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no surprise for me, so, of course, I was surprised."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Prodigal is a self-consciously 'final' meditation on a career that has lasted fifty years. Its eighteen cantos are unevenly split into three sections. Ten are grounded 'elsewhere', (Europe, the United States and South America) while the eight of the final section, by and large, take the poet back to the Caribbean. The critic Adam Kirsch has described the arrangement as "not so much a plot as a continuous provocation to verse: a conversation on a train, a hotel lobby, a Swiss Alp, a Caribbean beach, all ...woven together into a single tapestry."
The poem reads like a journal but feels like a quest. There is always a sense of the narrator piecing his identity together from the memory of his travels. Each new wandering offers a different landscape and culture, a different way of being in the world-a glimpse of elsewheres that must be forsaken if the Prodigy of Another Life is to find peace in his first world.
The poem moves between different phases of the poet's life quite randomly, creating a muddled sense of place and time. This is deliberate. In his excellent recent survey of Walcott's work, Professor Edward Baugh observes that "[i]t is as if the poem, as it evolved, drew into itself all the possibilities for short poems that crossed its horizon." Baugh mentions a 1990 interview in which Walcott spoke of "the sea as a symbol for a way of movement and being that contrasts with those of what is conventionally called history."
In that interview Walcott remarked: "With the sea, you can travel the horizon in any direction, you can go from left to right or from right to left. It doesn't proceed from A to B to C to D and so on." And neither does The Prodigal. Instead, like the eighteen-chaptered Ulysses so lovingly honoured in Omeros, each section wanders around with apparent aimlessless, circling larger themes, word-painting impressionistic landscapes and hinting at dilemmas for which no easy solutions are offered.
Reversing the World
One of Walcott's favourite tropes is the confusion of world and word. Throughout his poetry, landscapes and objects dissolve into the phrases that construe them: "boulevards open like novels / waiting to be written"; a traveller's eye sees "canefields set in stanzas", notices the "monotonous scrawl of beaches" or looks down from a jet that "bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud." With Ovidian lightness, nature and art fade into each other, the world becomes a text and the poet's lines disappear into the land- and seascapes they describe. It is often difficult to say where one ends and the other takes over. Some of this is simply a poet's delight in the stitching and unstitching of his thoughts, but it is also driven by the hope that this textual world can be partially changed, that the liminal space between memory and imagination might allow poetry to 'reverse'-that is, to rewrite and undo-the pain of history.
This hope is central to Modernism. Both Ulysses and The Waste Land use mythic parallels to frame their impressions of the boredom, horror and emptiness of modern life. And both appeal to the religion of art, the belief that forgotten traditions can illumine the fragments of a fallen world and endow our daily lives with lost meanings. Richard Ellmann, Joyce's distinguished biographer, once referred to this interplay of ancient and modern as a commingling of the "two ends of the western tradition like a multitemporal, multiterritorial pun." That description fits Walcott's poetry quite nicely. His prodigious facility with the textual manoeuvres of high Modernism has always helped him to think of the Caribbean in these ways, but he has also been farsighted enough to avoid mere mimicry, to come to terms with his world in his own way.
The Prodigal examines this tension between art and life with an elegiac manner. Perhaps this is inevitable in Walcott's late poetry, for as Kirsch explains:
"If the whole world is a poem, then the poet doesn't need subjects in the usual sense; he becomes like a sponge, soaking up poetry as he lives, sees, and travels. Increasingly in his work, Walcott has had less and less use for subjects and occasions; all of his poems have come to seem like parts of one long poem, which is his life itself. This tendency is brought to perfection in The Prodigal..."
This poem, then, may be thought of as the apologia of a sponge, an evocation of the places that have shaped Walcott's strangely beautiful hybrid voice, and also as his words' last benediction of the worlds they have absorbed, distilled, and represented.
Parochial, provincial,
uprooted
The poem can also be thought of as a return to a lost paradise. Having escaped the suffocation of a small island for life as a cosmopolitan intellectual (playwright, professor and poet), The Prodigal is eager for the simplicities of his youth. As ever with Walcott, there is a literary pedigree for this yearning. Twenty-five years ago, he told the editor James Atlas: "The greatest writers have been at heart parochial, provincial in their rootedness. I think Shakespeare remains a Warwickshire country boy, Joyce a minor bourgeois from Dublin ... Hardy's place, of course, was rural Essex, you know." In fact, Walcott has two West Indian homes-St Lucia, where he was born, and Trinidad, where he wrote and produced plays for the local theatre for nearly two decades.
