From the issue dated April 5, 1996
A LIFE IN SONNETS
Indiana U. Professor Combines Poetry With Many Other Fields
By Peter Monaghan
Bloomington, Ind.
Willis Barnstone is amused that some students here at Indiana University believe that he lives in his office.
He says it's not true.
But he does spend extraordinarily long hours there. His habit is to arrive around noon and stay until midnight or later, writing and reading in the room he dubs "my Virgilian retreat."
High in Ballantine Hall, a forbidding tower that wouldn't look out of place in a Soviet-bloc capital, his office is not much like the pastoral keep of the poet of the Aeneid.
But a retreat it is. For 34 years, Mr. Barnstone has withdrawn to this office, day after day. Here he has written 46 books that have been published and about 20 others that sit on his shelves, ready to mail out when he judges the time is right.
Among his published writings are books of poetry; translations; memoirs; studies of non-standard religious texts; children's books; and songs.
"I'm a bit of a nut, as you can see," he jokes. "I publish too much. Well, I shouldn't say too much. I don't send all my books out at once. I've got to wait until they have a little time."
The well-traveled, polyglot poet and academic has a title at Indiana that suggests the breadth of his passions: Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, West European Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Biblical Studies. "But don't say I'm all that," he requests, abashed.
"I think he's quite remarkable," says James Laughlin, editor and owner of the New Directions press, who has corresponded monthly with Mr. Barnstone for 25 years. "His kind of knowledge, and attention to classical things, is so much wanted in universities."
Mr. Barnstone is not a household name in American letters, but his many advocates hope that his latest book, The Secret Reader, a 501-sonnet sequence, will change that. The book, published by University Press of New England, is part memoir and part rumination on life, letters, and the good and bad of being human.
One squeezes into Mr. Barnstone's brimming-over "retreat" – library, living room, and museum of his life – through a narrow corridor formed by high bookshelves. Within, shelves continue all around. Desks and tables are laden with books and documents. There's a couch and some easy chairs. Beneath a desk is a small refrigerator holding orange juice and yogurt to fuel him through days and sometimes entire nights.
I play
with letters like Jehovah at the Tree:
vain, lonely maker reading till the day.
A 19th-century Mexican painting of Jesus hangs beside a Hieronymus Bosch-style depiction of heaven and hell. "I've been asked to do a book on the apocalypse, which I'm considering," he says. Bird-shaped antique Burmese opium weights sit on a table with other small treasures from Tibet and China. On the walls are photographs, including one of 12-year-old Billy Barnstone with Babe Ruth. The Great Bambino? It's a front-page photo from the New York Daily News: young Mr. Barnstone with his Manhattan neighbor, who was dressed in a mock mortarboard and gown as "Professor of Swat" for the 1939 World's Fair.
All around are photographs of Mr. Barnstone's long-time friend and literary mentor, Jorge Luis Borges, the late writer, of whom he writes, in one of the poems of The Secret Reader:
you longly scheme
the alphabet of light to fill the sphere
in your heart
He describes his friendship with the Argentine writer – from their meeting in 1968, to Buenos Aires, where Mr. Barnstone spent 1975 to 1977 as a Fulbright scholar, to New York, Bloomington, and other cities – in a rich 1993 memoir, Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires (University of Illinois Press).
Along one wall is a collection of Mr. Barnstone's works, some illustrated with his drawings and paintings. The unpublished books are neatly bound to mark their completion. "I'm a slob, but with my manuscripts I'm a perfectionist," he says.
He has published more than a dozen books of his own poetry – two of them nominated for the Pulitzer Prize – and 19 books of translations of poetry, from Chinese, Spanish, French, Latin, ancient and modern Greek, and biblical Hebrew.
What particularly impresses literary colleagues is that he has also written several well-received scholarly works, including The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, and Practice (Yale University Press, 1993). It outlines his argument that translation is itself a poetic act. "It is more than exercises," he says. "You become the poet for that moment."
Though a professed "sinner and unbeliever" himself, he takes a keen interest in religion – "the vastest source of the imagination we have." Hence his thick compendium, The Other Bible: Jewish Pseudepigraphia, Christian Apocrypha, Gnostic Scriptures, Kabbalah, Dead Sea Scrolls (HarperCollins, 1984). The volume, which was a Book of the Month Club selection, includes dozens of non-standard, or "gnomic," religious texts, and his essays about them. He argues that they tell us as much about religious faith as do the Bible and other more-accepted texts. Mr. Barnstone revels in the imagination of these unfamiliar works, which are, he suggests, "no more far-fetched, or reasonable, than our conventional religious texts."
So, although he considers religions oppressive, he has agreed to write a book on the poetry of prayer.
Another book? Mr. Laughlin, the editor, can hardly believe how many Mr. Barnstone has produced. "It kind of overcomes a publisher."
