It happened, as it does, that a Nobel Prize-winner's publisher was caught on the hop when the name was released; but by now Faber's new printings of Derek Walcott's poetry have become available here. Once upon a time, a less-garlanded poet could still be omnipresent, at least in some circles – as when Robert Lowell’s work was taught in all four years of English at the University of Melbourne – but tides have turned. The poet's laurels have lost their sheen in many eyes, and the critic's blade gleams in their place. The result has been, sometimes, that dead foliage has been pruned, but more often that the metallic has replaced the organic. In such a climate, even a Nobel celebrity may find it hard to flourish. Still, for Walcott, the condition of flourishing has always been one of the things under question. Consider, for instance, this characteristic poem:
Preparing for Exile
Why do I imagine the death of
Mandelstam
among the yellowing coconuts,
why does my gift already look over its
shoulder
for a shadow to fill the door
and pass this very page into eclipse?
Why does the moon increase into an
arc-lamp
and the inkstain on my hand prepare
to press thumb-downward
before a shrugging sergeant?
What is this new odour in the air
that was once salt, that smelt like
lime at daybreak,
and my cat, I know I imagine it, leap
from my path,
and my children’s eyes already seem
like horizons,
and all my poems, even this one, wish to hide?
It has been said that poetry usually brings bad news, and perhaps it does, though not as its last word. Exile is by definition bad news for the exiled person, but it has precipitated some of the greatest of poetry – witness Ovid and Dante. Brodsky, reflecting on ‘The Condition We Call Exile’, said that ‘Exile brings you overnight where it normally would take a lifetime to go into the condition in which all one is left with is oneself and one’s own language, with nobody or nothing in between’. For an artist, that is good news, though of an austere and exacting kind. Wherever Walcott has been physically, whether in his native Caribbean or in Boston or London, his best work has been written from that difficult country of the mind. Like it or not, all poetry worth a second reading comes from the Land of Abnormality, against the grain of expectation. In the words which open L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. The poetical past, and present, and future, is a foreign country. Writing is always writing home from exile.
Of course, Preparing for Exile is greatly concerned with the dark side of futurity, death. If poetry ‘estranges’ consciousness, death is the estranger par excellence. What Rome did to Ovid, and Florence to Dante, death does to all of us. And it does it to others, especially the storied and celebrated ones, before it does it to us. Gwen Harwood, in a poem mourning the death of Vincent Buckley, wrote, 'Irish Darling. It's mortals who die'; there is an element not only of the affronting but of the outrageous about the exilic death of those who have immortalised themselves to us. And that is why there is something singularly touching in Walcott's citing 'the death of Mandelstam'. Mandelstam gave himself to poetry as the candle gives itself to the flame; but in time he died, with many millions of others, as a victim of killers with a boundless hatred for creativity and liberty. That lends to his death an outrageousness far beyond anything due to our organic fragility.
I make the point because, although Walcott can and should be characterized in a variety of ways, what has often been overlooked in him is the metaphysical note – the ictus that can leave the reader where it caught the writer, somewhere between provocation and stillness. Good poetry stops us in our tracks, visited as we are by whatever it is that has stopped the poet in his tracks. This agency may properly be, as in Walcott's case, something stemming from cultural marginality, from a fascination with the dramatic, from an equipoise between the lyrical and the epical, or from the interweaving of all these. But what lasts poetically often does so because the words re-key alertness from a minor to a major mode. And one of the best-established ways to bring that off is in the vein of questioning.
In a much-anthologised poem, A Far Cry From Africa, from his first book, Walcott, reflecting on his bloodline, asks,
I who am poisoned with the blood of
both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the
vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule,
how choose
Between this Africa and the English
tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what
they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be
Cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
This might be a mantra to be repeated in the face of many a colonial and postcolonial predicament-and, as such, as relevant to a Gaul under Rome, or an Argentinian under Spain, as to the simmering cauldron of Barbados. It also makes explicit Walcott's bewitchment by 'the English tongue', a thing which is, for its lovers, as good a sacrament as any yet to be dreamed up. And it has all the air of dramatic interrogation, of Elizabethan flair, which has over the centuries lent vivacity to so much writing in English, whether in poetry or in prose. But for my money, the telling note in this poem of thirty years ago is the reverberant question, as such. I will back poetry's capacity to ask us what is so, as against its proficiency at telling us what is so, any day. That in doing so it diminishes the gabble of the ideologue, of whatever stripe, is not its main excellence, but is something for which to be grateful.
