BOOKS
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gracious ghost of a bygone moment, but he writes with a lack of pretention
that makes the reader his peer.
IfWarren's essays, even before the author's death, had a retrospective
force, the note struck by David Kalstone's
Becoming a Poet
is of several si–
multaneous kinds of loss. Dying as he did in 1986 (he was only fifty-four),
Kalstone left the book unfinished.
It
has been gracefully rounded off, rather
than completed, by Robert Hemenway; and James Merrill contributes a
poignant Afterword which makes no claims to the authority of closure ("a
note on which to let this book break off," writes Merrill; he chooses not to
say "to let this book end."). Nor is Kalstone's the only death informing these
pages. At the time he was working on the book, both Lowell and Bishop had
died recently - and suddenly (he in 1977, she
in
1979).
Writers live their lives, recapture their pasts, do their work as best
they can; and Kalstone's book could serve, as Hemenway notes,
as an excellent
vade mecum
for writers - a guide to becoming a poet -
for he offers a paradigm that has much to say about how writers ought
to (and alas, how they sometimes do) behave.
In
going at their work,
in going about the process ofliving.
What is not often given to writers, especially in a book like this one
whose last chapter remains unwritten, is to say goodbye. Bishop did write an
elegy for Lowell; and her matchless villanelle, "One Art," is one of the great
farewells in the language, characteristically couched as casual anecdote and
advice. Still, I think it is more than the premature silencing of Kalstone's own
uniquely perspicacious, gentle, and patient voice that makes the abrupt deaths
of Bishop and Lowell in this book so shocking. The network cut short by
death is one painstakingly woven over the course of a lifetime. Years of dia–
logue, doubt, revision, friendship, scruple, intimacy, nuance, retreat, and re–
newal don't decrescendo, they simply cease. As Bishop's Robinson Crusoe
puts it in "Crusoe in England," "And then one day they came and took us
ff. "
o .
Not that this book makes for gloomy reading: it is often funny and al–
ways fascinating, whether what we learn of is Marianne Moore's binding
relationship with her mother or Lowell's insolent rewriting of some of
Bishop's best work (or for that matter, Moore's "correction" of Bishop's
"Roosters" - what was it about Bishop that gave her friends the urge to im–
prove upon perfection?). In Bishop's famous phrase in "The Bight," many of
the details of these intertwined lives are "awful but cheerful." If
Becoming a
Poet
leaves in the reader's mouth a lingering taste of elegy, it is not only be–
cause Moore and Bishop, Lowell, and Kalstone himself will write no more.
We'd better brush up on our skill at losing things, for other elements seem to
,.
