{"id":120563,"date":"2018-01-22T11:00:57","date_gmt":"2018-01-22T16:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=120563"},"modified":"2018-01-22T15:55:06","modified_gmt":"2018-01-22T20:55:06","slug":"the-poet-upstairs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/22\/the-poet-upstairs\/","title":{"rendered":"The Poet Upstairs"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Avigdor Arikha, \u201cAnne in Summer,\u201d 1980<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

We call her Upstairs;\u00a0she calls us Downstairs.<\/p>\n

From our ground-floor apartment in Paris, my husband and I can look across the courtyard to her apartment on the top floor, with its large, curved windows.<\/p>\n

\u201cDownstairs,\u201d she writes, \u201cbefore drawing the curtain for the night, stepped out on the balcony, and saw your light on; which was good news.\u201d<\/p>\n

Each message from her is a treasure: \u201cWhen next we meet, we’ll salute each other like two lamp-posts, lighting up at the same time. Have a lovely day without rain.\u201d<\/p>\n

She tells us often that we live in a village. She says that\u2019s a lucky thing. She has a way of molding the mundane into harmony, of living in music.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook at me walk,\u201d she says, and sets off singing to the rhythm of her walking stick. \u201cUn, deux, trois. Un, deux, trois.\u201d<\/p>\n

She rhymes when she jokes, recites poems out of the blue, as if she had the lines flowing through her without cease.<\/p>\n

One morning, when we run into her at the Saturday market, she tells us she\u2019s been reading the phone book and that it made her cry. \u201cAll those names,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

This is our neighbor, the poet Anne Atik.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Over the years, living in the same square, we\u2019ve established a routine. She comes down; we go up. We have dinner; we listen to music. We all arrive with poems to read.<\/p>\n

Even before we made this a ritual, Anne would share poems with us\u2014never her own but ones she knew by heart or had copied in the more than thirty journals crammed with her reading notes.<\/p>\n

There are poems which have become our favorites, which we read often. Roethke\u2019s \u201cThe Waking,\u201d Stevenson\u2019s \u201cRequiem.\u201d There are lines we all wait for, and Anne waves her hand in the air and tells us, \u201cListen, listen, it\u2019s coming.\u201d<\/p>\n

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
\nWhat falls away is always. And is near.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are lines which make her cry each time.<\/p>\n

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
\nAnd the hunter home from the hill.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Eventually, our evenings turn to stories of her husband, the painter Avigdor Arikha; of their good friend Samuel Beckett; of a life seeped in art. There is the sense, listening to Anne\u2019s stories, that my husband and I arrived too late and missed something great.<\/p>\n

Though we\u2019ve never met Arikha (he died in 2010, before we moved to Paris), we\u2019re acquainted with him through his etchings and paintings that cover every wall, his library of art, history, and ancient texts in the most surprising languages. Anne tells us that he wouldn\u2019t say a word after waking up, to save himself for the almost sacred task of putting brush to canvas, \u201ctelling the truth as it came,\u201d she says, \u201cif it came.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is also, looming above her recollections, Arikha\u2019s genius. Anne has always made room for it, sometimes at the expense of her own work.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven though I\u2019m alone,\u201d she says, \u201che\u2019s actually here, telling me, Don\u2019t do this, do that!\u201d<\/p>\n

Another story she loves to tell is of their good friend the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who reproached Anne one evening at a concert for not allowing him to photograph her. But Anne felt too dressed up. She told him, \u201cI\u2019m better in painting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Avigdor\u2019s portraits of Anne are hard to decipher for their density of emotion. But her poems about painting, in her collection Offshore<\/em>, reveal a world beyond the gaze of the artist and his model.<\/p>\n

One more thing I mean to protest.
\nWhat the painter can\u2019t avoid:
\nThe left-out in what he tells.
\nWhat I was the hours I stood.
\nLike painting a pomegranate
\nAnd not the seeds with which it fills.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m reminded of Rembrandt\u2019s painting of his longtime lover, Hendrickje Stoffels. Her expression is resigned\u2014not\u00a0naive\u00a0but compassionate, as if she has seen the folly of the painter and forgiven it, as if she is saying with weary grace, It\u2019s alright, I understand.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Anne Atik was born in Jerusalem in 1932. The sights and sounds of her hometown are always present in her writing and stories. She talks about the city\u2019s particular smell of caper leaves, jasmine, and urine. She remembers the women at the communal ovens on Fridays, baking challah, gathering and dispersing like a ballet.<\/p>\n

Her family left Jerusalem for New York when Anne was six years old. Unlike her brothers, who went to religious schools, she attended a secular school. Her father didn\u2019t know what to do with her, or with her love of writing and music; she says he had never expected to be \u201chit over the head with such a daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n

The poet Horace Gregory, who was Anne\u2019s teacher at Sarah Lawrence,\u00a0submitted one of her poems for publication. One day, she found a check in the mail and a copy of the journal. When her first collection of poetry was published, her mother, who did not speak English well, kissed it.<\/p>\n

