The Poetry of [em]Libido Dominandi[/em]

This review essay appears in the Winter–Spring 2013 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

Breakwater  (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2009)
Trees in a Park (Thibodaux, LA: Chicory Bloom Press, 2010)
by Catharine Savage Brosman

We live in an age that has seen former Episcopal bishop Shelby Spong attempt to wean Christians from belief in a God in whom Spong no longer thinks they can believe and reground it on an absolutist, indiscriminate imperative founded on Genesis 2:18: “The LORD GOD said: ‘It is not good for the man to be alone.’ ” We no longer need to love God and then do what we will; we must simply do whatever it takes to find a little erotic companionship—whether that entails abandoning the bedside of one’s dying wife, looking among the members of one’s own sex, or searching beyond the frontiers of one’s own species (a “lifestyle” option the Spanish government now promotes in school textbooks).

The critic of modernity may look upon this spectacle with uncertainty, wondering whether the libido ubiquitous in modern life is a mere species of the more general libido dominandi, the desire to dominate and control that we see in the home, market, and state alike; or, to the contrary, if the desire to become, in Descartes’s words, the “masters and possessors of nature” through state and technology might be a mere instrumental good intended to facilitate the total liberation of sexuality from nature and ethics.¹

Whatever one may conclude on this question, we may say for certain that the arts, which have throughout history taken romantic and sexual love for a theme, can no longer do so unreflectively if they are not merely to function as slave labor for this endless modern project of emancipation. And so it is at once refreshing and troubling to come across Catharine Savage Brosman’s stunning new collection of poems, Breakwater: a book set amid the absurd ruins of the sexual revolution; a book in many ways beholden to it; and a book that offers with poignancy and ambivalence reflection on the world we have forged in our desires’ latest heat.

As other writers on Breakwater have noted, the reader is advised to begin the book at the end, with Brosman’s “Lightning in the Heart: A Postface in Prose.” Here Brosman offers a narrative that serves as background for many of the poems in the collection. We learn that Brosman had married Patric Savage in her first youth but that the marriage soon failed. She confesses uncertainty as to the reason, but we gather it had much to do with their respective career ambitions (he took a job in California, she was beginning a promising academic career) and her related unwillingness to bear a child. They divorced; she remarried, had a daughter, and eventually divorced again. Entering her eighth decade in the now familiar role of the retired divorcee free for travel and the safe affections of friendship, Brosman is unexpectedly contacted by Patric via e-mail. A jolt of sudden, renewed love enters her heart, and an electronic correspondence is born. We learn that Patric, too, had remarried under unhappy circumstances. That marriage endured, but his second wife now lies debilitated by a severe stroke and under his exhausting and constant care. Patric and Brosman reunite in Houston, where he has spent his career, and she soon resettles there, in the same condominium building where he lives. Their romance blossoms alongside Patric’s continued care of his wife; when the latter passes away, he and Brosman marry.

What are we to make of this life story? It contains the elements of shame and misfortune: divorces and estrangements, the subordination of family life to career, and the related trumping of marital bonds by romantic desire. Brosman—as its protagonist, and as the poetry editor of the leading magazine of cultural conservatism, Chronicles—repeatedly confesses her discomfort and shame before the decisions she has made in her life even as she recognizes with the reader their sad typicality. To most living Americans, her story bespeaks the familiar concessions of a broken society; to those of us born into the culture of prurience but refusing its terms, her tale appears no less familiar but more disconcerting. But Brosman is not just troubled but moved: it is she who has been struck by this lost-and-found love and who feels obliged to answer to its law. She has retailed this story to many friends and “of the dozens of people . . . including professional-grade Catholics, ordinary Catholics, a devout Anglo-Catholic,” and so on, “all have applauded, recognizing, doubtless, that the law was made for man and not man for the law; put differently, abstraction must yield to the concrete, the universal to the particular.” If her account entirely persuaded, this passage would not need to have been included. Indeed Brosman’s ambivalence threads through her narrative: she senses something is not right, but the present is a product of the irrevocable choices of the past even as it cannot be reduced to penance for past errors. In Brosman’s case, shame before her past must yield to the goods to which that shame is bound, such as the life and love of her daughter, her enduring friendship with her second husband even after their divorce, and her second shot at a first marriage.

At moments in this “prose postface,” Brosman seems to take comfort in a world that judges romantic misadventures less harshly than she naturally does: the narrative is excessive in details regarding the technological specifics of her relationship with Patric. It makes one feel a bit awkward to hear her relate the inane if ubiquitous difficulties of wireless Internet connections, or to protest her near “luddite” opinion on modern technology while explaining all the places she has toted her laptop. Describing their life after the reunion, but before the death of Patric’s wife, Brosman writes, “In the hours remaining at the end of each day, we share dinner in my place, listen to music, talk, look at art books, and (readers will wonder) make love; today’s mores and literary conventions permit me to add that our lovemaking is exquisite.” An apologetic discomfort before relenting to “today’s mores” is the fulcrum about which Brosman’s narrative turns.

