Life with a Capital L Read online

  There is poetry of this immediate present, instant poetry, as well as poetry of the infinite past and the infinite future. The seething poetry of the incarnate Now is supreme, beyond even the everlasting gems of the before and after. In its quivering momentaneity it surpasses the crystalline, pearl-hard jewels, the poems of the eternities. Do not ask for the qualities of the unfading timeless gems. Ask for the whiteness which is the seethe of mud, ask for that incipient putrescence which is the skies falling, ask for the never-pausing, never-ceasing life itself. There must be mutation, swifter than iridescence, haste, not rest, come-and-go, not fixity, inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself, without denouement or close. There must be the rapid momentaneous association of things which meet and pass on the for ever incalculable journey of creation: everything left in its own rapid, fluid relationship with the rest of things.

  This is the unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present, poetry whose very permanency lies in its wind-like transit. Whitman’s is the best poetry of this kind. Without beginning and without end, without any base and pediment, it sweeps past for ever, like a wind that is for ever in passage, and unchainable. Whitman truly looked before and after. But he did not sigh for what is not. The clue to all his utterance lies in the sheer appreciation of the instant moment, life surging itself into utterance at its very well-head. Eternity is only an abstraction from the actual present. Infinity is only a great reservoir of recollection, or a reservoir of aspiration: man-made. The quivering nimble hour of the present, this is the quick of Time. This is the immanence. The quick of the universe is the pulsating, carnal self, mysterious and palpable. So it is always.

  Because Whitman put this into his poetry, we fear him and respect him so profoundly. We should not fear him if he sang only of the ‘old unhappy far-off things,’ or of the ‘wings of the morning.’ It is because his heart beats with the urgent, insurgent Now, which is even upon us all, that we dread him. He is so near the quick.

  From the foregoing it is obvious that the poetry of the instant present cannot have the same body or the same motion as the poetry of the before and after. It can never submit to the same conditions. It is never finished. There is no rhythm which returns upon itself, no serpent of eternity with its tail in its own mouth. There is no static perfection, none of that finality which we find so satisfying because we are so frightened.

  Much has been written about free verse. But all that can be said, first and last, is that free verse is, or should be direct utterance from the instant, whole man. It is the soul and the mind and body surging at once, nothing left out. They speak all together. There is some confusion, some discord. But the confusion and the discord only belong to the reality, as noise belongs to the plunge of water. It is no use inventing fancy laws for free verse, no use drawing a melodic line which all the feet must toe. Free verse toes no melodic line, no matter what drill-sergeant. Whitman pruned away his clichés – perhaps his clichés of rhythm as well as of phrase. And this is about all we can do, deliberately, with free verse. We can get rid of the stereotyped movements and the old hackneyed associations of sound or sense. We can break down those artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to force our utterance. We can break the stiff neck of habit. We can be in ourselves spontaneous and flexible as flame, we can see that utterance rushes out without artificial form or artificial smoothness. But we cannot positively prescribe any motion, any rhythm. All the laws we invent or discover – it amounts to pretty much the same – will fail to apply to free verse. They will only apply to some form of restricted, limited unfree verse.

  All we can say is that free verse does not have the same nature as restricted verse. It is not of the nature of reminiscence. It is not the past which we treasure in its perfection between our hands. Neither is it the crystal of the perfect future, into which we gaze. Its tide is neither the full, yearning flow of aspiration, nor the sweet, poignant ebb of remembrance and regret. The past and the future are the two great bournes of human emotion, the two great homes of the human days, the two eternities. They are both conclusive, final. Their beauty is the beauty of the goal, finished, perfected. Finished beauty and measured symmetry belong to the stable, unchanging eternities.