The familiar impression of Walcott is of a man fully at home in the noise-filled isles, cultivating his own garden. And yet, like his great literary rival, V.S. Naipaul, there was a time when the poet found the Caribbean much less welcoming. In 1979, during the same week that he was awarded a National Writer's Prize by the Welsh Arts Council, the New York Times reporter Jo Thomas interviewed Walcott in Port of Spain, in "one of those hotels in which even an unreflective traveler would think of death ... Its bare bulbs and damp rooms are enough to send one howling for the solace of its narrow and empty bar..." A sprightly 49 at the time, Walcott was unusually expansive in his criticism:
"The older I get, the tougher it becomes for me to make any kind of living here, and the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development of the arts. In one of the richest countries in the Caribbean there is no national art gallery, no theater, and only one library. While the wealth of this country grows, the coarseness and the vulgarity of the people who have the wealth also increases, like any boom town."
Twenty-eight years later there are manifold ironies in these complaints. Trinidad is going through another bout of shallow prosperity, squandering its wealth in the usual politics. Art remains largely a private affair. Contemporary theatre hardly ventures beyond farce. Coarseness and vulgarity have thrived (half an hour of talk radio will furnish ample evidence of both). West Indian writers face the same unequal struggle against philistinism that drove both Naipaul and Walcott abroad. The greatest irony, however, is that one of Walcott's most accomplished poems, written close to the time that he gave this interview, was occasioned, quite literally, by his ruminations in a Trinidadian hotel.
Timely Reflections
'The Hotel Normandie Pool' in The Fortunate Traveller (1981) expresses Walcott's thoughts as he stood on the threshold of his other life. The pool's reflections stir up anxieties about his craft, and lead to thoughts about the passing of time, memory and regret. The poet, thinking of exile, already knows the pains of estrangement:
... at fifty I have learned that beyond words is the disfiguring exile of divorce.
In an inspired leap of historical imagination-one that prefigures many of the triumphs of Omeros-a tourist at the poolside metamorphoses into the poet Ovid, and he discusses the challenges of contemporary poetry with the author. The Roman understands perfectly what it's like to feel that,
corruption, censorship and arrogance make exile seem a happier thought than home . . . our house slaves sigh; the field slaves scream revenge; one moves between the flatterer and the fool yearning for the old bondage from both ends.
But he is cautious too. He knows what a long absence will entail:
Romans-he smiled-will mock your slavish rhyme,
the slaves your love of Roman structures. . .
Walcott's lines glide effortlessly through several intricately patterned stanzas of this sort of advice before the poem closes with a sunset. An ominous, murky scene that haunts you more with each re-reading.
Dusk. The trees blacken like the pool's umbrellas.
Dusk. Suspension of every image and its voice.
The mangoes pitch from their green dark like meteors.
The fruit bat swings on its branch, a tongueless bell.
This imagined dialogue clearly helped Walcott decide how to handle the warring claims of a literary tradition that he loved (the English/Romans), and his sympathies with a postcolonial Caribbean (Ovid's 'slaves') desperately trying to make its own style, but the problem is never far from his thoughts at any point in his subsequent career. (The Prodigal admits that "The inheritance you were sent to claim/ defined itself in contradiction.")
And yet, somehow he has managed to keep squaring that circle; most obviously by splitting his oeuvre into poetry and drama, but also by turning the full force of his learning and virtuosity back towards the home he left behind. Omeros captures this double-focus in a single line: "All that Greek manure under the green bananas'. That may look like a dismissal of the poem's bookishness, but the image also suggests that the 'manure' of classical learning is necessary if the green fruit of a young culture are to achieve a tasteful maturity.
Walcott's role as a tireless sifter of that 'Greek manure' has been well documented, but I believe that the scope of his accomplishment has been largely overlooked in the Caribbean. There is a sadness in this last poem that goes beyond nostalgia, a sense of disappointment. An Odyssean melancholy that one's epic voyage is least known where it is most relevant, fear that this homecoming has no Eumaeus, no Eurycleia.