I do not know why the committee at issue balloted for Walcott. The Muse, allowed a vote, might bear in mind three things: his ability to write (like Keats, and like Eliot) in the shadow of the eclipse at once of language and of personality; his sense not only of the vividness but also of the imminence of experience, whose index is sensuality; and his alertness to what Seamus Heaney calls 'the sorry deprivation that occurs when any conjectural meaning is divorced from the poem's body of sound'. Just so, all of us are swaddled in mortality, are prompted by stimuli, and are the sound-paths of sense. Poetry of distinction embodies this ensemble as if its free accomplishment were all-but-inevitable. That it should, as in 'Preparing for Exile', be occasioned by the prospect of unspeakable loss, does not, somehow, prevent it from occurring.
The one-and-a-bit poems I have quoted will make it clear that Walcott is the beneficiary of much 'cultural endowment'-the sort of thing which the sippers of sundowners have begrudged 'the natives', and concerning which the newly-liberated feel, to say the least, wary. As religion, degraded, clogs the heart instead of exposing it: as intellectual critique, manipulated, preens the wits it claims to employ: so the 'devices and desires' of poetry can take writer and reader, together, back to some cultural sac. This is worse than a world away from the shock of recognition I mentioned earlier: it is its anti-world. Auden said that it was the poet's business to disenchant and disintoxicate. However beguiling the writer's strategies, and however engaging his adornments, he comes to apply astringents. Poets who do not tend to keep us awake have been telling us lies, and this is no less true if they have been lying while shouting at us.
Recently, the first book of essays on Walcott's poetry has appeared. I have not seen it, but at least one review suggests that it is worth the carriage. It would be a sorry thing if his work were not attended, as Heaney's, for instance, has long been, by intelligent and taxing critique. But the further we go in time, and the more intensely the relationship between word, world, and self is debated, the more paradoxical it would be if the great pallium of interpretation were to be flung, smotheringly, over the shoulders of the poems.
True, Walcott has knocked around with the past, with a vengeance. For at least thirty years, for instance, he has alluded, glancingly or substantially, to The Odyssey, and last year he put a version of the whole damn thing on the stage at Stratford-upon-Avon. Combing through his hundreds of poems, I am taken, almost without exception, by his filial indebtedness to his imaginative begetters. To take those debts away would be like taking away Yeats' debts to the engenderers of his dreams. But who reads Yeats simply to hear him trumpet his progenitors? We want to hear his hurt said in such a way that we know in it something of our own: and, in the good saying of that hurt, something of our healing. What is on offer from Walcott is there on those terms.
Had we been there to ask Dante from what he was exiled, he might have said various things: from Florence; from Heaven; from Beatrice; from youth; from serenity. Had any of us had the wit or trenchancy to press the question, we might have asked him about his exile from the art itself-the thing implied in his own citing 'the skill of the art and the trembling hand'. Such questions attend, sooner or later, all writers of major ambition.
And if ours were a culture disposed to interrogate prophets, we would ask of them not only how accurately they addressed what is so, but how imperatively they drove us into what we have not yet seen. If this were a culture taking its writers seriously, it would fear what they divulged, not because that was, necessarily, menacing, but because it was, inevitably, awesome-and was so because common speech, uncommonly wielded, could take us into zones of realisation which were also zones of transformation.
As things stand, though, we are safe from such interrogations. The spirit of contemporary Australia is such that Walcott and his like will make no difference to our consciousness, whether inside or outside the institutions which claim to foster education. The bitter, but by now commonplace, truth is that to face into the vocation of poetry as Mandelstam did, at his life's cost, is in the present milieu of the West equivalent to diving handcuffed over a cliff.
Anti-humanism has become such a cultural axiom that to protest against it is taken for prating. 'In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man will have his eye wrenched out': Kafka did not say that, but then Kafka did not live in 1993. In his time, you had to invent and sustain your own despair: it was neither institutionalised, nor subsidised by the public.
After which, genially, I commend to you the works of Derek Walcott. They are praised, in handsome terms, by his distinguished peers. They are prolific in autobiographical gesture, in complaint and satire in the face of society's self-lesions, and in all those good postcolonial sentiments which continue to cost him more than they are likely to cost most of their applauders.
Far more importantly than any of that, the poems display the insignia of a human being who, when first he entered the world, entered the word: and who found, soon enough, that they are one. As things go nowadays, that makes him an exile indeed.
This article originally appeared in Eureka Street, April 1993.
Peter Steele SJ was a poet and and academic at the University of Melbourne, and a longtime contributor to Eureka Street. He was awarded the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry in 2010. Peter Steele SJ passed away in June 2012.