The following is the third in a series of excerpts from an essay by Stan Dragland (and conversation between Stan (SD) and Agnes Walsh (AW)) published in Brick 68 (Fall 2001).
Mother of Pearl: Agnes Walsh and Halldór Laxness (continued from October 6)
SD:
I was educated in the pseudo-science of close reading, Practical Criticism, to behave as though a text were a closed, autonomous signifying system. Put ’er in a bell jar and suck out the air. (I saw that done in the Oyen high school lab.) Everlasting flowers are better than real ones. How could it be an ivory tower when you don’t see any ivory?
The unfairness escalates. Shame on me for enjoying it.
But there's still something to be said for banishing most of the contextual whirlwind, if it’s eventually allowed to blow back in, preferably a zephyr at a time. I asked Agnes to write something about the genesis of “When I Married Halldór Laxness,” for example, but not before I´d given the poem a loosened form of close reading -- depending on my own resources to reach through technique towards the heart. I wanted to find out what I could say about it, more than any other poem in Agnes´s book, because it seemed so impervious to criticism. I was actually trying to keep the author at arm’s length, perhaps perversely feeling obliged to make it on my own but also convinced that she wouldn’t, maybe couldn’t, have my sort of relationship with her poem, that no more than I was she an authority on her own work. I know from experience the gap that opens between writer and writing when the latter estranges itself. “When I Married Halldór Laxness,” strange and dreamlike, seems clearly to have emerged from some such letting go.
But a shade of the Agnes Walsh I know was always near while I read and considered and wrote about her work. I had both to keep my independence from this wraith and write nothing that would dismay it. Like poetry, criticism has nothing to do with placation or flattery. It has nothing to do with ingratiation, with ego, neither hers nor mine. But an intense respect, a deep courtesy towards the writer at full stretch might stretch me taut in my turn. That benign presence at my elbow reminds me that her work and mine are phases of the same enterprise. Real people meet in flesh-and-blood writing. The creative and the critical, compatible and autonomous:
Reader, in your hand you hold
A silver case, a box of gold.
I have no door, however small,
unless you pierce my tender wall,
And there's no skill in healing then
Shall ever make me whole again.
Show pity, Reader, for my plight;
Let be, or else consume me quite.
The answer/title of this Jay Macpherson riddle/poem is “Egg,” but the address to a Reader elevated into proper noun makes Egg a metaphor for Book.
I write about dead authors just as tenderly as about those living -- tenderly and toughly -- tough it is to think in and then out, in my humanly limited way, into the heart of the work and on out through layer upon layer of meaning towards ... I wish I could drop that ellipsis. Untroubled participation in some continuum would sure be welcome. It’s a strange occupation, this heartfelt service of what I can neither name nor know.
AW:
Two subjects I have always been interested in are humor and eroticism. Two others are places (and especially islands), and what makes up the culture of places. When I was a young girl I had a stamp collection with stamps only from islands. Big land mass has never interested me: Canada, Australia, China, Russia. But the little dots have: the Faroes, Iceland, Tobago, Newfoundland, Ireland, etc.
I wrote this poem in the late 70s, not long after my father passed away. I was living at home then, having returned to be near my father in his old age. I had spent the ten years before that kicking around the U.S. and when I returned home I was struck by how much attention I was paying to detail, to small things in life, and to time passing. I spent a lot of time reading, a lot of time walking, thinking, imagining.
The atmosphere of the poem, the atmosphere I was living that is, was one of interest in light, wind, landscape, and observing. I believe that such a length of time in this “mind-frame” leaves one with pores more open and the mind “relaxed into a care-free sinking,” if I can quote myself from another poem.
