by Atar Hadari

from The Kenyon Review, Summer 2007

John Donne
Anne Donne
Un-done.

This was a bit of doggerel the poet and later preacher John Donne wrote and sent to friends in the aftermath of his elopement, while a young and ambitious courtier, with the daughter of his patron. Anne's father, in a fit of temper he later came to regret, got Donne thrown out of his appointment at court and for some long years the poet lived in limbo, unable to return to court, unable to make a living to support his wife and growing family, until he finally gave in to the demands of the king, converted to Protestantism, and accepted the only offer the king would make, priestly office. He became the Dean of St. Paul's, the most prominent pulpit in the land, and many of the phrases he is known for, phrases which have entered the language, come not from his poetry but his rolling and thunderous sermons: "The sun also rises. . .", "Do not send to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. . . ." Ernest Hemingway would have had a difficult time with titles if John Donne had not run away with his patron's daughter and so lost a promising civil service career. The language would also have missed quite a few phrases if he'd been allowed to remain just a comfortably court-ensconced, part-time poet, circulating poems to his friends.

In my twenties, a few years after taking all the poetry workshops I was ever going to take, I began to read biographies of poets. These were no random poets either—and not necessarily figures I admired—but rather people who had made a career in a particular way—William Carlos Williams, for instance, earning his living as a doctor, as well as Dylan Thomas, who did it by writing for radio and touring the poetry circuit. What I was looking for was guidance as to how the poetic enterprise ticks on once you are no longer bubbling along with a crowd of also-striving mini-bards. I was looking for a view of how people do this thing, really. I was looking for the shape of a poet's life.

Why was I looking for such a thing, you ask? Surely, live fast and die young is the classic recipe—hopefully leaving a beautiful book, or three. Well, I was already older than Keats when he died, and had been studying with Derek Walcott, who had just set about his masterpiece at age sixty, and also had a sneaking admiration for Chaucer, who'd only settled to his own masterwork around sixty, so I believed there had to be a way of going about this over the long haul. Finally, I was, like any young man starting a job, looking for a manual to see me through. Poets have not, with the possible exception of Robert Penn Warren and his daughter Roseanna, generally produced poet offspring. Novelists' children clutter the shelves—Amis, Cheever, Dubus, just to start the alphabet—but poets don't grow up in a house, usually, watching Mum or Dad carve out the time or peace or paper required for a life in poems. To learn how to do that you have to read the lives of poets.

One set of books I was given by my father (a businessman) was a battered green four volumes of the 1830 edition of Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets, which he picked up at auction. (My father was a bookaholic and always brought some amount of books home with him. I can simply say I learned to read browsing his shelves. It was only in my thirties, later, that I learned he'd had a failed career as a writer himself before turning to business. That was why I was looking for role models outside the house in the first place. As Kurt Vonnegut notes, a writer's ambition is usually cross-generational; it comes from someone else, further back.) I promptly ignored the books my father gave me, as I had ignored Dickens's Great Expectations when he tried to urge it on me when I was twelve, but they sat on my shelf and some years later I read the "life" devoted to Alexander Pope, a favorite of mine from high school English literature classes.

Johnson had the advantage over many modern biographers in knowing, often intimately, either his subjects or their friends. He never met Pope, having narrowly missed running into him at a mutual friend's bookshop, but he knew Pope's world like the smell of his own sheets. Here is Johnson on Pope's famous creation, an underground grotto in the garden where light filtered dimly from above and the sound of water played from artificial springs:

A grotto is not often the wish or pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit than exclude the sun; but Pope's excavation was requisite as an entrance to his garden, and as some men try to be proud of their defects, he extracted an ornament from an inconvenience and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage. (95)

Johnson was a poet as well as every possible kind of man of letters, and what this all but epigrammatic passage illustrates is what he brings to the commercial endeavor of life-writing about the great dead: the literate imagination to convey, by means of an image drawn from his subject's life, a deeper truth about his subject's character. He draws, out of the scraps and memorabilia of a poet's estate, the shape of a career, the habits of a gift. Bear in mind that Pope was deformed by an early disease and a Catholic in a country that denied office to anyone but Protestants, and the observations about being proud of a defect start to have reverberations about the life, not just the garden.

