|
Letters in Canada: 1964
Poetry
By Milton Wilson
If (in poems like "Arrivals" and "Meeting of Strangers") Birney writes a version of the poetry of guilt, so does Leonard Cohen in Flowers for Hitler (McClelland and Stewart, pp.128, $4.50 cloth, $2.50 paper), and with an even greater theatricality and flair for comedy. But the comparison is hardly worth sustaining. Cohen's white-collar sadists and innocent junkies, his casual scapegoats and ritual murderers, his connoisseurs of guilt, belong to a different generation, not to mention a different culture. And the styles and forms that he works with bear little resemblance to Birney's.
Cohen's society is very close and ancestral: a continuity of family betrayals and renewals. His sense of time is equally intimate: history as notebook, diary, list of addresses. His machines of communication are the telephone and the radio; his last place of meeting the oven where all things melt or flake into one. A web of blood in a museum of relics in a fiery furnace. One of his prose poems begins:
When he learned his father had the oven contract, that the
smoke above the city, the clouds as warm as skin, were his father's
manufacture, he was freed from love... |
But another works toward a climactic moment of cultural piety:
"It's true!" I shouted twenty years later, pulling him out of his
dirty bed. "Poor little Father, you told me true."
"Let me be. I am an old Father."
"No! Lift up thy nose. The window is made of axes. What is
that grey matter in the ashtrays? Not from cigarettes, I'll bet. The
living room is a case for relics!"...
Yes, yes, we wept down the Turkish carpet, entangled in the
great, bloodwarm, family embrace, reconciled as the old story
unfolded.
It happens to everyone. For those with eyes, who know in their
hearts that terror is mutual, then this hard community has a
beauty of its own. |
It's hardly a unique world (certainly not among Jewish writers); and I can't imagine any living reader not feeling at home in at least some of its provinces. In any case, it isn't so much the exact landmarks (Belsen and Dachau, or, for that matter, the psychology of guilt and confession itself) that make it familiar. It's the sense of role, of trying to find a convincing part in a cosmic melodrama of inept miscasting and dropped cues, of letting the second-rate play down in almost exact proportion to one's will to live up to it:
Where where is your demonic smile
You vomit when you want to burn. |
What the book is really about, I suppose, is the problem of style, seen in the most literary and most unliterary sense of the word. "To love you is to live my ideal diary which I have promised my body I will never write!" And the last character in the dramatic personae would have no style at all. But to reach him we may have to learn to play all the other parts first. To complain that Cohen is histrionic is to miss the point.
It's useful to think of Flowers for Hitler as the author auditioning himself for all the parts in an unwritten play. Useful because it underlines the process of self-recovery and self-discovery that is at the center of these poems. In a jacket-note Cohen says that these poems won't appeal to the reviewers who praised his previous (second) collection, The Spice Box of Earth (1961). But I suspect that anyone who really liked the latter in all its range of style and substance (that is, not just its lusher surfaces and sounds) will like Flowers for Hitler even better. From the new perspective what looks wrong with the earlier work is a kind of premature coming to terms with himself. In Flowers for Hitler Cohen isn't so much shifting his ground; he's trying to unjell himself before it's too late. He's taking a more searching and uncompromising look at the poetic substance that he exists on, at all the things that he can remember, imagine, absorb, separate, excrete, transmute, forget. By an untalented poet such a book would be a bore. But Cohen is potentially the most important writer that Canadian poetry has produced since 1950-not merely the most talented, but also, I would guess, the most professionally committed to making the most of his talent. What we get in a great deal of Flowers for Hitler is the returning of a virtuoso instrument, elaborate mnemonic devices, a series of techniques for the extraction of selves, a disciplined fulfilling of irrational tasks, a combination of derangement and restoration within the poetic process. I am sure that for Cohen this is (among other things) the necessary means to poetic survival. But for the reader who is convinced of the fineness of the instrument, Flowers for Hitler can be an exciting book in its own right.
I learn nothing
because my mind is stuffed with bodies:
blurred parades, hosts of soft lead wings,
tragic heaped holes of the starved,
the tangled closer than snakes,
swarming gymnasiums,
refuse of hospital compose my mind:
no neat cells,
limbs, rumps, fetuses compose my mind....
Language is gone,
squeezed out in food, kisses.
Arithmetic, power, cities never were.
God knows what they've built today.
Only the echo I cast in world offices
returns to damn me ignorant-
as if I can hear in the screech of flesh
or talk back with mouth of hair. |
|
|