  But in free verse we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment. To break the lovely form of metrical verse, and to dish up the fragments as a new substance, called vers libre, this is what most of the free-versifiers accomplish. They do not know that free verse has its own nature, that it is neither star nor pearl, but instantaneous like plasm. It has no goal in either eternity. It has no finish. It has no satisfying stability, satisfying to those who like the immutable. None of this. It is the instant; the quick; the very jetting source of all will-be and has-been. The utterance is like a spasm, naked contact with all influences at once. It does not want to get anywhere. It just takes place.

  For such utterance any externally applied law would be mere shackles and death. The law must come new each time from within. The bird is on the wing in the winds, flexible to every breath, a living spark in the storm, its very flickering depending upon its supreme mutability and power of change. Whence such a bird came: whither it goes: from what solid earth it rose up, and upon what solid earth it will close its wings and settle, this is not the question. This is a question of before and after. Now, now, the bird is on the wing in the winds.

  Such is the rare new poetry. One realm we have never conquered: the pure present. One great mystery of time is terra incognita to us: the instant. The most superb mystery we have hardly recognized: the immediate, instant self. The quick of all time is the instant. The quick of all the universe, of all creation, is the incarnate, carnal self. Poetry gave us the clue: free verse: Whitman. Now we know.

  The ideal – what is the ideal? A figment. An abstraction. A static abstraction, abstracted from life. It is a fragment of the before or the after. It is a crystallized aspiration, or a crystallized remembrance: crystallized, set, finished. It is a thing set apart, in the great storehouse of eternity, the storehouse of finished things.

  We do not speak of things crystallized and set apart. We speak of the instant, the immediate self, the very plasm of the self. We speak also of free verse.

  All this should have come as a preface to Look! We Have Come Through! But is it not better to publish a preface long after the book it belongs to has appeared? For then the reader will have had his fair chance with the book, alone.

  Memoir of Maurice Magnus (1921–2)

  On a dark, wet, wintry evening in November, 1919, I arrived in Florence, having just got back to Italy for the first time since 1914. My wife was in Germany, gone to see her mother, also for the first time since that fatal year 1914. We were poor; who was going to bother to publish me and to pay for my writings, in 1918 and 1919? I landed in Italy with nine pounds in my pocket and about twelve pounds lying in the bank in London. Nothing more. My wife, I hoped, would arrive in Florence with two or three pounds remaining. We should have to go very softly, if we were to house ourselves in Italy for the winter. But after the desperate weariness of the war, one could not bother.

  So I had written to N— D— to get me a cheap room somewhere in Florence, and to leave a note at Cook’s. I deposited my bit of luggage at the station, and walked to Cook’s in the Via Tornabuoni. Florence was strange to me: seemed grim and dark and rather awful on the cold November evening. There was a note from D—, who has never left me in the lurch. I went down the Lung ’Arno to the address he gave.

  I had just passed the end of the Ponte Vecchio, and was watching the first lights of evening and the last light of day on the swollen river as I walked, when I heard D—’s voice:

  ‘Isn’t that Lawrence? Why of course it is, of course it is, beard and all! Well, how are you, eh? You got my note? Well now, my dear boy, you just go on to the Cavelotti – straight ahead, straight ahead – you’ve got the number. There’s a room for you there. We shall be there in half an hour. Oh, let me in
troduce you to M—’

  I had unconsciously seen the two men approaching, D— tall and portly, the other man rather short and strutting. They were both buttoned up in their overcoats, and both had rather curly little hats. But D— was decidedly shabby and a gentleman, with his wicked red face and tufted eyebrows. The other man was almost smart, all in grey, and he looked at first sight like an actor-manager, common. There was a touch of down-on-his-luck about him too. He looked at me, buttoned up in my old thick overcoat, and with my beard bushy and raggy because of my horror of entering a strange barber’s shop, and he greeted me in a rather fastidious voice, and a little patronizingly. I forgot to say I was carrying a small hand-bag. But I realized at once that I ought, in this little grey-sparrow man’s eyes – he stuck his front out tubbily, like a bird, and his legs seemed to perch behind him, as a bird’s do – I ought to be in a cab. But I wasn’t. He eyed me in that shrewd and rather impertinent way of the world of actor-managers: cosmopolitan, knocking shabbily round the world.

