Jack Gilbert, a Reappraisal: Part One
B. Renner

Jack Gilbert has been as astringent as any living English-language poet and approaches, among the dead, even Larkin. Yet I will suggest, across the stretch of this essay-in-parts, that he has been insufficiently astringent, that--as well as he is capable of writing--he is just as capable of writing badly and of publishing at least some of that badness. Views of Jeopardy, his first volume, the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize-winning beginning to his career, introduces readers to his strengths and weaknesses, as well as to his customary "voice," his customary subjects, and a far too customary posture.
At this remove of 37 years from the first appearance of Views, it is fairly easy to give the book an overall assessment: it is weak, swamped again and again by a tough-guy pose that would seem to owe more to the narrative stance of "hard-boiled" crime novels than to the ancient Greeks, and narrated by an insistent "I" which is uncomfortably close both to the confessionalist "movement" which had just officially begun in 1959 and to the linguistically flippant Beats, so at home in California, one of Gilbert's locales. Indeed only one poem, "Orpheus in Greenwich Village," belongs unquestionably among the undeniable poems of Gilbert's career. There are then a few more--"Susanna and the Elders," "The Whiteness, the Sound, and Alcibiades," "Rain," "County Musician" (also about Orpheus) and "The Abnormal Is Not Courage"--which are confounding confusions of fine and awful lines, and which successful and incisive editing (and in some cases rewriting) might well have brought near to perfection. A second batch contains poems which are simply small--not necessarily sabotaged with serious flaws, but also not greatly removed from workshop poems. The rest of the book is simply dispensable or bad.
The most interesting group to examine, to be sure, is that first group, those poems in which Gilbert seems to have embarked in the right direction, but also to have stumbled at some point and to have been incapable either of recognizing the flaws or of correcting them (or both). "Rain" is perhaps the most easily addressed. It begins conventionally, and unnecessarily,

Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.

Fragments and heavily end-stopped lines are to become two of the most characteristic elements of Gilbert's poetry, and both are readily apparent in this poem and throughout Views. Even here, at the public inception of his career, Gilbert has to some extent allowed style to turn into stylization, though the effect is muted by the book's brevity and its relative novelty in its time. Given the poem's title, Gilbert might have skipped these beginning lines (with their unspecified defeat) and the next four lines, an admirably abbreviated but conceptually trite notation of rain's effect of dulling color and vividity. The poem would then begin--

In the cold streets
Your warm body.
In whatever room
Your warm body.
Among all the people
Your absence.
The people who are always
Not you.

And the poem should also end here. Thus we have an almost classical simplicity, a cliche of thought sufficiently fashioned by "hard" language and lack of ornamentation as to aspire to poetry. But Gilbert continues--

I have been easy with trees
Too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
Suddenly
This rain.

To his credit Gilbert avoids an outright explication of his images and their conventional dichotomy--nature vs. city, verdure and grandeur vs. dreariness--but the images are already so laden with such explanations that we feel he has condescended to us and attached a directly stated moral for our edification. (Which is certainly what the awful line "Joy has been a habit" can only be read as.) Even as edited, "Rain" would not likely make anyone's "Golden Treasury", but neither would it flounder into sophomoric inanity.
"County Musician" is a greater loss. One of the poem's assets is its third-person voice, which effectively cuts away the likelihood of Gilbert's slipping into his disco strut. The poem is a "trademark" blend of sentences and fragments.

It was not impatience,
but despair. From the beginning,
it had gone badly.
From the beginning.
From the first laughter.

The subject is Orpheus' final betrayal of Eurydice, his turning back in disobedience to "the provision." This is unnecessary exposition, but it reveals the vital kernel of Gilbert's reinterpretation of the myth--despair, not impatience, drove Orpheus' mistake. This piques our interest. We wonder how Gilbert will make this revision valid, and we begin to think that we know how this "despair" will play out--Orpheus does not believe Hades will keep his word; he resists turning as long as he can; finally he turns anyway, managing to reassure himself and to lose his gamble in the same instant. This sort of despair is not far removed, actually, from the more traditional impatience explanation and thus seems both "new" and expected at once. If this were all Gilbert attempted, the poem would be another fairly well-written cliche, a suitable partner to Rilke's much longer and lusher "Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes." But Gilbert surprises us. His despair is self-, not situation-generated.

