Derek Walcott | Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004 | ISBN
0374237433, 112 Pages, $20.00
A review by Brendan de Caires
Home Is Where The Art Is
“When I came home I expected a surprise & there was
no surprise for me, so, of course, I was surprised.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Prodigal is a self-consciously ‘final’ meditation on a career that has lasted fifty years. Its eighteen cantos are unevenly split into three sections. Ten are grounded ‘elsewhere’, (Europe, the United States and South America) while the eight of the final section, by and large, take the poet back to the Caribbean. The critic Adam Kirsch has described the arrangement as “not so much a plot as a continuous provocation to verse: a conversation on a train, a hotel lobby, a Swiss Alp, a Caribbean beach, all …woven together into a single tapestry.”
The poem reads like a journal but feels like a quest. There is always a sense of the narrator piecing his identity together from the memory of his travels. Each new wandering offers a different landscape and culture, a different way of being in the world-a glimpse of elsewheres that must be forsaken if the Prodigy of Another Life is to find peace in his first world.
The poem moves between different phases of the poet’s life quite randomly, creating a muddled sense of place and time. This is deliberate. In his excellent recent survey of Walcott’s work, Professor Edward Baugh observes that “[i]t is as if the poem, as it evolved, drew into itself all the possibilities for short poems that crossed its horizon.” Baugh mentions a 1990 interview in which Walcott spoke of “the sea as a symbol for a way of movement and being that contrasts with those of what is conventionally called history.”
In that interview Walcott remarked: “With the sea, you can travel the horizon in any direction, you can go from left to right or from right to left. It doesn’t proceed from A to B to C to D and so on.” And neither does The Prodigal. Instead, like the eighteen-chaptered Ulysses so lovingly honoured in Omeros, each section wanders around with apparent aimlessless, circling larger themes, word-painting impressionistic landscapes and hinting at dilemmas for which no easy solutions are offered.
Reversing the World
One of Walcott’s favourite tropes is the confusion of world and word. Throughout his poetry, landscapes and objects dissolve into the phrases that construe them: “boulevards open like novels / waiting to be written”; a traveller’s eye sees “canefields set in stanzas”, notices the “monotonous scrawl of beaches” or looks down from a jet that “bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud.” With Ovidian lightness, nature and art fade into each other, the world becomes a text and the poet’s lines disappear into the land- and seascapes they describe. It is often difficult to say where one ends and the other takes over. Some of this is simply a poet’s delight in the stitching and unstitching of his thoughts, but it is also driven by the hope that this textual world can be partially changed, that the liminal space between memory and imagination might allow poetry to ‘reverse’-that is, to rewrite and undo-the pain of history.
This hope is central to Modernism. Both Ulysses and The Waste Land use mythic parallels to frame their impressions of the boredom, horror and emptiness of modern life. And both appeal to the religion of art, the belief that forgotten traditions can illumine the fragments of a fallen world and endow our daily lives with lost meanings. Richard Ellmann, Joyce’s distinguished biographer, once referred to this interplay of ancient and modern as a commingling of the “two ends of the western tradition like a multitemporal, multiterritorial pun.” That description fits Walcott’s poetry quite nicely. His prodigious facility with the textual manoeuvres of high Modernism has always helped him to think of the Caribbean in these ways, but he has also been farsighted enough to avoid mere mimicry, to come to terms with his world in his own way.
The Prodigal examines this tension between art and life with an elegiac manner. Perhaps this is inevitable in Walcott’s late poetry, for as Kirsch explains:
“If the whole world is a poem, then the poet doesn’t need subjects in the usual sense; he becomes like a sponge, soaking up poetry as he lives, sees, and travels. Increasingly in his work, Walcott has had less and less use for subjects and occasions; all of his poems have come to seem like parts of one long poem, which is his life itself. This tendency is brought to perfection in The Prodigal…”
This poem, then, may be thought of as the apologia of a sponge, an evocation of the places that have shaped Walcott’s strangely beautiful hybrid voice, and also as his words’ last benediction of the worlds they have absorbed, distilled, and represented.
Parochial, provincial,
uprooted
The poem can also be thought of as a return to a lost paradise. Having escaped the suffocation of a small island for life as a cosmopolitan intellectual (playwright, professor and poet), The Prodigal is eager for the simplicities of his youth. As ever with Walcott, there is a literary pedigree for this yearning. Twenty-five years ago, he told the editor James Atlas: “The greatest writers have been at heart parochial, provincial in their rootedness. I think Shakespeare remains a Warwickshire country boy, Joyce a minor bourgeois from Dublin … Hardy’s place, of course, was rural Essex, you know.” In fact, Walcott has two West Indian homes-St Lucia, where he was born, and Trinidad, where he wrote and produced plays for the local theatre for nearly two decades.
The familiar impression of Walcott is of a man fully at home in the noise-filled isles, cultivating his own garden. And yet, like his great literary rival, V.S. Naipaul, there was a time when the poet found the Caribbean much less welcoming. In 1979, during the same week that he was awarded a National Writer’s Prize by the Welsh Arts Council, the New York Times reporter Jo Thomas interviewed Walcott in Port of Spain, in “one of those hotels in which even an unreflective traveler would think of death … Its bare bulbs and damp rooms are enough to send one howling for the solace of its narrow and empty bar…” A sprightly 49 at the time, Walcott was unusually expansive in his criticism:
“The older I get, the tougher it becomes for me to make any kind of living here, and the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development of the arts. In one of the richest countries in the Caribbean there is no national art gallery, no theater, and only one library. While the wealth of this country grows, the coarseness and the vulgarity of the people who have the wealth also increases, like any boom town.”
