[转帖]The Closest Reader

曾园

<p>The Closest Reader</p><p>Cambridge in autumn. The pathways of <a title="More articles about Harvard University." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/harvard_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org"><font color="#004276">Harvard</font></a> Yard are strewn with acorns. Sunlight plays on ivy-covered brick. Inside Emerson Hall, Helen Vendler takes the podium of her popular undergraduate lecture class, “Poets, Poems, Poetry.” A few late arrivals straggle in, seeking a rare empty seat. Armed with just a clip-on microphone and an extraordinary command of the lyric tradition, Vendler quickly runs through “The Grasshopper” by E. E. Cummings before alighting on the main topic of the day: Keats’s “To Autumn,” which she introduces simply as “one of the best poems in the English language.”</p><div id="articleInline"><div id="inlineBox"><a class="jumpLink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/books/review/Donadio.t.html?_r=1&amp;oref=slogin#secondParagraph"><font color="#004276">Skip to next paragraph</font></a>
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                                        </font></a><div class="credit">Janet Reider</div><p class="caption">Helen Vendler in 1980. </p></div><div id="inlineMultimedia"><h4>Multimedia</h4><img height="10" alt="Audio" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/multimedia/icons/audio_icon.gif" width="13"/> Helen Vendler Reads Keats\'s \'To Autumn\' (<a href="http://graphics.nytimes.com/audiosrc/books/20061210vendler.mp3" target="new"><font color="#004276">mp3</font></a>) <div class="inlinePlayer box"><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="25" width="155" data="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/INLINE_PLAYER/inlinePlayer.swf?mp3=http%3A//graphics.nytimes.com/audiosrc/books/20061210vendler.mp3&amp;duration=129"></object></div></div><div id="inlineReadersOpinion"><h4>Readers’ Opinions</h4><div class="story"><h2><a href="http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/books/booknewsandreviews/index.html?page=recent"><font color="#004276" size="2">Forum: Book News and Reviews</font></a>
                                        </h2><p class="summary"></p></div></div></div></div><a name="secondParagraph"></a><p>“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” she reads aloud, her soft, Boston-tinged voice slightly breathy and filled with emotion. “Close-bosom friend of the maturing sun; / Conspiring with him how to load and bless / With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; / To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, / And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.” Over the next hour, Vendler dissects the ode line by line, explaining how it moves outward from kernels and cores through an ever wider “sphere of expanding knowledge,” until “small gnats mourn,” “full-grown lambs bleat,” “hedge-crickets sing,” “the redbreast whistles,” and, in the poem’s final line, “gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” In her reading, Keats’s autumn, melancholy yet hopeful, has its own muted pleasures and sounds. “You wouldn’t have noticed the music of autumn if the nightingale were still singing,” she tells the class. </p><p>Vendler, who is 73, has been teaching since the early ’60s — for the last quarter-century at Harvard, where she is the A. Kingsley Porter university professor — but the lecture hall is not her only sphere of influence. She is also the leading poetry critic in America, the author of major books on Wallace Stevens, Keats and Shakespeare, and for a generation has been a powerful arbiter of the contemporary poetry scene. Her authoritative judgments have helped establish or secure the reputations of Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney and Rita Dove, among many others. Eschewing fashionable theory, Vendler is a school of one, an impassioned aesthete who pays minute attention to the structures and words that are a poet’s genetic code. “She is a remarkably agile and gifted close reader,” the literary scholar Harold Bloom said. “I think there isn’t anyone in the country who can read syntax in poems as well as she can.” </p><p>For Vendler, syntax is not a mere technical matter but the order of a poet’s universe, a kind of secular scripture. Her office — as scholar, critic and teacher — is to serve Poetry, which she does, with the precision of a chemist and the devotion of a religious acolyte. Both qualities were in evidence this spring, when Vendler fiercely criticized a new collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s uncollected poetry, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/books/review/02orr.html"><font color="#004276">“Edgar Allan Poe &amp; the Juke-Box,”</font></a> assembled by Alice Quinn, the poetry editor of The New Yorker, who herself wields enormous clout in poetry circles. Even as other critics — including David Orr, in these pages — welcomed the book as an important addition to the Bishop oeuvre, Vendler, writing in The New Republic, said the volume “should have been called ‘Repudiated Poems.’ For Elizabeth Bishop had years to publish the poems included here, had she wanted to.” It would have been far better, in Vendler’s view, for Quinn to have published the drafts that went into Bishop’s published, polished “real poems” rather than “their maimed and stunted siblings,” adding: “I am told that poets now, fearing an Alice Quinn in their future, are incinerating their drafts.” </p><p>In October, Vendler elaborated on the controversy in an interview in her cozy, book-filled office at Harvard, not mincing words as she accused Quinn both of undermining Bishop’s legacy and of betraying something sacred, the poet’s personal trust. </p><p>“I would rather have had the drafts of the finished poems well before you got the rejected stuff from the trash can,” Vendler said, sitting on a chair facing the window and a life mask of Keats. “If you make people promise to burn your manuscripts” — as Kafka and (by legend) Virgil did — “they should,” Vendler insisted. “I think the ‘Aeneid’ should have been burned and Kafka’s works should have been burned, because personal fidelity is more important than art,” she said in her quiet, direct manner. “If I had asked somebody to promise to destroy something of mine and they didn’t do it I would feel it to be a grave personal betrayal. I wouldn’t care what I had left behind. It could have been the ‘Mona Lisa.’ ” </p><p>That assertion seems peculiar — even shocking — coming from one who has devoted her life to the study of literature. But it reflects the intense and sometimes lonely fervor Vendler brings to her vocation. </p><div id="articleInline"><div id="inlineBox"><a class="jumpLink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/books/review/Donadio.t.html?pagewanted=2&amp;_r=1#secondParagraph"><font color="#004276">Skip to next paragraph</font></a>
                        <div id="inlineMultimedia"><h4>Multimedia</h4><img height="10" alt="Audio" src="http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/multimedia/icons/audio_icon.gif" width="13"/> Helen Vendler Reads Keats\'s \'To Autumn\' (<a href="http://graphics.nytimes.com/audiosrc/books/20061210vendler.mp3" target="new"><font color="#004276">mp3</font></a>) <div class="inlinePlayer box"><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="25" width="155" data="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/INLINE_PLAYER/inlinePlayer.swf?mp3=http%3A//graphics.nytimes.com/audiosrc/books/20061210vendler.mp3&amp;duration=129"></object></div></div><div id="inlineReadersOpinion"><h4>Readers’ Opinions</h4><div class="story"><h2><a href="http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/books/booknewsandreviews/index.html?page=recent"><font color="#004276" size="2">Forum: Book News and Reviews</font></a>
                                        </h2><p class="summary"></p></div></div></div></div><a name="secondParagraph"></a><p>She can be harsh about those she sees as subordinating literature to an ideological agenda. In a review of David Denby’s “Great Books” (1996), the film critic’s account of how he returned to college, immersing himself in Columbia’s core curriculum, Vendler wrote, “Seeing the Columbia course use Dante and Conrad as moral examples is rather like seeing someone use a piece of embroidery for a dishrag with no acknowledgment of the difference between hand-woven silk and a kitchen towel.” In 2001, again in The New Republic, her main venue in recent years, Vendler took the critic James Fenton to task for his interpretation of Robert Frost’s 1942 poem “The Gift Outright,” a version of which was recited by the aging poet at the Kennedy inauguration in 1961. Fenton, in her view, had imposed a mistaken interpretation on a poem as much “about marriage as about colonials becoming Americans,” because “his politics has wrenched him into misreading it.” (Some argued Vendler herself was misreading the poem by choosing to ignore its subject matter.) </p><p>Vendler once wrote that the poets A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery and James Merrill embraced “the thankless cultural task of defining how an adult American mind not committed to any single ideological agenda might exist in a self-respecting and veracious way in the later 20th century.” That could also apply to her.</p><p>Vendler was born Helen Hennessy in Boston in 1933. Although she was encouraged to read poetry — her mother, a former schoolteacher, had memorized many poems, and her father taught Romance languages at a high school — her parents forbade her to attend the prestigious Boston Latin School for Girls, and later Radcliffe, because, like many devout Roman Catholics at the time, they accepted the church’s strong disapproval of secular education. Instead she enrolled in Boston’s all-female Emmanuel College, hoping to study literature, but “literature, I discovered with disgust, was taught as a branch of faith and morals,” she recalled in a 2001 lecture. That experience “inoculated me forever against adopting any ism as a single lens through which to interpret literature.” </p><p>Vendler switched to the sciences, and after graduation was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to study mathematics in Belgium. “I loved math and I loved organic chemistry because they have structures and I love structures,” she said. But on the stormy trans-Atlantic voyage, Vendler had a reckoning with herself. “And I decided, now that I was free, I would do English, because that’s what I had always wanted to do.” With the Fulbright commission’s blessing, she