Seidel poetry written with glittering malice
Frederick Seidel Selected Poems
By Frederick Seidel (Farrar, Straus & Girous)
The way to read Frederick Seidel’s “Selected Poems” is to remove the dust jacket, light a match and torch it. It’s not that the jacket is unattractive. But the hard cover underneath it is ink black. Once the jacket’s gone, you have what each of Seidel’s volumes aspire to be: a little black book.
You may also want to flip it over and read it back to front. Seidel is among the rare poets who’ve become noticeably better — nervier, more tricksy and electric — as they’ve slid into old age.
Seidel, who turns 85 next week, knows this. His “Collected Poems,” published a decade or so ago, were arranged in reverse chronological order. Like Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” Martin Amis’ “Time’s Arrow” and Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along,” it traveled backward in time, movingly, from experience to innocence.
The word “innocence” is not easily applied to Seidel’s work. His poetic credo, articulated in a Paris Review interview, is: “Write beautifully what people don’t want to hear.” He’s the Dark Prince of American poetry, a writer of glittering malice, one who cuts against the grain of almost every variety of community feeling. He’s not a poet for everyone, but no poet worth anything is.
Someone — I think it was
John Ashbery — said that you can usually pick up a book of poems, riffle through it and tell in about 10 seconds if it’s for you. They’re like first dates this way. If you flip through Seidel’s new book, be prepared to suppress whatever class animus you may be clinging to.
Seidel grew up wealthy in St. Louis, the son of a coal industrialist, and he seems to have been born with a Harvard accent and a chilly sense of hauteur. A poem titled “Frederick Seidel” begins: “I live a life of laziness and luxury, / Like a hare without a bone who sleeps in a pâté.”
The nouns that populate his poems include: old prep schools, Hermès briefcases, Savile Row tailors, grand hotels, sky-filled tall windows, elite restaurants, splits of brut, fox hunts, open-topped Mercedes. The reader will struggle to keep in mind that envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that is no fun for the sinner. That his verse never reads like a parody of a certain kind of life — courtly old men in creaking shirts, flashing their monocles — is a testament to his fluid sense of irony.
He is a seeker of alienatingly expensive sensations; on a deeper level, he’s a complicated critic of such seeking. In a poem titled “A Gallop to Farewell,” about buying clothes in Europe, he writes about a maker of bespoke shoes in London:
No one has surpassed / The late George Cleverley’s lasts, / The angle in of the heel, the slightly squared-off toe, the line, / Though Suire at Lobb is getting there. / His shoes fit like paradise by the third pair. / Like they were Eve. The well-dressed man, / The vein of gold that seems inexhaustible, / Is a sunstream of urine on its way to the toilet bowl.
Seidel tinkers like a mechanic with rhyme. He embraces it when it suits him, and flings it away when it doesn’t. Rhyme is the tuxedo that’s always ready to go, as if in a spy novel, when the hero steps out of the sea and pulls off his wetsuit.
He writes often about motorcycles. Like his shoes, he has them custom-made. In one early poem, he asked: “What definition of beauty can exclude / The MV Agusta racing 500-3, / From the land of Donatello, with blatting megaphones?” His poems are life force and death wish. He’s the only living poet who could creditably be played by Nicolas Cage in a biopic.
“We can’t all be proletarians, you know,” the critic Dwight Macdonald once thundered, in a letter. To focus on the status details in Seidel’s poems is to miss the way grief filters through them. A subset of this grief arises from longing for connection, albeit connection — is he so different from the rest of us in this way? — on his own terms. He winces at the beauty of the world.
His infamous line about sex — “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare” — would be harder to swallow if the poet didn’t get a shock at seeing his own withered buttocks in a bathroom mirror.
A poem that describes the author’s illicit thrill, as a boy, at watching his father chastise a Black employee is hard to read. Ta-Nehisi Coates once subversively performed it on stage. He wrote that doing so “was like living in someone else’s skin for a moment” and, in terms of recognizing the human impulse toward brutality, “finding myself there at the bone.”
This well-chosen collection of Seidel’s work includes several memorials to dead friends. He finds late-life love with a woman who casually tosses grenade after grenade into his heart. You begin to realize, if you haven’t before, that Seidel is among the most distinctive and original poets of our time.
There’s a lot of longing, in his later work, for a vanishing New York. With Seidel it’s always an angular, witty longing. In “Remembering Elaine’s,” he writes:
We smoked Kools, unfiltered Camels, and papier maïs Gitanes, / The fat ones Belmondo smoked in Breathless — and so did Don, / Elaine’s original redhaired cokehead maître d’ / who had a beautiful wife, dangerously. / But stay away from the beautiful wife or else catastrophe.
Near the end of this meticulous and sublime poem, he writes: “We were the scene. / Now the floor has been swept clean.”
