WITH A GREAT WEALTH ON MY TONGUE
From
The Apocalypse of Quintilius. Peter Russell. Selected and introduced by Glyn Pursglove.
John Gery
While Ezra Pound
has inspired a variety of poetic traditions, including now generations of
post-Imagist poets, post-Sinologist poets, post-Vorticists,
and so on, few of his successors have committed themselves to a work
approaching the scale of The Cantos.
Louis Zukofsky is one. Another is British poet Peter Russell, who,
living mostly in exile, has followed Pound’s example in scope, if not quite in
subject, structure or style. In the
energetic spirit of Pound’s early “translations” of the Latin poet Sextus Propertius, for half a
century Russell has been developing and expanding the persona of one, Cittinus Aurelianus Quintilius Stultus, a fabricated
fifth-century “Grecified” Latin poet “we know nothing
about,” who, anachronistically, is only mentioned in passing in Horace’s odes
yet who, for Russell, has grown into a vast, diverse, multilingual, prolific,
and iconoclastic, if not notorious, figure, an unforgettable character whose
voice scintillates with a mad mix of lyricism, social satire, arcane
scholarship, philosophic speculation, and spirituality.
As Russell himself
tells the story of Quintilius’s origins (as quoted in
Glyn Pursglove’s
introduction to this book), in 1948 one morning after he had visited the aging
George Santayana in a convent in Rome, Russell found himself composing an
imitation of an elegy by Tibullus (whom Santayana was
in the midst of translating). The poem,
apparently spawned by a troubled love affair Russell was embroiled in at the
time, and written during a “terrible hangover,” also took on elements of
Virgil’s eclogues, with echoes of Catullus, Propertius and other Latin poets thrown in for good
measure, creating a kind of “pseudotranslation,” or
as Pursglove calls it, a “pseudoepigraphical
translation.” And so Quintilius
was born.
Over the next
several years, Russell produced a half-dozen elegies in this same voice,
attributing them to Quintilius and publishing them in
small journals (such as his own Nine), as well as in limited
editions. Eventually, they were gathered
in The Elegies of Quintilius (1975) and still
later reissued in an “enlarged” edition (1996) that included a brief
“biography” of Quintilius, a preface, further poems
on the madness attributed to him, and no less than six appendices. This more recent collection some fifteen
years in the making, From The Apocalypse of Quintilius,
now adds to The Elegies Pursglove’s
compilation of 142 poems “selected” from Quintilius’s
life’s work, together with her introduction, detailed notes, “Three Statements
on Quintilius” by the “translator” Russell
himself, and four further
“glosses.” In this highly self
conscious, pseudo-scholarly edition, Russell has constructed not only an
elaborate, varied, sometimes harrowing, and utterly fantastic biography for his
persona from the “Lower Empire” (including, for instance, references to his
lifelong correspondence with his “classmate” Augustine debating Plato and
Aristotle), but an equally esoteric body of medieval scholarship surrounding
his activities and poetry. More than a
supreme fiction––although surely it is that!––Russell’s detailed insinuations
of Quintilius’s travels throughout Europe, Africa,
the Near East, and even China, of his experiences ranging from military heroism
to enslavement, of his correspondence, of his historical encounters, and of
fragments of his writings sometimes recoverable only from translations of them
into a host of other languages, inevitably raises the specter of the fiction of
all non-fiction, of the questionable nature of whatever scholars may assert as
authentic in history or literature.
Indeed, Russell’s whole grand scheme is so unbelievable, so
rambunctious, so ambitious, we are sorely tempted to believe it, all of it,
since the human folly, estrangement, sexual longing, sacrifices to beauty,
plunges into despair, and frailty of the spirit Quintilius
expresses in poem after poem are so evocative, so damnable, so cogent, why shouldn’t
all of it be true? As Quintilius
himself points out in Poem 38,
Nothing
is real until it is transformed.
The
unrealities acquire a copula. All things
As
we know them, are something else
In
this world,
and once we are conjoined
to Quintilius’s world, his world, like ours, becomes
paradoxically familiar and peculiar at the same time. As Russell justifies his persona in one of
his statements, “Instead of the Poundian technique of
a modern consciousness penetrating into the past I use the device of a
consciousness from the distant past penetrating ‘unconsciously’ into the
future!”
