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Charles Simic staring at the wall
At ten or twelve, I was struck by an interest in twentieth-century tragedy. In my case, a chance encounter with Solzhenitsyn set it off, but I don’t think this is a rare pre-adolescent boy’s interest—some perverse fascination is attached to the quirks of tyrants, even among adults. One gets the impression that, hovering behind those idiosyncrasies is some dim insight to wickedness. I started on Hitler, and of course he was perfect for that sort of thing. My mother told me of an early, abandoned artistic enterprise in which he drew buildings, countless charcoals of buildings, all empty of people; she phrased it with audibly wide eyes and maximum, awed grimness. That wasn’t quite it, as it turns out—the architectural sketches I later saw reproduced in John Toland’s biography had rough human figures for scale, and they were merely banal: one would sooner find traces of inhumanity in vegetarianism. But how indelible that original image: the madman and his neutron-bomb cityscapes, a dreamworld uninhabited and menacingly plastic.
Charles Simic was born in Belgrade in 1938, and the first fifteen years of his life were spent among Nazi bombings and the noise of military movements. He started writing poetry at twenty-one, living in Chicago, but from the first the poems have a dreamlike emptiness, where ordinary objects are almost always elevated to the titles and seem to bask in metaphysical halos. The presence of the writer appears almost exclusively in his shadow, or shades that serve as doubles. They’ve always seemed to me to have a frequency the inverse of Hitler’s supposed drawings: the victim’s negative-world, perfect and empty, in perpetual dusk, and everywhere the implication of invasion. “Fork” is typical:
This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.
In his first books, Simic’s verse is still gooey with innards, and at times (as in the first poem in his Collected, “Butcher Shop”) spills into the macabre. The reinvention of common objects is a fascination, and some of the successful early poems, like “My Shoes,” through unlikely imaginative acrobatics derive rich effects from pedestrian objects. That is exactly the action of primitive surrealism: a simple device for eating in nine lines becomes a disfigured carrion feeder. Dali is the obvious reference point—the strokes are precise and probably too boldly colored, and the images always threaten to swarm out any focal attention. In Simic’s early work, the grisly looms as a tonal distraction, before giving way (as with Dali) to narcissism and the colorful trappings of lust. Some of Simic’s most memorable lines, if not his best, appear in the poem simply called “Breasts,” which suggests the Cavalier poet Thomas Carew’s effusive euphemism (“A Rapture”) updated to gross frankness. It begins “I love breasts,” and by the midpoint has achieved:
They bring on their nipples
Beads of inaudible sighs,
Vowels of delicious clarity
For the little red schoolhouse of our mouths.
And
I like to come up to them
From underneath, like a kid
Who climbs on a chair
To reach a jar of forbidden jam.
I find myself smiling a bit sideways after that. Simic, as his style matured, became entirely unable of summoning that sort of response: in the years between 1977–1990 his primitive surrealism turned into to something like a surreal assortment of primitives. Nightmare grotesques gave way to profound Platonic solids. He occupied himself with the endless production of spacious, hollow poems that, at their best, had a stirring, distant resonance. Where he previously evoked the strange distortions of Dalí, as his matter cooled, his landscapes began to resemble de Chirico’s: they occasionally achieved an insulated, airy space for echoing intimations of absence. Max Kozloff described the Italian painter’s work as “a collection of geometrical still points over which hovers a monstrous imminence,” which seems exactly what Simic was after (he titled one book Austerities). The predictive example from the early work is “Poem”:
Every morning I forget how it is.
I watch the smoke mount
In great strides above the city,
I belong to no one.Then I remember my shoes,
How I have to put them on,
How bending over to tie them up
I will look into the earth.
But that poem, however muted, remains marked with the grimness of his early career; the later work trades those faint invasions for at most a mild ebullience (occasionally edging into preciousness). When both are absent, the poems’ insistence on the variations of absence becomes so complete that it threatens to render each poem completely empty. His latest volume, My Noiseless Entourage (2005), begins with “Description Of A Lost Thing” which finds Simic mannered to the point of robotic.
It never had a name,
Nor do I remember how I found it.
I carried it in my pocket
Like a lost button
Except it wasn’t a button.
The wit of the last line is strained and washed, like cold noodles. It’s topped with the usual ingredients of the Simic sauce:
Horror movies,
All-night cafeterias,
Dark barrooms
And poolhalls,
On rain-slicked streets.
To his credit, the poet’s efforts are perhaps more subtle than before—by exerting his energies towards the creation of an anonymous object, rather than casting an oneiric retinue for an everyday one, he is following his style to its logical conclusion: total evacuation. If successful, the haunting imminence would arise from nothing at all, correlative without objective. But, his insistence on cliches—his own personal ones as well some from the common library—pollutes the vital cleanliness of the interior:
It lead a quiet, unremarkable existence
Like a shadow in a dream,
An angel on a pin,
And then it vanished,
In his earlier work, one might expect the next stanza to draw together into some clinching, bald, beakless fist. But either dismissive of conclusions, or finding them impossible with “a lost thing,” he just wanders off:
The years passed with their row
Of nameless stations
Til someone told me This is it!
And fool I was,
I got off on an empty platform
With no town in sight.
The reader doesn’t feel anything so much as lost, but maybe she wishes she hadn’t made the trip. On the one hand it’s a relief when Simic veers off his familiar paths to the haunted houses with pretend ghosts and animated shadows, but when he does it’s obviously with great expense of effort. He is ritually attracted to addressing the general topic of history, usually adding one opaque poem on the topic in each book. These are always about tyrants and war, and are so obvious one wonders if they specifically cater to the biographical strain in his critics (who, like the present one, always manage to mention his childhood). But they rarely, if ever, succeed. The persuasiveness of Simic’s work lies in his ability to invite interpretation and then frustrate it; to offer what appear to be symbols, and then leave them hanging, forcing the reader to admire only the strangeness and dislocation of the space he creates. The poems about dictators never leave off. This book’s entry is predictably titled “The Role Of Insomnia In History”:
Tyrants never sleep a wink:
The aggrieved and grim
Unblinking eye
Stares back at the night.
Which reminds me more of Tolkein than John Toland. Later, by the way, “The tyrants feed their hounds / Chunks of bloody meat.” More comfortable with ambiguity is “Clouds,” one of Simic’s better recent poems (which was printed in the New Yorker in 2005), though it doesn’t appear in the book.
To those worried about the future,
You bring tidings,
Shapes that may recall things
Without ever shedding
Their troubling ambiguity.
Perhaps the habitual return to elevating everyday objects was deemed too retrogressive for collecting (and I can understand Simic having qualms with the matter-of-factness that is disturbingly Wilbur-like), but it is ill-advised. Even as his interests have mutated and his style has given up the dismal for the whimsical, his peculiar powers and limitations have not changed. Simic is a textbook minor poet, situated comfortably on the scale between one-trick pony and prophet—at his best he controls an effect entirely his own.
Though it’s unfortunate that the present volume does not find success in its attempt to expand his repertoire, what’s more disappointing is its failures at the formula. Its most diverting poems are amusing but purely decorative exercises like “Midnight Feast,” which contains “Snowflake and laughter salad / Cuckoo-clock soup … / Venus in her own gravy.” But even that thins, unbelievably, to “A takeout menu / Someone slid under my door / When I was staring at the wall.”