If I’m a boat person, thinks the narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Committed,” so were the English Pilgrims who came to America on the Mayflower.
The Pilgrims were lucky in their public relations, he continues. There were no video cameras to capture them, thin, dazed and lice-ridden, stumbling in the surf. Instead, romantic painters glorified them in oils.
“The Committed” is a sequel to Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer” (2015). The books share a narrator, a communist spy, half-Vietnamese and half-French, who refers to himself as “a man of two faces and two minds.”
This new novel is set in the early 1980s, as the man of two faces flees not to America but to France. He has survived a harrowing boat trip, and a flight from Jakarta with Bon, his “best friend and blood brother.” Their story is complicated to unwind.
In “The Sympathizer,” the narrator had gone undercover as a refugee in Southern California after the fall of Saigon. On a mission back to Vietnam, he was captured. Both he and Bon have been traumatized by time spent in a re-education camp run by their other blood brother, Man.
Bon has a gladiatorial disposition. There’s dramatic irony in the fact that he does not know Man was his Torquemada.
History really comes at these men. If you read “The Sympathizer,” you’ll remember them, but if you haven’t, it’s not necessary; Nguyen neatly brings you up to speed.
The first 100 pages of “The Committed” are, to my mind, better than anything in the first novel. The narrator’s voice snaps you up. It’s direct, vain, cranky and slashing — a voice of outraged intelligence. It’s among the more memorable in recent American literature.
The man of two minds attended a lycée in Saigon, where he’d wander the streets with a French book under his arm and be racially abused by the local French “in the language of Dumas, or Stendhal, or Balzac.”
The heat in “The Committed,” of which there is a good deal, derives from the friction created by the narrator’s contradictory thoughts about France, his country’s colonizer. This is a book about humiliation, about repression and expression, about the plasticity of identity. It searches for a heterogeneous ideal, not a homogeneous one.
Even those Vietnamese who despise the French have been seduced by them, Nguyen writes. They’ve been “shaped by their hand and touched by their tongue.” The very word colonialism “sounded better when dubbed ‘la mission civilisatrice.’” The narrator is contemptuous of French gentility but attracted to it as well.
Nguyen’s narrator is a sophisticated tour guide into what he calls “the heart of whiteness.” French intellectuals love jazz, he writes, “partially because every sweet note reminded them of American racism, which conveniently let them forget their own racism.” This book subtly draws upon the mythic power France once held for Black Americans.
Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. His sentences, as they heat, expand. He lets them run riot. Some cover multiple pages, building to towering peaks. When these arias work, they’re ecstatic. When they don’t, one recalls Capote on Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
The overwriting in this novel
only rarely bothered me. More often I was reminded of George Balanchine’s comment that if his dancers didn’t occasionally fall onstage, they weren’t really going for it, and of John Coltrane’s emotionally overblown notes in “A Love Supreme.”
The second half of this book is shaggy, shaggy, shaggy. If it’s not a total breakdown, it’s something close. The man of two minds becomes a drug dealer. Thanks to the French Vietnamese woman he calls his aunt, who works in publishing, he has access to left-wing French intellectuals, who have a strong taste for his products. Infecting France with Eastern drugs is his own tidy form of payback.
Nguyen consigns his characters to a series of frazzled, farfetched scenarios. Mayhem feeds mayhem. There are several extended torture scenes in the back half of this book that don’t work at all. (“You can’t torture me,” the narrator says, in error.
“I’ve lived through a re-education camp.”)
Nguyen doesn’t find a tone for these scenes. They’re awful in their way — there are rubber hoses and electrodes clamped onto nipples — but they’re hard to take seriously. There’s a daft James Bond quality to them. The torturers fritter their time away, long enough for the tortured to be rescued. Doors are kicked open with a bang; guns blaze. You sense the author trying to keep the plot frantically spinning, rather than elegantly extending his themes.
A colonial-themed orgy — in which obese, bourgeois Frenchmen bid to sleep with “some of the finest girls from the whorehouses, fleshpots and slave markets of the greater Orient and Africa” — is, in Nguyen’s hands, a savage burlesque. Nguyen’s cynical humor just saves him; this demented orgy carries hints of French absurdist writers such as Alfred Jarry (“Ubu Roi”) and
Raymond Queneau. Opéra bouffe twists into opéra sérieux.
Men and women of two minds are not so rare. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald told us in “The CrackUp,” “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
Nguyen’s narrator matters because of his author’s intelligence and his incendiary, crazylegged style. This novel doesn’t hold together, but it’s more serious and more entertaining than nine-tenths of the novels that do. Its narrator wants redress for the wrongs of history, but he also wants to live in the imperative tense.
As you can tell, I’m of two minds about “The Committed.” I’ll put my feelings this way, borrowing something the English writer Jonathan Coe said about “Fedora,” Billy Wilder’s penultimate film: “Flawed and bonkers, but I like it.”