Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #1: Helen Vendler's "A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me"

I wonder what Susan Eilenberg means when she says, in her recent review of Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (“Emily v. Mabel,” London Review of Books, June 30, 2011), “And yet, as I read the commentaries, one after another, I begin to feel as if I am listening to a scholar talking to what she suspects may be an empty room." Reading Vendler, I’ve never felt that way. Quite the opposite, in fact; I’ve always felt she was talking to me and to like-minded appreciators of close reading, subtle analysis, and superb writing. I’ve yet to read Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. But, over the years, I’ve read and reread many of her other works. I count her Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980), The Music of What Happens (1988), and Soul Says (1995) among my favorite books. When I traveled in the Arctic, I always carried something by her in my pack. Her slim books of lectures, e.g., Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (1984), The Given and the Made (1995), The Breaking of Style (1995), Coming of Age as a Poet (2003), Poets Thinking (2004), and Invisible Listeners (2005), are very portable and – this is my point - companionable. As I say, reading her, I never got the feeling that she was "talking to an empty room." If that’s the feeling her new book conveys, it strays substantially from the effect she said she aimed for in Part of Nature, Part of Us:

When I was in school I read, besides anthologies, books about poets to find new poets and new poems and to reassure myself that there were people in the world who, to paraphrase Auden, “exchanged messages” about poetry. I did not care, or even notice, who had written those books. But I was glad they existed. In agreeing to collect these pieces, I remembered my younger self in the library; it is for her counterparts today that this volume is intended.

But I was glad they existed. I’m glad Vendler’s writings exist. In homage (albeit, quite inadequate) to her, I want to place one of her New Yorker pieces at the head of my “Top Ten.” Deciding which of her reviews to choose hasn’t been easy. She’s written, by my rough count, thirty-four pieces for the magazine, beginning in 1978 and ending in 2001. After careful consideration, I’ve decided to pick her memorable “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1989; collected in Soul Says), a review of Seamus Heaney’s brilliant 1988 essay collection The Government of the Tongue. I choose it for the following seven reasons:

1. It brought me news of the existence of Heaney’s wonderful book. As a result of reading Vendler’s review in the magazine, I immediately went out and obtained a copy. The Government of the Tongue has been (and continues to be) a tremendous source of reading pleasure.

2. Its praise of Heaney’s writing (“bravura pieces of characterization, the best in recent memory”; “he observes, with an insight impossible to anyone but a poet”; “one is moved to profitable thought by his metaphorically vivid judgments”) confirmed my own opinion of Heaney’s greatness. (I’ve been a passionate admirer of Heaney’s work ever since the day, back in the early eighties, when a friend of mine read aloud from Heaney’s Field Work as we drove to Halifax.)

3. Its assertion of sensitivity to “the art of language” as a critical touchstone.

4. Its marvelous description of Heaney’s critical writing: “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act, the texture of the lines on the page.”

5. Its critique of Heaney’s view that George Herbert “surrendered himself to a framework of belief and an instituted religion.” Vendler responds (rightly, in my opinion) that “Herbert deserves better praise than the ‘felicity or correctness of a work’s execution,’ which is all that Heaney allows the Renaissance poet working within the Christian consensus.” She says, “We need a better theory of what it means to an artist to struggle with an ideology from within, as a believer.”

6. Its unforgettable definition of “the morality of style”: “The writing self does not have to be virtuous in the ordinary sense of the word; but it does have to be extraordinarily virtuous in its aesthetic moves. It must refuse – against the claims of fatigue, charm, popularity, money, and so on – the idée reçue, the imprecise word, the tired rhythm, the replication of past effects, the uninvestigated stanza.”

7. Its equally unforgettable quotation of Heaney’s interpretation of Jesus’ silent writing in the “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone” passage in the Gospel of St. John. Heaney construes Jesus’ silent writing as an allegory for poetry. He says, “In the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.” Vendler calls this “Gospel of St. John” passage “the most original moment of this very original book.” (Interestingly, Vendler revisits Heaney’s interpretation of the Gospel of St. John in her Seamus Heaney (1998), wherein she says, “Heaney’s emphasis here is that of lyric: ‘a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.’”)

I pay Helen Vendler’s “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me” my ultimate compliment when I say that, reading it, I experience double bliss: the subject is tremendously interesting; the writing is intensely pleasurable.

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.