Literary relations: Pater, Hopkins, and me

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2002 by Weiss, Theodore

Literary relations, easily remarked, tend to be superficial, a showing off of the original's idiosyncrasies. The influence that matters is the one entirely absorbed in the follower's blood stream. Contagiously dense, bodied, dramatic as his poetry is, Gerard Manley Hopkins is hard to resist. He advised the opposite: read a poet, admire him, then go and do otherwise. But at twenty-one, a floundering, all-out scribbler, not too surprisingly, I was increasingly taken by him. Now, at eighty-five, almost twice his age, and a veteran writer of poetry, I continue to find him endlessly renewing.

Brilliantly he filled the role of the unknown uncle who suddenly turns up in letters describing the fortune he has left to his nephew. Despite seemingly insurmountable barriers of distance and time, and through them, my relationship with Hopkins has gone on deepening. However, lest the readers of this paper see in it a would-be gilding of myself by association, I assure them that what I am after are correspondences which admiration and affection are likely to seek out. Sometimes not altogether mistakenly.

My role in this relationship, as the happy recipient of that fortune, eager to make the most of it, is obvious. But what, beyond words less than paperthin, has Hopkins, notwithstanding his supersensitivity when alive, come to? What more than borrowed breath does he live on? A breath, one might point out, in turn inspired by that encapsulated in his words. Yet may my interest in him not spring, in large measure, from my own investments of interest? I changing, he changes too; and vice versa. This is one of the wonders of letters that, flimsy as they are, with the varying of contexts-- later times, other places-they, surviving, encourage the varying.

However skeptically we may regard such exchange, the fact remains that, of all the poets I am indebted to, few have equaled Hopkins's impact and influence. His harrowing, brief life, for all it cost him, has proved ultimately precious. My gratitude to him has expressed itself in two essays. The first was a brief introduction to Selections from the Notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a 1945 New Directions chapbook; and the second, "Gerard Manley Hopkins: Realist on Parnassus," published in 1946 in Accent Anthology.

These essays grew out of my Columbia University master's thesis on Hopkins, written in 1942. But I must admit that, though the thesis was passable enough to win a master's degree, I have now -marvelous to say-no recollection of it. Am I out to shield myself from recognizing how feeble or wrong-headed the thesis was? In any case, at that time I proposed expanding it into a Ph.D. dissertation. Approval of my proposal, for a variety of obstacles, was long delayed.

However, in 1950 New Directions suggested that I edit a much amplified volume, drawn from all of Hopkins's prose, six large books of journals and correspondence. Hopkins was a copious writer after all! His letters, especially to Bridges, his dearest friend and eventual editor, and to the poets Dixon and Patmore, even though years sometimes closed down one correspondence or another, supplied his chief life-line to literature and, I am tempted to say, to living itself. At the same time, New Directions informed me that the arrangement had to be tentative "because the Jesuit Order takes the position that all the worldly goods of its members belong to the Order; writings evidently come under this category." Spiritual property is still property;. not to say real estate. So we had to wait on the Jesuits' decision.

Optimistically, during a Bard College winter field period, I prepared my volume, only to learn, at the period's end, that the Order had refused permission. No doubt, having seen my chapbook's preface and my Accent essay, with my youthfully pawky criticism of religions influence on Hopkins, the Jesuits must have, understandably, felt that even as I deprecated religion in general and Christianity in particular, I had misinterpreted them and, therefore, Hopkins no less.

Still, my two publications softened the blow. I much admired New Directions, and though Accent is now mostly forgotten, during its lifetime its appeal surpassed-at least for me-that of the heavyweight, academic literary quarterlies. In fact, Accent's printing of my first poems and my first essay constituted one of the most exciting moments of my literary life. How could there be any question that I had arrived as a writer.

Nonetheless, I decided against including the two items in my collection of essays, The Man from Porlock, published in 1982. I suspect I had become uneasy before my early efforts' brashness and before the Jesuits' rebuff. Even so I still feel a paternal affection for these two callow younglings, if mainly for their ardency. Thus, in the following pages, I feel free to draw heavily on them, free, at the same time, to disagree with them when I question their judgment.

But where and when did my interest in Hopkins begin? Certainly not n my high school or college days. Most of my- teachers, were they aware of him, would, I suspect, have considered him an outrageous sport and dangerous influence, for the unsavoriness of his becoming a Roman Catholic and a Jesuit, more alien, more suspect, than even a Jew. One might expect Columbia University's English graduate department to be different But its program made little room for Hopkins; and my mentor in Victorian literature, when I proposed Hopkins as a dissertation topic, dismissed him as "a flash in the pan." He also said he could not work on a Catholic writer. Apparently I had encountered Hopkins during my first year of graduate school. Then I restlessly foraged on the lesser-traveled pastures of English Literature. A sense that a writer was neglected, through something irregular, something odd and different about him, intensified my interest.