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PARTISAN REVIEW
reported on how sides were taken, arranged, and rearranged among the
intellectuals.
Clem is drawn to and yet often seems
to
despise "Wasps," "gentiles,"
"Yids," and "fairies." He appraises them and knows that all good things
in the end are Jewish, Yiddish. He occasionally delivers his asides on sex
in general and homosexuality, making blanket statements on the nature
of the beast-in this case the beast is often Clem. Despite their disagree–
ments, Clem was "true" to his own family-to Pa, his brothers Sol and
Marty, and even his nubile stepsister, Natalie. There's both a certain
respect and loathing for the whole bunch which comes through lovingly.
Janice Van Horne, Clem's widow, has created a little treasure in these
letters. Her notes make the connection that really glue the book
together. Her appendix is thorough and to the point; even including
some of Clem's poems and letters from Harold. A difficult book
to
bring
off; original in every wa y.
What makes
The Harold Letters
so appealing is how fresh the letters
are-the starkness of Clem trying
to
look at himself honestly. He lays
out his life signature in these fifteen years. The letters are vividly per–
sonal, yet often universal. Good letters can turn secrets and privacy
inside out. Censorless, he calls it as he sees it, Clem-style. Feeling is all.
Helen Frankenthaler
A Poet's Poet
FORMS OF HOPE. ESSAYS BY TOMAS VENCLOVA. Sheep Meadow Press.
$29·95 ·
FOR TOMAS VENCLOVA, writing poems has always been a conversation
"with the emptiness, or perhaps the higher power, which we find inside
ourselves in moments of despair and which sends us the angel called the
gift of speech ." Literature, especially poetry, he believes, is an uncertain,
complex affair, an intimate reckoning and exercising with one's moral
and artistic conscience. In his penetrating essays here on lIya Ehrenburg,
and Russian poets Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Ven–
clova deftly illustrates how moral compromise has led, inexorably and
inevitably, to artistic compromise.
Widely considered to be Lithuania's greatest poet, Venclova is, as
Joseph Brodsky points out in his introduction to Venclova's
Winter