Another book from my father. He, too, liked Alexander Pope and for his birthday, again sometime in my twenties, I gave him Maynard Mack's thousand-page tome Alexander Pope: A Life. I inscribed it, "A book about the first poet to make an independent living, from your son, who to your great distress has yet to become the second. All my love. . . ." My father duly howled that I would not see another penny from him, and after a decent interval, say one or two days, I made off with his book to my own shelves. Mack's life was actually the standard work—though probably much less widely quoted than Johnson—and this is a relatively early passage:

In any case, it would inevitably be a soberer existence from now on. Many of the friends with whom he had been merry in younger and more hopeful days were dead or gone now. . . . Pope would make new friends—was making new friends: Burlington, Bathurst, Peterborow and many another. Still, there is a glow about one's earliest companions during those short days when Time lets us play and be golden in the mercy of his means that is never quite re-capturable. He was thirty, going on thirty one. His youth had passed.(343)

What Mack does here is take a date and a series of deaths and departures in the poet's life at that time and make of them—what? Poetry? If not poetry then certainly the kind of wistful pain that poetry often comes from. He evoked, again, out of a poet's life, the shape of life itself. That image of Pope, alone at thirty, also stayed with me—this was Mack's legacy, his sympathetic projection of his subject's life into a not-quite myth, something more real than myth—the outline of a heroic path. Not a romantic death, you understand, nothing half so simple, just a view of the road as it unwinds ahead, not so much the path less taken as the path you didn't realize you would travel alone, or fall back from.

Another man of letters and another Life. When I was eighteen or so, T. S. Eliot's centenary came up and his newly reissued Collected Poems was accompanied by the first full-length biography, by Peter Ackroyd. I understood and retained very little about Eliot or his life from Ackroyd except this remark about a drama fragment of his I much admired:

Eliot himself believed that Sweeney Agonistes was the most original of his compositions, but he was never able to finish it and, characteristically, refused to speculate on what it might have been like if he had done so. (146)

This is Ackroyd to a T—distilling data into ringing critical observations, chattily made and neatly turned to move the page along. There's not much sense of pain, or at least nothing you can conjure up in the mind's eye when you close the book. Some years later I encountered Lyndall Gordon's two volumes on Eliot and, despite my prejudice to agree with the poet's own view that his best work was done, so to speak, in volume one of his biography, I also read the latter part, Eliot's New Life. What most moved me was the sense of isolation—of a public poet's role gradually drowning out the sound of the man, of outside noise finally extinguishing the voices heard at night. There's nothing like this in Ackroyd:

Almost all accounts of these years sound curiously empty, as we are regaled with anecdotes of people who "knew" or interviewed Eliot. The man is simply not there. Did he go dead in the late forties, as he saw himself in his relation to Emily Hale, or did the prophetic soul live on, burning, inscrutable, behind the facades? The whole truth depends on holding a balance of two almost antithetical selves. There is the man who was burnt out, and accepting fame to the further depletion of his vitality; and there is a public hermit who recognized that the time had come to take up, once more, the task . . . still uncompleted: to sound a message that could pierce the worthless chatter of the sycophantic throng. To command its attention he did need fame, yet to live as a celebrity cut him off still further from the human heart. . . Many letters to Mary Trevelyan or to . . . a priest in New York, suggest that sensations now tapped their beaks in vain against the hardening shell of the elder statesman of letters. (192)

Perhaps, also, I'd been reading about the Hebrew national poet Bialik, who died when Eliot was just getting going. He, too, was a very famous poet whose voice drowned in the adulation of the cheering mass. Eliot reminded me of Bialik, or at least Lyndall Gordon's human being in distress did. It was the first poet's life I read that taught clearly the need to be careful of fame. Years earlier I had asked the poet George Macbeth, who taught a workshop at the University of East Anglia, if it was not rather easier to write your poems before you became famous or knew you would sell them. He replied that it was not easier to do before but rather harder to do after, and getting known made it not easier but less spontaneous. You were better off before your name was made. Wrote more, cared less.

Gordon is a woman who freely admits having been ferociously in love with her subject during the writing of the two biographies. She does successfully bring across the plight of the various women in Eliot's life whom he drew into intimate friendships—sometimes lasting fifty years—and then dropped quite suddenly, quite absolutely. These women are quite apart from the first wife, Vivienne, whom he consigned to a lunatic asylum. Another thing you can learn from poets' biographies: how not to behave. It may seem merely morally judgmental, but it's also a question of artistic good business—as the most recent English language poet to win the Nobel, Seamus Heaney, attested: the vigorous laughter of a first wife and old friends are a great preservative in the face of fame. Bankers rarely leave behind the letters and poems that illustrate how a marriage worked: poets do, and if their marriage and life produced many poems, then both will be worth perusing. You may not be able to emulate their marriage, let alone their poems, but you may benefit in both cases by knowing such things can be done.