It was not impatience,
but to have at least the face,
seen freshly with loss,
forever. A landscape.
It was not impatience;
he turned in despair.
And saw, at a distance, her back.

Orpheus, all his long climb, has been torn between two things--only one of which he can have: either the living Eurydice, or the (almost) firsthand knowledge of what it means to be dead, and to see the possibility of life's returning torn away. He wants to see what Eurydice's face has to show him about the state of the dead--but there is more. He wants also to see her face at the moment that she realizes she is going into death again, rather than escaping it. Unlike Rilke's Eurydike, who is essentially a sleepwalker, Gilbert's is vivid (or at least Orpheus presumes so), wearing her emotions as clearly on her face as the living do. Orpheus' turn is not a giving in to the too-human desire to see his wife again; it is the deliberate act of an artist to learn something no other artist has ever had the chance to learn, it is the deliberate condemnation of his wife to the underworld in order to take away with him something altogether unprecedented in this life.
But the knowledge is denied to him--Gilbert punishes Orpheus even as Orpheus has punished Eurydice: in the second or two it has taken Orpheus to turn, Hades' command has already retrieved Eurydice, so that Orpheus can see only her retreating back. These seven lines are remarkable, an utterly new take on an utterly familiar tale, and are far beyond the conceptual and technical abilities of the great majority of our living poets. They are vital enough that we forgive Gilbert the unnecessary beginning, including his pedantic and shallow definition of the underworld (or Hell, as he calls it)--"the important made trivial." These seven lines raise the bar for Gilbert--from a poet capable of that condensed impact we are not likely to allow the normal blah-blah of contemporary poetry.
"Susanna and the Elders", Gilbert's direct attempt to wrestle Wallace Stevens to the ground (as the prominent usage of the adjective "simpering" makes clear), is likewise full of unnecessary lines, though it's not a poem on the scale of "County Musician." Beginning again with conventional exposition (a reference to Rubens' painting), Gilbert walks us by the hand through his version of the legend. We are seven lines deep before we meet a specific meaningful image--the elders "at the hedge with their feeble eyes, / the bodies, and the stinking mouths." Not great poetry, but at least to the point, and inoffensive. But what are the elders seeing? Here Gilbert fails completely, as Stevens before him failed, with a too literal description of something essentially beyond explanation--that is, the actual burst of thought, imagery, and/or emotion in a man's mind when he is so excited by sexual desire that his "object" suddenly seems all-encompassing--and likewise not requiring explanation, since we already know of the elders' lust for Susanna. Gilbert is thus reduced to convention--

All the loveliness of the world
Compacted. The lavish gleaming.
Her texture.

He even gives us a "Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue" moment with

The sheen of water on her
Brightness.

The only thought that matters, in any of this "scene-setting," is the description of the elders as "excluded / Forever. Forever in exile." And even this describes only their state of mind as they watch Susanna bathe--because, as their rape of her shows, they could not be physically "excluded."
Then why, you must be wondering, am I insisting that this poem has value? Because of where Gilbert takes the elders in his conclusion.

I think of them pushing to the middle
Of Hell where the pain is strongest.
To see at the top of the chimney,
Far off, the small coin of color.
And, sometimes, leaves.

Although we may question even his need to delineate "the middle / Of Hell" as the place "where the pain is strongest" (shouldn't that be obvious?), these are specific, fresh, unexpected lines. He has cast Hell as a fireplace, a homely fireplace, the elders struggling to the center of the fire because there only can they see up and out through the chimney to what--we must presume--they really desire, an escape from lust into what we might characterize as an innocent, or at least less solipsistic, world. The underlying thought, the pain required for transformation, is conventional, but it is convention as archetype, not mere cliche. And besides, we note, it is purgatory, not Hell, from which souls are cleansed and freed. These elders, like Tantalus, will see forever what they cannot have, but they have enforced that vision upon themselves.
I urge readers to seek out this volume--whether from a used book dealer or in a large public or university library--so that each of you may explore it and the ways in which it has gone wrong. Most books of poetry go wrong throughout, and thus teach us very little--but Views of Jeopardy is that rarity, a collection from which we can learn even through many of its flaws.
(Next time around I will take a look at the faux-Views, the section of Monolithos labeled "1962." This "book within a book" is substantially different from Views and represents Gilbert's attempt to recast his early career.)

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