The Enigma of A Rival
The Enigma of Arrival, V.S. Naipaul's misanthropic hymn to life in rural England, offers a useful contrast to the journeys in The Prodigal. In his most incisive analysis of Naipaul (reprinted in What The Twilight Says) Walcott resets some of The Enigma's musical prose as verse, to show its affinities with Hardy, Clare and Edward Thomas. He marvels at Naipaul's feel for natural rhythms and the landscape: "... the growth of his pleasure draws the reader in without fancy. There isn't a better English around, and for me this is wonderful without bewilderment, since our finest writer of the English sentence, by praising the beauty of England, however threatened with industrial encroachment, saves it from itself." But even in this Eden, the serpent is never far away. Walcott quickly fastens on to the "phantoms of the old Naipauline trauma-the genteel abhorrence of Negroes, the hatred of Trinidad, the idealization of History and Order." He then takes examines a classic piece of condescension-that the enchanted hues of Manhattan would have been thought "dead colours" in Trinidad- and takes firm hold of the nettlesome Naipaul:
"Why is the sticky, insufferable humidity of any city summer preferable or more magical than the dry fierce heat of the Caribbean, which always has the startling benediction of breeze and shade? Why is this heat magical in Greece or in the desert, and just heat in Trinidad?"
The questions almost answer themselves. Naipaul's fetishism of England's landscape-and culture-is a pattern foreshadowed by Ganesh's repackaging of himself at the end of The Mystic Masseur. The G. Ramsay Muir worldview is exactly what makes Sir Vidia such an insufferable fraud. Walcott points out that "the estimate of his lonely journey towards becoming a writer is conservative": a very polite description for the willful forgetting-of CLR James, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, Edgar Mittleholzer, Wilson Harris and Jamaica Kincaid-that Naipaul must perform when recreating the cultural wilderness from which he has heroically escaped.
The narrator in The Prodigal has a more complex relationship with his origins. He accepts them, certainly, and they also set him thinking of elsewhere-other traditions, other landscapes. But whereas Naipaul cannot resist elbowing the reader with his superior taste, Walcott can be thrilled without reflexive colonial judgments. He loves unusual light too, but his elation in Alpine or Venetian afternoons produces no disparagement of the dusk in Soufrière. In a welcome corrective to the Naipauline phantoms, this poem reflects on the murderous hatreds within Europe, the much nearer trauma of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the casual anti-Semitism that abounds sixty years after the Holocaust. European culture may be irrestibly civilized, but you musn't forget that it has a heart of darkness too.
If Naipaul's pastoral can be versified, Walcott's poetry can just as easily be turned into prose. Consider, for example, this 'paragraph':
"It was still unfamiliar, the staidness of trains. And the thoughtful, the separate, gliding in cars on arrowing rails serenely, each gripped face intent on the puzzle of distance, as stations pass without waving, and sad, approaching cities, announced by the prologue of ramshackle yards and toothless tunnels, and the foliage rusting across an old aqueduct, loomed and then dwindled into their name. There were no stations or receding platforms in the maps of childhood nor blizzards of dogwood, no piercing steeples from buttressed cathedrals, nor statues whose base held dolphins, blunt browed, repeating themselves."
That is Joycean to my ear. A horsebreeder might call it DeLillo out of Tennyson. It is the prose of a vigilant mind coupled with a perfectly tuned ear. The style finesses anxiety, never loses its nerve, doesn't have to convince you that its author is not like other people. In fact, immediately after this passage come the lines:
Look at that man looking from the stalled window-
he contains many absences.
This is the counterpoint to Whitman's multitudinous self, a cri de coeur that every displaced West Indian will understand completely. This vulnerable honesty is what allows Walcott to make his peace with history, and it is ultimately what sets him apart from his enigmatic rival.
About turns
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? asked a famous early Walcott poem. How does one reconcile Africa (or India) with Europe? How does the mongrel Caribbean find its way in the world? Turn both ways and neither is the answer that the poetry keeps giving. Hold a middle course between the Scylla of myopic nationalism and the Charybdis of self-loathing. Walcott's long essay 'The Muse of History', grappled with this problem very intelligently and suggested, presciently, that "maturity is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor." Much of the poetry he has written since has tried to show what this might mean. In long poems like Omeros and Tiepolo's Hound, the assimilation takes place in the overlap or fusion of literary and artistic traditions. In The Prodigal the reconciliation seems to occur within the poet himself.
