Horatian Matthews

Richard Jackson

We were sitting in Chattanooga, sipping some Chalone Pinot Blanc, when Bill mentioned that he was about finished with his Martial versions. What next? Horace, I suggested. Not the odes, was his immediate reply; someone was already working on them, and besides, too many people had done them well in our own time. But it was the satires I meant. Perfect, was what he thought, and a few months later he sent the rather notorious i.vii. There followed, at regular intervals, several others over a few years, always accompanied with a note expressing some surprise and ironic self satisfaction at how the version had turned out.

To be sure, Horace and Matthews turns out to be a perfect match indeed. Other poets in the past, Byron and Pope, for example, had certainly been influenced by Horace. In our own day James Wright claimed him as "my good father," and of course the whole notion of fathers, as we shall see, is essential to Horace. But the urbane tone, the shifts in diction, the register of rhetorical effects, the self irony, the bemused look at our human condition, these describe Matthews as well as Horace. So does the tension between line and sentence, iambic an accentually based poetics, the references to the joys and foibles of everyday life, of manners, the arts, city life, temptations set up by the odd connections "between language and desire, " as he puts it in one of his last poems.

Horace himself makes extensive use of word play, something Matthews loved-- his poem "Oxymorons" being a fine example. Bill loved the idea that satire probably comes from the legal phrase per satura (also applied to any social situations) meaning through a medley, suggesting several angles of attack, a technique as much as a subject. This is certainly true of the first Roman satirist, Ennius, who called his poems saturae -- they were composed of a variety of meters and in modes that ranged from ironic self-assessments to fables to aphoristic jabs. That the original word probably refers to food, to a mixed dish or stuffing, thus providing an odd mixture of the civil and the culinary especially delighted Bill. he also wished, but knew better, that the word had derived from "satyr," an image that in some ways, in its benign images, he felt suited us all.

More to the point, though, he respected the way Horace focused on types rather than individuals unlike his rougher predecessor Lucilius (see I.x). For Bill Matthews, like Horace, specific foibles of any individual were hardly worth mentioning, but the way we all participate more largely in the foibles of being human had been the main subject of his own poems since the beginning: "what next? God knows, / who counts us on God's shapely toes, one and one and one" he wrote in "Fellow Oddballs." And Horace did not exclude himself: there is no moral high tone in these poems meant to instruct the rest of us. Horace well knew he was himself a potential target for his barbs. ("I shouldn't pick on myself, but I do" Matthews wrote in another poem.) Indeed, the second book of satires, with its dialogues, suggests a poet highly conscious of what others think, highly conscious of how his own arguments are being perceived. One can suppose that any man who is as self conscious of his own actions as Seutoinius fosters the risque rumore in his thumbnail biography of Horace, was at least bemused by his own highly self-conscious actions. Nothing was too embarrassing for Horace to suggest about himself if his critiques of others were to have any validity, a fact born out by the frustrating night waiting for a lover who never arrives which he describes in I.vi.

So, one finds in these poems, and this is marvelously brought out in Matthews versions, an ironic self that at least potentially includes itself in every critique. At the end of "The Generations," a poem about his sons, Matthews writes how

we're made in the image

of each other and don't know it. How hard

we'll fight to keep that ignorance they had

yet to learn, and they had me as a teacher.

There is a kind of tenderness here that Matthews also saw in the satires, and which is often overlooked, a tenderness based upon a knowledge of our own faults as no better or worse than those of others, including, realistically, our best friends; more than mere empathy, there was a fully engaged imagination at work trying to experience what those other lives were about. Once, when a close friend, a poet, died, he was crushed by the way that poet's survivors treated him but held no animosity, only a sense of the understanding of how a writer's life is shared so much with other writers, and what that costs the writer''s family; indeed, his response was to satirize himself as a sort of unwelcome ghost of a house guest, clumsily intruding from the past. The aim, for Horace in his poems, for Bill in his own poems and these translations, was the artistic formulation of a way of life, a life that was an art as much as the poems, and the art was how to counterpoint criticism and friendship, judgment and embrace. This is surely something Bill saw in Satire I.ii with its call for friendship to be based on the forgiveness of our own peculiar faults.

As mixed dishes, then, the satires offer even more than criticism. Horace's wondrously warm praise of his own father in I.vi is a good example in itself and helps us to illuminate poems like "The Generations" cited above: "My father himself/ stayed with me and led me, himself, among / my teachers." The repetition of "himself" here underscores the sacrifice of time, and money, the father made in accompanying the son and actively aiding in his education. "He didn't fear / that if I should practice a modest trade-- / become an auctioneer, or tax collector, / like himself -- he'd be thereby thought a fool, " Horace continues in Matthews' version. There is a sense of acceptance here, a sense of the father's pride matched by the son's, a pride based in the mere fact that each has learned to be himself. And then he continues:

So long as I am sane I'll not be ashamed

of such a father, nor will I defend myself,

as many do, by whining that its not my fault

my parents were not free-born and famous.

That's not my style.

Before swerving back into lighter moments the poem summarizes this part of the argument:

If it were natural

to live our lives a second time, and for that

revised life to choose the parents our prides

craved, I'd ask for my own again.

This is the kind of generosity of spirit one finds in Pope's own great versions of Horace, especially his "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, " and it is crucial to understand that this sentiment lies at the base of the satires which are so much less vitriolic and unforgiving than the earlier Ennius and Lucilius or the later Juvenal.

"That's not my style," the passage above ended, and by style Horace, -- and Matthews-- always mean poetic style and style of living, the two being so closely bound. A simple glance at those lines reveals Matthews way of finding equivalents the metrically and sonically dexterous Horace. The off rhymed "sane" and "ashamed" might be rather jarring in any context other than Matthews conversational blank verse but here produces an echo that ties the line together. In fact, each line in that passage makes perfect sense in itself, has its own thematic identity: the line break at "my fault" emphasizes Horace's unwillingness to cast blame in and of itself, and only then proceeds to say, now by way of emphasis, that he would not blame for their station in any case. Horace was a master of the line, of arranging the words (much easier to do in Latin syntax) for precisely such effects. The slightly elevated diction provided by the assertive "nor" clause in the midst of the highly colloquial poem provides an emphatic gesture, itself underscored by the phrase, "as many do," and the "many" in turn emphasized by the echoing 'n' in "whining." Finally, the nor, not not sequence adds further rhetorical scoring even beyond the semantics of the lines-- another Horatian effect.

Surely Bill saw in contemporary life, as Horace did in his, many specific examples of the types of foibles displayed here. No one living in the literary world of new York could fail to see that, no matter how aloof from the petty squabbles one stood, as Bill did. The poems have an air of spontaneity that can be seen in the numerous similes that suggest a possible branching out that is not followed through, a technique Horace used to suggest a bountiful set of possible subjects that Horace, was still able to suggest could be approached. Satire II.1, for example, mentions "boxing,' and the whole manner we have of settling arguments through fighting and violence could be gone into at this point, but remains subservient to the main issue-- such references, as in Pope, act as metaphors to suggest the larger nature of the world we inhabit.

These are poems, finally, that not only tell us what Bill's vision of contemporary life was as seen through his Horatian eyes, but also his view of what Horace saw, and more-- what Horace would have seen in our own world. They are an important contribution to our understanding of Horace and of ourselves. In the end, these poems were an act of love, for the art, for Horace, for what it means to be human. As Horace himself knew, they harbor not a mere critique of this world, but an unswerving love for it. As Bill ends one of his own poems, ironically identifying himself with the rather unmusical rooks:

The rooks and I rejoice

not to be mute. The day burgeons with raucous

song about the joy of a song-stuffed throat.