John Matthias, Living with a Visionary, Dos Madres Press 2024.
This small but astonishing book is John Matthias’ lament for his wife, Diana. It illustrates the truth of Geoffrey Hill’s suggestion that if a writer gets the balance between trauma and technique right, the end result is great art.
At the heart of the book is a 13 page prose narrative. Diana was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and then became the victim of increasingly frequent hallucinations. She died due to complications from Covid. There are poems on either side of the prose. The three that precede it were written for or about her before she became ill. The piece that comes after it, Diana’s Things, is a sequence of 8 short prose paragraphs. There is also an afterward by Igor Webb which feels like a fussy stranger at a funeral, telling the mourners how to react. This I could do without.
The story is traumatic enough to have stopped many people from writing, but Matthias is one of the most interesting American poets I’ve read, and a technique developed over a life time holds the subject, stops it from overwhelming the writer, and shapes it into art.
The relationship, destroyed by illness and an implacable medical system caught up in the Covid pandemic, is revealed in the three initial poems. ‘Of Artemis Aging (For Diana on her 65th Birthday)’ plays on her name, the Roman version of the Greek Artemis, the hunter goddess. It has its moments of gentle humour:
‘Actaeon turned/Into a stag. I’ve seen Diana at her bath but never was/devoured by my hounds, only by my longing.’
The Goddess does not get old, and cannot change. If she could change:
She might be like the woman called by her roman name,
Reading in a book beside the fire in my own house.
She has come down all these years with me, and she
Is getting old. She turns the pages slowly, then looks up.
Her wise ironic glance is straight as a shaft of gold
The comparison between sterile, unchanging Goddess and aging familiar namesake is handled in a way that the goddess comes off second best but the subject of the poem is celebrated and yet made particular. This skilful use of myth is carried over into the next poem.
Good Dream takes the story of Baucus and Philemon from book 7 of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Ovid’s story, as Matthias points out, is one of the few gentle ones in his book. The elderly couple, having offered the God’s hospitality when no one else did, are offered a wish. Their wish is to have their house turned into a temple; that they be its priests, and that above all they will not outlive each other. As they are dying they are changed into two trees, facing each other. What more do you need to know about the writer and his wife’s fifty years of marriage? The poem and the dream end:
The three remaining walls of my house collapsed
And I was standing in a marble temple, and I
Was not I. Beside me, Serpent Aesculapius arose
In flaming cloak. Diana spoke: I am a linden tree
And what I was replied: I have become an oak.
But as the prose recounts, the poet does outlive his wife. He isn’t allowed to visit her when she is dying because of Covid. At the beginning of her hallucinations she has seen a ‘flowery man’ in the hall. At that stage she knew he was not there. Unable to visit her due to Covid restrictions, his last contact with her is over the phone. He is reading her the poem he wrote for her 65th birthday: ‘I couldn’t continue. “You’re doing great dad,” my daughter said, “but she wants to know about the flowery man.” So I told her everything I knew.’
The emotion that generates the story is left outside, and the facts are assembled and related and allowed to speak for themselves. Although the poet’s own experience is harrowing enough: taken to hospital, kept separate from his wife, put into the psychiatric ward and only allowed out when a friend organises a legal intervention, the focus remains on Diana, not on himself. The result is much more moving than any wailing could be.
What follows the prose is Some of Her Things, a meditation on a life through seven objects. In his dream he is standing in a river, with an impossibly large suitcase which contains all her possessions. He knows she is dead but she is present on the other bank of the river. She tells him ‘Do like Henry James’. He has no idea what that means. ‘ Do like Henry James,’ she repeats, ‘but save me seven things’.
It turns out that Henry James was asked to dispose of Constance Woodson’s things. He drowned her clothes in a Venice lagoon. Or tried to:
‘A ball gown billowed up and wouldn’t sink. It seemed that Constance Fenimore Woodson swam beside them’.
As Henry James discovered, drowning the past is not that easy. The danger is being drowned in it. In the seven sections that follow each thing is linked to a memory, or memories. It builds the kind of picture we all have of someone we know well, associated with items that have personal significance. Only once, in the last piece in the sequence, does the poet come close to a direct description of his own feelings.
‘I suppose I stand midstream only in a dream, but I am broken to the point I can't tell.’
It’s one of poetry’s harsher realities that no matter how traumatic or ecstatic the experience or emotions that generate the writing, once they are written down and handed over to a stranger they risk becoming cliches. As human beings we might sympathise with the writer, but as experienced readers of poetry we may well be bored and wonder why someone wanted to tell us this. At the other extreme, a death becomes an occasion for poetry and the sincerity of the poet can be questionable. Even a great poet like Tennyson’s sincerity was and is questioned for the writing of In Memoriam.
What Matthias has achieved here is to produce a sincere lament for his wife but in such a way that the lament is interesting as a made thing. My discussion of doesn’t do it justice. Total strangers will share and feel his loss, but the book is also an exemplary lesson in how to turn trauma into art without in any way betraying the experience or the subject.
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