switched to literature. </p><p>Back in the States, Vendler enrolled in 12 English courses in a single year at <a title="More articles about Boston University" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/boston_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org"><font color="#004276">Boston University</font></a> so as to qualify for graduate school at Harvard. In her first week there in 1956, the chairman of the English department told her, “We don’t want any women here.” (Years later, he apologized.) Another professor, the renowned Americanist Perry Miller, considered Vendler his finest student and published one of her course papers, but denied her admission to his Melville seminar. “The men come over in my house and they sit around and drink and we talk. I wouldn’t talk like I wanted to if there was a woman there,” she recalled him explaining. </p><p>Still, she had supporters, and influences. One was I. A. Richards, a leading figure in the New Criticism, which emphasized close reading of texts over an author’s biography or historical situation. Vendler found his Harvard course electrifying. “Richards would take a single word in a poem and talk about its origins in Plato and its vicissitudes through Shakespeare and its reappearance in Shelley,” she recalled. “You would feel each word heavy with the weight of its associations.” Vendler adopted this method and dedicated her second book, “On Extended Wings,” a study of Wallace Stevens, to Richards.</p><p>In 1959, Vendler became the first woman to be offered an instructorship in Harvard’s English department. But she turned it down to follow her husband, Zeno Vendler, a philosopher and linguist, to <a title="More articles about Cornell University." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/cornell_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org"><font color="#004276">Cornell</font></a>. Several years later, divorced and raising their son alone, she taught at Smith for two years before taking a job at B.U., where she remained for two decades, for some of that time a single mother teaching a punishing 10 courses a year. “The only way I could make my life easier was to give up writing,” she wrote many years later. “But I knew that to stop writing would be a form of self-murder.” She kept writing books and reviews, but late at night, after her son had gone to sleep. “I envied my male colleagues who, in those days, seemed to have everything done for them by their spouses.” (Her son, David, is now a lawyer in California.) </p><p>In 1981, with several major books behind her, Vendler at last joined the English department at Harvard — but kept a part-time affiliation with B.U. for four years until she was convinced that Harvard took her seriously. “I didn’t want to be some little token person,” she said. By this time she already wielded considerable power outside the academy. Her first review — “my work of the left hand,” as she has called it — was a roundup of contemporary poetry published in the mid-’60s in the Massachusetts Review. That led to assignments from The New York Times Book Review, a venue whose prominence she initially found jarring. “Who was I to occupy people’s Sunday morning attention?” Vendler wrote in a 1994 essay, a complicated nod to Stevens’s famous poem “Sunday Morning,” about spiritual longing in a world without religious faith. Beyond the extra income, Vendler found she liked writing for a general audience — and excelled at it. “She’s the best since Randall Jarrell, I don’t think there’s any question about that,” the critic John Leonard said in a recent interview. </p><div id="articleInline"><div id="inlineBox"><a class="jumpLink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/books/review/Donadio.t.html?pagewanted=3&amp;_r=1#secondParagraph"><font color="#004276">Skip to next paragraph</font></a>
                        <div id="inlineMultimedia"><h4>Multimedia</h4><img height="10" alt="Audio" src="http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/multimedia/icons/audio_icon.gif" width="13"/> Helen Vendler Reads Keats\'s \'To Autumn\' (<a href="http://graphics.nytimes.com/audiosrc/books/20061210vendler.mp3" target="new"><font color="#004276">mp3</font></a>) <div class="inlinePlayer box"><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="25" width="155" data="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/INLINE_PLAYER/inlinePlayer.swf?mp3=http%3A//graphics.nytimes.com/audiosrc/books/20061210vendler.mp3&amp;duration=129"></object></div></div><div id="inlineReadersOpinion"><h4>Readers’ Opinions</h4><div class="story"><h2><a href="http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/books/booknewsandreviews/index.html?page=recent"><font color="#004276" size="2">Forum: Book News and Reviews</font></a>
