WARREN'S novels read like essays about themselves. His fictions continually resolve into apologues. It is scarcely possible while reading them to have the experience but miss the meaning. Where commentary does not preempt drama, it quickly intrudes to explicate it. While in "Pure and Impure Poetry" he argues that ideas "participate more fully, intensely, and immediately" in poetry by being implicit, his own work typically incorporates ideas "in an explicit and argued form." Such a habit of mind stations Warren on the border between two modes of imagination, between the artist who works from experience and the critic who works toward meaning.
Warren's double career in the creative and critical establishments seems to be the central fact here. There is nothing remarkable about a divided allegiance in a man who set out to devote himself to both worlds. But had Warren never written his major articles on Frost, Faulkner, Conrad, and Coleridge, or his textbooks on understanding poetry and fiction, we would still need some term for a writer so concerned to usurp, within the body of his own fictions, the critic's task. Warren has revived interest in Wilde's claim that "it is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it." His works constantly "talk about" themselves. In the midst of overwhelming adolescent arousal, a Warren narrator can suddenly step out of himself to tell us: "I was lost in the flood of sensations." How can one both feel and say this? Through the curious doubleness of this sentence, at once both in and out of time, Warren tries to convert self-consciousness into ecstasy.
His characters are placed out of themselves, the bemused or obsessive spectators of their own wayward acts. So his newest narrator tells us:
Something is going on and will not stop. You are outside the going on, and you are, at the same time, inside the going on. In fact, the going on is what you are. Until you can understand that these things are different but the same, you know nothing about the nature of life. I proclaim this.
We abstract; we embody. Warren has dedicated his career to proving the indivisibility of the critical and the creative imaginations. He thus joins that central American tradition of speakers—Emerson, Thoreau, Henry Adams, Norman Mailer—who are not only the builders but the interpreters of their own designs.
The stance of a critic is the stance of a son. Both are fundamentally indebted as both take up their positions in response to prior achievement which surrounds and defines them. The price of understanding is belatedness, a sense of remove in time. If the creative spirit repudiates as much of the past as it possibly can, the critical sensibility conserves as much as it possibly may. Warren's central character is a son (or daughter) whose only hope lies in not rebelling against father, tradition, home. In 1960 Leonard Casper nominated "exploration of unbroken years of homesickness" as Warren's central theme. Warren has not been coy about proving him right, A Place To Come To depends upon a place one has come from. Warren's most recent novel explores once again the psychology of exile and return.
Adam's first word to Eve in Paradise Lost is "Return," and it is upon her reluctant but ultimately obedient response to this command that Warren models his plots. The voice of one's origin keeps calling one homeward. Satan wanders; Eve returns, While Warren's strongest characters wander also in aimless selfhood (in A Place, through what Jed's mentor calls the "imperium intellectus"'), none of his readers is left to doubt the pointlessness of such quest. Warren the critic always shepherds us toward the destination the artist knowingly withholds. The best way out is always back.
In the character of Jed Tewksbury, Warren has found his perfect hero. As if in passing a last judgment upon himself, Warren writes a novel about a critic writing a novel. Just after Jed introduces himself by retelling the primal memory of his father's death—drunk, he fainted while pissing in the road at midnight before the very wagon which then rolled over his neck and broke it—he steps out of his autobiography to tell us how it reads to him:
I wrote that part very fast. It came rushing out, my ballpoint pen rushing ahead—a new experience for me, who am accustomed only to scholarly and critical composition and who, not being of a quick mind or ready to trust my early notions, am inclined to be painfully slow and careful in my formulations.
"Rushing ahead" on into experience is, unfortunately, just what this Dante scholar repeatedly fails to do. Too much the spectator and too little the actor, he prefers telling to doing. Potential ecstasy becomes mere alienation as we read on into this book full of "the passion for the big ideas." Considerable scorn is heaped, as usual, upon abstractions untethered to fact. But Warren goes far beyond his earlier judgment in World Enough and Time that the world must redeem the idea. It is no longer a question of working from the concrete toward the abstract; there seems little hope here that the two can be brought into any relationship whatsoever. The author of this novel seems to have rejected Wilde's boast and embraced Faulkner's dismissal: "those who can do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can't, write about it." All writing comes under indictment here as an evasive sublimation, a criticism of rather than a participation in life. When Warren shares this mood, he tries to make it convincing by reducing writing to a merely critical impulse. This book displays a contempt for learning which is downright redneck. Scholarship feeds on the death of life: as Jed's first wife dies, his essay on "Dante and the Metaphysics of Death" grows. Never are we made to feel Jed's work as interesting, let alone valuable. Jed suffers an alienation of word from world which he is never fully allowed to resolve.
