Author: Vadim Goss

by Vadim Goss

‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’ is the greatest opening line to the greatest villanelle ever written. 

On a first reading, ‘One Art’ begins ostensibly simplistic. How yes, indeed, it is easy to lose door keys and have an ‘hour badly spent’. But that’s ok — ‘their loss is no disaster’. And then, in its heartbreaking final stanza, we understand what the poem is really about. 

When Elizabeth Bishop was 40, she was awarded a fellowship to travel South America; and it was during her travels in Brazil when she met Maria “Lota” Soares, a daughter from a prominent Rio de Janeiro family. Bishop was only supposed to stay for two weeks in Brazil. In the end, she stayed for 15 years. It was during this period Bishop wrote her third and most outwardly joyful volume of published work, Questions of Travel, in 1965. The work is markedly different from her previous collections, North and South and A Cold Spring, with the shedding of her insular, New England upbringing in favour of a more mature, more outward facing poetic. And whilst the theme of place remained (and indeed, would always remain), what it signified underwent significant alteration. That instead of it being somewhere one has been, rather, place became somewhere one arrives. 

As mentioned, there is an immense amount of joy in Questions of Travel. For we get to witness Bishop’s voice grow as if a bird learning to fly — beginning as the outsider in ‘Arriving in Santos’, before developing to that of the full-fledged native in ‘The Riverman’. Such joy is compounded in its context, running parallel with Bishop and Soares’ love story — a journey which too began under foreign skies and found its home through a blissful familiarity, reaching the clouds. For as much as the work is a love letter to Brazil; as much as it is a testament to the importance of travel and the virtues found in new beginnings, more significantly the work is an ode to Soares; to the discovery of love and the long-awaited aggrandisement of Bishop’s own homosexuality. It is an object which unveils how love is transformative across all strata.  

Questions of Travel was Bishop’s most hopeful collection. A work which encapsulated the sheer happiness of a life kept waiting now living. But this happiness, like all happiness eventually one must suppose, was not to last. Yet in this particularity, its ending was that of superlative horror. In September 1967, very shortly after she went with Bishop back to New York, Soares took her own life. Questions, in turn, gained an unwanted context and thus an unwanted new way of reading it — becoming a work that no longer lived in happiness, but could only reminisce. More than that, it felt (and still reads now) as if it is begging to reminisce. 

8 years later, Bishop began writing ‘One Art’. Conversely, one might question why it took her 8 years to address the subject. But as the poem itself answers, grief makes the memory of love as young and as old as yesterday. “Lota”, who had been gone for 8 years, had never left. Perhaps any attempt at elegy had eluded her for 8 years. Or perhaps, for Bishop, it had only been 8 minutes.

Like Dickinson before her, Bishop had a singularly small body of published work (just a little over a hundred poems), making her, too, anomalous compared to other great poets. Indeed, she was an extensive drafter, known to spend months at a time working and reworking a single poem. ‘One Art’ was no different, amounting to 17 drafts in total. The title, for example, went through several iterations, such as ‘How to Lose Things’, ‘The Gift of Losing Things’, ‘The Art of Losing Things’. Another notable revision was the line ‘I shan’t have lied’, originally ‘I am lying’. And so on. These drafts are particularly revealing, not only in relation to her signature, artistic anxiety, but also in demonstrating an equally real human one. 

But how different would ‘One Art’ really be for example, if the title was ‘How to Lose Things’? Or if she wrote ‘I am lying’ instead of ‘I shan’t have lied’? If the former was the title, perhaps it seems Bishop is telegraphing an instruction manual of letting go. If she opted for the latter as the line’s composition, Bishop willingly admits that the poem’s thesis — of how ‘it’s no disaster’ to lose things — is untrue. And yet ‘One Art’ is a product of the struggle between these two anxieties; a constant tremble; an endless grappling between her responsibility as a renowned poet and as a lover who never stopped loving. In this light, ‘How to Lose Things’ suddenly becomes a question Bishop is asking herself, desperately trying to write the answer to rid the pain. ‘I am lying’ becomes Bishop’s own doubt invading an art form which demands a disguise to the writer’s Caliban. Yet I think one has to concede: all these tensions exist in ‘One Art’, whether it’s a draft version attested in her notebook, or the final version.