A major example of another poet with unconventional life-style choices and a biographer who knew him well, is Philip Larkin. He was fortunate, perhaps, to share a university and a friendship with a younger poet and award-winning biographer, Andrew Motion, to whom he started making remarks, Motion says, "as if he was addressing posterity." Indeed, Motion's Philip Larkin: A Writers Life is littered with footnoted quotes, which upon investigation in the back pages you'll find attributed: "PAL to author." (Philip A. Larkin being the subject, which is to say: "He told me so.") That is the highest authority, in some ways, but also restricts the biographer's point of view. Perhaps, unlike Samuel Johnson, he shares the poet's world but is not free to depict it, to interpret its images metaphorically, as he sees fit. But Motion is a canny, sympathetic writer with a considerable eye for the drama in facts and objects (his first biography was of a painter). Here is a scene I can't forget from the end of the Larkin biography. Monica is the companion Larkin had avoided living with almost until the end, and also the other source providing authentic flesh to much of Motion's account:

As Friday wore on Larkin grew steadily weaker. In the evening, trying to get into his chair in the sitting-room, he fell to the ground and picked himself up with difficulty. Monica, not strong enough to help him herself, rang for a neighbour. Later Larkin collapsed again in the downstairs lavatory, jamming the door shut with his feet. Monica was unable to force the door open. She couldn't even make him hear her—he had left his hearing-aid behind—but she could hear him "Hot! Hot!" he was whispering pitifully. He had fallen with his face pressed to one of the central heating pipes that ran around the lavatory wall. (522)

Everybody dies—but it is something of a metaphor, I now realize, for a man who's kept the women in his life at bay for most of his days, to end those days fallen in a toilet, keeping the door jammed shut with his feet to keep one out. A starker image of the isolated poet's life I can't imagine.

(For those with less lurid and more textually oriented tastes, Larkin at Work is a study of Larkin's many drafts, which he meticulously filed in shoe boxes, and the story they tell of how his poems were made. This tells you more than most biographies ever can about the actual poems. This tells you, actually, what biographies promise but can't give—an explanation of "what the poems meant." No one could tell you that—not even the living poet—but the word he discarded, having grasped for it first, may tell you a great deal of where he was going, or trying to go.)

A year or two ago, when my father died, I decided to read Allen Ginsberg's exchange of letters with his poet father, Louis, Family Business. I read it, as one reads any book, to reflect my own emotional concerns at the time, but the book remains probably a better portrait of Allen than any of the glitzier, hipper, more star-struck actual biographies. As well as giving an account, blow by blow, of his initial rise, it also includes the best single piece of advice I've ever read on putting together a first collection, and it is all the more moving because the star son was giving it to his eclipsed poet father:

I repeat, please select the very best for [the publisher]—they can be reprinted in a collected works, or a hardback volume later if you're not satisfied with [his] sales and splash. But the book won't make a splash if you give him secondary work and hold out your gems for some future fantasy publisher because publishers are (1.) hard to get (2.) stupid. Have a ball with this book. Forget about tomorrow. (133)

The collected letters as a whole, skillfully selected and annotated by Michael Schumacher, is another very nuts-and-bolts look at the poetry business, which I would recommend to anyone interested in the business, not the glamor, as well as a very moving account of two very different men and how their love for each other survived career declines and ascents, political and moral disagreements, and, finally, death. We should all have a chance to part from our fathers, poets or businessmen, as Allen Ginsberg did.

And it is perhaps to hunt down that other father figure of my own experience that I got around to reading another book only last year. It's the only one I can judge the tone of in any way from direct knowledge, having known the subject Derek Walcott for a year in 1989 when I was studying with him at Boston University. And here we reach the basic problem with biographies of anybody famous, even poets. One of the definitions of fame is that everyone wants a piece of you—which means you talk to fewer and fewer people in a natural way. Hence the subject matter of the biography—the life, not the work—shrinks in direct proportion to the fame of the subject.