If these circumstances make for uncertain reading in prose, it provides tremendous occasion for lyric beauty and intellectual exploration in the poems themselves. Indeed, Brosman’s ambivalent position as a modern lover with a conscience resistant to the very drive-to-emancipation to which her life has succumbed has led her to write one of the most intelligently unified, elegantly composed, and morally compelling books of poems I have read in years. Her poems not only distill in finely wrought recollections the materials of her life; they also elevate them for inspection in such a way that she can at once do justice to her reborn love and the more dubious genealogy of “secular love” to which Boccaccio gave birth. The closing lines of the title poem locate her in just these circumstances. Having admired “two blue herons” on a breakwater, she turns back upon herself:

In love, beside the man who was my husband
long ago, I gaze with them, scanning the stream. Strange:
my middle decades—Dante’s tangled wood—appear

a foreign thing, lived by someone else. Yet that was I.
Now, having passed the breakwater, we’ve landed
on this island of our age, two Robinsons, conjoined,
and canopied by trees whose million leaves
murmur love of light and lucid shade, and paint
the bayou in great shimmering mottles, figuring happiness.

Already, the mystery of estrangement and identity before one’s past has taken poetic form.

Brosman always writes in well-turned verses, with a clear interest in finding those forms in which her familiar but jeweled discursive style can most readily recline. In Breakwater, she frequently composes in English quatrains, but, above all, in long-lined blank iambics. English is no stranger to loose iambics, in which the poet freely substitutes and adds extra syllables. Brosman, however, is quite rigorous in maintaining the integrity of her meter; she makes refreshingly little use of metrical substitutions, preferring the flexibility found in varying her lines from iambic pentameter (traditional blank verse) to lines of octo- and nona-syllabics. I have never quite seen this before and would speculate that her typical verse forms—again pentameter quatrains and various long-lined blank iambics—owe something to her long familiarity, as a professor of modern French literature, with the traditional alexandrine or the long, loose lines of Paul Claudel. The resultant style is a fitting concord of masterful craft and an authoritative discursive voice that exercises the rule of verse in the virtue of art.

The poems themselves unfold with all the momentum of a complex tale of love. Part 1 recounts the lead-up to and fulfillment of her renewed life with Patric. These poems seek to capture the excitement and anticipation of love but also to grapple with the disbelief such late-life romance may stir in others. “To Former Students, Who Would Be Skeptical,” composed in the heroic couplets and public style of the Augustan Age, captures this awkwardness nicely:

. . . I’m distracted, dreamy, quite unfit
to play my role as you’ll remember it.
So can you guess? “Good gracious, heavens above—
but yes . . . our old professor is in love!”

This section concludes with a moment of wholeness, a resolution of all prior ambivalence, in her wedding poem.

But we then move beyond the terrain of Brosman’s imperfect but real happiness. Part 2 comprises a number of short narrative and lyric poems that grapple with the historical and ethical implications of the love Brosman has described. The narratives constitute some of the most conceptually rich material in the volume, although their syntax is uninventive and at times grows tedious like the prose of a medieval chronicle. The first four such narratives speak of old relatives and acquaintances, as Brosman seeks to contextualize romantic love as almost invariably born of unfortunate choices and unforeseeable circumstances: Aunt Flora, the spinster, who lived a life of loneliness; Louise, the pianist who sacrificed romantic love for the love of art; “Lieutenant Fran,” the army nurse whose true love is killed but who eventually marries and has a family; and, finally, the story of a promising young student who learns French, marries a Frenchman, but dies young—whatever promise she had left unfulfilled. These are painful narratives, not so much apologetics for the strange curves Brosman’s life has taken as they are an exemplum by which to understand it:

                                              What then
do we owe destiny? We are its wheat
and chaff, its tracks and random leavings. Fran
remarked that life had dealt a decent hand;
instead, she was its strange accomplishment,
a star ablaze amidst expanding dust.

Later in part 2 we encounter another set of narratives, recounting the infamous marital misadventures of Madeline and André Gide (of whom Brosman is a distinguished scholar), of D. H. Lawrence discovering the “blood religions” of American Indians, and of the Jewish modernist poet and radical Mina Loy. The inclusion of these narratives probes deeper the fortunes and function of eros in the modern age. If the stories of Aunt Flora and others serve the volume chiefly to suggest the agony of love’s absolute demands upon us in circumstances of radical contingency and unwonted reversals, these accounts of modernist artists suggest at once how deliberate was the project of love’s becoming, like Mina Loy, “a law unto herself,” and how devastating the consequences. The disintegrating homosexual hedonism of Gide excuses itself as a necessary spiritual impulse, though it destroys the one who was “loved by him in soul / from childhood; never bodily, though.” After initial doubts, Lawrence becomes “mesmerized” by the Hopi Indians, finding in primitive ritual the deep foundation of life in the sexual passions. Loy, who asserts a feminist demand for autonomy, finds herself searching desperately after a man who is literally swept from her by the forces of nature.

