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W.D.
Snodgrass in Conversation with Philip Hoy
80
pp, ISBN 10: 0-9532841-0-7, ISBN 13: 978-0-9532841-0-8, £9.50
(paperback only), Publication, May 1998
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A
note about W.D. Snodgrass in Conversation with Philip Hoy
An 80 page book, containing a 15,000 word interview, a 20-page
comprehensive bibliography, and a representative selection of
quotations from the poet's critics and reviewers.
Of this book, the first to be published
by Between The Lines, Robert Phillips (Moores Professor of English
in the University of Texas and author of The Confessional Poets)
wrote: "This volume is invaluable. It is the most important
document we have toward understanding the central enterprise of
Snodgrass's work, especially the intentions behind and misunderstandings
of The Führer Bunker. When the post-modern American
poets are re-evalued, Snodgrass's reputation will surely rise
to the top, and this volume will be cited as justification."
And Glyn Pursglove, reviewing the book for the Swansea Review
(1999), wrote: " W.D. Snodgrass in Conversation with
Philip Hoy … is rich in anecdote and memory - of Randall
Jarrell, Robert Lowell, William Empson and others; it is fascinating,
too, on Snodgrass's experience … of creative writing classes;
it is good on Snodgrass's own work - especially when he discusses
his extraordinary cycle The Fuehrer Bunker - and its
reception by readers (and others). There is, in short, much to
enjoy and learn from here. Though the questions are asked
by Hoy, he also has things to say that aren't questions addressed
to Snodgrass; what is presented is, that is to say, more of a
conversation than interviews often are, and seems better for it.
The book's value is increased by the inclusion of what seems to
be a pretty thorough bibliography of Snodgrass's work, and of
critical writings on him. Warmly recommended." |
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A
note on W.D. Snodgrass
W.D. Snodgrass was born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1926,
and was educated at Geneva College. His studies were interrupted
when, during WWII, he was drafted into the Navy, and sent to
the Pacific.
After
demobilization, Snodgrass resumed his studies, but transferred
from Geneva College to the University of Iowa, eventually enrolling
in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which had been established
in 1937, and was attracting as tutors some of the finest poetic
talents of the day, amongst them John Berryman, Randall Jarrell
and Robert Lowell.
Snodgrass’s
first poems appeared in 1951, and throughout the 1950’s
he published in some of the most prestigious magazines (e.g.
Botteghe Oscure, Partisan Review, the New Yorker,
the Paris Review and the Hudson Review). However,
in 1957, five sections from a sequence entitled ‘Heart’s
Needle’ were included in Hall, Pack and Simpson’s
anthology, New Poets of England and America, and these
were to mark a turning-point. When Lowell had been shown early
versions of these poems, in 1953, he had disliked them, but
now he was full of admiration. He wrote to Elizabeth Bishop,
saying: ‘I
must tell you that I’ve discovered a new poet, W.D. Snodgrass
– he was once one of my Iowa students, and I merely thought
him about the best. Now he turns out to be better than anyone
except Larkin.’He also wrote to Randall Jarrell, this time
calling Snodgrass Larkin’s equal, and comparing him to
the great French poet, Jules Laforgue. The point was developed
in an interview he gave the Paris Review rather later:
‘I
think a lot of the best poetry is [on the verge of being slight
and sentimental]. Laforgue – it’s hard to think of
a more delightful poet … Well, it’s on the verge of
being sentimental, and if he hadn’t dared to be sentimental
he wouldn’t have been a poet. I mean, his inspiration was
that. There’s some way of distinguishing between false
sentimentality, which is blowing up a subject and giving emotions
that you don’t feel, and using whimsical, minute, tender,
small emotions that most people don’t feel but which Laforgue
and Snodgrass do. So that I’d say he [Snodgrass] had pathos
and fragility … He has fragility along the edges and a
main artery of power going through the center."
As well as writing to Bishop and Jarrell, Lowell wrote to Snodgrass,
saying how much he admired the anthologized poems, and offering
to help him find a book publisher.