Parts of this poem are written in the first person, others refer to a more distant 'you". At first these shifts seem little more than an inconsistency, but they gather force as the poet keeps pondering the flux of identity. Halfway through the book the poet learns of the death of his brother Roderick and writes:
Your soul, my twin, keeps fluttering in my head
A hummingbird bewildered by the rafters
The sense of one soul trapped inside another lies at the heart of this poem. It is one of many images that suggest that the self carries traces of all that it has loved. Sometimes these memories are so powerful they erode the distinction between past and present, inner and outer worlds. This confusion of perspectives seems to be one reason why the poetry hedges its bets by recording some experiences as 'I', and others as an ambiguous 'you'. On several occasions, Walcott also worries that he has been no more than a translator of experience, someone who trafficks meaning between two worlds, but can make his home in neither-this, I suspect, is another meaning of the changing pronouns.
Towards the end of the poem, contemplating the old man who now looks back at him from the mirror, the poet explicitly acknowledges his wish for another self:
In my effort to arrive at the third person
has lain the ordeal; because whoever the 'he' is,
he can suffer, he can make his own spasms, he can die;
I can look at him and smile uncontrollably.
In other words, perhaps, somewhere beyond the I of experience and the you of reflection lies a he that can suffer while the poet creates. The use of this third person is that you and I can stand apart from him, with enough aesthetic distance to make sense of his predicament.
Unter der Linden
The poem's sixth section opens with the wish
To go to Germany for the beautiful phrase
unter der Linden, which, like a branch in sunshine,
means "without History, under the linden trees,"
without the broken crucifixes of swastikas,
with the swathe of summer, green hillocks and red roofs...
/... and yet there is guilt
in all that green . . .
Here is another central idea. Nowhere remains innocent of History-the grand forces that we learn about in school-but the artist labours against its impersonality. He seeks humanity in uncapitalized 'history', in ordinary lives lost to the shadows of the historical record. This point is well made when the narrator considers a Velaszquez canvas in the 'casual sanctity of the Prado'. Admiring the master's brushwork, the poet suddenly realizes that the painting's force flows out of the artist's compassion, his interest in marginal figures that he could easily have ignored. His technical skill is important, but it means nothing without sympathy:
In your ambitious, pompous panel of a country fete
work on those minuscule extra figures.
They have lives too.
Respect for the details of actual life also imposes a discipline on the artist, not to turn his material into a morality play. When he returns to St. Lucia, the poet is newly alive to the tension between words and the world (Every library/ is a cemetery in sunlight); uneasily aware of the perils of poeticising. The natural world, for example, has no politics:
... with whose anger
do the wild parrots scream, who has tormented them
as mercilessly as we have tormented ourselves
with our conflicts of origins?
... [they] were never emblems.
But, of course, History intervenes and we make symbols. No matter what we tell ourselves, we all know that "When memory blows out its candle/ you can feel Europe drawn slowly over your cold brow." To pretend otherwise is foolish. So Walcott accepts that the serpent of knowledge must be allowed to have a place in every paradise. He acknowledges the "guilt in all that green". Landscapes are filled with echoes like 'the surrendering lances of the cane'. His wanderings in Europe have taught him that you forget the past at your peril-no matter where you live. If you choose amnesia, the land loses its meanings:
What if our history is so rapidly enclosed
in bush, devoured by green, that there are no signals
left, since smoke, the smoke of encampments
by brigand and the plumes from muskets
are transitory memorials and our forests shut
their mouths, sworn to ancestral silence.
We can only ever be 'unter der Linden' in the imagined worlds of art, but even there the responsible artist must yield to the muse of History.
There is much more of this brooding in The Prodigal, but there are other pleasures too. Walcott's gift for rendering landscapes has never been put to better use: Milan, Florence, the Hudson river, St Lucia and Trinidad flash out of these pages. Sometimes the poetry chases a colour (gamboge and ochre are two favourites), sometimes it follows the play of the light. When the verse hits its stride-as it often does- you cannot but marvel at the virtuosity of Late Walcott. Several sections of this poem are transcendently beautiful-which makes the poet's resignation to the silence of old age all the more poignant. So many other poets cloy the appetites they feed, this one makes hungry where most he satisfies-I can think of no higher praise.