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Unsentimental Education: Coming to Terms With Richard Howard
An essay by Jeremy Glazier
Reprinted from the Summer 2003 Ohioana Quarterly
In his foreword to the 1969 edition of Alone with America: Essays on the Art
of Poetry in the United States Since 1950, Richard Howard wrote, “[I]f I
intended to go on writing my own poetry, I discovered some years ago,
there was a choice of coming to terms with the work of my contemporaries,
my elders, my friends, or having no terms of my own to come to.”1 It is with
such a choice in mind that I set out to come to terms with my own
teacher - a contemporary, an elder, and, I hope he will allow, a friend.
Professor Howard, whose lectures at Columbia I attended from 1998 to
2000, has said that “If we are to save poetry, which means if we are to savor
it, we must restore poetry to that status of seclusion and even secrecy that
characterizes only our authentic pleasures and identifies only our intimately
valued actions.”2 Preston Merchant, in a review of Howard’s book Trappings,
finds it ironic that “Howard believes that poetry should indeed be a secret,
not available for general consumption. Its value should lie in the fact of its
unavailability.” He points to Howard’s various roles - “as editor of the Paris
Review and Western Humanities Review, professor at Columbia, selector of
manuscripts for various presses, frequent lecturer at conferences and
universities, and tireless champion of a growing number of struggling and
established practitioners of the art.”3
Merchant doesn’t mention Howard’s role as translator from the French -
though throughout his career he has translated more than 150 books, some
of which would still be unavailable to English-speaking audiences without
his midwifery. Even so, I find neither irony nor contradiction in his stance.
One of the most important lessons I learned (and am still learning) from
Richard Howard is the solitary, and sometimes necessarily lonely, nature of
the art that consumes my life.
In her Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, published as In Defense of the
Imagination, Helen Gardner defines reading as “essentially a solitary
occupation”: “[O]ur reception of a book,” she writes, “is an individual and
personal experience.”4 According to Howard, ‘individual’ is a word that
“tends to mean the opposite”; it would seem to mean “that which cannot be
divided-but the individual is always divided from the rest.”5 Howard’s
lectures on poetry, music, and the arts were the most intellectually challenging adventures I have ever undertaken. No, ‘undertaken’ makes it sound
funereal; they were nothing of the sort. I might instead say that I was
overtaken by them. In any case, they were ecstatic experiences-though even
that contains a hint of death, the out-of-body experience. (During a lecture
on Keats and Shelley, Howard said that “being dead is the nearest thing to
being ecstatically alive.” I was beside myself.) Few things have sustained me,
intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, as his lectures have during the intervening
years. The notebook I kept during that critical time continues to be a
source of study, discovery, and surprise. It is my Prospero’s book, filled with
glyphs, some of which I have yet to master. Every day I struggle to come to
terms with modernity and my relation to it. It’s as if I am a savage beholding
civilization for the first time every time: “Modernity,” Howard has said,
“is always a return to the unacceptable primitive.” I have no qualms about
being a slave to knowledge; like Caliban, I was given “Water with berries in
’t; and [taught] how to name the bigger light.”6 Naming only implies
understanding, though; it doesn’t guarantee it. Richard Howard has taught
me the value of occasionally letting go of ‘meaning’: though “one cannot
arrive at meaning without experience and cannot arrive at experience
without finding in it meaning,” Professor Howard exhorts us to recall
Roland Barthes’ axiom that “literature must struggle against the temptations
of meaning.”
My first lecture with
Richard Howard was a
course on Primitivism in
Literature. It was the
third of a series of three
courses on the roots of
Modernity; the previous
lectures were on Infantilism
and Insanity. We
began the semester with
Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness and ended,
fittingly enough, with
Mircea Eliade’s The Myth
of the Eternal Return.
Between these book-ends
we explored the periphery
of the primitive:
Andre Gide’s The
Immoralist, Freud’s Totem & Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents
(“Freud’s project,” according to Howard, is “identifying the moment of our
civilizing. It begins with the son’s and brothers’ slaying and eating the father,
which produces a feeling of guilt. With guilt comes civilization. There is no
civilization without repression.”), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, D. H.