  He looked a man of about forty, spruce and youngish in his deportment, very pink-faced, and very clean, very natty, very alert, like a sparrow painted to resemble a tom-tit. He was just the kind of man I had never met: little smart man of the shabby world, very much on the spot, don’t you know.

  ‘How much does it cost?’ I asked D—, meaning the room.

  ‘Oh, my dear fellow, a trifle. Ten francs a day. Third rate, tenth rate, but not bad at the price. Pension terms of course – everything included – except wine.’

  ‘Oh no, not at all bad for the money,’ said M—. ‘Well now, shall we be moving? You want the post office, D—?’ His voice was precise and a little mincing, and it had an odd high squeak.

  ‘I do,’ said D—.

  ‘Well then come down here –’ M— turned to a dark little alley.

  ‘Not at all,’ said D—. ‘We turn down by the bridge.’

  ‘This is quicker,’ said M—. He had a twang rather than an accent in his speech – not definitely American.

  He knew all the short cuts of Florence. Afterwards I found that he knew all the short cuts in all the big towns of Europe.

  I went on to the Cavelotti and waited in an awful plush and gilt drawing-room, and was given at last a cup of weird muddy brown slush called tea, and a bit of weird brown mush called jam on some bits of bread. Then I was taken to my room. It was far off, on the third floor of the big, ancient, deserted Florentine house. There I had a big and lonely, stone-comfortless room looking on to the river. Fortunately it was not very cold inside, and I didn’t care. The adventure of being back in Florence again after the years of war made one indifferent.

  After an hour or so someone tapped. It was D— coming in with his grandiose air – now a bit shabby, but still very courtly.

  ‘Why here you are – miles and miles from human habitation! I told her to put you on the second floor, where we are. What does she mean by it? Ring that bell. Ring it.’

  ‘No,’ said I, ‘I’m all right here.’

  ‘What!’ cried D—. ‘In this Spitzbergen! Where’s that bell?’

  ‘Don’t ring it,’ said I, who have a horror of chambermaids and explanations.

  ‘Not ring it! Well you’re a man, you are! Come on then. Come on down to my room. Come on. Have you had some tea – filthy muck they call tea here? I never drink it.’

  I went down to D—’s room on the lower floor. It was a littered mass of books and typewriter and papers: D— was just finishing his novel. M— was resting on the bed, in his shirt sleeves: a tubby, fresh-faced little man in a suit of grey, faced cloth bound at the edges with grey silk braid. He had light blue eyes, tired underneath, and crisp, curly, dark brown hair just grey at the temples. But everything was neat and even finicking about his person.

  ‘Sit down! Sit down!’ said D—, wheeling up a chair. ‘Have a whisky?’

  ‘Whisky!’ said I.

  ‘Twenty-four francs a bottle – and a find at that,’ moaned D—. I must tell that the exchange was then about forty-five lire to the pound.

  ‘Oh N—,’ said M—, ‘I didn’t tell you. I was offered a bottle of 1913 Black and White for twenty-eight lire.’

  ‘Did you buy it?’

  ‘No. It’s your turn to buy a bottle.’

  ‘Twenty-eight francs – my dear fellow!’ said D—, cocking up his eyebrows. ‘I shall have to starve myself to do it.’

  ‘Oh no you won’t, you’ll eat here just the same,’ said M—.

  ‘Yes, and I’m starved to death. Starved to death by the muck – the absolute muck they call food here. I can’t face twenty-eight francs, my dear chap – can’t be done, on my honour.’

  ‘Well look here, N—. We’ll both buy a bottle. And you can get the one at twenty-two, and I’ll buy the one at twenty-eight.’

  So it always was, M— indulged D—, and spoilt him in every way. And of course D— wasn’t grateful. Au contraire! And M—’s pale blue smallish round eyes, in his cockatoo-pink face, would harden to indignation occasionally.