This alienation arises from Jed's attempt to use words as a defense against origins. He begins as sick of home. Jed's parents confront him in embarrassing postures. His father dies not only drunk but clutching his penis of legendary size. His mother, having worked for a decade to free her son of Dugton, Alabama, is rewarded by having him return from college to find her in bed with a man of somewhat lesser proportions. Such things must be put behind one. When the distancing power of words fails him, Jed tries to escape the continuities of the self through the discontinuous joys of sex.
The best writing in the book is reserved for the return to Rozelle, Jed's rejected high school prom date who becomes his middle-aged adulteress. A past rejection becomes a future one must inevitably face; through this fateful (and wish-fulfilling) logic Warren guarantees that one must return not only to the abandoned parent but to the spurned girl friend. No other explanation is offered for this highly coincidental reunion other than the implicit appeal to the return of the repressed. Sex proves, however, less a way to redeem time than to stay it. The critic who would return gives way to the artist who will escape. Sex becomes an anti-metaphysic. Making love leads to "the death in life-beyond-Time without which life-in-Time might not be endurable, or even possible." Jed's impossible project here stands revealed. Sex, which promises a transcendence of duration, stands defined by the original repression it undoes and the eventual interpretation it generates. The worlds of before and after catch such a moment up to interrogate and place it. Jed comes to realize that a love founded solely on the instant of conjunction is "nothing":
What had I had of her? Only what I had had, and that seemed, in that instant, nothing at all. It was as though there could be no possession, not even blind and timeless pleasure, unless confirmed by the sight of a sleeping face.
A Place To Come To is Warren's most ambitious attempt to study "the relation of the concept of Love to that of Time." Love finally proves subordinate to time; the only abiding love is a repetition, not a revolution. Thus Jed must return to the mother before he can begin to live. The conclusion which has been lying in wait consequently presents itself, and this wandering son of Alabama, standing for the first time since a boy in his dead mother's front room, not only returns but understands: "after all the years I was returning to my final self, long lost."
A reviewer of this novel may well feel cheated in having nothing climactic to give away. Surprise endings are impossible in a book which knows from the beginning that there is finally only one place to come to. Home hovers over Warren's novels like the threat of death—it will get you in the end. What one may come to resent about Warren's work is not its end but its means. The necessity for return no one will question, but where it emerges as inevitability rather than option, we are deprived of the very chance to wander and even lose our way, which makes arrival seem an achievement rather than a gift.
II
The end of Warren's Selected Poems: 1923—1975 entirely defies prediction. One usually reads such a volume with a gathering sense of a poet's hard-earned maturity. But this selection begins with the poems of 1975 and ends with those of 1923—1943. As one reads into the book, the past looms up as if it were the future.
This
Is the process whereby pain of the past in its pastness
May be converted into the future tense
Of joy.
This inverted presentation of his poetic development is Warren's most profound act of criticism. It is also his biggest lie against time.
The most obvious motive for such reversal is to present the best work first. Warren has had the luck to live a long life. It took 60 years for his poetic voice to mature into his great volume, Or Else. Naturally he might wish to begin with his triumph. More compelling, however, must have been the impulse to revolt against a career dedicated to the awful responsibility of Time. This is a book in which poem after poem defines man as a creature caught up in irreversible history. Yet all these propositions inhabit a structure which belies chronology. The arrangement of the Selected Poems constitutes a rebellion against the priority of an earlier self, and, by extension, earlier selves. Through an illusion of presentation, early Warren becomes indebted to late Warren. In throwing off the yoke of time, the critic/son finally becomes the artist/father.
Watching Warren assume fatherhood creates the drama of this book. If we restore chronology for a moment, the following pattern emerges:
I Poems 1923—1943 (The Fugitive and After)
II Ten year gap (The Novelist)
III Promises: 1954—1956 (The Birth of the Son)
IV Poems 1957—1960 (Mortmain: The Death of the Father)
V Poems 1960—1968 (The Falling Off)
VI Audubon (The Recovery)
VII Or Else: 1968—1974 (The Father's Sublime)
Not until Promises does Warren achieve a fully personal voice over the length of an entire book. The birth of his son and daughter suddenly converts the abstractions of Time and History into a continuity of blood in which he has chosen to participate. In the moment of watching his son asleep, we can begin to hear all the voices of his past absorbed into the poet's own:
Moonlight falls on your face now,
And now in memory's stasis
I see moonlight mend an old man's Time-crossed brow.