Lawrence’s “The Woman Who Rode Away,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s
Electra, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste-Land, Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha, William
Faulkner’s Old Man. We pored over the ‘primitive’ art of the Fauves and the
German Expressionists, Emil Nolde, Ernst Kirchner, and Paula Modersohn-Becker.
We heard, as if for the first time, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and
Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun - pieces that, when premiered,
caused riots to break out among the ‘civilized’ audiences. As with other
artistic media in the birth-pangs of Modernism, the new music was scandalous:
“Scandal,” noted Howard, “usually accompanies the explosion of the
Dionysian, then the absorption of the scandal. Today, to us, these seem the
most cultivated, refined, artistic interpretations of the problem [of Modernity].
But to the listeners/readers/audience in the first decade of the 20th
century it was absolutely barbaric.” Later he would remind us that “shock is a
rejuvenation of an atrophied aesthetic.”
The second lecture course was called Difficult Love: “An examination,
across genres and national boundaries and several centuries, of that central
western confusion of CARITAS, AGAPE, and EROS, which has generated
so much of our literature and which is responsible still for the specific
agonies of ROMANCE.”7 Rarely have my own romantic agonies seemed so
specific. We began the course with an engagement of Robert Browning
(“Porphyria’s Lover”), Charles Baudelaire (“Carrion”), and Walt Whitman
(“The Sleepers”). Fifteen weeks and twenty-one novels later, love was no
less difficult than when we started, but as Howard said, “Difficult love
begins to merge and be confused with Easy love . . . . Difficulty Conquered is
followed by Easiness Recovered.” We examined two versions of Medea (by
Euripides and Anouilh) and three versions of the Phaedra story (by Racine
and Seneca, as well as Euripides’ Hippolytus). Book V of Dante’s Inferno, the
story of Paolo and Francesca, was followed by Shakespeare’s Antony and
Cleopatra (“Antony is a mortal god . . . . At his death, in Cleopatra’s arms, he
ceases to be a god and she - rising to an apotheosis - becomes
one . . . . Cleopatra is the most formidable and subtle of Shakespeare’s
women…she is endlessly in the process of becoming. Her comic energy
rivals her erotic energy, and we lose something of her character if we regard
her only as a tragic figure.”).
Skipping several centuries, we read William Hazlitt’s brilliant Liber Amoris
and George Meredith’s unconventional sonnet sequence Modern Love
(Howard said he could have called it Modern Marriage). Colette’s Cheri and
The Last of Cheri and Gide’s Strait Is the Gate brought us into the twentieth
century. After stories by Anton Chekhov (“The Kiss”) and Henry James
(“The Pupil”), we took a step back to the 18th century for Choderlos de
Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, an epistolary novel: the “18th century form of
tragedy . . . it eliminates love and substitutes eroticism. The couple is sealed not
by love but by fucking. . . The pleasure
principle and the will to power are totally
interconnected.” Perhaps this novel more than
any other exemplifies Howard’s maxim,
adapted from Nietzsche, that “Love is
justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.”
Again, we consulted Dr. Freud - this time his
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Jean
Genet (Our Lady of the Flowers) and Pauline
Reage (Story of O) delivered us into the dark
recesses of an already sado-masochistic
enterprise (“eroto-genic and hysterio-genic
zones are identical”). “The value of difficult
love,” we learned, “is that there is no demarcation
of inner or outer,” interior or exterior-it
is just as difficult to love ourselves as it is to
love others. In fact, “Autoeroticism [is] the narcissistic object choice: it is not
the genesis of the erotic, but rather the object” of it. We have no choice but to
love one another (and ourselves) with only the greatest difficulty, realizing
(hopefully?) that “Every minute in which love is frustrated or missing is a lost
opportunity for fulfillment.”
* * * * *
My second-year lectures with Richard Howard were a pair: Arts of
Ecstasy and Arts of the Ordinary (or, Simply the Thing I Am Shall Make Me
Live). In the first, we investigated “that pervasive experience of Being
Beside Oneself [Gr. ekstasis], Transcending the Ego, Communicating with
the Divine as the arts have represented it in nature as well as by certain
negative self-cancellations associated with modernity. The endeavor is to
afford a recognition, even an identification, of the Sublime.”8 As one might
expect, most of the readings were poems - or could be considered poems.