These tensions define ‘One Art’. They are why it comes across so undecided and elusive. On one hand, we have the poet — the silent communicator whispering to the reader permeable meanings. And on the other, the mourning lover who simply wants to scream and to cry and to convince herself of her own meanings. And whilst this is not unique to the elegy itself — one has to look no further than Tennyson’s In Memoriam and the dedication to his “friend” Arthur Henry Hallam (and we can even go as far back as Milton and the veneration he pays to his “esteemed fellow” Edward King in ‘Lycidas’) — ‘One Art’ is unique because it does not pretend to uphold the elegy’s mythos. There is no attempt to re-write a national consciousness; no lamentations on the state of the English Church. Bishop does not divert her attention to state apparatus. She does not dilute the meaning of the elegy. She stares down at grief undiverted, for they have Lota’s eyes. She demands for them to close, for yet cannot bare the sight of Lota’s light becoming lost forever. For Love is ‘filled with the intent / to be lost’. It should be ‘no disaster’. And yet it will always be. This is the concession that renders heartbreak. 

One would be tempted to think there is no “resolution” in ‘One Art’ of which we expect in the traditional elegy. There is a misconception however, that the elegy is supposed to be some sort of cathartic experiment healing the writer from its pain. No doubt this is the consequence of the form’s male lineage, in which coming to terms with grief and “turning away” from it are the same thing. But grief exacts an emotional struggle seemingly too demanding for the masculine sensibility. No male elegists have ever been able to properly deal with grief (except maybe W. H. Auden) because men must always conquer their emotions. They must have their victory over grief. But in grief there is no chance for victory. We have already lost. Bishop’s female sensibility understands this. The “resolution”, if one can call it that, is simply one of this understanding. Grief will always be a cruel contradiction. ‘One Art’ is therefore the anatomy of grief itself — a psychology of contradiction constantly wanting to preserve, to get back, and to let go. 

‘One Art’ towers over later twentieth-century poetry. What first appears as an ode to the elegiac tradition becomes something more confessional, more fragmented, and more human. It refuses to be lofty, nor does it seek to be universal — “to speak for everyone”. Bishop speaks her own voice. She sings her own song. It’s the reader’s job to listen. And at its heart, what we hear is a declaration, both mournful and proud. ‘I have loved. I still love.’ 

by Vadim Goss

The English Language, in all of its forms, holds a particular place for those who were born outside of its whiteness. It is the language of the oppressor; no amount of lectures on Wordsworthian poetics nor Wildean stylistics can ever erase its association with centuries of colonial enterprise. In the colonial era, the English Language itself became a product, in which its reproduction was enforced upon a population on whom this product would always be semiotic of the language and culture they had lost. It wasn’t enough for this language to be shared with native languages, it had to create total erasure. In other words, there could be no before, only after. Only then would it serve as the signifier to Empire’s and by extension whiteness’s power; only then would it become a product of whiteness itself; and any non-white seeking to attempt the language would only be, could only be, appropriating it—cementing their status as what Edward Said calls “The Other”. So it must have been hard for those same ideologues when an African-American homosexual expatriate living in Paris became the most important prose writer in the English Language since James Joyce. 

James Baldwin was never able to shed the language oppressed onto him. A language that, even by the publishing of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, he had mastered. In their famous debate at the Cambridge Union, William F. Buckley accused Baldwin of adopting a ‘British accent’, in turn suggesting that Baldwin was in effect “acting white” for the white audience. Baldwin, throughout his whole career and indeed his whole life, was faced with an insurmountable situation: for if the English Language is a White Language, then how can a Black man—to which this language has been forcibly imposed upon—preserve his own identity if in the very words he speaks assumes an inexorable reproduction of that whiteness? Moreover, how can he escape being a product of a White system to which he is unwillingly reproducing? 

Ultimately, how could James Baldwin speak in his own words, and not theirs? 

As a Black and Gay man, Baldwin spent all of his career resisting the relegating categorisation a white-heteronormative literary culture sought to reduce him into. Already it had happened with his first novel and his subsequent essay collection Notes of a Native Son. He was known as a “Black writer” producing “Black Literature”. That such a thing would continue to happen was something he acknowledged even before the seminal Giovanni’s Room was published. Hence why he chose not to feature any Black characters in the story: a decision prompted out of protest at the literature culture placing genre onto an identity. Still, upon the release of Giovanni’s Room it fell immediately into the sub-genre of “Gay Literature”. To make my point clearer, “White Literature” is just called “Literature”. 

