A Poet's Novel
By PHILLIP LOPATE
Among those who cherish his tender, translucent, humane
poetry, Charles Reznikoff is a venerated figure, a role model of integrity and
sustained excellence. During most of his lifetime (1894-1976), he had been so
underrated and neglected that he developed a kind of stoical, resigned shell,
going his own way. In person (I saw him on numerous occasions before he died),
Reznikoff gave off an obliging, almost meekly humble impression, but there was
a stubborn will underneath; his dedication to his art was unshakeable. You can
see it from his correspondence, that remarkable, moving record in Selected Letters of Charles Reznikoff,
1917-1976 (Black Sparrow Press, 1997). If publishers would not accept his
poetry manuscripts, he would print them himself. He also had that grain of
selfishness that all writers need, however annoying to their loved ones. Though
his wife Marie yearned for years to quit her high school teaching job, Charles,
the most devoted, uxorious of husbands, nevertheless would not become a
go-getter. He refused to practice law, though he had a degree. Instead, he held
down jobs that would afford him the mental freedom to pursue poetry and
fiction: he wrote tedious legal definitions for textbooks, sold hats, and, ill-suited
as he was temperamentally to service the Hollywood dream factory, polished
screenplays for his boyhood friend, producer Albert Lewin.
Towards the end of his life, he was taken up by the younger members of the New
York School of poetry and the descendents of the Objectivists, and treated
reverently by them, like a fragile, priceless grandparent, a last link to the
pioneers of the 20s and 30s. Reznikoff, glad for the appreciation, did not know
quite what to make of it, just as he had been puzzled decades earlier when
championed by Louis Zukofsky (whose abstruse criticism he could barely
decipher) as a sort of instinctual Objectivist poet. The problem with that
annexation was that Reznikoff was no primitive: he was extremely intelligent,
rigorous, and, in his own non-showy way, committed to an ambitiously austere
aesthetic program of his own.
Thematically, his work showed a lively, unsentimental sympathy for those
underdogs in the urban sweepstakes: the laborer, the beggar, the immigrant, the
storeowner trying to eke out a living. Stylistically, he hewed to the diction
of ordinary American speech, carving his material into tight, haiku-like images
and wry vignettes that could best convey the often comical sufferings,
struggles, contradictions, and consolations of the everyday human beings he
observed, including himself. He also went to sources such as legal documents
(for his long two-part prose poem Testimony),
historical records (for the book-length poem Holocaust) and Biblical stories (King David) for his often unsparing, sometimes gruesomely
realistic, verses.
His poetry, immensely appealing as it is, lacks only one
quality that has so far kept it from being fully embraced by the academic
literary establishment: “difficulty.” There is nothing remotely arcane about it
that would require professional interpretation; it speaks for itself… or so it
would at first appear. I would argue, however, that Reznikoff’s work is very
sophisticated and requires a good deal of unpacking, precisely because it seems
so simple and straightforward. If true for the poetry, then how much more so
for the fiction.
Reznikoff wrote two novels: the first, the one you have in your hand, was
published in 1930, just as the Great Depression was getting under way. One
associates this writer with the Depression, partly because of the grey air of
diminished expectations and pinched circumstances that seem to unify his
characters, though their chronic money troubles had predated the 1929 stock
market crash and would outlive the postwar boom years. Actually, 1930 was a
highpoint for Reznikoff: he had won the hand of the lovely Marie Syrkin and
convinced her to divorce her second husband, and he had finished his first
novel, which the respected firm of Charles Boni agreed to publish.
(His second novel, The Manner “Music,”
was found in his desk after he died and published posthumously in 1977. It is
very bleak, set in the Depression years as well, and full of fine cutaway
descriptions of the city, as two old friends engage in marathon walks,
conversing about their dashed dreams and the bitterness of married life,
stopping only for the occasional coffee and Danish in a cafeteria. It has many
grace notes, but does not hold together nearly as well as his first.)
_____
By the Waters of Manhattan is a
diptych. Part One tells the story of Sarah Yetta, who emigrated on her own from
Russia to the United States and at great personal sacrifice established a
family in New York City. In his letters Reznikoff referred to this narrative as
his mother’s autobiography. It seems that Sarah Reznikoff wrote an account of
her life called “Early History of a Seamstress,” and her son reworked this
material into the first part of By the
Waters of Manhattan, just as he would later rework the harsh documentary
summaries of 19th-century legal American cases into the poems that would
comprise Testimony. And, like a dry
run for Testimony, oftentimes
horrific events such as serious illness, death, betrayals, pogroms, hostility
between family members, and swindles by trusted partners, are told with a
deadpan terseness, as vignettes offered up in the no-nonsense manner of oral
storytelling: the shocks of fortune laid out and the after-shocks allowed to
register in the reader’s mind, with no attempt to milk emotion.
