SIMPSON, Louis (Aston Marantz)

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Nationality: American. Born: Jamaica, British West Indies, 27 March 1923. Education: Munro College, Jamaica, 1933–40, Cambridge Higher Schools Certificate, 1939; Columbia University, New York, B.S. 1948, A.M. 1950. Ph.D. 1959. Military Service: U.S. Army, 1943–45: Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Family: Married 1) Jeanne Claire Rogers in 1949 (divorced 1954), one son; 2) Dorothy Roochvarg in 1955 (divorced 1979), one son and one daughter; 3) Miriam Bachner in 1985 (divorced 1998). Career: Editor, Bobbs-Merrill Publishing Company, New York, 1950–55; instructor, Columbia University, 1955–59; professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, 1959–67. Professor of English, 1967–91, distinguished professor, 1991–93, and since 1993 professor emeritus, State University of New York, Stony Brook. Awards: American Academy in Rome fellowship, 1957; Hudson Review fellowship, 1957; Edna St. Vincent Millay award, 1960; Guggenheim fellowship, 1962, 1970; American Council of Learned Societies grant, 1963; Pulitzer prize, 1964; Columbia University medal for Excellence, 1965; American Academy award, 1976; Institute of Jamaica Centenary award, 1980; National Jewish Book award, 1981; Elmer Holmes Bobst award, 1987; Harold Morton Landon award for translation, 1997. D.H.L.: Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, 1977. D.Litt.: Hampden Sydney College, 1990. Address: P.O. Box 119, Setauket, New York 11733–0119, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

The Arrivistes: Poems 1940–1949. New York, Fine Editions Press, 1949.

Good News of Death and Other Poems. New York, Scribner, 1955.

A Dream of Governors. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1959.

At the End of the Open Road. Middletown, Connecticut Wesleyan University Press, 1963.

Five American Poets, with others, edited by Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. London, Faber, 1963.

Selected Poems. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1965; London, Oxford University Press, 1966.

Adventures of the Letter 1. London, Oxford University Press, and New York, Harper, 1971.

The Invasion of Italy. Northampton, Massachusetts, Main Street, 1976.

Searching for the Ox. New York, Morrow, and London, Oxford University Press, 1976.

Armidale. Brockport, New York, BOA, 1979.

Caviare at the Funeral. New York, Watts, 1980; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981.

The Best Hour of the Night. New Haven, Connecticut, Ticknor and Fields, 1983.

People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–1983. Brockport, New York, BOA, 1983; London, Secker and Warburg, 1985.

Poems. Merrick, New York, Cross-Cultural Communications, 1989.

Collected Poems. New York, Paragon House, 1990.

In the Room We Share. New York, Paragon House, 1990.

Wei Wei and Other Friends. Francestown, New Hampshire, Typographeum, 1990.

Jamaica Poems. Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Press of Appletree Alley, 1993.

The King My Father's Wreck. Brownsville, Oregon, Story Line Press, 1995.

There You Are: Poems. Brownsville, Oregon, Story Line Press, 1995.

Recordings: Louis Simpson Reads from His Own Works, Carillon, 1961; Today's Poets 1, with others, Folkways, 1967; Physical Universe. Watershed. 1985.

Plays

The Father Out of the Machine: A Masque, in Chicago Review, winter, 1950.

Good News of Death, in Hudson Review (New York), summer 1952.

Andromeda, in Hudson Review (New York), winter 1956.

The Breasts of Tiresias, adaptation of the play by Apollinaire, in Modern French Theatre, edited by Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth. New York, Dutton, 1964; as Modern French Plays, London, Faber, 1965.

Novel

Riverside Drive. New York, Atheneum, 1962.

Other

James Hogg: A Critical Study. Edinburg, Oliver and Boyd, and New York, St. Martin's Press, 1962.

Air with Armed Men (autobiography). London, London Magazine Editions, 1972; as North of Jamaica, New York, Harper, 1972.

Three on the Tower: The Lives and Works of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams. New York, Morrow, 1975.

A Revolution in Taste: Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell. New York, Macmillan, 1978; as Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell, London, Macmillan, 1979.

A Company of Poets. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1981.

The Character of the Poet. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1986.