Twenty-eight years later there are manifold ironies in these complaints. Trinidad is going through another bout of shallow prosperity, squandering its wealth in the usual politics. Art remains largely a private affair. Contemporary theatre hardly ventures beyond farce. Coarseness and vulgarity have thrived (half an hour of talk radio will furnish ample evidence of both). West Indian writers face the same unequal struggle against philistinism that drove both Naipaul and Walcott abroad. The greatest irony, however, is that one of Walcott’s most accomplished poems, written close to the time that he gave this interview, was occasioned, quite literally, by his ruminations in a Trinidadian hotel.
Timely Reflections
‘The Hotel Normandie Pool’ in The Fortunate Traveller (1981) expresses Walcott’s thoughts as he stood on the threshold of his other life. The pool’s reflections stir up anxieties about his craft, and lead to thoughts about the passing of time, memory and regret. The poet, thinking of exile, already knows the pains of estrangement:
… at fifty I have learned that beyond words is the disfiguring exile of divorce.
In an inspired leap of historical imaginati
on-one that prefigures many of the triumphs of Omeros-a tourist at the poolside metamorphoses into the poet Ovid, and he discusses the challenges of contemporary poetry with the author. The Roman understands perfectly what it’s like to feel that,
corruption, censorship and arrogance make exile seem a happier thought than home . . . our house slaves sigh; the field slaves scream revenge; one moves between the flatterer and the fool yearning for the old bondage from both ends.
But he is cautious too. He knows what a long absence will entail:
Romans-he smiled-will mock your slavish rhyme,
the slaves your love of Roman structures. . .
Walcott’s lines glide effortlessly through several intricately patterned stanzas of this sort of advice before the poem closes with a sunset. An ominous, murky scene that haunts you more with each re-reading.
Dusk. The trees blacken like the pool’s umbrellas.
Dusk. Suspension of every image and its voice.
The mangoes pitch from their green dark like meteors.
The fruit bat swings on its branch, a tongueless bell.
This imagined dialogue clearly helped Walcott decide how to handle the warring claims of a literary tradition that he loved (the English/Romans), and his sympathies with a postcolonial Caribbean (Ovid’s ‘slaves’) desperately trying to make its own style, but the problem is never far from his thoughts at any point in his subsequent career. (The Prodigal admits that “The inheritance you were sent to claim/ defined itself in contradiction.”)
And yet, somehow he has managed to keep squaring that circle; most obviously by splitting his oeuvre into poetry and drama, but also by turning the full force of his learning and virtuosity back towards the home he left behind. Omeros captures this double-focus in a single line: “All that Greek manure under the green bananas’. That may look like a dismissal of the poem’s bookishness, but the image also suggests that the ‘manure’ of classical learning is necessary if the green fruit of a young culture are to achieve a tasteful maturity.
Walcott’s role as a tireless sifter of that ‘Greek manure’ has been well documented, but I believe that the scope of his accomplishment has been largely overlooked in the Caribbean. There is a sadness in this last poem that goes beyond nostalgia, a sense of disappointment. An Odyssean melancholy that one’s epic voyage is least known where it is most relevant, fear that this homecoming has no Eumaeus, no Eurycleia.
The Enigma of A Rival
The Enigma of Arrival, V.S. Naipaul’s misanthropic hymn to life in rural England, offers a useful contrast to the journeys in The Prodigal. In his most incisive analysis of Naipaul (reprinted in What The Twilight Says) Walcott resets some of The Enigma’s musical prose as verse, to show its affinities with Hardy, Clare and Edward Thomas. He marvels at Naipaul’s feel for natural rhythms and the landscape: “… the growth of his pleasure draws the reader in without fancy. There isn’t a better English around, and for me this is wonderful without bewilderment, since our finest writer of the English sentence, by praising the beauty of England, however threatened with industrial encroachment, saves it from itself.” But even in this Eden, the serpent is never far away. Walcott quickly fastens on to the “phantoms of the old Naipauline trauma-the genteel abhorrence of Negroes, the hatred of Trinidad, the idealization of History and Order.” He then takes examines a classic piece of condescension-that the enchanted hues of Manhattan would have been thought “dead colours” in Trinidad- and takes firm hold of the nettlesome Naipaul:
“Why is the sticky, insufferable humidity of any city summer preferable or more magical than the dry fierce heat of the Caribbean, which always has the startling benediction of breeze and shade? Why is this heat magical in Greece or in the desert, and just heat in Trinidad?”
The questions almost answer themselves. Naipaul’s fetishism of England’s landscape-and culture-is a pattern foreshadowed by Ganesh’s repackaging of himself at the end of The Mystic Masseur. The G. Ramsay Muir worldview is exactly what makes Sir Vidia such an insufferable fraud. Walcott points out that “the estimate of his lonely journey towards becoming a writer is conservative”: a very polite description for the willful forgetting-of CLR James, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, Edgar Mittleholzer, Wilson Harris and Jamaica Kincaid-that Naipaul must perform when recreating the cultural wilderness from which he has heroically escaped.
The narrator in The Prodigal has a more complex relationship with his origins. He accepts them, certainly, and they also set him thinking of elsewhere-other traditions, other landscapes. But whereas Naipaul cannot resist elbowing the reader with his superior taste, Walcott can be thrilled without reflexive colonial judgments. He loves unusual light too, but his elation in Alpine or Venetian afternoons produces no disparagement of the dusk in Soufri