The language of this first part has a slightly foreign inflection. The New York Times reviewer who panned the
book complained: “Too often one feels as if one were reading a jerky and not
particularly felicitous translation.” The anonymous reviewer was correct to sniff
out a “translated” quality in the prose—Reznikoff was channeling his mother’s
immigrant voice—but wrong to think it was an accident or mistake. Nowadays we are much more aware of the
contributions that Jewish-American writers such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud
and Philip Roth have made to our literature by twisting and torquing the
language and giving it a playful Yiddish tinge. We have also become, I suspect,
more grateful to immigrant literature as a whole, whether its source be
European, Latin American, African, or Asian, for these priceless accounts of
the newcomers’s struggles to adapt to the United States. The impatience of the Times reviewer in 1930, however,
suggests that there was still embarrassment about sounding like a greenhorn.
Reznikoff’s deliberate cultivation of this alienation-effect in the novel’s
first part can be read as a stubborn provocation or an entrancing coloration.
The peculiar spin on diction begins with the very title of the novel, By the Waters of Manhattan. This title was
a favorite of Reznikoff’s: he used it repeatedly, almost like a good-luck
charm, for a 1929 annual that contained stories, poems and the first part of
the novel; for the 1930 novel; and for his 1962 selected verse. It is hard to
say why this phrase held such appeal for him, but I hear in it an echo of
Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha:“By the shore of Gitche Gumee.” The
locution “By the …” also sounds Biblical (the Old Testament was never far from
Reznikoff’s mind, and he named two poetry collections By the Well of Living and Seeing). New Yorkers are notorious for
disregarding the fact that their city is on the water, so the emphasis on
“waters” (plural) suggests an ironic, archaic undertone: in any case, a learned
idiom.
Part One ends with a telling line of dialogue, spoken by Sarah Yetta, which
operates as a hinge between the two parts: “‘We are a lost generation,’ she
said. ‘It is for our children to do what they can.’” The paradox, for us, is
that these first-generation immigrants, who braved dangers so resourcefully and
sacrificed so much for their offspring, seem to possess a wholeness of self and
spirit, while their relatively more privileged children seem the lost,
fragmented ones.
The second part focuses on Sarah’s son, Ezekiel, who (we learn from Reznikoff’s
letters) was not modeled on Reznikoff himself but on his friend Joel. It is
significant that this Ezekiel bears the same first name as his grandfather, a luftmensch who secretly wrote poetry.
When Grandfather Ezekiel died, his wife Hannah burned all his verses, thinking
they might contain some reference to Nihilists and get the family in trouble
with the Russian police. “As she put the first into the fire she said, ‘Here’s
a man’s life.’” With characteristic understatement, Reznikoff the novelist
leaves it at that; but Reznikoff the man was deeply affected all his life by
the burning of his own grandfather’s poetic output, an event which actually
happened, and his persistence not only in writing, but in seeing the work
published at all costs, even setting the type and printing it himself, was
clearly in part a defiant response to that earlier erasure. Stephen Fredman
makes this point eloquently in his fine study of Reznikoff, A Menorah for Athena (University of
Chicago Press, 2001). “Here is the primal scene of poetry for Charles
Reznikoff. His grandfather’s lifework, his secret self, written in Hebrew,
language of the Torah—not Yiddish, language of the Diaspora, or Russian, the
cosmopolitan language—is destroyed out of fear and ignorance.... This ‘sad
story’ was related by Reznikoff obsessively in interviews and in the family
histories he wrote in prose and verse…. Making manifest his inheritance,
Reznikoff’s poems are the great-grandchildren—as though the dead, cremated
manuscript had produced, through the intermediary of Charles’s mother, this new
breed of American Jewish poems.” In the novel, Ezekiel the younger is not a
writer, however, but a touchy malcontent, a would-be artist without an art. “If
he had studied music, if he could draw and paint…” he broods.
The two parts of the novel are radically different from each other: the first
half flows with the folkloric sound of a family chronicle and spans decades,
while the second slows down, covers a chronological period of months, and is much
more introspective, taking us into Ezekiel’s thoughts and
stream-of-consciousness. The language in the second part is also different,
having lost its foreign tinge and become American-educated, sprinkled with
poetic quotations and references to Wordsworth and the Buddha in the
Metropolitan Museum. Most crucially, the psychology is vastly different: the
first part has an extroverted, indirect psychology, similar to Gertrude Stein’s
Three Lives, where the working-class
protagonists are barely aware that they have an unconscious, much less that
they are expressing it in every statement they make. Sarah Yetta acts
forthrightly and maturely, even as a young girl, with consistent rectitude. She
may sorrow at the changeable nature of people’s emotions, a neighbor who goes
from friendliness to frosty hostility, but she herself is solid and dependable.
Ezekiel, her son, is more unstable in his emotional response, as we see so
dramatically and frankly in his sudden satiety with the previously unattainable
Jane once she submits erotically to him. Prone to defensive rationalizations,
Ezekiel suspects his own motives and is already tired to death of his
narcissistic air of superiority, knowing full well he has accomplished so
little. (Such neurotic self-suspicion would have been a luxury for his mother,
who needed to hold onto any shred of self-respect in the face of a community
that denounced her as prideful when she struck out on her own.)