By
the time Heart’s Needle was published, in 1959,
Snodgrass had already won the The Hudson Review Fellowship in
Poetry and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Poetry Prize. However,
his first book brought him something more: a citation from the
Poetry Society of America, a grant from the National Institute
of Arts, and, most important of all, 1960’s Pulitzer Prize
in Poetry.
It
is often said that Heart’s Needle inaugurated confessional
verse. Snodgrass dislikes the term, and is quick to point out
that the kind of verse he was writing at that time – a
‘searingly personal’ verse, as Ann Sexton called it
– was hardly unprecedented. This is true, but it is also
true that the genre he was reviving here seemed revolutionary
to most of his contemporaries, reared as they had been on the
anti-expressionistic principles of the New Critics.
Snodgrass’s
confessional work was to have a profound effect on many of his
contemporaries, amongst them, and most importantly, Robert Lowell.
The evidence for this is on display in Lowell’s most accomplished
volume, Life Studies, which appeared in the same year
as Heart’s Needle, and enabled its author to carry
off the other great literary prize for 1960, the National Book
Award. The effect on other poets, on both sides of the Atlantic,
is fairly described as liberating. As one English critic was
to put it later on:
”'Confessional'
was an unfortunate way of describing what was new about Life
Studies and Heart’s Needle – the term reeks
of guilt and ingratiation – but it does recall the general
surprise that such poetic vibrance and composure could be won
from subjects that seemed doomed to privacy or narcissistic
inflation."
In the almost forty years since this auspicious debut, Snodgrass
has gone on to produce an impressively diverse body of work,
including After Experience, Remains, A Locked
House, W.D.’s Midnight Carnival, The Death
of Cock Robin, Each in His Season, The Führer
Bunker, seven volumes of translations, and a large number
of essays too, some of which were collected in In Radical
Pursuit. These books have seriously divided the critics,
bringing bouquets from some and brickbats from others. Most
controversial of all was The Führer Bunker, a book
which not only pitted critics against each other, but in one
notable case pitted a critic against himself.
Snodgrass
has a long and distinguished academic career behind him, having
taught at Cornell, Rochester, Wayne State, Syracuse, Old Dominion,
and Delaware Universities. He retired from teaching in 1994,
and now devotes himself full-time to his writing. He lives with
his ‘fourth, last and best’ wife, the writer, Kathleen
Snodgrass (née Browne), spending six months of each year
at their home in New York, and the other six months in Mexico.
–
Philip Hoy, 1998
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A
note on Philip Hoy
Philip
Hoy was born in 1952, and educated at Glastonbury High School
in Surrey, and at the Universities of York and Leeds. He has a
Ph.D in Philosophy, a subject he taught for many years, in the
UK, and, more recently, overseas. Since returning to the UK, in
1996, Hoy has been writing, editing and publishing. His most recent
publications include "The
Starry Night": Snodgrass's Van Gogh Reconsidered' (Agenda,
London, 1996), "The Genesis of On Certainty: Some
Questions for Professors Anscombe and von Wright' (Wittgenstein
Studien, University of Passau, 1996), the proem and afterword
to Peter Dale's Da Capo (Agenda Editions, London, 1997),
"The
Will to Power #486/KGW VIII, 1 2[87], 2: A Knot that Won't
Unravel?" (Nietzsche Studien, Walter de Gruyter,
Berlin, 1998), W.D. Snodgrass in Conversation with Philip
Hoy (BTL, London, 1998), Anthony Hecht in Conversation
with Philip Hoy (BTL, London, 1999, 2001, 2004), Donald
Justice in Conversation with Philip Hoy (BTL, London, 2001),
"The Interviewer Interviewed: N.S Thompson talks to Philip
Hoy, editor of Between The Lines", The Dark Horse,
15, Summer 2003: 40-46. (If you would like to read this article,
please follow this link: http://www.waywiser-press.com/imprints/darkhorse.html).
