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"Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister" by Gregory Maguire
Cinderella is a manipulative, self-pitying twit who loves to sweep ashes in this retelling of the fairy tale.
By Rachel Elson
[12/17/99]

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Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette
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Original Bliss
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Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley
Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley
By Peter Guralnick
[12/16/99]

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I come upon them in the partial dark
                    (I mean, the shadows
serve what is happening, partial that way)
and make my outsider's discovery:
this moment has no message, no intent
                    till I descry it!
There has to be a witness to the scene.

Does life truly exist before art discovers it? For Howard, apparently not -- not any more than art can be created without some worldly inspiration.The series ends with a wonderful sendup about Magritte's painting "Family Values," from which the poem series borrows its title. Magritte's interpretation of Milton and his offspring is itself an homage to one of the other Milton paintings Howard discusses in the "Family Values" series. The poem sets up a 1947 correspondence between a flummoxed gallery owner and a Miltonist from Columbia University who has been called upon to help allay charges of obscenity stemming from a planned Magritte exhibit. But Professor Nicolson, too, hits the stumbling block at the intersection of life and art. In the painting, Milton is depicted hovering just above his daughters, each of whom is naked and has a fish head instead of a human head. Nicolson believes that "Magritte is punning/ on "milt" -- fish sperm, you know -- milt on:/ an incestuous poetry." But trying to analyze the painting in intellectual terms, she realizes that what is an established mode of artistic expression can easily be conceived of as perverse.

... Oh dear, I suppose that does sound
rather obscene, though it's a classical
                    trope for Apollo.
The longer I look, the less I know what
to think.

The poem's finale takes the form of the gallery's ad for the Magritte show, which bears this simple, albeit truthful, quotation: "'No modern canvas has/given me more pleasure.'/-- Professor Marjorie Nicolson."

Pleasure, as Howard shows us elsewhere, can be an elusive quantity. A more subtle incarnation of the idea that enjoyment shouldn't be overanalyzed appears in "My Last Hustler," in which the stanzas (bound by strict metrics and a rhyme scheme, which Howard pulls off seamlessly) play out like a set piece, a tableau vivant of sorts. First, the poet lays out the scene:

... "Brad" is lying naked, or rather naked is lying
in wait for whatever those he refers to as clients require
by way of what they refer to as satisfaction ...

On a bed above suspicion, creases in obviously fresh
linen still mapping a surface only a little creamier than
the creaseless hills and hollows of his compliant flesh.

And then the acts (in both theatrical and sexual senses) unfold:

... Brad is not wholly a youth.

Routines on some arduous rigging, however, can restore
him to himself in mirrors, every which way surrounded
by no more than what he seems and mercifully by no more ...

Fond though your touch may be and truly feeling your tact,
yet a mocking echo returns -- remote, vague, blasé --
of Every Future Caress, so very like your own!
However entranced the scene you make (the two of you act
as one to all appearance, but one is always alone).

What is artifice if not this peculiarly human role-playing in the name of ardor? In any life, moments arise in which we suddenly seem to be play-acting, based on some idea of what we believe we should be doing, and Howard isn’t afraid to confront that tendency.

Neither, however, is he afraid to draw the line between artifice and self-deception. In one of the most candid and moving poems in the book, "For Mona Van Duyn, Going On," he lays bare the continuous struggle to ward off a prefabricated experience of humanity:

          Most of us, Mona,
spoil our poems (our lives) because we have
ideas -- not ideas but approved topics
that can be carried around intact.

Poems and lives equally, Howard seems to say, must be constantly re-examined for signs of complacency and tired repetition. To live, and to write, means never to rest easily on a familiar idea of what is correct or beautiful.

"Trappings" ends on a similar note in praise of evolution, in the final lines of "At 65":

Like Orpheus, like Mrs. Lot, you
will be petrified -- astonished -- to learn
memory is endless, life very long,
and you -- you are immortal after all.

That Richard Howard's life and work are continuously in progress seems to leave him as awestruck as this wise book leaves its readers. He moves ahead with marvelous aplomb -- he recently turned 70 -- and every few years he lets us in to see the humble, triumphant improvements.
salon.com | Dec. 17, 1999

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