Poets in Prose: A Review of Holy Fool by Henry Gould and The Making of a Pure Poet by Augustus Young

Henry Gould’s memoir, which makes up the opening three quarters of Holy Fool is the story of a young man quite literally on a mission. Set in and around the early to mid 1970s, the memoir takes off from Gould’s escape from a mental hospital following a breakdown while studying in Providence and charts the sort-of progress of his ‘quasi-infantile missionary personality’, for the young Gould, it emerges, believes himself to be elected, via communion with Shakespeare and the Bible, to bring the word of god to the rest of the world via rock and roll. As he puts it:

I was pursuing an occult destiny which seemed to have been foretold – intimated, whispered to me directly through the medium of certain pivotal texts.

His destiny takes him via Denver to California thanks to old high-school musician friends. He has an odd on-stage encounter with Jerry Garcia (the first of a number of meetings with the famous) that helps him come to understand that the West Coast is not where his new brand of visionary music is going to happen. He returns to his home in Minneapolis where he plays out the part of disappointed prodigal, and then on to New York where other old friends prove to be more receptive to his ideas. Along the way, the spectre of sex tortures the would-be saint. But the details of the story are less interesting to the reader than the manner of their telling.

For one thing, Gould’s prose is much more limpid than his often quite Baroque poetry, and he relates his adventures and failures with a convincing honesty. This is reinforced by his repeated admissions of memory failure, of not knowing how or when certain events took place. This has the effect of calling into question the very genre he’s working in; how does a memoir work when most of us have only hazy recollections of our own pasts? Regardless of the story Gould has to tell, it’s this awareness of his limitations that makes the book so interesting.

In New York, Gould sees a newspaper article on Mick Taylor’s leaving The Rolling Stones and decides that here, at last, his destiny can be achieved, so off he sets to London on a wing and a prayer, so to speak. Here he falls on his feet, finding off-the-books work with some very well connected people. He actually meets Mick Taylor, then Keith Richards and finally cuts Cat Stevens’ grass. But I suppose I’m not giving anything away if I tell you he doesn’t get the gig and the world is spared from his musical vision. In the end, he’s back in Providence and back in time to tell us the story of how he ended up in hospital in the first place.

The most significant aspect of his London adventures has nothing to do with his mission, really. He meets Alma, a married Brazilian/Lebanese singer whose husband was in Wandsworth prison.

I was attached to Alma – I wanted her, but I wasn’t deeply in love with her. It was an all too familiar situation. I knew the dynamics from my old life, before the conversion crisis. I was becoming a lapsed Christian, a fallen angel.

Out of work, out of money and with his missionary dreams broken, Henry wires home for money and flies back to the States. He left Alma behind, but she didn’t leave him, as the final part of the book, a sequence of 50 sonnets written 20-odd years later, back in London and under the spell of Shakespeare testifies. The poems return to Gould’s central preoccupation, love, justice and the idea of America, specifically through the vision of Roger Williams and lost opportunity:

But central to the sequence is the figure of capitalised ALMA, the soul/muse of the sequence:

I am     that cardinal goldfinch – apple of your eye
the shadowy ALMA of your soul      I am
that blackened penny – widow’s mite
that brought down satraps & their soldiery

Here the raw material of memory, as documented in the prose memoir, is transmogrified by the poet’s sense of musical order. Holy Fool provides a rare glimpse into that process.

As is the case with so many of his books, Agustus Young’s The Making of a Pure Poet  is sui generis. Subtitled ‘Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1904 – 1908) and his life while writing them’, it is part translation, part lit crit/commentary, part biography, part reflection on the process of reading the letters and part cultural history. And more besides.

The translations from the letters aim beyond literal exactness. As Young says early on:

Mindful of Rilke’s much-quoted citation ‘happy are those who know behind all language there stands that which is beyond words’ as I read along, I transcend the text and reinterpret the more obscure or incomplete passages, using hints from Rilke elsewhere and right reason. This led to translation as free as when I adapt poems that can’t stand on their own if literally rendered into English. I needed to do so in order to make sense of what Rilke is trying to say, or, as I prefer, nearly saying.

Young returns time and again to the question of method in what he refers to as his ‘transcriptions’ of the letters, reflecting on their elliptical nature and readerly uncertainty around what they were for, one of his most telling observations being that ‘the book could be more aptly retitled Letters from a Young Poet. Meanwhile, Young immerses his readers in the intellectual climate that lay behind Rilke’s thinking at the time of writing: Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nitzsche, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Rodin, Hölderlin and others all feature (as an aside, I learned that the first Zimmer frame was built for Hölderlin). He also shows us the importance of personal relationships in Rilke’s development, particularly his friendships with Lou Andreas-Salome, Rudolf Kassner, the Swedish feminist Ellen Key, and the aforementioned Rodin.

The ’letter from’ jibe rings true on a number of counts, not least of which is Rilke’s resolute refusal to comment on any of the poems that Franz Xaver Kappus, the young poet and reluctant military cadet to whom Rilke was addressing himself, sent him. Young is at pains to put himself in Kappus’ shoes and speculates on how this neglect must have felt to him. As he puts it in one of his notes to himself ‘I doubt that the young poet considered the practice of love that excluded others as either desirable or justified’. Amen to that, say I.

Equally, Rilke’s extended perorations on the joys of solitude and of what I can only call disembodied sex can’t have held much appeal for a 20-year-old military misfit with little if any experience of women. It must also have struck the younger man that Rilke’s effective abandonment of his wife Clara and daughter Ruth sat uncomfortably alongside Rilke’s sort-of-feminist pretensions.

In effect, Young argues, the letters were a working out of the ‘felt thoughts’ that underpin Rilke’s two major works, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. Kappus may not have found encouragement for his own poetic pretensions in the correspondence, but he, albeit unwittingly, certainly provided Rilke with a platform for working out his own poetics.

Taken as a whole, Young’s mix and match approach is highly successful, and he’s inclusive enough to include literary and biographical information from the period after the letters had finished, including the impact of WWI on his life and work and an interesting chapter on Rilke and America, where he has received a somewhat mixed reception. In the end, he leaves us with Rilke’s ambiguous epitaph, and Clara and Ruth at work in their Café Rilke, reconciling themselves to their by then permanently absent late husband and father.

For me, the book has an unusual measure of success. I started it as a reader who never really got Rilke as a poet and ended it with a better understanding of why that is. I still don’t really get him, but I get Young’s reading through his life and work.