Hoy
is managing editor of Between The Lines, and executive
editor too of The Waywiser Press, the press of which
BTL is an imprint. He lives in Surrey. |
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An
extract from the interview
An
extract from the interview
Do
you think that some of the criticism [The Führer Bunker]
has attracted may have sprung from the idea that understanding
must lead on to forgiveness, so that, if we’re not to forgive,
we must not be able to understand?
I’m sure
it did.
A lot of
people do seem taken with the idea – it’s to be found
in Arendt’s The
Origins of Totalitarianism,
for example, and in the afterword to Primo Levi’s If
This Is a Man and
The
Truce
– but it’s surely unsound …
You can understand
why someone did something and still want to see them punished.
But
there’s a more important reason why people might dislike
The Führer Bunker, and it goes back to what I was
saying a moment ago. It’s comforting to believe that the
Nazis were utterly different from the rest of us, so different
that we can describe them as inhuman – or bestial or fiendish
or whatever – and so different that any attempt to understand
their behaviour is bound to fail. The Führer Bunker
assumes that this is false.
Hence the
epigraph: ‘Mother Teresa, asked when it was she started her
work for abandoned children, replied, “On the day I discovered
I had a Hitler inside me.’’’
Right.
There’s
a fine book by Ian Buruma called The Wages of Guilt, in
which he talks about the ways in which Germany and Japan have
tried to come to terms with the outrages they committed during
the ‘30s and ‘40s. And I’d like to quote from a
part of the book where he seeks to explain why it is that the
Nazi leaders have received so little attention from writers, fictional
and non-fictional. He’s talking of German writers in particular,
but I think the point he makes has more general application: ‘This
fear of biography, in fictional or documentary form, is due possibly
to an idea common in the 1960s and the 1970s - that structures
and institutions, not human beings, explain the past. But it must
also have something to do with the fear of identification; what
Germans call Berührungsangst, literally the fear of
making contact.’ I wonder if this doesn’t help to explain
the difficulties some people have had with The Führer
Bunker?
I very much
agree with Buruma’s statement about the fear of contact.
But even stronger, I think, is the fear of recognition, which
is what I was talking about just now. In other words, it’s
not only the fear that bad luck, or bad morals, are contagious
and may rub off, but also, and more importantly, the fear that
the disease is general and innate. I hate to agree with the church
about anything, but they were right in seeing evil as innate and
universal.
Did your
own experience during the war contribute to The
Führer Bunker
in any way? James Fenton says in the piece he wrote for Agenda
that you didn’t have any terrible experiences at the hands
of the enemy …
The Navy is
very foolish, but not so foolish as to send me into combat! The
only Japanese I got to see were prisoners.
But according
to Fenton, you hated what life in the Navy involved. What did
it involve, for you?
Well, let
me describe an incident for you. I was a brig guard for a time,
and one of the prisoners we had was a huge black guy – we
nicknamed him Heavy – who shouldn’t have been there
at all. He’d been playing craps on board an aircraft carrier,
and somehow became involved in a fight. He hit the other guy once,
and thought – quite reasonably, given his size – that
it was all over. But the other guy managed to pick up a fire-axe,
and hit him in the back, giving him a huge gash. He was in hospital
for months. But then, when he came out, they sent him to the brig.
What had he done? Nothing! He was the victim!
Then, one
day, a new prisoner, who’d been put in the same room as Heavy
and a lot of other prisoners, claimed he’d been gang-raped
during the night. Some of them admitted having anal intercourse
with him, but said that he’d been a willing partner, that
he’d even suggested it. No formal charges were made, because
it could have been embarrassing for us and our officers if it
had got out that the Brig hadn’t been properly check-ed that
night. Instead, these guys – and Heavy was amongst them –
were made to do heavy labour. They were also made to sleep in
an absolutely bare room, under bright lights, with no furnishings
of any kind, just a bucket for shitting in. And as if that weren’t
bad enough, I had to go in every night, every hour on the hour,
get these guys on their feet, bring them to attention, dismiss
them, and then leave ….
