BOOKS
647
No Traveller
is almost single-minded in its variations on the theme of
erotic and artistic revelation.
It
stages these revelations, or failures thereof,
almost entirely abroad, especially in Paris, which in view of the book's title
comes to stand for a state of aesthetic possibility rather than a geographical
location. Rites of conjuring often depend on a medium; Howard displaces his
summoned voices into ventriloquist's impersonations ofartistic figures such as
Wallace Stevens, Loie Fuller, Proust, Rodin, Wordsworth, Fuseli, Kafka, and
Woolf. Through them, the poems reach into recesses of desire, sometimes
stirring up second-level totems: Byron for Woolf, Saint Sebastian for Kafka,
Fuseli for the Victorian painter of "The Foreigner Remembered by a Local
Man." Others, bitter and comic Poems of Experience, insist more on the
forces of repression and distortion; the social arrangements of
"Triangulations" depend on sterility and benzedrine; Wordsworth is imagined
writing in horrified fascination to a friend about "a pair of popinjays" who
have rented a nearby cottage; Rodin's Scotch admirer in "A Sorcerer's Ap–
prentice" is transfixed by tl1e prospect of a large and literal
membrum virile
in
marble.
Repression and desire play out within the containments and unleashings
of meter and its attendant orders: rhyme, alliteration, assonance. The long
epistolary poem "Even in Paris" exults in such Apollonian/Dionysian
prosody, and since it resumes as well the dominant themes of the book, it
calls for and rewards particular attention. Two worlds, Empson's polar
senses of wit, oppose one another in the alternating Parisian letters to a
friend in America from "Ivo" and "Richard." Ivo, who initiates the series, is
all sparkling surface; he cultivates his "Sapphic goose-girls, / Romaine,
Rachilde, and Ida Rubenstein," and the aging Nathalie Barney, and entertains
himself by entertaining relics of aristocracy at the
Tour d'Argent.
His is the
voice of gossip and cynical pleasure: "All I ask is someone / to make me
fervent, and I'll do his / bedding ..." His verse, in variable syllabics, seems to
court colloquial chaos, though its ligatures are in fact tightly drawn and sus–
pend occasional pentameters and trochaic densities like "fallow still, and
French as well." Richard (a ghostly variant of the author?) personifies the
other expatriate vision of Paris: worship of art. No less worldly than Ivo, but
dedicated to aesthetic rather than social ritual, he finds his god incarnate in
Wallace Stevens, imagined on a secret trip to France.
The poem works by oppositions. Richard's verse, Stevensian
pentameter spiced with latent alexandrines, counterpoints Ivo's syllabics;
French dallies with English, verse with prose, snobbery with art. The third
force, subsuming opposition, is Stevens, the "old absquatulator" ("a factitious
word," the O.
E.
D. charmingly instructs, meaning one who makes off or de–
camps). Precipitated in epigrams and
discours,
Stevens is imagined embracing
a spiritualized eros through Whitman and Monet, ecstatic in the "temple" of
