his double. Its presence is to be a constant in his work, though it changes with the years and each time its words sound more bitter and hopeless. In the image of the double, always the untouchable reflection, Cernuda seeks himself but he also seeks the world: he wants to know that he exists and that others exist. The others: a race of men different from men.

Beside the devil, the companionship of dead poets. Reading Holderlin and Jean Paul and Novalis, Blake and Coleridge, is something more than discovery: a recognition. Cernuda goes back to his own. Those great names are living persons, invisible but dependable intercessors. He talks with them as if he talked with himself. They are his true family and his secret gods. His work is written thinking of them: they are something more than a model, an example, or an inspiration: they are a gaze that judges him. He has to be worthy of them. And the only way to be worthy is to affirm his truth, to be himself. The moral theme reappears. But it will not be Gide, with his psychological morality, but Goethe who will guide him in this new phase. He does not seek a justification but an equilibrium; what the young Nietzsche called “health,” the lost secret of Greek paganism: the heroic pessimism which created tragedy and comedy. Often he spoke of Greece, of its poets and philosophers, of its myths, and, above all, of its vision of beauty: something which is neither physical nor corporeal and which is perhaps only a musical chord, a measure. In Ocnos, when he speaks of “beautiful knowledge”—because he knows beauty or because all knowledge is beauty?—he says that beauty is measure. And thus, by a road which leads from surrealist rebellion to German and English romanticism and from there to the great Western myths, Luis Cernuda recovers his double heritage as a poet and as a Spaniard: the European tradition, the sense and savor of the Mediterranean noon. What began as a polemical and unbounded passion ends in a recognition of measure. A measure, it is true, in which other things—also of the West—do not fit. Among them, two of the greatest: Christianity and woman. “Otherness” in its most absolute manifestations: the other world and the other half of this one. Nonetheless, Cernuda makes a virtue of necessity and creates a universe in which two essential elements are not lacking, one peculiar to Christianity, the other to woman: introspection and the mystery of love.

I have not spoken of another influence which was of the first importance both on his poetry and on his criticism, especially after Las nubes (1940): modern English poetry. In his youth he loved Keats and later on felt himself drawn toward Blake, but these names, especially the latter, belong to what could be called his demonic or subversive half: they nourished his moral rebelliousness. His interest in Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats, and Eliot is different in kind: he seeks in them not so much a metaphysic as an aesthetic conscience. The mystery of literary creation and the theme of the ultimate significance of poetry—its relations with truth, with history, and with society—always concern him. In the reflections of the English poets he found—formulated in a way different from or similar to his own—answers to these questions. One evidence of this interest is the book he devoted to the poetic thought of the English lyric poets. I believe I am right in thinking that T. S. Eliot was the living writer who exerted the most profound influence on the mature Cernuda. I repeat: an aesthetic, not a moral or metaphysical influence: the reading of Eliot did not have the liberating effects that his discovery of Gide had done. The English poet makes him see the poetic tradition with new eyes, and many of his studies of Spanish poets are composed with that precision and objectivity, not without eccentricity, which are among the charms and perils of Eliot’s critical style. But the example of this poet can be seen not only in Cernuda’s critical opinions but also in his creative work. His encounter with Eliot coincides with the change in his aesthetic; having assimilated the experience of surrealism, he does not bother to seek new forms but rather to express himself. Not a norm but a measure, something which neither the French moderns nor the German romantics could give him. Eliot had felt a similar necessity, and after The Waste Land his poetry is poured out into increasingly traditional molds. I could not say whether this attitude of return, in Cernuda and in Eliot, benefited or harmed their poetry; in one sense, it impoverished them, since surprise and invention, the wings of the poetry, disappear to some extent from their mature work; in another sense, perhaps without that change they would have become mute or impoverished in a sterile search, as happens with great creators such as Pound and Cummings. And it is commonplace that nothing is more tedious than the professional innovator. In a word, Eliot’s poetry and criticism helped Cernuda to moderate the romantic he always was.

Cernuda had a predilection, from the first, for the long poem. For modern taste poetry is, above all, verbal concentration, and therefore the long poem faces an almost insuperable problem: to bring together extension and concentration, development and intensity, unity and variety, without making the work a collection of fragments and without recourse to the vulgar expedient of amplification, either. Un coup de des, maximum verbal concentration in a little over two hundred lines, some of them a single word in length, is an example, to my mind the highest example, of what I want to say. It is not the short poem but the long one that requires the use of scissors; the poet should exercise remorselessly his gift of elimination if he wants to write something that isn’t prolix, dispersed, or diffuse. Reticence, the art of saying the unsaid, is the secret of the brief poem; in the long poem silences do not work suggestively, do not speak, but are like the divisions and subdivisions of musical space. More than a form of writing, they are a form of architecture. Mallarmé had already compared Un coup de des to a partita, and Eliot had called one of his great...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Robert Frost: Visit to a Poet
• Walt Whitman
• William Carlos Williams: The Saxifrage Flower
• The Graphics of Charles Tomlinson: Black and White
• Jean-Paul Sartre: A Memento
• Baudelaire as Art Critic: Presence and Present
• André Breton, or the Search for the Beginning
• Henri Michaux
• Dostoevski: The Devil and the Ideologue
• Considering Solzhenitsyn: Dust After Mud
• Gulag: Between Isaiah And Job
• José Ortega Y Gasset: The Why and the Wherefore
• Luis Buñuel: Three Perspectives
• Jorge Guillén
• Two Notes On José Revueltas: Christianity and Revolution
• Luis Cernuda: The Edifying Word