Why did I want to read a biography of a poet I knew myself? Why does anybody read a biography? To know more! And Bruce King's Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life is not disappointing in many ways—it gives the dates, the degrees, the marriages and—more important—the financial details of how Walcott's career—in poetry, plays, film, and finally the Broadway musical—progressed to the Nobel and beyond. King is very good at giving an overview of the literary business at the highest level—how Joseph Brodsky took over from Robert Lowell as Walcott's mentor, for instance, coaching him to act more "coolly" to build a stately and dignified manner, as befits a major contender, and even arranged a major Italian literary prize for him, to be awarded only after Brodsky's death. And there are traces in the book of the man I knew, but only fleeting snaps—he isn't quite alive.

When Walcott taught his poetry class at Boston University in 1989, Brodsky came to sit in one day, a hawk-nosed Russian man, stocky, with wispy red hair straying off his balding pate. I remember being highly offended when he turned to us in the class and said, "You are all—what?—twenty-two? You don't know anything yet. . . ." I shifted in my seat, thinking: "I'm the same age Keats was . . . I've actually learned quite a lot." But he was certainly right in what he said. What we learned we learned later, after we stopped studying.

In the restaurant "The Kangaroo," right across the street at the time from Boston University, Walcott used to take the class to lunch, though he only once, that I remember, actually paid. He brought along Brodsky to eat lunch with us, and as the bill was split and Brodsky rummaged in his corduroy slacks, bringing up a handful of change to throw over the bill, Walcott said: "Joseph, is that what's left of the Nobel Prize money?" Brodsky gave him a look. The next year Walcott finally won the Nobel and started fooling around a little less.

There is not so much of that sort of thing in King's bio, and I miss it, knowing it could be there—there are many stories—but that's a problem, again, of fame and of writing the life of a poet still famous and still living. King has a photo of Walcott pulling a face, as a young man, with the caption: "Derek Walcott being amusing, St Lucia, early 1950s." It is one of the rare moments of genuine affection that can be felt between author and subject, though the subject is very much still warm. Until you're dead, people don't want to retell your jokes, or your embarrassments, in case they lose what access they have to that fame, lose that little bit of the poet they know for real, and give it up to the public, to the microphone of posterity. People never tell their best material on mike; they know that's when they're not "being themselves."

Brodsky was right. You know nothing when you're twenty, and you try to learn it from books. You learn little. But you learn, over time, and what you learn is your own life of a poet, that's what you come to know. And some day, if you haven't lived too foolishly, and haven't let your talent waste away—someone may write your life, sniffing around your tracks. And some twenty-year-olds may read it, looking for their own way to be real. And you, some time or other, have to stop looking for fathers and start being one yourself, however ill-prepared. I was asked to teach a poetry workshop recently, to graduates of an M.A. program, some of them already sixty themselves. And I teach it, and I quote Walcott, but often as not I say what I know from my own flesh, by sending out poems, and then I back it up with things from poets' lives.

I'll mention one last bio—not even a full life—Ian Hamilton's A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold. It's a short book, written by a poet who spent his life on journalism and biography, about another poet who gradually got blocked and spent his life as a critic and school inspector, not as the author of "On Dover Beach," the famous poem he wrote just after his marriage:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

At a similar point in life to the beginning section I quoted from Mack's life of Pope, Hamilton's life of Arnold has this:

By 1851 he had—he might have said—renounced renunciation. True enough, he had been forced to, in order to get married. On the other hand, he knew that his free time had more or less run out, that now a different kind of battle must be joined. He had no strategy, could not distinguish friend from foe, and certainly could entertain no hopes of a heroic triumph. He was simply ready to bear arms, and prepared also to concede that his young dream of the poetic life might have to be among the early casualties. (147)

It's a very readable, terse and affecting book, but more important, I'll tell you this: if you ever notice a few months going by without your writing a poem—pick up that book. It'll scare you so much you may write a poem so as to be not like Matthew Arnold, but yourself.

Works Cited

Ackroyd, Peter. T S. Eliot: A Life. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984.
Bald, Robert Cecil. John Donne: A Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970.
Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot's New Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.
Hamilton, Ian. A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold. London:
    Bloomsbury, 1998.
Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the Poets. Vol 3. London: John Bumpus, 1830.
King, Bruce. Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Mack, Maynard. Alexander Pope: A Life. London: Yale UP, 1985.
Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer:s Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and
    Giroux, 1993.
Schumacher, Michael, ed. Family Business: Selected Letters between a Father and
    Son, Allen and Louis Ginsberg. London: Bloomsbury, 2001.
Tolley, A. T. Larkin at Work. Hull, UK: U of Hull P, 1997.

About the Author
Atar Hadari's Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of H. N. Bialik (Syracuse University Press, 2000) was a finalist for the American Literary Translators Association Award in 2001.

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