Paul Norris: 'Ashbery's Vague Renaissance'

John Ashbery’s final collection begins with a cursory summary of a period to which he often returned:

We’re moving right along through the seventeenth century.
The latter part is fine, much more modern
than the earlier part. Now we have Restoration Comedy.
Webster and Shakespeare and Corneille were fine
for their time but not modern enough,
though an improvement over the sixteenth century
of Henry VIII, Lassus and Petrus Christus, who, paradoxically,
seem more modern than their immediate successors,
Tyndale, Moroni, and Luca Marenzio among them. (‘Commotion of the Birds’)

The poem speaks in the voice of a self-appointed tour guide, one who combines erudition with a disarming lack of interest. Though able to list and assess a large range of figures from literary history, the speaker reads these old writers through a pig-headed progressivism, expressed in truisms. Their knowledge is somehow both deep and casual at once, able to assess writers with precision, but only interested in their modernity, which is essentially their closeness to the speaker’s own self.

The paradox of this knowledge is epitomised in various meanings of ‘fine’. The word is first used to describe the later seventeenth century, then appears a couple of lines later in reference to the earlier seventeenth century. Here, rather than making a fine distinction, it flattens, apparently appropriate to all parts of history. But it retains a kind of aptness. The adjective ‘fine’ is fine for both uses because it points in two directions, conveying both limp praise and a sense of finery, or genuine richness.

The two senses of ‘fine’ express a close affinity between the ornate and the mediocre, which meet in many of our aesthetic categories (kitsch, camp, gaudy, etc.). Ashbery’s ‘fine’ does not quite fit into these categories, instead holding excellence and mediocrity in inassimilable suspension. Just as Christ is fully man and fully God, Ashbery’s ‘fine’ is great and trifling. Writers who were ‘fine / for their time’ are (as the trite near-rhyme suggests) being dismissed from a modern-day perspective, clouded by a layer of condescension. But ‘fine for their time’ could also mean ‘fine, as the word meant in their time’, therefore (as the OED has it) ‘perfect, pure, genuine’.

Writers of the English Renaissance are often ‘fine’ for Ashbery, and bring with them a vague opulence, a rightful oddity, to his own verse. As Kathryn Murphy has recently argued in a chapter on Thomas Browne and Walter Pater, the ‘quaint’ appeal of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marks a moment of decision between the enduringly beautiful and the merely antiquarian, between the Latinate and the Anglo-Saxon, and between plainness and opulence. Between the fine and the merely ‘fine’.

Ashbery’s early modernism has affinities with his contemporaries’ Renaissance infatuations: Thom Gunn’s for Fulke Greville, Frank O’Hara’s for Thomas Wyatt. The latter pairing is the topic of Jeff Dolven’s Senses of Style (2017). Ashbery appears here on the periphery, reading Wyatt’s ‘To the Harbormaster’ at O’Hara’s funeral, adopting a cod-Shakespearean style in a letter to a poorly Larry Rivers in the 1950s. Dolven argues that Ashbery’s easy movement between styles in this letter to Rivers attempts to move him towards forgiving Ashbery for not visiting him in his illness. Ashbery concludes: ‘Please, please, in these days of factions let there be no feelings of rancor ’twixt you and me.’ The old-fashioned diction literally makes enmity a thing of the past, a relic of ancient duels, quite unfitting for their sophisticated New York circle.

The past is not easily forgotten, but often pleads for forgiveness. In ‘The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers’ another cod-Shakespearean voice 'durst not seem to take offence' after a faithless lover sends jewels. This poem, from Ashbery’s first collection, Some Trees (1956), takes it title from Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers’. Ashbery imposes his own initials over those of Marvell’s Theophilia Cornewall. The wit of Ashbery’s title comes from the shifting of words over the centuries: in the 1950s, ‘picture’ means photograph, not a painted portrait, and ‘prospect’ more often means ‘future possibility’ than ‘view’. With both new meanings in mind, Ashbery describes the attitude of his young self:

As though the rolled-up future might stink
As loud as stood the sick moment
The shutter clicked.

