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page 38
I learned that week, in love and swears, that the earlier times I’d been back had not been true returns, just ghostly half-measures, memory dreaming flesh at half gravity. Now I was sore and heavy and bogged in chairs. I lifted nothing but my long frame, with my wrists; I walked hard stomps, I extended all the way in itch and muscle-twist and cloth-rub from the head I’d lived in to the feet that had been my far limits, and from the first I knew no counter-prayer, no horror, nothing would bring my null-body back. It was gone forever. The limelight goes off me with it. We went on living: Joe got married next year, which filled his dimples with grins. Lou went to high school. I backed Norrie when I’d make extra cash and some people picked I was different. Not up inyour point-shoes, Fred? as Ron asked me, getting back into his, from the war. Later on we travelled - 1paid to sleep! - and people died of old age. But there’s too much in life: you can’t describe it. ELA IN E F E IN ST E IN IN CONVERSATION w ith M ic h a e l S c hm id t During a visit to Manchester in June 1997, the poet, novelist, translator and biographer Elaine Feinstein was interviewed at the University by Michael Schmidt about her new collection Daylight. M ICHAEL SCHM ID T I want to talk to you first about origins. There is a strong Russian element obviously in your poetry, but there's also Russian blood in your veins, isn’t there? ELAINE FEIN STEIN Russian Jewish blood, I have to say. All four grandparents were Russian Jews, who came from Odessa. I know a bit about the grandfathers, and about one of the grandmothers. The grandfather on my father’s side was well-read in Rabbinic literature, and had been trained at a Yeshiva in Odessa. He could also speak five languages, and write in most of them. But over here he worked in the wood trade. So did all his children, including one o f my aunts. This was fortunate for my grandfather ; he was able to go off and study, while the rest o f the family got on with the hard business o f earning a living. As a result, my own father left school at twelve. My other grandfather was much sharper. He wasn’t an intellectual, he was a glass merchant, but he made a great deal of money, so his sons went to university, two o f them indeed to Cambridge. Did hisfam ily remain Orthodox Jews? Not in the least. My mother’s brothers were socialists, and militantly atheist. On my father’s side of the family, however, they did by and large. My father was Orthodox. Perhaps not by contemporary standards, but he was a believer. No one would regard him as Orthodox today. Did your father know Russian? You were born in Bootle, and brought up in Leicester. What were they doing in Bootle? My mother would probably never have married my father if it hadn’t been for the First World War, which eliminated a whole generation o f possible husbands for her. He was handsome, ebullient, good-natured and in one o f his prosperous periods, but my grandfather disapproved of him intensely. She was allowed to marry him, I suspect, only because she was already twenty nine. I was born in Arundel Avenue, which is a fairly pleasant street in Bootle, after they were married. We moved to Leicester in my first year. T ha t was a bad time for the North, particularly for Liverpool - a lot o f unemployment and not much trade - and Leicester had very diverse industry. My father was always enterprising. He wasn’t a great businessman, though. He was too uncalculating. Not to say extravagant. And your mother? She was a pretty woman. But rather a timid one. She was crushed, I think, because her rhesus negative blood killed all the children she conceived after me. I remember her being taken off in an ambulance. Or having to rest in the afternoons. But it was she who taught me to read, and she loved books. Did she feel later on, like Mrs Hardy, that it was a misalliance? That she had married beneath her somewhat? No, she adored my father. She sometimes tried to make him more polite, less inhibited. Was it the Jewish community you moved into in Leicester or a general community? No. My grandfather o f course had books in Russian but his preferred language was Yiddish and anyway he could speak English. My father spoke Yiddish which he enjoyed. And do you speak Yiddish as well? Or is it afading element? Key phrases remain. Shrugs. Insults. Jokes. I ’m not a good linguist. I ’m not a Russianist, for instance. I ’m a very nervous Russian speaker. We were very much part o f the Jewish community. In fact my father was President of the Synagogue. Largely through my mother, who did all the background administrative work, while he sat in his seat with his top hat and enjoyed being President. They attended the Synagogue on all the Festivals. While I was living in Leicester I used to accompany them. It was fun. I had a lot of cousins living in the same town and they all went as well. Children d idn’t have to pray. We used to go outside and chatter. 36 P N Review 118
page 39