Unlike for his
Aristotelian rival Augustine, whom he mocks as a hypocritical “master/ Of tall
stories” who “can’t even read Greek, and . . . sits up worrying all night/
About his career” (“Gnostical Animadversion”), thus
perpetrating “a brainless concept like ‘survival/ Of the best adapted’” (“Probabilia Nihil Est Tam Incredible. . .”), Quintilius’s
metaphysics are doggedly Platonic. From
his early embrace of “Air my bread” in “The Prelude to The Apocalypse” (where
he adds, “You will hear me muttering to myself/ But it will be the silences/
That speak of worlds”), to his later rant against his contemporaries who, like
the figures in the cave, “gather in little groups and watch these images/
Creeping like beetles or flashing like swallows or swifts/ Against a smooth
plaster wall. . ./. . .these fond fatheads/ [who] Sit gazing solemnly at
walls,–what they fondly call their ‘screen’,/And swear to themselves it’s
reality” (“Animae Nox Obscura”), Quntilius is devoted
to the preeminence of the ideal, despite recurring bouts of despair. “Reality’s so different from what they choose
to imagine,” he insists, and a page later, “The shadows are only shadows/ Of the shadows of reality, things we perceive with the
senses. /–You have too [sic] look through the shadows, not at them, to see/ The realities that lie beyond.” As though refuting both modernist credos
such as “No ideas but in things” and the postmodernist propensity for
image-based poetry drenched in sensual, private experience, Russell’s Quintilius remains staunchly outward-looking, reminding us
again and again, “The poet’s true task is divine song. Do not despise it” (“Non Enses
at Ex Norico Carmen”).
Yet the nexus of
voices uttered in The Apocalypse, in poems that range from a few
fragmented lines to nearly twenty pages in length, compositely offers more than
sustained philosophical musings or spiritual supplication. In fact, nothing in Quintilius’s
own era (which is of course ours, too) extends beyond the reach of his wrath,
and though more accessible, and finally less cryptic, than The Cantos,
his poems shift mood as abruptly, as dramatically, and sometimes as comically
and unexpectedly, as Pound’s. Longer
poems tend to roam across Quintilius’s obsessions
with avarice, cultural and material poverty, academicians, lust, and greed,
reading as though translated from Greek or Latin hexameters:
I
myself after a lifetime of unrewarded servitude
Inanely
sing on, on a far shore to desert halcyons,—
The
Muse is unkinder to me than ever Cynthia to Propertius,
Yet
I have loved her more than Propertius himself.
Of
all men’s products good verses alone
Are never superseded.
I write good verses.
Be
that my epitaph (though who will pay for the stone,
Let
alone a chiseller?)
(“We Need a Censor”)
Yet such poems are interspersed by hymns, epistles,
allegories (such as “The Key” and “The Yellow Bird,” two of the best poems in
the book), songs, and epigrammatic fragments resembling early Greek poems, such
as “Dicunt Mihi Puellae,”
Dicunt mihi puellae
anacreon senex
es
PD I, pp. 122-23
The
young girls all say to me now: “Quintilius,
You’re
an old man,–what would you want with us?”
This is another occasion when it is better to keep silence,
of extended word-play and lyrical ascent:
Miniatures
or minotaurs
I care
not which
Ichors
and acres, landscapes of the mind
Hoary
old life is nearly dead
But
death is something we don’t talk about
In
decent circles
Our
days revolve
Around the roundabouts and swings
It is
The
gladiator not the swan
Today
who sings (“The Metaphysics
of the Muse”)
Despite the use of
a persona, the obscure variety of “sources,” the mix of languages, and the
dissembling of histories, The Apocalypse of Quintilius
pays homage to the art of self-expression.
While Russell’s Quintilius makes it clear that
he despises the self-aggrandizing sophistries of postmodernism, his apocalypse,
or as he calls it, his “chrestomatheia,/ A
manual for use, a guide for the perplexed to unique emotions, authentic/ Evocations
of the Good and the True” (“Quintilii Ricardo Epistola”), stands poised on the cusp of Poundian modernism as a truly “post-modern” text, “indeed a
legacy/ To the Gods who are coming. . . the Gods that will be/ Not our fathers,
but our children. . .” Thanks to Pursglove’s admirable arrangement of Russell’s considerable
body of work to its best advantage, we leave Quintilius
not so disturbed by his vitriol sometimes verging on misanthropy as we are
moved by his allegiance to the divine, his writing his “Solitudes” to remake
the world into a place of wonder, thereby earning him the right to “sink into
the carrion earth serene/ With a great wealth on my tongue” (“Vitam Reddere ad Asses”). And as a poet who has stubbornly gone his own
way, refusing to compromise his vision, no matter what the personal cost, “so
that the mystery vanish not” (“Last Judgements”),
Peter Russell has promulgated a poetry that, while it may not have actually
been celebrated sixteen centuries ago, may well be sixteen centuries from now.