CHAPTER 24

A Simple Theme (1949)

Review of Charlotte Marletto’s Jewel of Our Longing

The difficulty of dealing, in art, with the most common experiences shows itself in the thinness of our literature of childhood. Here is your universality, here is your common denominator, and the complexity of meanings, and the symbols of growth, promise, consciousness. Where are the children? In Mark Twain, in Booth Tarkington, in Thomas Wolfe, in William Carlos Williams, in Henry Roth, in Carson McCullers, in Dickens; take up the list.1 And in poetry? In de la Mare?2 In Blake they are; and I saw the children standing before them at the Blake show, standing heads thrown back, hands clasped behind them, staring up at the children and the angels and at Job.3 But to speak of our own time. The poetry of childhood scarcely exists.

There is no poetry of birth in the literature that reaches us. In our own time, we can count the poems on our fingers; there is a great blank behind us, in our classic and religious literature. There we might expect to find the clues to human process and common experience. In our religious literature, birth is not faced until the moment after: we are given the scene with the kings and the animals and Joseph, Mary holding the newborn; the Pharaoh’s daughter discovers the newborn.4 I cannot think of a scene of birth (and we edit out the little children nowadays) in Greek drama, or all the way up to Gargantua; of any representation in graphic art other than the tribal statues, African, Mexican, Polynesian.5 I cannot think of anything in films, or in the literature that tries to give us the stream of consciousness; or in music. I cannot think of anything in Western poetry, other than formal Nativity odes, until this century. I may be mistaken here, and I shall be glad to know of the existence of any poems of birth or pregnancy. But it seems to me that there is a great lack, one that has scarcely been noticed. Havelock Ellis speaks of the necessity for documents concerning the psychic state during pregnancy; he refers to one novel which he says is autobiographical, although he does not tell us its name.6 I think offhand of another, Enid Bagnold’s Door of Life; and I think of the poems of Anne Ridler, and of Genevieve Taggard and Marie Welch; and the lines in Spender and Edith Sitwell and Gabriela Mistral.7

This is an entire area of experience which has not reached poetry. And it should hardly be necessary to say that this is a universal, and at the same time a scene one hardly ever sees in this civilization. How many of you have ever seen a birth, or have been conscious while you gave birth? I look at my line about birth’s being a universal; one is on the edge of the absurd the minute one tries to relate the experience of birth to the silence about it in poetry. But why is an absurdity felt here?

And why is there a silence?

In the books about the artist, and I have Otto Rank’s Art and Artist before me, there is absolutely no allowance made for the possibility of the woman artist.8 And in the crop of recent books about women (with the exception of Woman and Music) the possibility of dealing with the experience of parturition (even the vocabulary is not fully made, along with the sexual terms of women) is simply not there.9 In the index to Rank, you will find as neighboring listings: “Woman as Muse,” “Womb-Symbolism.” Apart from its comic value, the listing of these concepts badly needs addition and adjustment for women. But that is all there is. And we go on to the birth-trauma.10

Now birth as trauma has an important repressive role in our art—our literature, in particular. Few of the women writing poetry have made more than a beginning in writing about birth. There is exceptional difficulty in giving form to so crucial a group of meanings and experiences. And the young men in poetry seem, for the great part, to suffer so from the fear of birth that we have a tabu deep enough in our culture to keep us even from speaking about it as a tabu.

I do not like to speak about poetry according to subject. I feel that our entire current criticism is on the wrong track, here, that the criticism of poetry has dealt either with subject or with a set of static terms. It could more fruitfully, I believe, speak of relationship and then go on in terms of dynamics. The poetry of birth will have to be one of relationship. Perhaps this is one of the next steps, for us.

Anne Ridler says, in “For A Child Expected,” “The world flowed in.” It is the poetry of the world flowing in, and of “what we began / Is now its own,” which will make a beginning.11 I heard a literary young man say, “In pregnancy a woman is all self-love; she is in a bath of narcissism.” You can see what is at work there. You can see it in a hundred references, in a hundred books dealing with death. There is a terrible fear of birth abroad. It is close to the fear of poetry; and I do not know how closely it is connected with the agonies of our wars and with the daily crushing of the fiery life. I know that there are strong bonds here; and the matter before me, the poetry of birth, seems to me to be one clue.

This book, Jewel of Our Longing, is another attempt to deal with birth.12 Charlotte Marletto uses the water-images to which one turns, during pregnancy, and often she comes close to the characteristic motion of that state, the rocking between selflessness and self that is the answer to my literary young man. She says,

[. . .] a convergence of flesh

or that I walking outside of body

have no name . . .

and, in the poem called “Conception,” “I am shed down the wind / circling upon Self.”13 She tries, again and again, for the images of fusion and the terms that will describe the body of pregnancy, which seems almost unspecialized, as one thinks one’s body in infancy might have been, seeing with the whole body, tasting with the whole body. This truth, we come to know scientifically, is a truth of the person. The mind is the acting man, it has been said, and we may go on with that.

These poems, however, are frustrated almost always by the inadequate attempt to make a form to communicate pregnancy and its emotions. The word-combining is not careful; and the music is thrown away. It is so easy, and fatal, in coming to a subject which frightens so many people, to fall into autobiographical sentimentality and “expression,” without having given the emotion to the reader. There is also an anatomical fallacy in these poems, which are written in an overdeco-rated “modern” idiom with all its errors. Lips are rivers fingering; there is “lip-sculptured foam / bright-braceleted once more by sun.”14 The traps are all illustrated here: we have the “cervix-hall,” “cerebral halls,” “orgastic waves,” “cephalic shores,” and the wild line, “shocking his schizospheres together.”15 But there are moments in broken phrases, when Charlotte Marletto forgets the details of anatomy and sentiment, and says, “Flesh my intercessor,” and speaks of the “totem of sense” and the “apocryphal animals.”16 Page after page is marred, made fancy, ruined and in bad taste; but all of this work is here to do, here is the unborn as Muse, all these poems are to be made,

this the season of mockingbird

singing poignant variations

on a simple theme . . .17

(Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1949)