  The room was dreadful. D— never opened the windows: didn’t believe in opening windows. He believed that a certain amount of nitrogen – I should say a great amount – is beneficial. The queer smell of a bedroom which is slept in, worked in, lived in, smoked in, and in which men drink their whiskies, was something new to me. But I didn’t care. One had got away from the war.

  We drank our whiskies before dinner. M— was rather yellow under the eyes, and irritable; even his pink fattish face went yellowish.

  ‘Look here,’ said D—. ‘Didn’t you say there was a turkey for dinner? What? Have you been to the kitchen to see what they’re doing to it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said M— testily. ‘I forced them to prepare it to roast.’

  ‘With chestnuts – stuffed with chestnuts?’ said D—.

  ‘They said so,’ said M—.

  ‘Oh, but go down and see that they’re doing it. Yes, you’ve got to keep your eye on them, got to. The most awful howlers if you don’t. You go now and see what they’re up to.’ D— used his most irresistible grand manner.

  ‘It’s too late,’ persisted M—, testy.

  ‘It’s never too late. You just run down and absolutely prevent them from boiling that bird in the old soup-water,’ said D—. ‘If you need force, fetch me.’

  M— went. He was a great epicure, and knew how things should be cooked. But of course his irruptions into the kitchen roused considerable resentment, and he was getting quaky. However, he went. He came back to say the turkey was being roasted, but without chestnuts.

  ‘What did I tell you! What did I tell you!’ cried D—. ‘They are absolute —! If you don’t hold them by the neck while they peel the chestnuts, they’ll stuff the bird with old boots, to save themselves trouble. Of course you should have gone down sooner, M—.’

  Dinner was always late, so the whisky was usually two whiskies. Then we went down, and were merry in spite of all things. That is, D— always grumbled about the food. There was one unfortunate youth who was boots and porter and waiter and all. He brought the big dish to D—, and D— always poked and pushed among the portions, and grumbled frantically, sotto voce, in Italian to the youth Beppo, getting into a nervous frenzy. Then M— called the waiter to himself, picked the nicest bits off the dish and gave them to D—, then helped himself.

  The food was not good, but with D— it was an obsession. With the waiter he was terrible – ‘Cos’ è? Zuppa? Grazie. No niente per me. No – No! – Quest’ acqua sporca non bevo io. I don’t drink this dirty water. What – What’s that in it – a piece of dish clout? Oh holy Dio, I can’t eat another thing this evening –’

  And he yelled for more bread – bread being war rations and very limited in supply – so M— in nervous distress gave him his piece, and D— threw the crumb part on the floor, anywhere, and called for another litre. We always drank heavy dark red wine at three francs a litre. D— drank two-thirds, M— drank least. He loved his liquors, and did
not care for wine. We were noisy and unabashed at table. The old Danish ladies at the other end of the room, and the rather impecunious young Duca and family not far off were not supposed to understand English. The Italians rather liked the noise, and the young signorina with the high-up yellow hair eyed us with profound interest. On we sailed, gay and noisy, D— telling witty anecdotes and grumbling wildly and only half whimsically about the food. We sat on till most people had finished – then went up to more whisky – one more perhaps – in M—’s room.

  When I came down in the morning I was called into M—’s room. He was like a little pontiff in a blue kimono-shaped dressing-gown with a broad border of reddish purple: the blue was a soft mid-blue, the material a dull silk. So he minced about, in demi-toilette. His room was very clean and neat, and slightly perfumed with essences. On his dressing-table stood many cut glass bottles and silver-topped bottles with essences and pomades and powders, and heaven knows what. A very elegant little prayer book lay by his bed – and a life of St Benedict. For M— was a Roman Catholic convert. All he had was expensive and finicking: thick leather silver-studded suit-cases standing near the wall, trouser-stretcher all nice, hair-brushes and clothes-brush with old ivory backs. I wondered over him and his niceties and little pomposities. He was a new bird to me.