LETTERS: 1976: 15-16

LETTERS : 1976 : 15-16

                                                                                                            Feb 26  ‘76

Dear R.K. Singh,

I am not in the least indifferent to you, not changed a whit, glad as ever to have a letter, and hope you received all mine, though I suppose there is some chance that a letter to you in East Bhutan may not have been forwarded.

Your M.A. thesis lies here on a side table in my study.  Only last Sunday, the wife of a faculty member from the University of Massachusetts, pointed it out to her husband, when they were here on an overnight visit.

Please tell me where Dhanbad is.  I haven’t located it on a map, but I gather it is somewhere about 100 miles from Gaya towards Calcutta.  I’m really in the dark.  I know you are much nearer home in Banaras than you were in East Bhutan.  I hope you will enjoy your work.

You ask for help in selecting a Contemporary American poet for your dissertation.  I think at once of William Carlos Williams as your kind of poet, and I’ve asked my bookstore to order his selected poems and in about two weeks when it comes, I’ll send the book on to you—regretfully, perhaps, for I don’t have a copy myself.  But your needs are prior to mine, for I’d be keeping the book only for my pleasure, while you will combine pleasure and scholarship, if you decide that Williams is to your taste.

Your other consideration—the Savitri—seems very good, but I have no knowledge of the epic and obviously, therefore, no measure of its worth.

My new book of poems you ask me to send you has not yet been published, is slated for around the end of April. I have had no final word from the  novel, which still languishes at Viking Press after having been there nine months.

My life is very quiet. Monday evenings I sing with a chorus that is preparing a new patriotic chorale written for the Bicentennial by a Bennington composer, the director of the chorus. The music is enharmonic, sort of Bartok, whose music I particularly enjoy.

All good wishes.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Yrs.

                                                                                                 Lyle Glazier

16.

                                                                                                                 June 4  ‘76

Dear R.K. Singh,

How can I thank you for going to the trouble and the expense of sending me SAVITRI? It is an extraordinary book, an extraordinary document in social history, even though there is no poetry in it. I ask myself what kind of man encrusts himself with such a protective shell of illusion to shield himself from everything that is visible in his teeming India.  There is more poetry in any one of your little  lyrics than in that whole grandiose volume of make believe. To be sure, he wears the mantle of mystic and protects himself again by claiming that anyone who doesn’t vibrate in tune with his revelation is out of touch with the GREAT TRUTHS THE TIMELESS TRUTHS OF ETERNITY.  I found his letters fully as revealing as his cantos, and was not surprised to come upon long passages venerating Milton.  What he does not seem to comprehend is that Milton ‘s vision, like Dante’s , pulses with human being.  Satan, gargantuan vision, is all too much a man, and behind the creation of Satan is Milton’s own Restoration England, which to the poet, Protestant that he was, was Hell, in which he had to believe he had the power to construct a new heaven and earth in the “own place” of his mind.

I doubt if you will agree with what I am saying.  I suspect that it will seem to you another instance of the remoteness of Occidentals from the  Oriental Mind.  However, since you send me the book, in the context of trying to reach a decision on a subject for a dissertation, I can only tell you that in my opinion you will be deluding yourself if you believe that you are writing about a poem if you write about SAVITRI.  All the other things you mention “the lengthiest epic in English”  an opportunity to  “exploit the tools of archetypal/mythical contextual criticism” may be there to some extent.  But the rhythm is flattering, the imagery is cloud cuckooland, and the language is that of an evangelist who does not dare look out at the world surrounding him, so he pulls down that tawdry curtain of imagined absolutes. 

If I seem to be hard on Sri Aurobindo, it is because I think you are too good a poet to be taken in by his nonsense.  He is a waste of time as a poet, and worse than that, unwittingly a social commentator, he illustrates how a weakling can run away into the Heaven of mysticism and ignore every social gangrenous sore that cries out for redemption.

Please forgive me.

                                                                           Your good frined,

                                                                             Lyle Glazier