One doesn't want to risk boredom, Mr. Barnstone responds. His advice to young writers is not to wait for inspiration. Insecurity, he says with a nervous chuckle, is a great motivator.
failure is
the providence we come to when in time
we tumble out of consciousness to mis-
erable extinction.
Of course, he says, the solitude of writing can conflict with natural gregariousness like his own. He enjoys talking with colleagues so much that he does his best to avoid them.
He says he has learned to accept solitude for his work's sake. He lives alone but often sees his son Robert, and his ex-wife, Helle Barnstone, who remains his close friend. Both of them live here.
As a salve to loneliness, he collaborates often with poets whose work he is translating, or with other writers.
One scholar he has worked with is his son Tony, an assistant professor of English at Whittier College. This year, Prentice Hall will publish their The Literatures of Asia, Africa, Latin America: A World Anthology. All that the 2,000-page anthology required of the two of them was "to read everything on those continents and put it into one book," quips Tony Barnstone. "It was delicious agony."
With his daughter, Aliki, an assistant professor of English at Bucknell University, Mr. Barnstone produced A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (Schocken, 1980).
Aliki and Tony Barnstone, published poets themselves, both like to tell the story about how their father, while walking along the Seine with a friend in the 1950s, expressed his joy over a poem they were discussing: He did a flip and continued without breaking stride, or conversation. "I'd been a diver at college," he explains.
Mr. Barnstone can still become excited about literary challenges – say, the rigors of the sonnet form. "Every obstacle is really a gift of freedom. A sonnet is almost like a short story, and it's one or two breaths. I find it very dramatic."
His preparation for 18 years of writing the sonnets in The Secret Reader began in his dormitory at Bowdoin College, after seeing his roommate have an epileptic fit:
I got up and
floated next door, sat down and wrote eight lines.
That night of moon breasts in my dirty hand
slipped into ink and I was born.
Then came the influence of Donne, Shakespeare, great Spanish sonneteers, Rainer Maria Rilke. And, of course, Borges.
Among the events in Mr. Barnstone's life that the sonnets relate are his witnessing the Greek civil war, and Franco's Spain. China during the Cultural Revolution. Argentina during its "dirty war" of oppression in the 1970s. He has also spent time in France, England, several countries in Latin America and Asia, Egypt, Turkey, and Lapland. Each summer, he still travels. This year, it will be to Cambodia and Vietnam.
The Secret Reader is far more than travelogue. In it, Mr. Barnstone lays bare, to a degree that even most poets would avoid, his self. His father's suicide, when Mr. Barnstone was 18, and his brother's, many years later, resonate through the book.
In Sunday Morning in Fascist Spain (Southern Illinois Press, 1995), Mr. Barnstone places his father, Robert, "in the tradition of Spanish picaro scamps." His father had suffered from manic depression, as did Mr. Barnstone's brother, Howard, a Houston architect.
Holding his hand,
I sought the pulse but heard the silence prove
a brother gone.
Aliki Barnstone believes that her father writes to survive the abandonment and expiate the guilt of what he calls "unnecessary deaths."
Mr. Barnstone, as his sonnets relate, has shored up his hurt with friendships among poets and people of all kinds. The Secret Reader comes with endorsements from poets numerous "to an extreme which I've rarely seen," says Edwin Honig, a retired professor of English at Brown University, who has published several books of poetry. It's as if Mr. Barnstone is driven to "build an edifice," he says.
Poetry, Mr. Honig observes, is a profession like any other: Members scratch each others' backs. But he believes that the commendations for The Secret Reader – from poets including Gerald Stern, Edward Hirsch, and Carolyn Kizer – aren't exaggerated.
"I'm always wondering how Willis can produce so much in a 24-hour day," he adds.
Mr. Barnstone mentions that since completing The Secret Reader, he has written two more books of poetry, each one in 22 days, each containing 52 sonnets. And his book-length essay, Jews and Blacks in Days of Icy Bigotry, about "the romance politically of the Jews and blacks in the '30s, which is heading for divorce," should appear within a year.
For all of his accomplishments, is Mr. Barnstone an under-celebrated American poet?
In response, Mr. Honig asks, Which accomplished American poet is not? "That's not to belittle him, but there are so many."
It doesn't help, Mr. Honig suggests, that Mr. Barnstone produces so many kinds of writing. "If a man does more than one thing, then he's not taken too seriously by his colleagues in the fields he's good at. In that way you can account for his relative obscurity."
Mr. Barnstone agrees:
Even Dante the Perfect Songmaker Ate Crow
Judging by The Secret Reader, Mr. Barnstone places less importance on selling himself than on extending a hand of trust to his readers. The poems are complex and allusive. Doesn't he conceive of the "secret reader" as someone he would like to share himself with? "I can't tell you," he says, "how sweet it is to hear that."
Copyright © 1996 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
