Airmail (6 page)

Some of his poems are made of linked successions of thoughts not easy to follow. These thoughts are embodied in high-spirited and eccentric language. Gunnar Ekelöf is the most difficult Swedish poet; yet, despite the difficulty, his audience is very large. His books of poems are published in editions comparable, given the difference in population, to printings of 200,000 in the U.S. He is an uncomfortable poet, who tries to make the reader conscious of lies.

The ideas which his work returns to again and again have been brought out clearly in an essay by the Swedish poet Eric Lindegren. I have chosen and translated sections from that essay, which appear elsewhere in this book.

Gunnar Ekelöf was elected a member of the Swedish Academy in 1958, and is now the youngest member of that body.

—ROBERT BLY

Västerås 3-1-66

Dear Robert,

this godawful wolf-winter is grinding to an end at last. Now and then we get a day above freezing, and we have the pleasure of hearing the water gurgle in the gutters and along the roof. Till it freezes again the next day. I’ve sent wife and children off to Stockholm so that Monica can get out a bit, and so she can parasitize her mama, who has quite a lot of money, for a few days. Our shortage of money is comical—toward the end of the month we go around and shake all our old clothes in the hope that a stray coin might fall out. The poetical deadlock has been broken, however, and I’m hard at work on a poem about COMPUTERS—about the world when computers have propagated themselves and taken over completely! At the same time I’m translating “The Hospital Window” by James Dickey and “Three Presidents” by you. Jackson is easy. Roosevelt fairly easy. Kennedy very difficult. What do you really mean by “I ate the Cubans with a straw”? Did he SUCK THEM OUT with a straw (reed)? Did he eat them with chopsticks like a Chinaman? Did he point at them with a straw and hey presto! they were consumed...And in Kennedy, what is meant by “Able to flow past rocks”—I don’t understand it purely in the language sense, either. And then all that about the crystal in the sideboards etc., I would be grateful for a more detailed explanation of that! It’s such a damned splendid poem, and fantastically exciting to translate.
¹

I have become culturally active in Västerås through becoming a member of Kulturrådet (The Cultural Council or whatever it would be called in the U.S.). We have strenuous meetings. We aren’t paid, unfortunately, but are invited to dinner once a year by Kulturnamnden (The Culture Department?), which is made up exclusively of the city’s bigwigs, politicians and the like. My debut in that company was unfortunate—I chanced to fall into a deep sleep after the dinner, in the middle of a solemn debate about the problems of the theater. This was observed by the elders, some of whom came up and congratulated me with heavy irony on my good sleep and a woman in the theater business bade me an ice-cold GOOD-NIGHT in a loud voice. I’m thinking about spreading the word that I suffer from a grave and mysterious illness that causes me to fall asleep abruptly.

On Friday I’m going to Lund, the university town in Skåne, to do a poetry reading for the students. The impoverished student union will pay for my lodgings and my publisher for travel expenses. [------]

A note on a note on Ekelöf! It’s accurate except for Part Two, about the proletariat and the aristocratic writing. I read that part with something of the same strange feeling as a Hottentot must have when he reads about himself in a tourist brochure. It’s certainly true that one can speak of a “proletarian writer,” but that would primarily be a novelist (Ivar Lo-Johansson, Jan Fridegård, Vilhelm Moberg) who—especially in the Thirties—published thick, widely read books in a realistic style, with autobiographical stuff from proletarian reality. It’s hardly possible to think of a single equivalent in poetry. The so-called “Five Young Men” (Martinson and Lundkvist, among others) certainly came from working-class or farming backgrounds, but the very two who devoted themselves primarily to poetry quickly took an “intellectual” line. Besides that, “Aristocratic” is misleading—I think you misjudge the number of aristocrats in Sweden and Europe. There aren’t all that many, besides Christina of course. Compare your, and all Americans’, strange interest in our monarch (he’s still reading
Ord & Bild
). In U.S. literature as everyone knows, there is a firm division between the COWBOY-SCHOOL (Robert Bly, Erskine Caldwell, Emerson and Carl Sandburg) and the Hollywood-school (Ray Bradbury, Pearl Buck, W. H. Auden and e. e. cummings).

The most recent issue of the
Literary Review,
to take one example, in which Professor Vowels has invented an entirely new literary school in Sweden, shows that it’s not easy to be an expert in the literature of foreign countries.

On another subject, I’m longing like a madman to see a new issue of
The Sixties.
You promised that the issues would come rolling out at high speed this year. Failing that, I could probably console myself with some collections of American poetry. The ones I’d like to have from your list are:

Lowell:
For the Union Dead

Wilbur:
Advice to a Prophet

James Dickey:
Into the Stone
and
Buckdancer’s Choice

Simpson:
Selected Poems

Creeley:
For Love

Göran Printz-Påhlson—with whom I will collaborate on the anthology—lives in England and is going to put together a Swedish anthology for a magazine called
Stand.
He may write to you and ask to use some translations.

With hopes of a speedy reply and the warmest greetings from Monica

Yours

Tomas T.

Aug [March] 18, 66

Dear Tomas,

Thanks for your letter! I’m sorry I’m so slow in answering—I’ve been on a reading tour out West. I’m enclosing a clipping from the
NY Times
—you’ll see what we’ve been up to.

Herewith a few notes on the Three Presidents: When he says “I ate the Cubans with a straw” he implies that they are so spineless, so weak, so soft that he could suck them all up inside a straw—he wouldn’t even need teeth to eat them. Typical American superiority complex toward the South Americans or Spanish-Americans.