Selected Prose. New York, Paragon House, 1989.

Ships Going into the Blue: Essays and Notes on Poetry. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Editor, with Donald Hall and Robert Pack, The New Poets of England and America. New York, Meridian, 1957; London, New English Library, 1974.

Editor, An Introduction to Poetry. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1986.

Editor, Modern Poets of France: A Bilingual Anthology. Ashland, Oregon, Story Line Press, 1997.

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Bibliography: Louis Simpson: A Reference Guide by William H. Roberson, Boston, Hall, 1980.

Manuscript Collection: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Critical Studies: Louis Simpson by Ronald Moran, New York, Twayne, 1972, and Four Poets and the Emotive Imagination by Moran and George S. Lensing, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1976; The World's Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets by Peter Stitt, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1985; On Louis Simpson: Depths beyond Happiness edited by Hank Lazer, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1988; "Great Experiments: The Poetry of Louis Simpson" by Henry Taylor, in Hollins Critic (Hollins College, Virginia), 27 (3), June 1990; "Re-Viewing Louis Simpson" by James. M. Cox, in Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 31 (1), winter 1995.

Louis Simpson comments:

I have written about many subjects: war, love, American landscape, and history. For several years I have been writing in free form. Influences: many poets, English and American—particularly Eliot and Whitman. I believe that poetry rises from the inner life of the poet and is expressed in original images and rhythms. Also, the language of poetry should be closely related to the language in which men actually think and speak.

(1980) My earliest published work was in traditional forms. At the end of the 1950s I began writing in irregular, unrhymed lines; I was attempting to write verse that would sound like speech. My subjects have frequently been taken from life, and in many of my poems there is a narrative or dramatic element. I aim at transparency, to let the action, feeling, and idea come through with no interference. Writing well is like meditating; it requires rising above the merely personal.

(1990) I would like my poems to seem as true as a story by Chekhov … or a poem by Chaucer.

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Louis Simpson's Selected Poems contained portions from his previous volumes as well as a dozen works in "New Poems." Two earlier volumes, published only four years apart, revealed his remarkable growth. Dealing with war, love, history, the emptiness of modern life, and the American in Europe, A Dream of Governors was knowing and intelligent but somewhat too formal, avoiding simultaneously the pressure of passion and the perspective of vision.

At the End of the Open Road, which received the Pulitzer, was a different matter entirely. Partly under the influence of the deep imagists, led by Robert Bly, Simpson found the key to the meaning and power of his themes. The development of the poem from the routine to the timeless, from situation to response, was no longer a matter of mere machinery but rather of vital shock. It was not simply that his style was getting more experimental but rather that his flexibility was a sign of growth in the character and thought of the speaker, an openness to life whereby the poet risked being changed by what he experienced. Simpson was on his way to becoming a major poet.

We have in this volume another group of poems about America, but they are much more penetrating than those in A Dream of Governors. "In California," for example, begins, "Here I am, troubling the dream coast / With my New York face." "In the Suburbs" begins, "There's no way out. / You were born to waste your life." There are three poems at the end inspired by Whitman, who is also hailed in "In California." Simpson knows that "the Open Road goes [now] to the used-car lot" and that, since the past keeps repeating itself, it cannot be canceled out; finally, "At the end of the open road we come to ourselves." Simpson had come a long way from the somewhat easy stance of Sherwood Anderson in "Hot Night on Water Street" and "The Boarder" from A Dream of Governors. America's emptiness was now seen in its historical context, and thus the poet's satire had cause and direction.

There also is a group of four wonderful love poems—"Summer Morning," "The Silent Lover," "Birch," and "The Sea and the Forest"—which are by far more meaningful and passionate than Simpson's earlier erotic lyrics. In the first named, for example, the speaker remembers having been with a girl in a hotel room fifteen years earlier, and he feels the weight of the intervening time, concluding, "So I have spoiled my chances. / For what? Sheer laziness, / The thrill of an assignation, / My life that I hold in secret." Finally, there is the remarkable piece called "American Poetry," a marvel of concise meaning, which I quote in full:

Whatever it is, it must have
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.
 
Like the shark, it contains a shoe.
It must swim for miles through the desert
Uttering cries that are almost human.

