“THE MYSTERY OF THE WORLD”: ON THE CRITICISM OF FAIRFIELD PORTER

7 3 R ‘ ‘ T H E M Y S T E R Y O F T H E W O R L D ’ ’ O N T H E C R I T I C I S M O F F A I R F I E L D P O R T E R C R A I G W A T S O N In a 1955 letter to Tom Hess, the editor of ArtNews, the artist and critic Fairfield Porter has this to say in praise of the ‘‘transparency’’ of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry: I think my admiration for Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, aside from the fact that she has a descriptive visual mind, and aside from the fact that she has humor and is not sentimental, comes from an admiration of her relaxed line which allows each word enough space to be savored properly for what it is; and this comes from knowing when to change as well as when to repeat, how to keep such a distance that you pay attention and can go on, as you might go over the surface of a canvas, and not get stuck by boring repetitions or boring variation. The letter itself is Porter’s attempt to explain his theory of the relationship between writing and painting, and this particular passage points to a recurring theme in Porter’s reflections about art. Even in discussing a poet like Bishop, who does indeed have a ‘‘descriptive visual mind,’’ Porter moves quickly beyond the content of her work, and even the remarkable accuracy of her images, and 7 4 W A T S O N Y instead dwells on what might be called the materials of the poems: ‘‘her relaxed line,’’ ‘‘each word . . . savored properly for what it is,’’ and the pages themselves on which the poems are printed, invoked here by Porter’s reference to ‘‘the surface of a canvas.’’ Elsewhere, he focuses on the relationship between the ‘‘innate value of colors’’ in painting and the ‘‘innate value of words’’ in writing, noting somewhat mysteriously that ‘‘there must be enough space . . . between the nouns, adjectives and verbs.’’ The poet, in this reading, is not so much constructing a ‘‘meter-making argument,’’ to use Emerson’s phrase, as arranging words in a compositional field – again, the page as canvas. It is the surface elements, too, that dominate his 1961 review of John Ashbery’s poetry, although Ashbery’s work contains much less ‘‘content’’ in any traditional sense than does Bishop’s: ‘‘And as the most interesting thing about abstract painting is its subject matter [for Porter, the subject of abstract painting is the paint itself], so one is held by the sibylline clarity of Ashbery’s simple sentences, in which words have more objective reality than the reality of meaning.’’ In short, it is the medium and materials of the work of art that most often capture Porter’s attention , rather than its descriptive qualities, say, or even any final ‘‘meaning’’ that might be found there. Porter’s commentary on both Bishop and Ashbery – and on poetry in general – is striking, and it benefits from his outsider’s perspective. Although he wrote poetry as well – in part out of the excitementofhisfriendshipsandcorrespondencewiththeyounger poets of the New York School – one would have to assume that his theories about the language of poetry derive more from his primary vocation as a painter. The analogy between poetry and painting in his criticism bespeaks the firsthand experience of the materiality of paint – that is, quite simply, of applying paint to canvas. Yet what may strike admirers of Porter’s paintings as odd is his defense of the poetry of Ashbery (despite the close friendship between the two artists), whose poems resist definitive meaning at every turn. Why does a painter who finds his inspiration in the landscapes of Southampton and Great Spruce Head Island as well as in the everyday life of family and friends there – an artist who discovered in the rich evocations of the ordinary in Edouard Vuillard’s paintings that there was no reason to paint ‘‘anything else when it’s so natural to ‘ ‘ T H E M Y S...