Michael Hofmann: Where Have You Been? Selected Essays | Review

Where Have You Been? Selected Essays

Author: Michael Hofmann

ISBN-13: 978-0571323661

Publisher: Faber and Faber

Guideline Price: £30

We live in the age of exclamation, and it is a world Michael Hofmann inhabits comfortably. Whether in asides or chatty contemplations, he does like a good “!”

Hofmann – poet, translator and critic – also loves dashes and brackets. It’s as if he needs many corrals to gather his thoughts. Writing, in this collection of his criticism, about the German poet Gottfried Benn, Hofmann says: “Over the years, thanks in part to Benn, my own sentences have become more indeterminate, my language more musical, my diction more florid. There is a sort of murmurous, mi-voix, halbaut quality in poems that I adore and, languidly, strive for.”

Although Hofmann is referring in this case to his own poetry, those traits seem to have seeped into his criticism also. His often florid style, replete with endless foreign words and phrases, produces an ornate, convoluted and confusing writing that sometimes detracts from the insightful criticism.

There is also, dotted throughout, an undermining qualification of opinion, an emphasis on numbers and quantifications. All are in evidence in the first sentence of the opening piece, on a book of letters between the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell: "Words in the Air is such a formidably and dramatically and lingeringly wonderful book, it is hard to know where to begin. Well, begin in the manner of the geographer and the embarrassed statistician and the value-for-money merchant, with quantity, though that's absolutely the wrong place. Here then are 459 letters, 300 of them not previously published . . ."

The style eventually settles down, and Hofmann delivers a poetic picture of the relationship between Bishop and Lowell.

There is also much beautiful writing. Hofmann does a highly enjoyable hatchet job on the early 20th-century writer Stefan Zweig. He quotes the opinions of a roster of famous writers to convict the hapless Zweig – Thomas Mann, Karl Kraus, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth. It is an enjoyable gossip-mag immersion in the literary life of Vienna in the early 1900s, and a well-argued execution.

His piece on the artist and writer Kurt Schwitters is wonderful, an exploration of artistic creation and ultimate failure; his summation of this failure is brilliant. This sense of failure runs throughout the book – in writers who had breakdowns, writers who took their own lives.

Tragedy pervading

The wonderful Robert Walser – “Defeat, I think, is everywhere in him” – is eventually institutionalised and dies of a heart attack. Hofmann ends: “In Zurich, I saw a street named after him, where he couldn’t have possibly afforded to live.” Tragedy pervades a piece on Ted Hughes through the shadow of Sylvia Plath. And here the computations continue: “The list of his poetry books alone covers a large, closely set page – page 1,238, if you must know.” No, Michael, really, I mustn’t know.

This is a wonderful trove of writers: "If I wanted to show someone – an agnostic – what a modern poem can do, I would show them something by Lawrence Joseph, or Frederick Seidel, or Karen Solie." Hofmann is particularly insightful on poetry; his detailed reading of Ian Hamilton's Birthday Poem and his comparison of two versions of Robert Lowell's poem Walking in the Blue are brilliant.

He is also very good on translation, as you would expect from a translator: “Yes, a translator is a passenger, riding in the relative safety (and deserved penury) in a vehicle that has already been built, but I would rather he would be a passenger of the bobsled kind – a converted sprinter, someone who at least puts his own bones and balance and reactions into his work.”

It takes a while to get used to Hofmann’s bobsled ride, with its disconcerting wobbles of style, but he cuts so many clean lines that get to the heart of the matter that it’s well worth crossing the finishing line with him.

Kevin Gildea is a comedian, critic and writer