Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea
Created, in his day, a touch of doubt.
An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes
Berries of villages, a barber's eye,
An eye of land, of simple salad-beds,
Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung
On porpoises, instead of apricots,
And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts
Dibbled in waves that were mustachios,
Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.
This, we feel, is crazy. It's closer to Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear than it is to serious poetry. But, as Elizabeth Sewell showed many years ago, Carroll and Lear have just as much right to be incorporated into the story of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry as Mallarmé and Rimbaud. Indeed, they are the playful reverse image of those two poets, and what we have in Stevens, as he struggles to understand the nature of his gift and his vocation, is the coming together of the two traditions. The sign, the word, is always threatening to take off into sound, ‘circulating freely’, as Krauss puts it, and leaving the signified, the semantic content of the word, behind. That is both the problem and the challenge for Stevens; for us the secret is to keep moving.
We are immediately rewarded. ‘Crispin was washed away by magnitude’, we read in the next stanza. He is dissolved in the sea,
nothing left of him,
Except in faint, memorial gesturings,
That were like arms and shoulders in the waves,
Here, something in the rise and fall of wind
That seemed hallucinating horn, and here,
A sunken voice, both of remembering
And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.
Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved
The valet in the tempest was annulled.
But just as Friedrich's Rückenfigur stands between us and the annihilated world of mist and sea, so now Crispin rises again as a comic Rückenfigur, protecting us from dissolution. In Part III, ‘Approaching Carolina’, we find him trying to find a balance between annihilation by the sea and the need to settle down and live. It would be easy to forget the sea, to lead a useful life, even to write poems, for the moonlight fills his mind with stories and ideas. Yet Crispin is wary:
How many poems he denied himself
In his observant progress, lesser things
Than the relentless contact he desired.
Moonlight, he senses, is an evasion, ‘mere poetry’, when what he longs for, like Francis Bacon, is the ‘relentless contact’ with reality. Such contact, however, he knows, would bring annihilation with it. But what if he were to forget the annihilating sea and celebrate the ordinary?
A river bore
The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose,
He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells
Of dampened lumber, emanations blown
From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes,
Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks
That helped him round his rude aesthetic out.
This has always been the dream of American writing and it is at the heart of Stevens's friend and contemporary, William Carlos Williams, and there again in Saul Bellow's most American book, The Adventures of Augie March: ‘I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.’ But anchoring the twentieth-century American drunken boat in ‘rancid rosin, burly smells’ and all the rest turns out, for Crispin, to be as much of a dream as everything else. In Part IV, ‘The Idea of a Colony’, we see him setting up his colony, determined to ‘make new intelligence prevail’, yet at the end he has to confess that
He could not be content with counterfeit,
With masquerade of thought, with hapless words
That must belie the racking masquerade,
With fictive flourishes that preordained
His passion's permit, hang of coat, degree
Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash
Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly.
It irked beyond his patience.
Perhaps, then, since he can neither reach the ‘essential prose’ nor do without it, what he has to do is what Donne long ago recommended: ‘He who would truth find/ About must and about must go.’ Sly Crispin accepts that his only role may be that of clown: ‘A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.’ In keeping with this the last two sections are entitled ‘A Nice Shady Home’ and ‘And Daughters with Curls’. He ‘who once planned/ Loquacious columns by the ructive sea’ is now content to build himself a cabin inland, in the American way, and to father four daughters. Is this a sell-out? He concludes, with one of those ‘if’ sentences that gives even as it takes away:
Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote
Is false, if Crispin is a profitless
Philosopher, beginning with green brag
Concluding fadedly, if as a man
Prone to distemper he abates in taste,
Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure,
Glozing his life with after-shining flicks…
Making gulped portions from obstreperous drops,
And so distorting, proving what he proves
Is nothing, what can all this matter since
The relation comes, benignly, to its end?
The ‘relation’ is of course both the telling and the fact that Crispin is not alone in the world, even if he sometimes feels that way. And so, after a gap to let the question mark do its work, the last line of the poem compresses all its themes together, playing with the meaning of ‘clipped’: trimmed, as of a hedge, and, in its old meaning, found in Shakespeare, embraced: ‘So may the relation of each man be clipped.’
What Stevens learned in ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ is that, like Picasso, it was the angel of reality he was after, but that to get at him you had to work dialectically and by indirection. It was a lesson that would stand him in good stead in the years to come.
Over in Europe at the close of that same crucial decade, the second of the century, Franz Kafka brought out one of the few books he would publish in his lifetime, a collection of fourteen stories, mainly written during the war, entitled A Country Doctor. As always, Kafka was meticulous about the order and the arrangement. The story he chose to open the collection is no more than a page long, but it is one of his greatest. It is called ‘The New Advocate’, and is, in a sense, his ‘Prufrock’, his ‘Comedian as the Letter C’. ‘We have a new advocate, Dr. Bucephalus’, it begins. ‘There is little in his appearance to remind you that he was once Alexander of Macedon's warhorse. Of course, if you know his story, you are aware of something.’ But even the usher at the law courts, who presumably does not know his story, though he is, it is true, ‘a man with the professional eye of one who regularly places small bets at racecourses’, finds himself ‘running an admiring eye over the advocate as he mounted the marble steps with a high action that made them ring beneath his feet’.
However, this high-stepping urge is now kept well under control, for ‘nowadays … there is no Alexander the Great’. Of course, even in Alexander's day, ‘the gates of India were beyond reach, yet the King's sword pointed the way to them’. Today, however, no-one even points the way — for in which direction would they point? Many, it is true, still carry swords, ‘but only to brandish them, and the eye that tries to follow them is confused’. So ‘perhaps it is really best to do as Bucephalus has done, and absorb oneself in law books. In the quiet lamplight, his flanks unhampered by the thighs of a rider, free and far from the clamour of battle, he reads and turns the pages of our ancient tomes.’