Simpson had digested the indigestible and was now embarked on his long swim through the desert.

Two years later in "The Laurel Tree," from "New Poems," we find Simpson realizing that "I must be patient with shapes / Of automobile fenders and ketchup bottles. / These things are the beginning / of things not visible to the naked eye." In "Things," in the confrontation between the speaker and an unearthly visitor, the latter tells him, "Things which to us in the pure state are mysteries, / Are your simplest articles of household use." The speaker replies, "I have suspected / The Mix-master knows more than I do, / The air conditioner is the better poet."

The spirituality of the mundane is surely a Whitmanesque-not to say Zen—theme, and Simpson returned in his next book, Adventures of the Letter I, to his obsession with America. In "Doubting," for example, he says, "I look on the negro as myself, I accuse myself / of sociopathic tendencies, I accuse my accusers." Here he has wittily captured the authentic Whitman mood and cadence, but then the feeling falls and he becomes depressed. Once more he must learn to be patient, he says, and "to breathe in, breathe out, / and to sit by the bed and watch."

Adventures of the Letter I is a marvelous and varied book, fulfilling all of Simpson's earlier promise and carrying it a stage further. It begins, for example, with a strange and fablelike section on Volhynia in which the poet creates an imaginary version of that part of the Ukraine his mother came from. There also is a section called "Individuals," which contains an effective narrative portrait, "Vandergast and the Girl," reminiscent in subject and tone of Edwin Arlington Robinson. In order to digest the trash of ordinary life, to see the light of meaning in the trivial, Simpson had to go into himself and learn to be patient, trusting "in silence" and not believing "in ideas / unless they are unavoidable" ("An American Peasant").

In Searching for the Ox, a book in which Simpson moves out on his own to develop what he sees as a plain, transparent narrative and dramatic style, the desert swim seems at moments to be wavering. There is, on the one hand, an emphasis in his preface to this volume on the rendering of human experience and of the world we live in, but there is also a strange note of detachment at the conclusion when he recalls his former selves as they appear in some of these poems: "But I have changed; I am different from the boy and the man I used to be… These changes cry out for a life that does not change. The less we are at home in the world, the more we bear witness to that other life." Paying attention to his cue, we are not surprised to find that the style of this book is not simply clear and direct, the language of speech, but that it also is curiously level, limpid, and even deliberately flat. The recurring theme of homelessness, of feeling out of the world, becomes more intelligible when we read, for example, "When I look back at myself / it is like looking through a window / and seeing another person" ("The Springs at Gadara") or "At dusk when the lamps go on / I have stayed outside and watched / the shadow-life of the interior, / feeling myself apart from it" ("Searching for the Ox").

Passion and trust in silence and patience alike were at a low ebb. One could only hope that the consequent shrinking of the ordinary would prove temporary, for there were a number of suggestions that Simpson's intention was otherwise. He explained that the book's title had its origin in a series of Zen illustrations whose message is the mastery and elimination of self (in the oriental sense of "ego"), a message that is not coincidentally related to Eliot's "objective correlative." The result for Simpson is a poetry that focuses on ordinary life not simply to reflect it but even more to evoke feelings and ideas about it, if not to like life then to see it in the scheme of things as part of a larger vision. As with Eliot's often misunderstood concept, the intent is not to be passionless but to allow the object to embody and evoke the passion. His confessed models are—in addition to Whitman—Wordsworth, Chekhov, and William Carlos Williams. He would reject any either/or choice between art and life, between pure beauty or pure alienation.

Simpson clearly is engaged in a significant struggle, and his next two major collections, Caviare at the Funeral and The Best Hour of the Night, bear its marks. Although he continues to explore memories of his Jamaican childhood, relates his mother's tales of her own childhood, and puzzles over the mysteries of time and art, he nevertheless continues also to plumb the emptiness of the ordinary without transformation, still in a dry, flat tone. It is not simply the emptiness of the lives of shop girls, soldiers on leave, or cocktail waitresses and of the gas stations, bars, and hotels where their stories are played out, but it also includes suburban couples as well, their adulteries and the shopping malls and restaurants where they live their lives. Rarely does the speaker accuse himself, reserving for himself instead the role of wry observer.