While I was living this “atmospheric life” I was also going into St. John’s twice a month by out-of-town taxi to take books from the MUN library back out home with me. I read them the way I had collected stamps. Islands. I carted back out in Dominion bags books from islands. Halldór Laxness was one of them. Axel Sandemose was another (he is mentioned in the poem). Sandemose was from Denmark with a Norwegian mother, or perhaps it was the other way around. Sandemose had been in Newfoundland in the early part of the 20th century and wrote about his time here. So I stumbled upon his work also and read his truly amazing novel, The Werewolf. Then another, Horns for our Adornment. I remember the thrill I felt when I read in this novel: “The Fulton [a ship], was towed into St. John’s, it being impossible to force the narrow channel without a fair wind.” And later in the novel: “In Spain the climate was mild and people different. Here they were like they were in Norway. A disagreeable, everyday feeling of being at home. They spoke another language, but that was the only difference.” It thrilled me beyond words to read this in a novel. Growing up we never read about ourselves or our landscape in fiction. And that a writer I admired had been here, in fact was harboured here, supposedly in Fogo after he killed a ship-mate who was cruel to him. If any of you have seen the film Misery Harbour ... well that is Axel Sandemose’s novel and a loose version of his life.
So there I was reading Laxness and Sandemose at the same time, two great novelists. Laxness’ novel The Atom Station is about a young girl from the north of Iceland working as a house-maid in the city. The American military are at Keflavik wanting to set up an atomic tracking station. When I was growing up in Placentia, the American base in Argentia had flights, sailors going to Keflavik on an almost daily basis. All that seemed dream-like. I saw and heard the planes leave Argentia every day for Keflavik. I had no idea what the Americans were doing there but the sailors talked of it a lot. I only saw the streaks the planes left in the clear blue sky.
When I wrote the poem I was after reading these books by Laxness: World Light, The Happy Warriors, Christianity at Glacier, Salka Valka, and The Atom Station (the latter several times). I was also asking my parents a lot of questions about their past and events that happened before I was born. I had also met with my cousin Sam B., to whom the poem is dedicated. Sam is 20-25 years my senior, a bit of a traveler, and a social misfit. We hit it off and traded books. He courted me which pissed my mother off. She thought he was too old and a cousin to boot. I liked being courted by him because he could old-fashion waltz, was saucy yet respectful, and he had a wonderful musky smell. So you get my drift. I was reading Laxness, I was drawn to Sam. I was living the atmospheric life of Nordic fiction, forbidden passion, and old Newfoundland, all mixed together with writing.
For me it is an erotic poem. A literary, folkloric, dream-state fantasy of living on the edge of the earth.
When I Married Halldór Laxness (from In the Old Country of My Heart)
(for Sam B.)
I watched the froth go down and the yellow liquid rise to meet it. I twisted the glass around and it tipped over and spilled on his arthritic knee. I looked to the side and didn’t apologize. His beautiful bony fingers flicked off the foam in separate particles as if it was incidental lint he had finally noticed.
The decision is yours now.
He rubbed the liquid into his pant leg. I sighed. Either decision I make will kill something.
And so, you want to hang in this ether land forever?
Yes.
And if I pulled your hair?
And if I scalded your mouth?
And if I made a teepee of birch billets with you in the centre?
Look at me.
No.
He went away.
Next night the phone rang.
I’ll meet you at Glacier and First Point. You must be exact.
I’ll be there for three evenings.
For three nights I wore myself ragged but couldn’t find where.
Friday evening the doorbell rang. He handed me two books by Aksel Sandemose. I put my fingers exactly where his warm fingerprints still lingered on the top book and closed the door. I read and waited.
(There was a tidal wave and a woman went from window to window with a candle in her hand as her house floated out the bay. They rescued her in St. Lawrence.)
When you are ready, if ever, light your own candle.
Two years later, my hand shook as I held the match. His hair had greyed around the temples and he crippled shyly.
Five years later, two babies look hauntingly like him. He is chopping wood in the backyard. He stops.
Look at me. I fooled you years ago. Glacier is in Iceland and I tore out all the pages where it was written in that book. Do you regret that we called the babies Abstract and Zero? Come feel Aunt Hilda and Didymus under my fingernails.
His gentle laugh ripped the night sky, and I got pregnant again.
(to be continued)