The poems ranged from Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, Fragment B,
William Blake’s Songs, William Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence,”
the odes of Keats and Shelley, Dickinson (“Because that you are
going . . .”), Whitman, Frost, and Stevens. Often the focus was on a single
poem, or even an excerpt (passages from The Prelude, for example), since, as
Howard has said, “what is grand is necessarily obscure. The Sublime is
always an aesthetic of surprise. Wonder, Surprise, the Sudden: their power
over us depends on their not being common.” There are, perhaps, exceptions.
Emily Dickinson spent twenty years of her life in a period of what
Richard Howard.
Howard called “ ‘willed stasis’ - terror, fright, immobility.” It is during this
“flood period” that she produced, with break-neck speed, many of her most
sublime pieces. It was not without its dangers. Dickinson was “constantly
aware of the dangers of language (‘peril’ is found in both ‘experience’ and
‘experiment’).” We experienced these experiments in peril and sublimity in
the land- and seascape paintings of J. M. W. Turner (“Landscape has its
memories (fossils, etc.) buried within its form. The visual presence of the
past in the present.”) and the music of Wagner and Scriabin. In the final
scene of Tristan und Isolde, the lovers literarily (if not literally) become one
with each other. The heightened Romanticism of Prometheus or The Poem of
Ecstasy - in which tonality has already begun to come unhinged, years before
Schoenberg was to complete the “emancipation of the dissonance” - demonstrates music’s capacity to express “consciousness itself [as] the source
of unhappiness and sublimity.” ‘Withdrawn’ is the term Professor Howard
uses for the modern sublime, which “destroys the slavery of pleasure.”
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and the conclusion of To the Lighthouse are
supreme examples (perhaps contradictions, too) of the modern sensibility
that “memory and narrative are antagonistic to an aesthetic of wonder.”
Experience and loss are conflated in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable,
“Modernism with a vengeance,” proving that “death is an image rather than
an event” and reminding us that “there is no greater pain than to remember
happy times in misery.”
Of all the works I encountered during our “consideration
of experience untransfigured,” 9 few had as
profound a transfiguration on the way I view the
world as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie
Sarraute. It was Richard Howard, along with
Susan Sontag, who championed these French
nouveau romanciers in the 1950s and ’60s and
introduced me to their work in the late 1990s.10
Professor Howard translated not only Robbe-Grillet’s most important novels (The Erasers,
The Voyeur, Jealousy, and In the Labyrinth; he
translated some of the later novels as well,
including Repetitions, published just this
year) but also the screenplay to Last Year at
Marienbad, which had a lasting effect on the avant-garde cinema.
What Robbe-Grillet writes about his art form in For a New Novel (also
translated by Richard Howard), can also be said of poetry: “Each novelist,
each novel must invent its own form. No recipe can replace this continual
reflection. The book makes its own rules for itself, and for itself alone.
