A Review of Stephen
Romer: YELLOW STUDIO (Carcanet, 2008)
In a Radio 3 interview with Clive Wilmer
conducted 20 years ago, Stephen Romer (a long-term resident in France and
professor of French literature) speaks of the engrained disparity between the “post-Mallarmean
reflexiveness’’ of French poetic idioms and an English tradition benched in the
quotidian world of people and things: he related how a French academic, on
being presented with a Larkinesque poem of urban mundanity, found it so alien
to his sensibilities that he declared ‘Ceci
n’est pas une poeme’. (A hint of Magrittean surrealism enters the picture
here.)
A major element of Stephen Romer’s project over his
five published volumes has been to work through a complex negotiation between
these two apparently divergent poetries and the epistemologies that accompany
them, an impressive attempt to marry the philosophical elegance and linguistic
clarity of contemporary French styles with the more worldly, experiential,
noun-cluttered demotic of their counterparts in English. His new collection Yellow Studio furthers this ongoing
dialogue through its five sections, plotting a kind of ironic narrative from the
opening’s ambivalent francophilia, through a satirical American divagation,
back to the poet’s English roots in the beautiful cycle of uneffusive elegies
for his father which close the book.
It’s as though, from the perspective of rueful
middle-age, Romer is dismantling the bookish pretensions towards high-flown
theory and aestheticism he may have indulged in when younger (just as in one
poem he dismantles his library) in favour of the looser, more provisional modes
of understanding that broken love and grief force upon us. In a characteristic
paradox, however, the pastoral withdrawal
of aging is also ironised, and in the title-poem Vuillard’s stylised ‘Yellow
Studio’ comes to symbolise the “humane heaven” of art he now regards “with
nostalgia, with homesickness” – is its “sweet, autarchic rest” really to be
longed for, though, if it provides only a “lumpy mattress” to lie on ie. hidden
imperfections would always trouble you, such as the social contexts of the
artist’s studio evoked earlier in the poem? The unusual word “autarchic” is
also troubling, alluding both to an anachronistic notion of absolute power (attainable
only in the abstract world of art) and perhaps even to a condition of autism that
implies exclusion from human discourse and reality.
This is a telling example of how subtly
Romer “loads every rift with ore”: the wry, sophisticated surface of each poem
often gives way on closer inspection to an unstable inner pattern of evasions
and problematics, frequently hinging on nuanced ambiguities or oblique
references to other source-materials. In this way, the oppositions the book initially
seems to set up – between art and life, France
and England,
exile and home, youth and age – are consistently skewed and disjointed into
more intricate relations. Equally, the urbane, knowing narrative ‘I’ who bobs
elusively in and out of the poems keeps adroitly pulling the rug from beneath
his own feet (the “two-tone shoes” he mentions hint at his doubleness): one is
reminded of what one critic said of Rilke, that “by most revealing, he was most
concealing himself”. Implicitly fighting shy of the unitary confessional voice
which is all too often the default-setting of contemporary English and American
poetries, Romer hives himself off into different registers, slants and postures
which enact multiple perspectives on recurrent situations and locales.
A further way the poems attain this polyphony
is through the use of translation and adaptation to create personae, in the Poundian sense: four haunting versions of
Apollinaire’s war-poems modulate familiar motifs of lost youth and thwarted love
through a newly modernist tonality lent by unpunctuated parataxis and
“calligrammatic” lineation. ‘Yehuda Halevi to His Love’ seems to wryly
ventriloquise the 11th Century Hebrew poet-philosopher, while the
longer, obscurer piece ‘Jardin Anglais’ uses material from de Nerval’s Sylvie to set up a dialogue between
conflicting historical voices, a ‘malentendu’.
The book begins in a contemporary Paris kitsch with
“sprinkle-glitter” and “seafood-platters”. Several of section one’s poems seem
distant parodies of the bathetic amorous liaison typically encountered in
Laforgue: the self-deprecating narrator struggling to seduce a markedly less
literate (and in this case much younger) ingénue-figure.
This ‘mid-life crisis’-type situation is mined for its comic potential, especially
in ‘At the Procope’, when his young American dinner-date unexpectedly reveals
hidden literary credentials in the form of
“a snatch of
Stevens- was it
‘The
Idea of Order’? - indelibly tattooed
On her back, just along the pantyline.”
The lines ripple with wordplay: the
double-entendre on the Americanism “snatch”; the adverb “indelibly”,
seemingly tautologous until you consider that not all tattoos are permanent and
indeed, in our throwaway culture, how few texts of any kind are indelible anymore – even those of Wallace
Stevens, that lofty, metaphysical poet whose appearance along a girl’s
pantyline seems surreally incongruous to say the least? What “idea of order”
remains plausible in this kind of context?
At the same time, as we read on through
section one, a subtext develops implying recourse to frivolous sexual
adventures is merely a diversion from the grievous breakdown of a more serious
relationship (or marriage?) The mood rapidly darkens: the despondent parting in
a Paris cafe
sketched in ‘Recidivist’ hinges on two pregnant images. “The eternal Lipton’s
teabag/laid genteelly on the saucer” works as an understated metaphor for
something used-up or redundant, as well as carrying the cultural connotations
of being the only brand of “English tea” available in France (and seemingly only ever
drunk by the English abroad). Even more subtle is what the poem doesn’t say:
that a Lipton’s tea-bag label is yellow, making it a tiny synecdoche of the
‘Yellow Studio’ that is an over-arching trope throughout the book. The closing image - “The way your blue dress
rises” - seems initially a straight visual-impression charged with misgiving,
but it seems also to bear a buried memory of another wife poignantly
mourned-for by an English poet, the “air-blue gown” of Hardy’s great ‘The
Voice’: the rising-up is both the erotic uncovering of the narrator’s raw loss
and his mediation of it through literary echoes and language.