Thematically, the two parts connect to each other with an organic rightness, telling
the whole painful story of immigration in America as it has tended to play out
on the family front. Still, the halves are in many ways radically unlike: so it
is puzzling that both the novel’s defenders and detractors paid so little
attention, in 1930, to the differences between the two parts, thereby scanting
the book’s haunting strangeness.
When first published by Boni, it contained an introduction by the
then-prominent literary figure Louis Untermeyer. He began his introduction by
saying: “It is a long time since I have read a story so obviously sincere—and
so tellingly simple. The simplicity, from the first paragraph to the last, is
not an incidental virtue or a trick of technique; it is essential. It bears no
relation to the over-cultivated monosyllables which have come as a reaction to
our over-cultivated (and belated) Eighteen Nineties. Here is nothing falsely naïf in story or in style. There is, in
fact, no ‘style.’” Though Untermeyer goes on to praise the novel for its severe
refusal of romantic theatricality, and for the realism of its inconclusive
ending, I am struck by the application of this backhanded-compliment critical
vocabulary (“simple,” “sincere,” “no ‘style’”) to Reznikoff.
The great critic Lionel Trilling, who also praised the novel in a glowing
review that appeared in The Menorah
Journal, was similarly taken with Reznikoff’s sincerity and purity:
“Certainly it is not great prose in the sense that it is exciting or
compelling. It makes no pretension to this. Perhaps it is merely such prose as
we should expect at the least from every writer—each word understood and in its
right place; each word saying exactly what it should say and not forced beyond
its meaning…. In short, style becomes its writer’s morality…. The charm of Mr.
Reznikoff’s book lies in its avoidance of… falsification. His book has true
words, hence truth—solid, raw, sociological truth.”
This is a splendid tribute, but I wonder if such points of view have not done
Reznikoff’s literary reputation more harm than good. To make of Reznikoff an
angel of sincerity and raw sociological truth-telling seems to me to slight the
selectivity of his artistry and the lyrical beauty of his language. Let us
consider some examples:
“He was glad to find himself on the bridge, the tenements and office buildings
behind him, his face towards the sky. Soon the roadway changed to slats of
wood, springy under his feet after so many miles of asphalt. Ezekial was
pleased, too, after the even curves of gutters and the straight lines of pavements
and houses to see the free glitter of the water. He was now in the rhythm of
walking, that sober dance which despite all the dances man knows, he dances
most.”
No ‘style’? Reznikoff speaks enthusiastically of “a new science, citycraft,”
and his novel is replete with urban tableaux that offer up the verbal
equivalent of Sloan’s or Hopper’s New York paintings, like the marvelous
descriptions of the Automat or the barber shop or the Italian procession. There
are astute little aphorisms dropped into the text: “Somewhere there must be a
woman—so a girl, he thought, dreams of the man she hopes to marry and at last
puts up with her husband.” Or: “He decided not to drink. After a while his
thirst would pass, as it often did, just like hunger and cold. The body, he had
found, makes its needs known and after awhile, unanswered, concludes its master
cannot satisfy it, though he would, or is busy, and courteously becomes
silent.” This is lucid, spare writing,
yes, but style-less? I find it elegant.
There is also a richness of sensory description, the way a character tries to
shake off “his familiar despondency” and adhere to the available charms of the
present. “In the bright morning he looked eagerly at the houses, at each horse
and milkwagon ….” “The silver of the thin dime was an unexpected pleasure.”
“How good to rest.” “He ate slowly, to taste each morsel to the utmost, and
praised God.” This elemental side of Reznikoff most resembles his contemporary
William Carlos Williams, who ended a poem about a beggar-woman eating in the
street: “Food, the great comforter.”
If the novel ends inconclusively, it is because Ezekiel’s hopefulness and
discouragement have fought to a legitimate standstill. He has managed to start
his own business, a bookstore in Greenwich Village, with virtually no capital,
though now he has little time for an inner life and feels imprisoned, tied down
to work; he has shaken off virginity and has a robust sex-life, though now he
is growing tired of his mistress; he decides one moment to drink “the bitter
night of his life,” and the next moment is diverted by a girl passing by; he
looks at himself and sees both an ordinary young man and a swindler. He is, in
Reznikoff’s words, “Janus-faced,” turning one visage to the world and another
away from it. He lives on a knife-edge between optimism and despondency. Just
when everything seems depleted inside, there is an upturn. This bobbing-up
reflex in the midst of potentially drowning is a deeply moving trope in
Reznikoff’s prose and verse, he reverts to it again and again, as his way of
bearing witness to the human spirit’s resiliency within a punishing world. “It
seemed to Ezekiel that his thoughts at last brought out the sun, whose
brightness they had been touching and leaving and returning to, as a bird pecks
at a golden fruit.” The power of one man’s thought to bring out the sun—that is
true magic, an indication of why By the
Waters of Manhattan is finally a poet’s novel.
This essay is the introduction to By
the Waters of Manhattan (Black Sparrow Press,
2009). It is reprinted with
permission of the publisher.