Indeed the movement of its style must often lead to jeopardizing them,
breaking them, even exploding them.”11 While “late in the 20th century, the
experience of ecstasy is almost always related in terms of eros,” writers like
Robbe-Grillet (at least in his early, pre-sadomasochistic novels) or
Nathalie Sarraute achieve a sort of antiecstasy
by fixating, not on eros, but on
almost neurotic impulses (“Neuroses are
asocial structures,” notes Howard, and the
works of these two certainly smack of the
asocial). In her introduction to Tropisms,
Sarraute speaks of her subject as “certain
inner ‘movements’ [. . . ] which are hidden
under the commonplace, harmless
appearances of every instance of our
lives.”12 Elsewhere she calls this substance
“psychic magma”; here she calls
it ‘tropisms’ due to its “instinctive
nature, similar to that of the movements
made by certain living organisms
under the influence of outside stimuli, such as light or heat.”13 Other
outside stimuli introduced into my own psychic magma by Howard were
the works of Henri Michaux (“The bird’s ravings have no interest for the
tree.”14 ), Norman Manea, and especially E. M. Cioran, a sort of hybrid
Baudelaire/Nietzsche, whose Notebooks are only the most recent of his work
to be translated by Howard. Cioran, whose “asocial structures” are an
anathema to, and yet fully a product of and participant in, our modernity, is
a self-proclaimed barbarian-at-the-gates: “For two thousand years, Jesus has
revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.”15 About Baudelaire,
whose Les Fleurs du Mal he translated, Howard wrote that the “poetry
concerns us much more, and much more valuably, by its strangeness than
by its familiarity: its authentic relation to us is its remoteness. Wanting to
keep Baudelaire, I wanted to keep him at a certain distance.”16 The same
might be said of Cioran, whose work, of all translations, “has afforded
[him] the most crucial experience.”17
* * * * *
 If I can claim to have had any crucial experience, I owe it to Richard
Howard. His poetry and aesthetic have indelibly influenced my own. His
most recent of twelve books of poems is Talking Cures; the title “is the old
name for psychoanalysis, and alludes to the therapeutic powers of speech
under controlled circumstances.”18 In “Elementary Principles at Seventy-
Two,” Howard writes:
When we consider the stars
(what else can we do with them?) and even
recognize among them sidereal
father-figures (it was our
consideration that arranged them so),
they will always outshine us, for we change.19
Seven years earlier, though, in a poem entitled “At 65,” he had denied
this change:
that garrulous presence
we sometimes call the self, sometimes deny
it exists at all despite its carping
monologue, is the same as when we stole
the pears, spied on mother in the bath, ran
away from home.20
Again, there is essentially no conflict or contradiction here. In retrospect,
Like Orpheus, like Mrs. Lot, you
will be petrified - astonished - to learn
memory is endless, life very long,
and you - you are immortal after all.21
Yet even this stance might seem a radical departure from the poet’s early
vision. In his second book, The Damages, a poem entitled “Intimations of
Mortality,” he asks:
How else do we know what we are,
Save by tokens of what we have ruined?
How else read right the signs
Of our surrender to ourselves . . . ?22
 In surrendering to Howard’s uncompromising education, I have given
my former self up to ruin, in the hopes of understanding what I am. His
body of work informs almost every aspect of my knowledge. His collection
of critical essays on forty-one of his contemporaries, Alone with America
(first published in 1969 and reprinted in 1980), is a storehouse of wisdom,
admonitions, and encouragement that is a cornerstone of my own understanding
of American poetry in the second half of the 20th century. The
great advantages of the book are its consistent perspective, its keen eye, its
authoritative voice - to say nothing of the spirit of exploration and discovery
that pervades the analysis. In it, one can witness the emergence of many
of Howard’s own concerns. He reads John Ashbery’s play The Heroes, for
example, as “almost a catalogue of the modernist principles…a postsymbolist
enchiridion: the poem as simultaneous structure, impersonal,
autonomous, released from the charge of expression, of assertion; the poem
as arbitrary construct, absurd, self-destroying, no longer aspiring to convince
or even to hoax; the poem as an agent of transformation, equal in
value to the poet himself and therefore capable of changing him; the poem
as means of escape from identity, leading into a world of contemplation,
indifference, bliss.”23
The bliss is in the contemplation, in the indifference to
the world that is not of that contemplation. Contemplation is a sacred space
(it contains a temple); Howard reminds us that “our relationship (as
Westerners) to the cornerstone of our culture (Greek) is constantly being
revisited and revised” and that “no particular distinction was made in Greek
culture between the social and the religious (between the theater and the
temple).” Elsewhere Howard has conjured up
the image
of an unvisitable shrine
where obscure artisans have succeeded
in transcending the five destinies
by which we claim to be guided:
mind body nation language home. This is
how we learn, by just such unseen
art, to approach the divine. 24
How can the student ever hope to approach the master (who, while not
divine in one sense, is certainly in another), or come to terms with such
erudition - after all, that is what I had hoped to do at the outset, though it
is clear to me by now that I have failed. Was it futile even to try? Poetry
shows us “what it is like to be alive,”25 if only we take the time to come to
terms with it, seriously and unsentimentally: “To be an artist is to fail as no
other can.” Richard Howard taught me the difference between futility and
failure - “failure implies the possibility of success.”
Jeremy Glazier is on the faculty of Ohio Dominican University.
Endnotes
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