You went to grammar school in Leicester? T h e Wyggeston grammar school. And then you got a scholarship to Cambridge? An Exhibition. A poor man’s scholarship. You went to —? T o Newnham, to read English. When did you start getting interested in English? Were you writing poems? I started writing poems, like most poets, very young. When I was nine or ten I had a selection of poems put in for the Sir Jonathan North Medal. Which I d idn’t win, I have to say. And the early poems, I assume, rhymed and scanned. Oh yes. When I was recently going through boxes of my old manuscripts, I came across a long poem called ‘Leda’ which is a pastiche o f K eats... Keats, not Yeats. When did you go up to Cambridge? ’49 to ’52. I knew and admired people like Peter and Tony Shaffer who were at T rin ity , and several Fulbrights who were older and much more sophisticated than anyone else I ’d ever m e t : Norman Podhoretz, for instance. Were you under the thumb o f Leavis? He seems to have had quite a big thumb. were living in a great commune of undergraduates and their friends; two o f them were taught by Donald Davie. I remember being very impatient with the Movement poets they were trying to interest me in, and showing them some Wallace Stevens in return. This they reported back. Donald said —‘Actually Wallace Stevens is a great poet, she’s right about th a t.’ They were absurdly impressed. So we had him round to dinner and got on very well. During your time at Cambridge you were associated with what is now thought o f as The Cambridge School J.H.Prynne, I understand, used to sit on your floor. Prynne paced around. But yes, the English Intelligencer poets sat on my floor. T hat was a little later, when I was living in Trumpington. I was teaching at Essex by then and had a book o f poems out. But when I began to write I was very well aware I didn’t have the right voice for current English poetry. It was partly because I was so influenced by Americans, partly, as I wrote in the introduction to that recent Liverpool Anthology, because I didn’t have the right intonation and rhythms. I started my own magazine, Prospect, not to publish my own poems, but to introduce Olson, Paul Blackburn and others who weren’t yet known in this country. T h a t’s how I came to meet Prynne. In fact, I sold Prospect to Prynne. He was young then and had not yet become the Guru o f Caius. When I say I sold Prospect to him, I gave him my overdraft and the title, and on that he built a network of American connections. He made something much more out o f them than anything I had. When I look back at poems in In a Green Eye and look at Prynne’s early work, there isn 't that much common ground between you. What is the difference? Newnham undergraduates were not encouraged to attend Leavis’ lectures, but o f course we did. I guess we were, all, under his influence. We read his books. And in my third year I went along to his seminars for practical criticism. What was the parallel culture to Leavis? Because we get this impression o f a sort o f hegemony o f Leavisites at the time - No, no, no. Not at that time. At Newnham we were taught to value scholarship and we admired C.S.Lewis, The Allegory o f Love. And we went to Rossiter and heard all about early pre-Elizabethan drama. I didn’t specialise. I was very interested in things that didn’t come into the syllabus. American poetry ? American poetry and also novels. Faulkner, for instance. A t what point did you meet Donald Davie? I went to London after I got my degree. Got married and came back. And after my return, I became very active in the undergraduate world. I supervised for several Colleges, and I edited an issue of the undergraduate magazine Cambridge Opinion; an issue called ‘W riter out o f Society’, based on my enthusiasm for Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett and Allen Ginsberg. Not fashionable preoccupations at the time. We He was more interested in the glitter o f the language and more intellectual than emotional. He looks at the world in conceptual terms. But I admired the surface o f his poems. Do you still read his work? I don’t, no. You have to be in conversational or at least in postal touch with Prynne to understand the obsessions that feed his language. What’s striking about your first book is that the poems use the short line, and they use really quite a short syntactical measure all the way through. I t ’s as i f you could reorganise them i f you wanted to - though I hope you won’t - into longer lines with gaps. There is a phrased quality there but what is missing, it seems to me, is a sense o f continuous syntax, which you get in the later work much more. Did Articulate Energy have an impact on you, do you think? I think it did with Tomlinson. I think hefound a way out o f the acridities o /T h e Necklace in part through reading it. I was very much affected by listening to Donald’s lectures. Before them, I ’d thought more about rhythm and vocabulary than syntax; I preferred simple propositions to any other structure. In a way y o u ’ve come back to a simpler sentence, but it is not P N Review 118 37

