The Comedian as the Letter I, or the Perils of Vaudeville in a Post-Modern Age

Abstract

The Comedian as the Letter I, or The Perils of Vaudeville in a Post-Modern Age Irving Feldman. The Life and Letters. The University of Chicago Press 1994. 103 pp. $29.00 $13.00 (paper) Irving Feldman. Beautiful False Things. Grove Press 2000. 95 pp. $13.00 (paper) If Jackie Mason could write poetry he would probably sound like Irving Feldman. Or maybe if Irving Feldman could do stand-up he'd sound like Jackie Mason. With the exception of Albert Goldbarth, no other American poet, certainly none who has retired from a distinguished academic career lauded and (as he puts it in one poem) Maclaureled, shoots past us so many riffs-energetic torrents mixing the sublime, the pathetic, and the almost-tasteless-as Feldman does. His vaudeville routines seem to belong to another century, as though Browning's dramatic monologues had been renovated for the fin of the siecle just past, and yet their author came to poetic maturity in the summer of High Modernism, right after World War II. (He was born in 1928, of the same generation as Ammons, Ashbery, Bly, Creeley, Ginsberg, Justice, Merrill, O'Hara, Rich, and Snyder, though he sounds like none of them.) He is the poet as comedian, a multi-faceted performer extraordinaire. But he wasn't always this way, and the development in Feldman's poetry over more than four decades roughly parallels the changes of fashion in American poetry. Here's Feldman in 2000: "Call!" "Call!" "Call!" "Call!""CAP" 'CAW) Thought I was bluffing. Wanted to see me. I'm loaded, guys, I am fuller than full. So, see 'em, read 'em, feed 'em, eat 'em-and weep! Then, our heart-and-soul-satisfying smart sharp snap-and-slap-the-cards-on-the-table shtick; up on two feet, I cracked the buggy whip my wrist; and the five-of-a-kind of the hand I held high, one by one, Take that, whump! and Take that, whamp! and Take this, whomp! I smacked down-notice served to all the stiffs and to the Big Stiffer by the woodcutter and master of the deck, owner of the ax, last man alive and standing! ("Joker," Beautiful False Things) Talk about energy, gamesmanship, testosterone-the whole shebang of masculine self-assertiveness. The wildness makes him sound like some cranky old codger on speed. But here is Feldman almost forty years ago: Like weary goddesses sick of other worlds-- Those little islands, their drugged white beaches Where the surf's unending colonies arrive, And, helpless, the sacrifice lies on altars Of their indifference, gasping in the sun, Offering millenniums of his wound They, as from the prows of ships stepping, Come to where the patient worries The sheet's spreading day, his body Stilled in drowsy rituals of disaster. And the marble paradigms, their patient, Uncaring hands, drop from the salt-parched Light, gathering your infinite gift, Its burden. ("The Nurses," The Pripet Marshes) Whatever else this may be, it is an exercise in stiltedness, from the stiff, slightly-off iambic metric to the tortuous simile that interrupts between the first line and the seventh. The diction seems to come from a translation of Hart Crane from English to Greek and back to English ("Offering millenniums of his wound"), and the whole, heavy piece is redolent of what we might call postness-post-Eliot, post-Yeats, post-Tate, post-Lowell. Young Feldman was in thrall to the masters of the first half of the century, and his earliest poems, which often responded to the Holocaust and the aftermath of World War II, did so in accents not entirely his own. Feldman has not just become looser, jazzier, and more dizzying over the years, he has shifted his entire aesthetic. Where in The Pripet Marshes he issued the Zen-like pronouncement that "The poem is in the center, but / In the center of the poem is emptiness" ("Nightwords"), now he has come around to the view that "the language isn't saved by style / but by a tale worth telling" ("Fragment," The Life and Letters). …