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PARTISAN REVIEW
have disappeared as well, and it is for them too that this book is an elegy.
The indisputable (however delicate) connection between a life and a work is
one of these. Kalstone doesn't force material roughly into certain molds, nor
does he pull aside the curtains of the personal with prurient relish to reveal
ineffable intimacies. What he does - what he did - do is to read, reread, and
luminously write about the work while at the same time carefully following
the written record of the lived life. The resulting aura of perception illumi–
nates the lives, which then shine back onto the work.
"We write and rewrite literary history," Kalstone says in his unfinished
introduction. "It becomes increasingly clear, the more we know about Eliza–
beth Bishop, that she makes us describe poetry in a different light ..." But
the "we" Kalstone confidently conjures up here - who are we, or they? Can
such a we be said to exist? The different lights in which poetry is described,
like the ways in which literary history is currently being rewritten, include
lights that do not (in Warren's words) bespeak an individual but rather ad–
dress problems of gender, society, canon. Like so many hasty partitions sub–
dividing rooms into cubbyholes, classifications have sprung up and ramified
into a labyrinth where the poetry itself can easily get lost. Annoyed at facile
comparisons of her work to that of Marianne Moore, Bishop wrote to the
older poet in 1954:
I think my approach is so much vaguer and less defined and certainly
more old-fashioned - sometimes I'm amazed at people's comparing
me to you when all I'm doing is some kind of blank verse - can't they
see
how different it is? But they can't apparently.
Categories are the enemy of patient rereadings and rediscoveries such
as Kalstone gives us. Busy placing the work in this or that niche or sect, few
critics writing today take the time to consider the work of art with the kind of
intent abstraction - disinterest, even - that Bishop evokes in a passage
whose eloquence surely has some self-referential component:
What one seems
to
want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing
that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless
concentration.
The light touch - ironic even in its seriousness - of that "perfectly use–
less" fades to a sardonic but still recognizable flicker in Peter Handke's vision
of what it is to be a writer.
The Afternoon of a Writer
calls itself a novel, but it
seems to me to bear as much relation to one as
The Cherry Orchard
does to
its self-proclaimed genre of comedy. The concentration at work throughout