These false genre handles served a purpose designed to thwart Baldwin. It was a deliberate tactic designed by a literary marketplace that governed itself in line with this normativity; with the explicit purpose of delegitimising his artistic merit by characterising his work as deliberately divisive; whilst simultaneously knowing they could profit from his work by marketing its taboo subjects as forbidden novelties. And by emphasising these traits of his work, it was thus a design to subsume this perception about his work as the content of it entirely. This measure was employed by normative critics determined to impose their definition as the only meaning to the novel; and to destroy its chances of ever being perceived as great art by ridding his art of its nuance and depth. This ensured normative and deviated identities remained such. It was an attempt by the literary canon to propagate a taxonomy that supported a system guaranteeing what was deemed normative, i.e. whiteness and heterosexuality, control. They controlled the discourse; so they controlled the reception.   

And it wasn’t so much because of Baldwin’s own, so-called “deviated” identity that triggered Giovanni’s Room’s reception, but rather, it was the novel’s topic matter. Literature by the 1950s had more than become accustomed to homosexual writers, so long as queerness itself remained out of the pages, or at best, only subversively hinted at. That’s not to say there were no stories depicting queerness, but they could never be considered with the same aesthetic and formalistic merit they deserved compared to their heteronormative peers. Nor could they end happily—indeed this was an explicit, editorial order by publishers. Love was not allowed to transcend in queer stories; queerness had to cause ruin. If it didn’t it would not be published. All stories centring on homosexuality were, and could only ever really be about shame. Giovanni’s Room, in all of its brilliance, could not escape this.

But Baldwin refused to hide nor did he accept the consequence of being visible. So when Another Country was published in 1962, a story that featured characters both gay and straight, black and white, it could no longer fit into these categories forcing critics to revaluate their approach to his work—with The Sunday Times writing, ‘Let other novelists read Mr. Baldwin and tremble. There’s a whirlwind loose in the land.’ Baldwin had wagered how his contemporary society’s obsession with racial and sexual barriers would not be able to contain a novel determined to show them “another” world in which all aspects of identity could intersect. He was correct—with the ‘whirlwind’ becoming an apt metaphor in describing how the rigorous system, which prevented Baldwin from ever being able to speak, had finally been turned against those who had imposed it in the first place. Language, which had been designed to designate a normative and an Other, had now been used to demonstrate their assimilation. 

This, by his own admission, became Baldwin’s chief ambition. As he stated in the short film Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris, when asked who he is writing for, he responds: ‘I’m writing for people, baby. I don’t believe in White people. I don’t believe in Black people either for that matter.’ White and Black; Straight and Gay, are all labels all supplanted by an equal Humanity.

Through this tenet Baldwin saw how segregation was detrimental not just to Black Americans, but all Americans. Because it encouraged a system which disallowed the opportunity for unity under this common, universal flag of humanity. Nation, race, religion, sex: in Baldwin’s eyes the taxonomy associated with each category, and the categorisation itself, detracted and prevented society from achieving this ultimate realisation. Suddenly, writing wasn’t enough to communicate this necessary message. It was why he became such a revered orator during the Civil Rights Movement, and why he expanded his work into public speaking to begin with. He was a public speaker who could write; he was a writer who was just as eloquent with a microphone as he was with a typewriter. And if, in his novels and his essays he matched the compassion of Martin Luther King, then it was in his rhetoric he emulated the determined fire of Malcom X. Indeed, if Malcom X symbolised the sword and Luther King the shield of the Civil-Rights Movement then it was Baldwin who symbolised the knight capable of wielding them both.

James Baldwin took the language forced upon him and claimed it for his own. In turn, he became the first Black-Gay writer who was able to successfully, on a public scale, integrate blackness and queerness into a white and heterosexual aesthetic. English Literature as such owes him a debt. For Baldwin reminds us that language and literature can and should belong to everyone, in equal measure. And whilst, yes, the English Language and overall literary aesthetic of today can still be seen in terms of hetero-whiteness due to its societal role as the normative, he made it possible for future Black, Queer, and other minority writers to assert their own agency over a language which historically took it away. James Baldwin knew his limitations: he could not erase history, but he could write his own.