One of my realizations reading this excellent double study of the marriage of Edwin and Willa Muir was that exception reporting (the world is going to hell in a handbasket) is a feature of not only news coverage (after all 99.99999% of the population of the United States were not murdered today) but potentially of biography too, built as it is primarily on letters, memoirs/memories and diaries. We tend not to record the everydayness of our contentments and quiet achievements but how our plans went awry, our anxieties over recognition gnawed, or our painful lumbago!
This is important here because Willa Muir especially has been caught between two tendencies.
The first was to downplay her own creative role in comparison with her husband. The patriarchial nature of the society in which she lived (and which continues) meant that her achievements, especially those secured together, most notably the translations from German literature - Kafka and Herman Broch especially - tended to be ascribed primarily to Edwin, with Willa in a supporting, if that, role. Whereas, in truth, the bulk of the translating work was completed by Willa, as Margery McCulloch makes clear (and which, fairly, Edwin always acknowledged).
The second tendency is the reverse: if only Willa had been more assertive (or had her consciousness raised), she could have forged a greater, more creative career for herself. Forget her sacrifices, often to earn money, which allowed Edwin to develop as a poet and critic. Why allow yourself to be subsumed? Viva the revolution! This tendency, whilst perhaps understandable, rather denies the actualities of the compromises any living together (and its wider context) demands - and would have horrified Willa. Though she certainly regretted the lack of fuller recognition and chaffed at circumstances, the idea of not having supported Edwin as a poet (and critic) would have struck her as a failure of their 'Belonging' (the title she gave to her autobiography that she wrote at the end of her life and after being ten years a widow).
This returns me to my starting point - how often our picture of people is conditioned by the shadows of life springing to prominence rather than the underlying realities of light. Edwin and Willa Muir's marriage was a fundamentally happy, collaborative, and engaged one that, as McCulloch shows, enabled both to find pathways towards creative expression; and, yes, if circumstances had been different more might have been possible but the actual is only ever misjudged by the ideal.
The book explores the actual gifts of both with commendable accuracy and judicious judgment including how their works were received, conceived, and, sometimes, misconceived by others.
They both started relatively late - both into their thirties when they married and serious literary production began - and both produced some of their finest work towards the end of their lives - Edwin's last poems were as good, if not better than anything he had produced before and Willa's idiosyncratic but influential book on the Ballard tradition in poetry and her autobiography. To both, but primarily to Willa, we owe Kafka's establishment as a writer in the English-speaking world.
They, also, enjoyed a life of significant incident - Germany during the post-First World War inflation and its magnification of anti-Semitism and the sense of the injustice of the Versailles' settlement. Czechoslovakia, after the Second World War, and the bright moment of its liberation being extinguished by the Soviet putsch and a return to authoritarianism. All of which McCulloch skillfully sketches giving you a real sense of the times through which they lived and in which they worked.
Finally, she shows how appearances can be deceiving. Willa was extroverted, colorful, opinionated, and, at times, brash, even for some people abrasive. Edwin was introverted, the quiet, contained presence, softly spoken, unwilling to intrude. It was Edwin who was often considered the vulnerable one but as McCulloch shows, in truth, ultimately it was Edwin who was the resilient and the practical one - years of earning his way as a clerk had been its training.
And, ultimately, their greatest gift, and both would have agreed, were Edwin's poems - one of the most imaginatively gifted of English language poets of the Twentieth century - whose poetry, the critic, John H. Summers described, "as larger than the merely literary...Implicit in all his works is the recognition that there are things more important than literature - life and love, the physical world, the individual spirit within the body: those things in which the religious man recognizes the immediate work of God."
Comments
Post a Comment