Keith Waldrop’s Haunted Realism

For the poet Wallace Stevens, “God and the imagination are one”—or, more exactly, in the absence of a God, the human imagination must re-enchant the world. “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar”: poetry’s power is “the power of the mind over the possibility of things.” This is why, for Stevens, “Poetry is a means of redemption,” a substitute religion.

I thought of Wallace Stevens’s faith in the poetic imagination while rereading the poet Keith Waldrop’s brilliant memoir, “Light While There Is Light,” which is being reissued by Dalkey Archive Press today. Maybe this is because I first read Stevens’s poetry in a class taught by Waldrop at Brown University—a class composed, on the one hand, of young writers eager to listen to one of the best-read humans on the planet talk about literature, and, on the other, of sleeping athletes who knew Waldrop pretty much gave everybody an “A.” But it’s also because, in a beautiful passage late in “Light While There Is Light,” Waldrop makes the unlikely claim that he has little imagination himself:

My imagination is poor. In my dreams, for instance—where one would suppose wishes can be fulfilled without hindrance—if I dream the events this account describes, they are not usually changed, but in what should be a world nearer to the heart’s desire, they play again, just as I tell them here, exactly as already experienced. It is as if despairing, even of imaginary improvement, I contrive instead to set my affection on the damned world, this very world, as it was and as it is.

It’s a surprising statement from a man who would go on to publish some thirty books of poetry and translation, who would be named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and win the National Book Award for Poetry (2009), a man who would, with his wife, the poet and polymath Rosmarie Waldrop, found Burning Deck Press, a small publisher responsible for printing some of the most important innovative writing in the language. Even in dreams, Waldrop is stuck with the merely real. He despairs of imaginary improvement, and he certainly is not consoled by his mother’s religious fundamentalism, which is the source of many of the misadventures, absurd and affecting, recorded in this understated masterpiece. Her religion, like the poetic imagination, is motivated by a fear of the emptiness of the given world:

The history of my mother’s religious opinions should be told as the record of a pilgrimage. As I imagine most pilgrimages, it was less the struggle towards a given end than a continual flight from disappointment and unhappiness. Neither the joys of heaven nor hell’s worst prospects provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world.

Waldrop’s remarkable patience with the unforgettable cast of characters in his “fictional memoir” derives, I think, from how he understands their suffering and shenanigans and occasional cruelty as issuing from that fear of emptiness—a fear he takes seriously, shares. This allows Waldrop to depict but not demean his mother’s idiosyncratic zealotry, her speaking in tongues, her dragging the family across the Midwest and South in search of a sufficiently severe church (and potential husband for Waldrop’s older sister); it allows him to write with humor and pathos and sometimes subtle exasperation—but without judgment—about his brothers Charles and Julian, whose plans to improve the world, or at least their lot in it, involve a variety of idiotic and occasionally illegal schemes, ranging from improvised indoor poultry farming to a used-car racket to a fraudulent medical practice. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever read a less judgmental book, let alone a less judgmental family history. Waldrop refuses to psychologize or allegorize, to excuse, pity, or condescend. Someone looking for a conventional novel or memoir might experience this as a kind of imaginative poverty, but it’s his restraint that allows Waldrop to depict so powerfully the world “as it was and as it is.”

His supposedly poor imagination—his power of attunement to the world—allows Waldrop to present scenes of quiet power most authors would overwrite or ignore. Here’s just one example: Waldrop has moved to Urbana to start graduate school (he’ll never finish there), in part motivated by the desire to get away from his family; the plan doesn’t work. His brothers Charles and Julian—the latter of whom has deserted from the Army—track him down. There they establish their used-car business (called “Used Car Heaven”—“I blush,” Waldrop writes, “to think the name may have been my suggestion”); Waldrop’s sister, Elaine, and her husband and infant son are evicted from their apartment in Indianapolis and move in with Waldrop and his brothers—everybody in the two-story building which is also the Used Car Heaven office. It was “in some ways the most uncomfortable year of my life,” Waldrop writes. This is as close as he gets to self-pity. The rooms were formed by curtains, not walls. There was only one stove to heat the place in the bitter winter cold. Julian and Charles’s business operations are increasingly shady. At this point in the narrative, you might expect the narrator to suffer a nervous breakdown, or at least to curse his luck or family. Or perhaps you would imagine the young Waldrop reading Wallace Stevens late at night and, via the powers of the poetic imagination, briefly transforming Used Car Heaven into … I don’t know, New Car Heaven. Instead of the redresses of rage or reverie, the escapes of poetry or prayer, we get this:

One pleasant memory of that stove remains. Julian’s blue alley-cat, whom I had named Wozzeck, drank from a bowl behind the stove, and every once in a while practiced what seemed a strange experiment—dipping his paw in the water and then shaking it, so that drops of water, hitting the hot stove, would pop and hiss as they burst into steam. He watched this process with wide green eyes for some time after there was no more reaction, and then, as if in doubt, needing further proof, would try it again. Sometimes this went on for half an hour. I could see it from my bed, where he slept also.