My son, sleep deep,
For moonlight will not stay.
Now moves to seek that empty pillow, a hemisphere away.
Here, then, you'll be waking to the day.
Those who died, died long ago,
Faces you will never know,
Voices you will never hear—
Though your father heard them in the night,
And yet, sometimes, I can hear
Their utterance like the rustling tongue of a pale tide in
moonlight:
Sleep, son. Good Night.
Metrical restraint here still chastens Warren's reach toward a more untrammeled rhythm. This father conserves as much as he invents: this is a lullaby. The poise of these poems is shattered in Mortmain, where Warren returns to the bedside of his dying father. The death of his origin releases even more in the poet than the birth of his future. So intensely felt is this sequence that we scarcely notice its beginnings in ottava rime. As the dying father reaches out to the awaiting son, perhaps in blessing, the motion stops:
But no. Like an eyelid the hand sank, strove
Downward, and in that darkening roar,
All things—all joy and the hope that strove,
The failed exam, the admired endeavor,
Prizes and prinkings, and the truth that strove,
And back of the Capitol, boyhood's first whore—
Were snatched from me, and I could not move,
Naked in the black blast of his love.
This failed embrace had to wait 20 years for requital. Warren achieves resolution not through return but through a repetition with a difference, by doing for his own son what had not been done for him:
When my son is an old man, and I have not,
For some fifty years, seen his face, and, if seeing it,
Would not even be able to guess what name it wore, what
Blessing should I ask for him?
That some time, in thaw-season, at dusk, standing
At woodside and staring
Red-westward, with the sound of moving water
In his ears, he
Should thus, in that future moment, bless,
Forward into that future's future,
An old man who, as he is mine, had once
Been his small son.
For what blessing may a man hope for but
An immortality in
The loving vigilance of death?
In this act of forgiveness, Warren heals the past by blessing the future. He realizes the great possibility of reversal, and in so doing recovers a sense of rhythm more sure than anything he has previously known.Or Else is a triumph of rhythm, in the line, and in the self. The poem which immediately follows this reconciliation of the generations thus testifies to renewed possibilities for a happy timing of one's responses with another. In "Birth of Love" Warren develops into what is perhaps most difficult, because least determined; a faithful lover. This is so arresting a poem that I want to read it at length:
Season late, day late, sun just down, and the sky
Cold gunmetal but with a wash of live rose, and she,
From water the color of sky except where
Her motion has fractured it to shivering splinters of silver,
Rises. Stands on the raw grass. Against
The new-curdling night of spruces, nakedness
Glimmers and, at bosom and flank, drips
With fluent silver.
This is a poetry of the verb rather than the noun. Warren rediscovers the power of words which enact over those which abstract. Our fate in the poem depends upon its verbs. Stationed at the beginnings and ends of lines, granted a full and measured breath of their own, these carefully positioned action words reach forward to create an anticipation which carries us through the poem. They draw us, like enduring love, into time.
Love is also born here in an onlooker:
The man,
Some ten strokes out, but now hanging
Motionless in the gunmetal water, feet
Cold with the coldness of depth, all
History dissolving from him, is
Nothing but an eye. Is an eye only. Sees
The body that is marked by his use, and Time's,
Rise, and in the abrupt ana unsustaining element of air,
Sway, lean, grapple the pond-bank.
Suspended in an undifferentiated medium, cut off from shore, the man here contracts into a mere seer. For a moment he seems in the world but not of it, but Warren allows him only a momentary stay. Simple eyesight quickly becomes historical consciousness as seeing leads to remembering. To see "The body that is marked by his use, and Time's" is to dissolve back into awareness of history. However much the eye may enjoy visions unmarked by time, the objects of its sight insist upon their subjection to time's usages. Warren rejects Blake's visionary claim that "The Eye sees more than the Heart knows," However much the heart longs for immutability, it can only feel the loss of memory as the loss of love.
This is a poem of suddenly perceived grace. Love comes back unannounced, as surprise:
Sees
How, with the posture of female awkwardness that is,
And is the stab of, suddenly perceived grace, breasts bulge
down in
The pure curve of their weight and buttocks
Moon up and, in that swelling unity,
Are silver, and glimmer.
With each "and" conclusion is here delayed while loving attention is extended. These conjunctions testify to her sheer bodily abundance. Within the ingathering the beat comes momentarily to rest upon "grace," and we are given time not only to see "How" she moves him but to feel how she moves us. What may have only penetrated to the eye now stabs to the heart,
The poem now precipitates us toward a fall:
Then
The body is erect, she is herself, whatever
Self she may be, and with an end of the towel grasped in each
hand
Slowly draws it back and forth across back and buttocks, but
With face lifted toward the high sky, where
The over-wash of rose color now fails. Fails, though no star
Yet throbs there.