An exception is "Armidale," a prose piece about a visit to Australia, and the four poems that accompany it in Caviare at the Funeral. There is a vigor here, partly produced by the frontierlike milieu of the place and partly by the moving effect of this milieu upon the speaker. Another exception is "Physical Universe," from The Best Hour of the Night, which, although narrated in the third person, represents the speaker finding a Zen-like delight once again in the ordinary, a delight he is, unfortunately, somewhat less likely to find in the lives of his neighbors. But perhaps it is, nevertheless, a good sign that reintegration is on the way.

This impression is borne out by Simpson's 1990 volume In the Room We Share, a collection of forty-nine poems plus a prose memoir of his and his wife's visit to Italy to attend to his aging and ailing mother. What we see here is the more frequent success—despite the occasional risk of flatness—of Simpson's quest to transform ordinary life embodied in ordinary language into a transcendent vision. In "Harry and Grace," for example, while the speaker acknowledges that he has material for the expected satire of life in the Hamptons on Long Island, he deliberately rejects this approach and, responding to a flight of geese in the flashing sunset, takes his place in line for the usual outdoor cookout. "The People Next Door" finds the speaker, without losing his sense of difference, laughing with those who laugh and mourning with those who mourn. In "Summer Comes to the Three Villages" God smells the smoke of summer "and pronounces it good." In his memoir, when his mother objects to his radical desertion of "beauty" and escapism, he replies that "as in a Chekhov story it should show the poetry in common things." We see that Simpson has discovered how to mine this rich ore more consistently.

Wei Wei and Other Friends, also published in 1990, is a chapbook containing three new poems. "The Saying," a short poem about meeting a man at a party who reminds the speaker of someone he knew during his Paris days, has a touch of whimsy, the man protesting that he does not know what the speaker is talking about. "Wei Wei" is a five-page portrait of Marjorie, a woman who "served during World War II / as liaison with Chiang Kaishek" and who bores her visitors with her rambling stories of that time. The speaker's mind glazes over, and he wanders off to her reproachful glance. She drives people away because she expects so much attention, and he finds himself unable to express his condolences when her husband dies: "Life isn't like a novel, with people / rushing into each other's arms / and asking to be forgiven." "Three Chimneys," just over a page in length, is a portrait of three sisters—Carol, Beverly, and Jo Ann. The focus is on the last woman, who is a dental assistant, and her boyfriend. The speaker is sitting in the dentist's chair, awaiting Dr. Weiss and his drill. It would seem that Jo Ann is not yet ready for marriage, for her boyfriend only wants to sit and watch television, while she likes to read books. The speaker concludes dryly, "I think it's more personal. / Sex. It usually is."

While this work continues Simpson's vein of suburban observations, his 1993 volume Jamaica Poems returns to his early life in Jamaica. Because it begins with a prose memoir, which is continued in The King My Father's Wreck (1995), and contains fourteen poems published in his previous volumes, it serves as a useful compendium of his work on the theme.

There You Are, another work published in 1995, is divided into three sections plus an opening poem, "To a Russian Poet," which laments the oncoming commercialization of post-Soviet Russia and concludes with the Zen koan "What's the sound of one hand clapping?" "Objects of the Stream," prefaced with a William James quotation about the persistence of memory in the present, contains memories of school days, the 1960s, student uprisings, and Existentialism, among other things. This section also includes the title poem, a hallucinatory depiction of French Jews being rounded up for Auschwitz: "So tomorrow, there you are, / And they walk you to the station …" The middle section, "The Walker on Main Street," returns to life in the contemporary suburbs and is prefaced with a quotation from Chaucer about plain speaking. Here the poet evokes his underlying mundane/transcendent theme, the title poem describing a strange man who used to walk through the town dressed always in the same winter clothing even in summer. The concluding section, "A Clearing," is prefaced with a quotation from Amos Oz about the difficulty of renouncing all desire. The title poem tells of the speaker's time as a visiting professor in Australia and of leaving a party to walk outside in the night: "I had ceased to exist. / There was only whatever it was / that was looking at the sky / and listening to the wind." We have returned to the Zen koan with which the volume began, showing that Simpson remains one of our most significant lyric poets.

—Norman Friedman