Waldrop is present for the small wonder of Wozzeck’s routine, has stored it in his memory (while “many names that might have found a place in this account have dropped somehow out of mind”—Waldrop also claims to have a poor memory; perhaps the book is classified as fiction as an acknowledgment of its fallibility). For most of us, Wozzeck’s experiment would have taken place beneath the threshold of perceptibility, or, if perceived, would then be forgotten; in “Light While There Is Light,” Wozzeck’s ritual—and his doubt, and his need for further proof—is given the same weight as any other character’s activity. Indeed, the quiet, patient, curious Wozzeck—who only appears in this paragraph—might be the figure in the book who most resembles the narrator. (One can speculate on why Waldrop chose the name Wozzeck—the title of Alan Berg’s first opera about the tragic life of a poor soldier, but Waldrop gives no clue.)

There is surprisingly little in this book about Waldrop’s development as an artist. But there are, at intervals, encounters with works of art presented with the same elegant simplicity as the scene with Wozzeck. One of the few moments (or is it the only moment?) in the book where Waldrop speaks explicitly about being changed by an event—more conventional memoirs are full of scenes of transformation—is when Waldrop’s father, a bitter railway man his mother ultimately divorced, takes him to see a production of the “G.I. Hamlet” in Topeka, Kansas (Waldrop was born in Emporia). It was a production first developed to travel to Army bases, but, after the First World War, it toured the Midwest in search of civilian audiences. Waldrop is a middle-school student at the time of the performance:

People who should know (older people) have since told me that it was nothing exceptional, mediocre acting of a badly cut text—and I remember the Edwardian costumes—but for me it was a view into another realm, a realm infinitely appealing and, most surprisingly, available to me. I was, I think, different from that day on. I noted the way, common enough I now know, in which each scene, instead of being marked off by raising and lowering a curtain, was brought up out of the dark and at the end returned to dark, so that the entire play became a series of moments articulated by light on a background of darkness.

It is not identification with Hamlet’s uncertainty, or love of language—neither character nor prosody—that stands out for Waldrop in memory, but rather the play of light and dark, the way each scene appears and disappears, is briefly present and then gone. Instead of the curtain that demarcates this world from that, there is the rhythm of dissolve.

It is the rhythm of “Light While There Is Light” itself, a book that develops by illuminating scenes, not by imposing the coherences of a conventional plot. In her excellent introduction to this edition, the novelist Jamie Gordon writes: “At rhythmic intervals—in this respect as much like music as collage—the novel revisits the theme of the narrator’s own relations with light, in brief, image rich variations throughout the text, each floating in its own shining white space.” Gordon wonders: “Is this the light of the title? The light of God? Of revealed truth about a God we once thought to grasp with our senses? Maybe it is just—light.”

I think it’s just light. Wittgenstein famously wrote: “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists”’—that there is a world at all. Waldrop maintains before “this very world”—with all its bad acting and ridiculous costumes and mangled scripts—a kind of muted, clear-eyed wonder. He sympathizes with the search for religious consolation, the project of imaginary transformation, but does not undertake any such project of his own. Instead he sets down things as they are with a perfectly poised and haunted realism. “I’ve read many stories of revenants and apparitions,” the book begins, “but my ghosts merely disappear. I never see them. They haunt me by not being there, by the table where no one eats, the empty window that lets the sun in without a shadow.” In what is perhaps a significant pun a few lines later, as Waldrop recalls hearing his mother moan in pain—she suffered from horrible migraines—Waldrop states: “I know enough not to make light of lamentations.”

In one of the last scenes in which the family is all together, Waldrop’s mother is, as ever, threatening damnation. Her attention is focussed on Julian: “You’d better be thinking about how you’re going to spend eternity. Take that old cigar out of your mouth.” (Julian and his mother are at this point living in Champaign in a dilapidated house, surviving—barely—by running a fruit stand: “Tomatoes were still plentiful. The porch was loaded with watermelons. The front room of the house reeked with vegetable decay, but they lived in the back, mainly in one room, with several cats and many locks.”) It is at this point that Julian makes a statement that has become a kind of refrain for Waldrop’s many admirers, now several generations of writers and readers who find the world, such as it is, more habitable as a result of Waldrop’s poems, prose, translations, collages, publishing—the fruits of his “poor” imagination. “I don’t want to go to heaven,” Julian responds to his mother’s threat: “I want to go where Keith goes.”