With “able to flow past rocks” I wanted to suggest this: other presidents, faced with the rocks of national habit, for example American anti-intellectualism, could not move. They put the rock of their program in front of this other immovable rock, and the two rocks just sat looking at each other all during the Administration and nothing got done. The strange thing about Kennedy was that he was able to evade American anti-intellectualism, American anti-communism, and he did it by being curiously fluid—he didn’t fight with the rocks, he just flowed around them and reformed on the other side. Before they knew it, half the intellectuals in the country were in his Administration.

As for the boulders, the heavy right-wingism, really serious obstacles, he just waited until his flow of water had sufficient momentum, and then he just carried the boulders with him to the valley. He did that at the time of Cuba, and prevented the right wing people from declaring war on Russia or some such stupidity.

By the crystals in sideboards, I was thinking of the fine crystal glasses that wealthy families in Boston will have in oak cupboards, standing in their dining rooms. Kennedy really loved the life of money: he thought himself a part of old wealthy aristocracy, and he thought he glittered like expensive glass. I think he considered the Catholic Church as being in the end an enemy of that sort of life, and that is one reason his interest in the Church was strictly minimal. He didn’t care beans for the Church.

Tell me what happened in Lund, when you read poems. [------]

Thank you for your mocking words on my Ekelöf introduction: that is exactly what I wanted! I had some doubts about that aristocrat-proletariat split—I don’t know how that idea got into my head—and that’s why I sent it to you. I’ll have to think up another division now—maybe that between long-headed writers, and round-headed writers. We’re always willing to believe the worst of another country.

I write this hastily. Carol sends her very best to you. We’ve been reading
Sweden Writes,
and Carol says you are the only Swedish writer photographed in it with any strength in the face.

How could that have happened?

I’m sending on a stamp outside for Monica—

Yours,

  Robert

P.S. New
Sixties
are coming! Yes! Yes! In fact I’ve scheduled 5 poems of yours for
Sixties
#9. Payment coming soon.

10 April ’66

Dear Tomas,

You’re getting to be a slow letter writer again! I’m busy, with Galway Kinnell, organizing anti-government readings. We’ll have a large rally in Chicago this Saturday for a thousand people or more. The Buddhists are trying desperately to kick us out of Vietnam—I hope to God they succeed.

We are printing up the contents of a typical read-in as a booklet to be called
A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War.
It will be out May 3rd. I’ll send you a copy.

I’m getting ready to publish soon
Three Swedish Poets
also—it will be 7–10 poems apiece of Martinson, Ekelöf, and Herr Across-the-River. The royalty on such a Sixties book is $150 usually, so I’m dividing it up to the three of you; $50 apiece as permissions fee. I hope that will be all right. Check enclosed here.

Jim Wright called a couple of days ago—he has been on a Guggenheim grant living in N.Y.—but has got a job for next year teaching at Hunter College, and was happy about that—he’ll be able to stay in New York, to which he has taken an enormous liking. He’ll never get to Europe at all this year. He said he had written a poem that day, and chortled happily.

Harpers has decided to publish my new book, after fierce fighting between the old and new guards there. Don Hall sent a postcard that arrived yesterday to tell me. I was gone all day, poking about at a lake nearby, and so Carol read the card. So, to tell me then, she put a up huge sign in the driveway, that said: DRIVE SLOWLY! HARPERS’ AUTHOR LIVES HERE. That was sweet.

My best to Monica & to you—

Affectionately,

Robert

10-4-66

Dear Robert,

The other day we got a Christmas present from you! A very beautiful Joan Baez record—she’s often running through my head. It made us very happy. Otherwise I mostly play Brahms, myself, on the piano. It affords a certain comfort, the rolling resigned and bearded progressions one is able to squeeze out of the instrument. It’s Truth, my lad, truth, nothing helps right now but that. In Saigon, Da Nang and Hue the truth is being written right now in such large letters that it ought to force itself on the attention even of the blinded masses that nourish themselves on
Time
magazine. It was fine to read that you and others are doing your best in Oregon and elsewhere. I hope you have no objections to BLM running a notice about it—I met Lars Gustafsson the other day and he had also gotten a photostat from the
N.Y. Times.
Powerful poems!

Here is a first draft of the 3 presidents. A few uncertainties: does Roosevelt want to be a stone that rushes around at night, in which case he goes at a fairly violent speed, or does he only want to walk around at an ordinary walking pace. (I imagine him, huddled, concentrated, moving as fast as a hunted bear.) And Kennedy: the air
invisible, resilient
[osynlig, stärkande], that’s something I’ll probably change. Air is always invisible anyway. Were you thinking of
clear
air? “Resilient” really means “spänstig,” but the latter word sounds so athletic in Swedish. Then there’s that damned sideboard, actually a
petit
bourgeois thing in Sweden. I shall consult a furniture expert.

My reading in Lund turned out not to be a success since too few people came. The ones who did come were however all young, except for one gray-haired person who was head of prisons for the southern district and had come to honor an old jailer at his reading. [-----] Afterwards we went to the home of a young poet who played Bach on the clavichord. The young people buzzed like bees, had plans to print pamphlets and magazines. Great fun to meet so much spiritual activity in this POP-Sweden! I provided the address for
The Sixties,
some of them wanted to subscribe.

I too have appeared in a political context, less heroic than the ones where you appear unfortunately. See the enclosed clipping. According to another paper the confusion following the reading was great. The leading Social Democrat in the town council thought it was a
Temperance
lecture.