While the future at the conclusion of Marvell's poem takes the form of ‘the buds’ which T.C. should ‘spare’ as she picks her flowers, Ashbery’s is blank camera roll, mechanically reproduced, preserving a single instant, incapable of growth. In his final lines Ashbery fears how ‘the loveliest feelings... soon find words’ which then ‘Displace them’, as photograph displaces memory. His hope resides ‘only in the light of lost words’, which would allow us to ‘imagine our rewards’, flirting with the Christian story of loss and reward, but interposing a distinctly secular imagination.

In another letter to Rivers, also quoted by Dolven, Ashbery praises Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’, writing ‘isn’t that emotion itself, not the memory of it.’ When Ashbery found Renaissance art fine (in the word’s older sense) it offered him experience unmediated by recollection. This is also the appeal of much early modern writing for me, as a student. Its mode of expression is antiquated enough that the words must be seen through, questioned, not immediately assimilated into the stream of one’s own thoughts, but standing jagged as the representation of a feeling beyond words. In the light of lost words, I see more clearly than in my own.

The final section of ‘The Picture of Little J.A.’ opens with a plea: ‘Yet I cannot escape the picture’. Ashbery’s most celebrated response to the Renaissance is also his most celebrated poem. 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror' takes Parmigianino’s painting as both title and subject. Parmigianino’s is another picture the poet cannot escape, haunting him from the moment he first saw in with his partner Pierre Martory in Vienna, the painter's outsized hand seeming at times to be trying to break out, at other times ‘to protect | What it advertises’. I had always assumed that what is advertised is the face, until last week. At a seminar run by the art critic T.J. Clark, the room was packed and I struggled to find my own ‘man-sized quotient’, leaning against a piano at the back of the room, but I could just about make out someone saying that Parmigianino’s left hand (because it is the left hand, despite what Ashbery says) hides the right hand as it paints, concealing the mechanism of artistic production itself.

The seminar was about the relation of poetry to painting, and in Ashbery’s poem this relationship is a light-hearted rivalry. The poem’s constant sense of movement reminds us that while a poem progresses through time, a painting stays in place. The final section begins ‘A breeze like the turning of a page | Brings back your face’. While the poem moves on, allows the reader to turn a page in a movement which is at once circular and progressive, the painting is stuck where it is, or was, back in Vienna with ‘Pierre’. When I saw the painting myself a few years ago, I was a little disappointed: it is astonishingly small, tucked into a corner of the gallery, and (though perhaps a somewhat narcissistic metric) I couldn’t imagine it as a reflection of myself, as I had hoped I could.

The poem is more portable, in the book, and in memory. Its concluding lines return to the painting as an assemblage of fragments:

The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew, except
Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time.

The painter’s chalkless hand is deprived of creative energy. The painting has ‘no recesses’, the painting cannot say a word, the painting has no sense of time. Only the poem can create these pockets of memory with no pictures attached to them. The very last words suggest many possibilities: a whisper that emanates from time itself; a whisper that clashes with an established tempo; a whisper that says, ‘out of time’. This last possibility is fitting for a poem which has reflected on the imminence of death, and which is itself brought to an end by these words. The Renaissance past is fine as in finite, bringing an end, fin. Ashbery's opening words are similarly multivalent: ‘As Parmaginiano did it’ suggests at once that Ashbery is embarking on an imitation (‘as’ as comparative) and that he is re-entering the moment of artistic composition (‘as’ as marker of time). Renaissance art is fine, finished, done with, but also available for re-making. There are times when Parmigianino offers Ashbery ‘emotion itself’, others when his self-portrait traps the poet in a hall of mirrors. Ashbery’s poem does not conclude whether the painting is fine as in beautiful, or fine as in just fine, mediocre and undifferentiated, ‘a magma of interiors’. The distance of the early modern period, the strangeness of its modes of expression, offers the poet a space where he can be his truest self, accepting everything, resolving nothing. And that's fine with me.

Paul Norris is a doctoral student in English Literature at Oxford University, researching the influence of architecture on the early modern mind. His research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He did his undergraduate and Masters degrees at Cambridge.