Section two steps back into the rural France of a
middle-aged Horatian quietism not without its disquiets. Two exquisite
landscape poems (‘A Small Field’ and ‘Loire, August’) and a concerted attempt
to cultivate his own garden (‘pruned expectation’) give way to deflating incursions
of loneliness and sexual frustration: he “check(s) the personals”, sees in a
“full-bottomed urn” a former lover’s buttocks, sleeps guiltily with one of his
young students (“the aging Don” is both university lecturer and ironic Don
Juan). The Apollinaire versions shatter any further pretence at bucolic
seclusion by bringing conflict and history back into the frame.
This leads on to section three’s more
measured and politicised slant on contemporary France, with side-sweeps at
cloistered academia and its reductive over-analyses. The liberalism, both
cultural and social (“the sensual life of art”), which France had
represented to Romer as a young man is vividly mourned in ‘Farewell to an
Idea’: he now feels “we are old, and exiled /into more frightening country”.
Section four transposes this sense of political malaise to America in the
context of 9/11: rather than simplistic condemnatory invective, however, Romer
restores historical perspective to the “toxic darkness” he finds there, subtly
alluding both to the pioneer-spirit of “the Founding Fathers” (ironically
foisted into the setting of a Back-to-Nature weekend) and, via Coleridge’s
“pantisocracy” and ‘The Tempest’, back to the United States’ conceptual origins
in the French Enlightenment and Voltaire: this great intellectual tradition has
disastrously terminated in the “autarchic” debasement of
“a
President
sitting among children in a classroom
with his reading-book upside-down.”
Stylistically, Romer taps into the abundant
resources of American poetry to work through his perennial French/English
dichotomy: whereas Section One had included an unexpected reference to Frank
O’Hara’s ‘Having a Coke with you’ (‘Alas Without Constraints’) to signal its
experiments with urban demotic, and the concluding lines of ‘Today I Must Teach
Voltaire’ seem to borrow a tone and cadence of trans-political obloquy from
George Oppen (‘He must explain to all of the children/this blazing love of
death’), the excellent ‘Adirondacks’ takes a leaf out of Elizabeth Bishop’s
magisterial later books, with its coolly defamiliarising outlook on a
travelled-through landscape and its all-too-human inhabitants, obliquely
summing-up a culture’s contradictions and discontents in a few off-hand,
resonant images.
What is so striking about ‘An
Enthusiast’, the twenty four interlinking elegies for the poet’s father that
conclude the book, is the way they explore intimately personal material in a
manner quite new to Romer while at the same time drawing together and
recapitulating many of the themes and images of the earlier sections. The
tentative endeavour to posthumously settle differences becomes a continuous
self-association with his father – whether in attachment to music, gardening (“my
hedges gone haywire”), flirtatious encounters, religious belief, marriage – all
these counterpointed by instances from preceding poems. Memory and imagination
fuse as Romer reconstructs episodes in his father’s life from a “strictly
private diary”, a writerly disclosure which once more unites them. Like Lowell’s
‘Life-studies’ (a memory-book ‘An Enthusiast’ has some formal kinship with,
especially in its use of short-lined, irregularly-rhyming free-ish verse),
there is also the attempt to read back current crises from family history: the
repressed, privileged middle-class England Romer’s father was heir to perhaps
lies behind the “silence, exile and cunning” of his son’s later defection to
France and to poetry.
In a final variation on the volume’s key-image,
the ‘Yellow Studio’ of art becomes the “yellow attic room” of childhood, to be
revisited in memory but not reclaimed, the poet reconciling himself to his
father’s work of “clearance” out in the sunlit garden so that he can move forward
and growth can begin again: the writing of these elegies has no doubt been a
similarly cathartic labour for the son. Such subtlety and reluctance to
polarise is typical of Romer’s art in this consistently-enthralling book – an
object-lesson for less meticulous contemporaries in how to construct a complex,
full-bodied book, not just a résumé of disparate pieces.
(First published in The Wolf, 2008)
Llubljana is a city poised between its two forefathers, Plecnik and Prešeren, whose respective principles of architecture and poetry define the character and dynamics of this beautifully understated version of the modern polis. Josef Plecnik(1872-1957), whose house in the Trnovo district I visited on a recent visit to Slovenia, redesigned the city from the 1920s in keeping with the principles of ancient Greek and Roman urban planning, with spaces for habitation, worship and commerce/social interaction (the agora) given balanced consideration. His curious marriage of neo-classical minimalism with odd anachronistic flourishes such as Egyptian pyramid motifs bespeak the near-autistic, monothematic vision of this pious and idiosyncratic solitary, as evidenced by his self-designed house and even his desk with its meticulously-arrayed clutter.
But as ever I'm intellectualising the appeal of what is simply one of the most charming, unspoilt and laid-back cities in Europe, drawing influence and savour from all its surrounding nations: Italy, Austria, Hungary, Croatia. It has come through state-Communism and the internecine dissolution of Yugoslavia (all notably recorded in the Museum of Contemporary History in Tivoli Park) and more recent economic hardship to being applauded this year as the European Green Capital 2016, a title the briefest walk or cycle-ride along the Llubijanica River through the pedestrianised city-centre and across its bridges will show to be amply justified. The puckishly surreal, oppositional spirit of Slovenia's two most feted contemporary voices - Slavoj Zizek and Tomaz Salamun - no doubt born of previous ideological turbulences, seems apt yet somehow distant.