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I learned that week, in love and swears, that the earlier times I’d been back had not been true returns, just ghostly half-measures, memory dreaming flesh at half gravity. Now I was sore and heavy and bogged in chairs. I lifted nothing but my long frame, with my wrists; I walked hard stomps, I extended all the way in itch and muscle-twist and cloth-rub from the head I’d lived in to the feet that had been my far limits, and from the first I knew no counter-prayer, no horror, nothing would bring my null-body back. It was gone forever. The limelight goes off me with it. We went on living: Joe got married next year, which filled his dimples with grins. Lou went to high school. I backed Norrie when I’d make extra cash and some people picked I was different. Not up inyour point-shoes, Fred? as Ron asked me, getting back into his, from the war. Later on we travelled - 1paid to sleep! - and people died of old age. But there’s too much in life: you can’t describe it.

ELA IN E F E IN ST E IN IN CONVERSATION

w ith M ic h a e l S c hm id t

During a visit to Manchester in June 1997, the poet, novelist, translator and biographer Elaine Feinstein was interviewed at the University by Michael Schmidt about her new collection Daylight.

M ICHAEL SCHM ID T I want to talk to you first about origins. There is a strong Russian element obviously in your poetry, but there's also Russian blood in your veins, isn’t there?

ELAINE FEIN STEIN Russian Jewish blood, I have to say. All four grandparents were Russian Jews, who came from Odessa. I know a bit about the grandfathers, and about one of the grandmothers. The grandfather on my father’s side was well-read in Rabbinic literature, and had been trained at a Yeshiva in Odessa. He could also speak five languages, and write in most of them. But over here he worked in the wood trade. So did all his children, including one o f my aunts. This was fortunate for my grandfather ; he was able to go off and study, while the rest o f the family got on with the hard business o f earning a living. As a result, my own father left school at twelve. My other grandfather was much sharper. He wasn’t an intellectual, he was a glass merchant, but he made a great deal of money, so his sons went to university, two o f them indeed to Cambridge.

Did hisfam ily remain Orthodox Jews?

Not in the least. My mother’s brothers were socialists, and militantly atheist. On my father’s side of the family, however, they did by and large. My father was Orthodox. Perhaps not by contemporary standards, but he was a believer. No one would regard him as Orthodox today.

Did your father know Russian?

You were born in Bootle, and brought up in Leicester. What were they doing in Bootle?

My mother would probably never have married my father if it hadn’t been for the First World War, which eliminated a whole generation o f possible husbands for her. He was handsome, ebullient, good-natured and in one o f his prosperous periods, but my grandfather disapproved of him intensely. She was allowed to marry him, I suspect, only because she was already twenty nine. I was born in Arundel Avenue, which is a fairly pleasant street in Bootle, after they were married. We moved to Leicester in my first year. T ha t was a bad time for the North, particularly for Liverpool - a lot o f unemployment and not much trade - and Leicester had very diverse industry. My father was always enterprising. He wasn’t a great businessman, though. He was too uncalculating. Not to say extravagant.

And your mother?

She was a pretty woman. But rather a timid one. She was crushed, I think, because her rhesus negative blood killed all the children she conceived after me. I remember her being taken off in an ambulance. Or having to rest in the afternoons. But it was she who taught me to read, and she loved books.

Did she feel later on, like Mrs Hardy, that it was a misalliance? That she had married beneath her somewhat?

No, she adored my father. She sometimes tried to make him more polite, less inhibited.

Was it the Jewish community you moved into in Leicester or a general community?

No. My grandfather o f course had books in Russian but his preferred language was Yiddish and anyway he could speak English. My father spoke Yiddish which he enjoyed.

And do you speak Yiddish as well? Or is it afading element?

Key phrases remain. Shrugs. Insults. Jokes. I ’m not a good linguist. I ’m not a Russianist, for instance. I ’m a very nervous Russian speaker.

We were very much part o f the Jewish community. In fact my father was President of the Synagogue. Largely through my mother, who did all the background administrative work, while he sat in his seat with his top hat and enjoyed being President. They attended the Synagogue on all the Festivals. While I was living in Leicester I used to accompany them. It was fun. I had a lot of cousins living in the same town and they all went as well. Children d idn’t have to pray. We used to go outside and chatter.

36 P N Review 118

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