Straying from St. Lucia
Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott's
verse memoir,
The Prodigal, begins with an image of literature
set aside. A traveler places his book on the seat next to him; "he preferred
to read / the paragraphs, the gliding blocks of stanzas / framed by
the widening windows." But literature is not so much disbanded in Walcott's
masterful memoir as diffused; it becomes both the object of observation-the
landscape flashing by outside the observer's window-and the means to
capture the ephemeral image on the page.
Train travel, one might note, hardly provides an innovative mode for
an author's reflection upon artistic creation, and Walcott has an expansive
opus upon which to reflect, including his breakthrough collection of
poems, In a
Green Night (1962),
Sea Grapes (1976),
Midsummer (1984), and more recently,
Tiepolo's Hound
(2000), among other poetic and dramatic works. But Walcott is conscious
of the clichéd legacy in which he operates, alluding openly to perhaps
the most famous treatment of trains in all literature; "he knew, through
the gliding window, the trees would lift / in lament for all the leaves
of unread books, /
Anna Karenina …" The allusion underlines
the self-awareness that runs through
The Prodigal, a self-awareness
that somehow manages to avoid self-promotion. The speaker's movement
towards the monuments and masterpieces of the past is inevitable but
humble; he will use well-traveled routes to reach these places of pilgrimage.
Literature, for Walcott, provides the pre-constructed railroad tracks,
but its parallel lines are reinterpreted in his own beautiful poetic
lines.
The Prodigal is composed of three parts, divided into chapters
that often contain distinct narratives. "Echoing railway stations drew
him to fiction," Walcott writes, accepting the inevitable draw of those
familiar cathedrals of fiction. But the speaker personalizes these fictions
for himself as well. One such fiction tells the story of a love affair
set among the "chasms and fissures of the vertiginous Alps." The whole
scene, the speaker reminisces, "was just like something he had read.
/ Something in boyhood before he went abroad." The love interest, "with
her cold cheeks, snow smudged with strawberries / her body steaming
with hues of a banked hearth," seems to complete the stereotypical alpine
romance. Confronted by the snowy blankness of the mountains and the
blank whiteness of the page, the speaker cannot escape narrative; "out
of this snow, like weeds that have survived, / came and assiduous fiction."
This self-awareness of his own creative process saves Walcott's poetry
from the trite and obvious, rendering it a beautiful distillation of
literary and imagistic influence.
Walcott describes images of "inns, / the gables shelved
with white, the muted trails, / and (unavoidable) the sharp horn of the
peak"-such images are, as he explicitly acknowledges, unavoidable. But
the images are not deployed as a result of creative limitation; they
illustrate the persistence of memory, "an ember's memory/ of fire,
provided since my young manhood/ or earlier, of the Ice Maiden." The Ice
Maiden, a Hans Christian Anderson tale, provided a bridge for the
author in his "young manhood," introducing him to foreign tales and
foreign climes. Now that he is a writer, it returns to him as a
demonstration of the power of words and narrative.
The rapid movement from childhood to adulthood, across eras, from one
end of the globe to the other, characterizes the fluid verse of
The
Prodigal. Relatively early in the book, the speaker describes Boston
in the winter, a potentially endless state of inertia but within this
description we are carried to the far reaches of Mongolia: "On Mondays,
Boston classes. Lunch, a Korean corner- / My glasses clouded by a tribal
broth, / a soup that tamed shaggy Mongolian horsemen / in steaming tents
which their mares stamped the snow." Sharing the contemplation of morning
sun on New Jersey, we are shipped to the author's home: "Blue-grey morning,
sunlight shaping Jersey, / and, magisterial, a white city gliding between
buildings, leaving the river for the Caribbean/ its cargo: my longing.
A high, immaculate ship." The sweeping movement of the verse never feels
misguided in Walcott's poetry. It is grounded by the tangible, everyday
details rendered with exquisite aplomb.
However,
The Prodigal does not succeed effortlessly. The self-consciousness
of the writing creates its most noticeable stumbles. Active criticism
enters the poetry at certain points: "You did not venture far from your
hotel, / Prodigal, in your untethered pilgrimage." In some of these
explicit lines of criticism, the poetry of
The Prodigal loses
an element of its fluidity. Perhaps Walcott includes these moments to
emphasize the inevitably awkward project of self-reflection, to illustrate
the moments in which consciousness rears its head to interfere with
its own depiction. For example, a sarcastic voice punctures the speaker's
rapturous descriptions of Genoa: "here it comes, the light / out of
pearl, out of Piero della Francesca, (you could tell he would mention
a painter)." The shift from first to third person, and the invocation
of an external commentator distances the reader from the verse, rupturing
the intimate display of the less obvious challenges facing the speaker.
The passage of the prodigal to his homeland is tumultuous in its own
right; these poetic shifts to a conversational criticism disrupt rather
than augment the depiction of the speaker's difficult and prolonged
journey home.
An additional discomfort with the verse may arise from the
prevalence of love affairs, which threatens to reduce the speaker's
narrative into a Don Juan-esque inventory of his personal evolution. The
women involved in these affairs hardly become characters in their own
right and often seem enigmatic extensions of the places themselves: "O
Serbian sibyl, prophetress / peering between your curtains of brown
hair/ (or these parentheses), if I were a Jew, you'd see me shuffling on
the cobblestones." From these lines, it is clear that the romance is as
much historical as it is personal. The affair with the "Serbian sibyl"
becomes a mechanism for the speaker to understand his relation to this
foreign place.
But ultimately we excuse such indulgences on Walcott's part
since the poem is unapologetically and unashamedly about its speaker. An
older version of the speaker reflects upon the fusion of human and
history: "what was adored, / the city or its women? Aren't they the
same?" At first the sentiment seems egocentric, an account of
relationships focused only upon their effect upon the speaker. But, as
Walcott continues, he reveals that the love that grew out of these
places did not cloud the speaker's appreciation; it allowed it to
blossom, reduced the anxiety of foreignness with intimacy and "a love
that has no epoch, no history." This type of love allowed both his home
and his travels to blend, "blent into this, whatever this thing is." The
speaker has not quite identified the result of his travels, but he is
tired at this late stage in his life with the constant questioning and
self-consciousness that imposed itself earlier in life; it seems he's
had enough of "the cracked heart and the dividing mind" which "yawn like
a chasm, from too many fissures / like the blanched Alps."
With simultaneous breadth and intimacy,
The Prodigal combines
anxiety of influence with a joyful celebration of influence.
The
Prodigal can be read as a reconciliation not only between a man
and his homeland, but between an author and the origin of his influence.
In the later stages of life the speaker probes the origins of identity:
Since I am what I am, how was I made?
To scribe complexion to the intellect
is not an insult, since it takes its plaid
like the invaluable lizard from its background,
and if our work is piebald mimicry,
then virtue lies in its variety
to be adept.
In
The Prodigal, Walcott adeptly escapes "piebald mimicry,"
creating a mosaic of influence that forms something truly original.
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