Adventures of the letter I
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 33: Such Is Life
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Peter Bishop
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Peter Bishop’s biography and other articles by this writer
In the town of Odessa
there is a garden
and Dvonya is there,
Dvonya whom I love
though I have never been in Odessa...
MORE than thirty years ago, the Jamaican-born American poet Louis Simpson came to Australia and was for a time in Armidale as a guest of the University of New England. He talked to me about being a poet in America in the years of the Vietnam War, how before the war he had written a poem that began with the line There’s no way out, and how during the war he came to know the truth of the line – for himself, for America.
His mother’s family came from Russia, from a province in the south named Volhynia – known to medical students for the water-borne disease Volhynia fever. To escape America he would imagine this place – mud and boards, poverty, the snow falling down the necks of lovers – and remember how he first heard about it, his mother’s voice in the tropical night, a sea breeze stirring the flowers that open at dusk, smelling like perfume:
The voice that spoke of freezing cold
itself was warm and infinitely comforting.
So it is with poetry: whatever numbing horrors
it may speak of, the voice itself
tells of love and infinite wonder.
And this was the way out, the only way: poetry, Russia, Dvonya with her
black hair and eyes
as green as a salad
that you gather in August
between the roots of alder...
To follow the adventures of the letter I – the imagination. To create the language of the letter I – the language that can speak of numbing horrors with a voice of love and infinite wonder.
IN TAKING MY title from Louis Simpson’s 1971 book Adventures of the Letter I, I’m honouring a long reading friendship. Reading is a matter of friendship, as music so often is. There are songs that are acquaintances, and we nod to them as we pass in the street – and there are songs that belong to us, and often we know this belonging from the moment we first hear them, and from then on we know them in our deepest selves, and we interpret our lives through their sound.
Andrei, all my life I’ve been haunted
by Russia – a plain,
a cold wind from the shtetl...
The letter I sometimes speaks from the deepest self – and sometimes from a sly, entertaining self, and sometimes the letter I doesn’t speak in the first person at all. The poem ‘A Friend of the Family’ begins:
Once upon a time in California
the ignorant married the inane
and they lived happily ever after.
But nowadays in the villas
with swimming pools shaped like a kidney
technicians are beating their wives.
They are accusing each other of mental cruelty.
And the children of those parents
are longing for a rustic community.
They want to get back to the good old days.
It was the time of flower power and the Vietnam War, and the first person starts to peep out when the poet thinks of Chichikov, the hyperactive hero on a bizarre mission in Gogol’s novel Dead Souls:
These nights when a space-rocket rises
and everyone sighs ‘That’s Progress!’
I say to myself ‘That’s Chichikov.’
‘Hey Chichikov, where are you going?’
‘I’m off to the moon,’ says Chichikov.
‘What will you do when you get there?’
‘How do I know?’ says Chichikov.
And then the poem plunges – an abrupt change of tempo, tonality – and the voice speaking from the depths of the letter I:
Andrei, all my life I’ve been haunted
by Russia – a plain,
a cold wind from the shtetl.
I can hear the wheels of the train.
It is going to Radom,
it is going to Jerusalem...
In the night where candles shine
I have a luminous family...
people with their arms round each other
forever.
So many personalities of the letter I can be contained within a single imagination – an endless conversation, sometimes a fight, a hubbub... But always there must be an encompassing I, an I that holds together these multiple and often contradictory personalities – and sometimes we hear the voice of this encompassing I: Andrei, all my life I’ve been haunted by Russia...