You had
to torment them?
Right …
This obviously
goes deep with you …
They were
all Black guys from the south … They’d had pretty wretched
lives …
And there
you were, making their lives still more wretched. How long did
the punishment go on for?
Oh, about
a week.
And what
effect did it have? On them, I mean …
They grew
steadily more exhausted, steadily more angry …
And Heavy?
Well, one
night, I arrived late, which meant that I had to call them on
the half-hour, rather than the hour, and, the next day, someone
told them I’d wakened them once too often. That wasn’t
true – in fact, I’d wakened them one time too few –
but they believed it, and when I went in again, I found Heavy
looming over me, angry as hell, convinced that I was getting pleasure
out of all this … I wasn’t so much scared as sorry,
sorry that he could think that.
You feel
guilty about what you did as a Brig Guard? That you should have
refused to be a party to it?
I should have,
but I didn’t have the courage. By then it would have meant
my going to prison, because I’d lost my religious beliefs.
Like a
lot of other people, you were just following orders.
Exactly.
You said
earlier that, after the war was over, and you became a student,
you joined the Quakers for a while. Was this because of what you’d
found yourself willing to do, or not unwilling not to do, while
in the Navy?
Sure …
Well … It’s hard to talk about …
We can
move on to other things …
No –
if it isn’t hard to talk about, it’s probably not worth
talking about ... While we were still in training, out in California,
near San Francisco, a combat instructor took a bunch of us out
and gave us a lesson in how, if you’re caught without any
weapons, you can blind a man with your bare hands, and then …
rip off his face … I sort of … I’m sorry …
You wrote
about this in ‘After Experience Taught Me …’
I did.
But it
troubles you still …
I recovered
that scene some years later when I was in shallow-level psychotherapy
… It was a strange situation, because the therapist was behind
a mirror, and couldn’t be seen … Anyway, we went back
to that incident, and I simply broke up, went all over the room
...
It
may be that they didn’t really expect us to do that, that
they were testing us, to see how willing we were to be stripped
of our former attitudes …
But you
didn’t think that at the time?
No, no. I
believed that’s what they expected us to do. I also believed
that I had no business being someplace I might have to do such
a thing.
Would you
have, do you think?
I think I
might have …
Maybe none
of us knows what he’s capable of, until he sees what he actually
does?
But you know,
I heard somewhere that in WWII, a very high proportion of the
guns ‘jammed’.
You mean
people couldn’t bring themselves to open fire?
Right.
It would
be nice to believe that that was true!
Except that
I kind of like the fact we didn’t lose that war!
Well, you
wouldn’t have wanted to lose that war because of your better
instincts, but maybe there’s something to be said for having
won it despite them!
Hah!
And the
Quakers?
Okay, well,
later on, when Korea was starting to hot up, I knew I couldn’t
go back into the military. I knew I couldn’t go to jail either,
because by then I was married and had a child to think of. The
only alternative was to find support from some religious group,
and that’s how I ended up going to the Quakers. I’d
gone to the Unitarians first, but they were so naïve, always
believing the best of people. The Quakers were very different,
very courageous, quite prepared to believe the worst about everybody!
When the
war did break out, were you called up?
As I recall,
I sent in my draft card, telling them I wouldn’t be prepared
to serve. And they said, ‘Look, if things were that bad,
we’d ring you up and tell you all about it! But for now we
don’t need people your age, so please: Go
away!’
We’ve
moved rather a long way from The Führer Bunker, but
it’s not hard to see how someone who’s had the sorts
of experiences you’ve described might be disposed to take
an interest in the evil that men do, and to make it a subject
of his poetry. In one way or another, the foul rag-and-bone shop
of the human heart has always been pretty close to the centre
of your concerns.
That’s
right.
I’ll
want to come back to this later, but it seems to me that the urge
to conform, the pressure to conform, and the dangers of not resisting
the urge and the pressure, are never very far away from your concerns
as a writer.
You won’t
get an argument out of me over that!
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