As she withdraws into her private history, the light fails. "Fails," Warren repeats, to emphasize that no fiction of arrest comes between this failure and the acknowledgment of it. Her ongoing withdrawal turns upon the "The's" which begin the next four sentences. Throughout the poem, the formality of definite articles replaces the intimacy of personal pronouns to create a sure sense of otherness. Here the articles build toward a vision of her as an "it," drawing "to itself . . .what light/In the sky yet lingers." What then shall we further be able to see?
An abstraction:
This moment is non-sequential and absolute, and admits
Of no definition, for it
Subsumes all other, and sequential, moments, by which
Definition might be possible.
"This" closes the growing gap between the man and his vision, the reader and the poem."This" testifies to the presence of a thing and our familiarity with it. We have had our moment; now we savor it through commentary. An immediacy becomes an example. Yet the poet speaks of this moment as still happening. It "is." We again question whether one can speak of a moment and still experience it. The poet's way of saying contradicts the force of his statement. He advances a definition about the inadmissibility of definition. He denies sequence in a poem dependent on it. The moment, we are told, subsumes and dissolves history. And yet the poem, as we have seen, involves us in a necessary sequence of seeings. Our movement through it is as much like walking as stationary looking. In its own words, it is "stair-steep." It is torn between asserting its moment as "non-sequential and absolute," and the necessity of entrusting any such experience to the mediation of language and emotion working in time.
The genius of Warren's poem is to locate this lapse from unconscious grace not after but within the swelling present moment. The abstraction interrupts rather than completes the poem's movement. So it is with relief that the reader returns to the unfolding of the actual sense. The woman must still wrap, glimmer, and go. For five syllables the poet prolongs departure and restores her to our sight through repetition: "Glimmers and is gone." This is the freedom of poetry, the power of its repetitions to reassure us that all is not quite yet lost. What the man now hopes for is not so much to stay her going as to stay her forever:
and the man,
Suspended in his darkling medium, stares
Upward where, though not visible, he knows
She moves, and in his heart he cries out that, if only
He had such strength, he would put his hand forth
And maintain it over her to guard, in all
Her out-goings and in-comings, from whatever
Inclemency of sky or slur of the world's weather
Might ever be. In his heart
He cries out,
Here repetition works not to recover but to remind, to remind that what he cries out for he cannot really achieve. Yet what we are moved by is not the impossibility of the hope but its stubborn persistence. That he cries out again—that is what matters. So he ends as the poet has proceeded, by raising his hand against the very medium—time—through which he expresses his love.
"Birth of Love" confirms the love between men and women which makes generation possible. Any enduring love is profoundly historical, growing through change, confirmed through repetition. Yet poetry represents love less in its confirmation through repetition than in its freshness through transformation. Warren's poem is a repetition experienced as a beginning. It fuses, as fully as one might ever wish, the imagination which conserves and the imagination which creates. This birth is really a re-birth. The man has again fallen in love with this woman, as he will, with grace, again. He falls in love again, however, as if for the first time, as if he were free to choose, apart from all the historical obligations determining such a choice. The whole poem is structured to be experienced as "the non-sequential" moment of which it speaks. It is given greater force than a poem of actual beginning by virtue of the very history it excludes, and yet which surrounds this moment to define and give value to it. We know that the body has been marked by time's use; we know that the day is late. Yet we are left with another image of beginning:
Above
Height of the spruce-night and heave of the far mountain, he
sees
The first star pulse into being. It gleams there.
Of course the star of Venus: of course the poem is a repetition in modern time of the myth of her birth. But Warren's mode of indirect allusion frees us from a mere rehearsal of the archetypical—the poem was originally titled "The Birth of Love"—and preserves the illusion of an original event. What is lost for mythic inevitability is gained for imaginative free-play.
The poet ends by refusing to answer an unasked yet implicit question posed by the evening star:
I do not know what promise it makes to him.
Is this a question on our lips? Not if we have attentively read the poem. For by the end we should realize that the fact of the star's pulsing forth every night, not what it might symbolically promise, is the promise. It too marks a pattern of repetition, yet it, too, in its nightly pulsing forth, is always ready to be seen and felt as if for the first time. In this quiet refusal to interpret his own imagery, Warren acknowledges the critic's desire to know while protecting the poet's will to present, a resolution worthy of his most mature and beautiful poem.