                                        </h2><p class="summary"></p></div></div></div></div><a name="secondParagraph"></a><p>In the early ’70s, as editor of the Book Review, Leonard was having trouble navigating the insular world of poetry. Poets “would never tell you if you’d asked them to review their best friend or worst enemy or ex-lover,” Leonard recalled. “There was always some agenda, and I could never figure out what it was.” So he hired Vendler to vet the flood of poetry books, reviewing some herself and suggesting reviewers for others. All this was done quietly. “We just couldn’t tell anyone,” Leonard said. “It would put her under enormous pressure.” </p><p>But in 1975, when Harvey Shapiro, himself a poet, succeeded Leonard as editor of the Book Review, he immediately ended the arrangement. Vendler had become “kind of an anonymous power,” he said in an interview. “It didn’t seem to me a healthy arrangement.” Vendler, who says her role at the Book Review “was never a secret,” thinks the source of dismay was her quarterly poetry roundups. They “annoyed a lot of people,” she said, especially poets whose work she hadn’t included. She recalled Shapiro wanting her “to review books by women and to sequester me in the women niche.” “In truth, I have no memory of this,” Shapiro said. “If what she said is true, I owe her an apology.” </p><p>Beginning in the mid-’70s, Vendler contributed regularly to The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, where in 1978 she became poetry critic at the request of its editor, William Shawn. As a critic, she has favored the idiosyncratic. In 1982, she criticized the “ventriloquism” of a future <a title="More articles about Nobel Prizes." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/nobel_prizes/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier"><font color="#004276">Nobel laureate</font></a>, Derek Walcott, whom she found “peculiarly at the mercy of influence.” In a joint review in The New Yorker in 1996, she lauded August Kleinzahler for “his irreverent joy in the American demotic,” and criticized Mark Doty for his “inert” rhythms and “plaintive didacticism.”</p><p>Although influential, Vendler’s judgments of contemporary poets are not uncontested. Some have questioned her championing of Jorie Graham, in whose work Vendler sees intricacies and trilingual rhythms (Graham was raised speaking English, French and Italian) where others see opacity. And some have found Vendler’s tastes too mainstream, though she has always been unpredictable. She was, for instance, an admirer of <a title="Allen Ginsberg retrospective with articles and reviews." href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/books/author-ginsberg.html?inline=nyt-per"><font color="#004276">Allen Ginsberg</font></a> when his literary status was still uncertain. “The monumental quality of ‘Kaddish’ makes it one of those poems that, as Wallace Stevens said, take the place of a mountain,” she has written. The poets she admires share “nothing except intelligence and originality,” said Stephen Burt, a poetry critic and professor at Macalester College who studied with Vendler at Harvard in the early ’90s. </p><p>For so prominent a professor, Vendler is known for being extremely supportive; she supervises many dissertations and serves as mentor to numerous students. “Maybe in the end her major achievement will be as a teacher, both in terms of her pupils, and the books she’s written about canonical figures, teaching people how to read them,” said the critic and poet Adam Kirsch, who studied with Vendler as an undergraduate in the mid-’90s. The critic James Wood, who also teaches at Harvard, recalled once complaining about the demands of parenthood to Vendler, who told him it would make him a better reader. “There are very few academics who would ever say something like that, who would ever bother connecting what they do academically with the arrival of the child,” Wood said. (Vendler herself has noted the lack of great poetry about motherhood, though Sylvia Plath, she said, “made a beginning.”) </p><p>Today Vendler seldom reviews poets under 50, since their “frames of reference,” she says, are alien to her. “They’re writing about the television cartoons they saw when they were growing up. And that’s fine. It’s as good a resource of imagery as orchards. Only I’ve seen orchards and I didn’t watch these cartoons,” she said. “So I don’t feel I’m the best reader for most of the young ones.” </p><p>These days Vendler is more focused on late style. In April, she will deliver the prestigious Mellon Lectures at the <a title="More articles about National Gallery of Art" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_gallery_of_art/index.html?inline=nyt-org"><font color="#004276">National Gallery of Art</font></a> in Washington. Her topic will be the final books of Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, <a title="Robert Lowell retrospective with articles and reviews." href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/books/lowell-featured-author.html?inline=nyt-per"><font color="#004276">Robert Lowell</font></a>, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill, and how each wrestled with what Yeats called “death-in-life and life-in-death”: writing about life facing impending death, and writing about death while still immersed in the world. “It used to be easier to deal with when you had heaven to believe in, when there was another place to go at the end of your poem,” Vendler said, as the late afternoon sun came through her office window. Death without heaven “produces more stylistic problems.” Vendler has recently finished the book on Yeats’s poems that she first wanted to write as a dissertation, but abandoned, she said, because at 23, “I didn’t have the life experience to penetrate them or resonate with them.” Life and life’s work, seamlessly intertwined.</p>