In each of these cases, we find Brosman suggesting the deeper genealogy of her circumstances. The twentieth-century cry for sexual emancipation was an act of rebellion against a bourgeois culture that seemed so mannered and materialist that it had lost any capacity for human passion. The almost tragic figures of Lawrence and Gide were thus supposed to appear as sacrificial reminders of the good we had lost. As it turned out, of course, the desires of a supposedly “repressive” materialism and an “unrestrained” romantic sexuality did not simply comport well with one another—they were fundamentally one, and desire became an absolute and commercially respectable little god. Brosman’s poem “Desire” captures the thrill and dangerous willfulness of him:

He bends to show his mastery, and shame
with her consent the body wholly bared,
submitted to a will she cannot name,
which violates her own but must be shared.

Withdrawing to himself, he hears the sense
of being magnified in heavy breath,
with knowledge, consciousness of knowledge, thence
in mirrored destiny to knowing death.

Part 3 begins by pushing these explorations of desire to a historical limit: the German army torching the libraries at Louvain during the First World War, which serves as a vivid instance of libido dominandi, as if the world must now be understood entirely in terms of a will to power and destruction. After this, perhaps the best, narrative poem in the volume, however, Brosman emerges from the historical inferno and turns back to the life one must live, in spite of the greater or lesser sins of the past. Several of the poems seek to recover an appreciative repose before the present things of this world:

I watch the sparrows cluster, calmer now, communal,
offering their part of the evening peace. I’ll stay here
in contingency, lifting a glass to human imperfection,
as God unseen walks in the garden still, scattering grace.

The most impressive poems in part 3 may also be the most perfectly realized poems in the volume: three meditations on ecclesial art, including two on the Church Saint-Séverin, and on the Christ Pantocrator altarpiece in the Duomo of Monreale. With their explicitly Christian subject matter, these poems reestablish an absolute scale of evaluation (after the fashion of the “professional-grade Catholics” in her prose narrative) that serves as a necessary complement to the appreciative acceptance of contingency and grace in the other poems. Here Brosman extends the example of her own impressive but imperfectly lived life to our entire culture. She takes us from ambivalence and excuse making to a quiet lament before those marmoreal signifiers of the divine. Writing of Saint-Séverin, she observes,

With Notre-Dame, the Sacré-Coeur, and all
the rest, obscure or famous—Trinity,
Saint-Julian-the-Poor, Saint-Roch,
Saint-Paul—it’s just another Paris church to see.

For we have come too late, I think—the call
to holiness will miss this century;
in recent years there’s been another Fall,
with gilded fruit of power on the tree.

But tourists go in anyhow, and weave
wide-eyed through narthex, chapels, transcepts, apse
and look as though they wished they could believe,

acknowledging the truth of human lapse
by what proclaims it visibly, alone:
the weightlessness of ransom wrought in stone.

This wrought-in-stone sonnet adds much weight to Brosman’s already formidable volume—one that manages a sustained meditation on the central question of our age, the claims and humiliations of love, in the ethical language our age would simultaneously like to believe in and like to forget.

In Brosman’s chapbook, Trees in a Park, we encounter poems that have evidently been written since the completion of Breakwater. They exhibit a meditative repose that, while certainly not absent in the earlier collection, appears sustained from poem to poem both in terms of method and subject. Befitting its title, this short collection takes trees, birds, and vegetables for explicit subject—each of which is submitted to the kind of ontological investigation modern poetry since Stevens and Ponge has made familiar. What distinguishes Brosman’s poems from others is not so much her deliberately domestic scenery—the New Formalist poets, such as Timothy Steele, have rendered this almost normative. Rather, Brosman conjoins an easeful, suave—sometimes, frankly, meandering—voice with a compact allusiveness and wit that recovers some of the genius of the Metaphysicals of the seventeenth century. “Watermelon” begins, for instance, with the appropriate “long incision down the rind, / a crack, a breaking of the heart.” But as the “pinkish water fills the plate,” we are slowly led to the observation that “even holy things arise / from greenery,” which in turn takes us to the Cross of Christ:

until the world made whole again
should raise its leafy, flowering head,
and we become through others’ pain,
like him, the first fruits of the dead.

The intent of the chapbook is appropriately less than that of the longer collection, and yet the genius of Brosman’s craft shines forth more steadily for being less obviously at the service of a great and troubling theme. The two volumes together demonstrate that, at this late date in her career, Brosman is producing some of her most accomplished work—work that merits the attention not only of those interested in one of the few obviously masterful voices in contemporary American letters but also of those looking for a means by which to grapple with the life of love in these wretched days of an unhallowed century. ♦