Anne speaks of her younger self with gentle admonition, though it\u2019s clear that she could have been no other way. One of her earliest memories is of being shown that letters came together to make up words. She knew at once that this was all she wanted to do in life.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd look at how little I did with that,\u201d she says, meaning her two published collections of poetry. The statement is never a complaint but reconciled melancholy. Testimony of a mother, a wife, and a support to Arikha\u2019s consuming genius. She met Arikha in her early twenties, when she was in Paris on her way from New York to Israel, and has lived\u00a0in\u00a0France since. Arikha had moved to Paris some years before and wanted to stay on, to be close to Beckett, his \u201clighthouse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anne has written of their friendship with Beckett in her memoir,\u00a0How It Was<\/em>, comprised in large part of the notes she took after evenings together. \u201cAfter fifteen years of memorable conversations with Beckett, I realized that I could not depend on my memory. The unforgettable was becoming the irretrievable \u2026 I finally started taking notes \u2026 usually just after he\u2019d left our house, or on returning from a restaurant.\u201d<\/p>\n

How It Was<\/em> is one of the most loving portraits of an artist I have ever read, a record of Beckett\u2019s kindness and extraordinary mind spilling over onto conversations and letters. There are scenes of chess with Anne\u2019s younger daughter, Beckett\u2019s discussions of rhyme endings in English and French, of vowels in Latin. In one conversation, he grieves the impossibility of replicating silence in fiction. Alongside this is Anne\u2019s description of Beckett\u2019s troubled silences.<\/p>\n

Anne herself is inconspicuous in the memoir. Like the parenthetical line in her poem \u201cThe Model and Her Painter\u201d (\u201cyears I eavesdropped on art history\u201d), she listens from the margins, joins in the chanting of poems, and diligently notes Beckett\u2019s views, rarely insisting on or sharing her own.<\/p>\n

She writes about Beckett\u2019s linguistic intuition, the way, when listening to translations of his work he didn\u2019t understand, he followed the music of sentences with his tapping fingers. But absent from the book are the ways Anne herself dances with language, the lines she repeats for the pleasure of saying them, like prayers.\u00a0When we were gathered around her kitchen table one evening, she asked my husband to read Anna Akhmatova\u2019s \u201cMuse\u201d in Russian over and over again. Another time, we read aloud Heraclitus\u2019s \u201cYou can\u2019t step in the same river twice\u201d in Greek. Just the sound of the words, Anne said, delivered the message of perpetual change\u2014 potamoisi toisin autoisi<\/em>.<\/p>\n

How It Was<\/em> is as much a testimony to Anne\u2019s gift of observation as it is to Beckett\u2019s virtuosity. In one scene, the actress Billie Whitelaw recites Eh Joe<\/em> at Anne\u2019s home after Whitelaw and Beckett had practiced it\u00a0in a caf\u00e9 earlier that afternoon:<\/p>\n

“We heard shingles in the sh<\/em> sh<\/em> sh<\/em>\u2019s, the swish of water, rocks, the pull of the tide, a rumble, Billie\u2019s arms lifting and turning as though she were thrashing in the water, ourselves on the shore, overwhelmed.”<\/p>\n

The memoir is set mostly in the backdrop of an orderly home. Anne\u2019s two young daughters in the playroom, the table set, the courses waiting out\u2014down to cheese and dessert\u2014never getting in the way of conversation. There is little description of what they eat, night after night. Fish is mentioned because Beckett eats the bones, and a salad of purslane, when Beckett remarks that purslane is \u201ca good English word.\u201d The children come in and out of the room, sit down to play or converse. Arikha sketches them in frenzied concentration.<\/p>\n

From our own dinners, I fill in Anne\u2019s joyful outbursts and her wit (\u201cIn my next life I\u2019ll be a comedian, and then you\u2019ll all be sorry\u201d); I picture the table set with the blue and white plates, the brass candlesticks. I know Anne\u2019s way of serving dinner, without fuss, but with such hospitality that we always help ourselves to seconds and thirds. On Hanukkah, she prepared salmon with lemon and endives, cauliflower with turmeric, pureed butternut squash. Then, there was a salad with oranges and pomegranates.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to make a feast,\u201d she said, beaming, when we exclaimed at the sight of the table and the vibrant colors.<\/p>\n

Another time, opening the door to a friend who\u2019d arrived late, she said without the hint of a smile, \u201cGood thing you came now and missed a lousy dinner!\u201d<\/p>\n

Offshore<\/em>, her second collection of poetry, was written during the same period she recounts in How It Was<\/em>. It reveals a parallel life to the one in the memoir\u2014the poetry and mechanics of the mundane.<\/p>\n

Shirts ironed.
\nVitamin pills. No lumps.
\nShoes polished, in repair. Clothes back
\nfrom the sloppy cleaner\u2019s.
\nA friend\u2019s distress- some sympathy.
\nMozart\u2019s Requiem from a facing window.
\nNot the right moment.
\nNo elation. No despair.
\nAll this in order\u2014tolerable\u2014
\nNow how write a poem?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Often, Anne\u2019s poetry is about the difficulty of writing\u2014not just the struggle for truthful expression but simply the effort to write.<\/p>\n

Quiet I want quiet in the house
\nand quiet. I am whelmed with sound.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One evening at dinner, while we sit listening to music, Anne says, \u201cIt\u2019s so important to be silent. Because you realize you are made up of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in her poems, time is always pressing, as is the poet\u2019s knowledge that life passes her by, brimming with poetry she will not have time to commit to paper.<\/p>\n

I thought that it could wait till after dark.
\nTill after tea, till after they\u2019d been done,
\nthe duties I thought day
\nimposed on me.<\/p>\n

\u2026 It seemed that such a sight \u2026
\nwould keep until I\u2019d write it, in some peace
\nI could not yet afford.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Words in Hock<\/em>, her first collection, is weighed with restless moments, inner storms that pass unnoticed save for the poems\u2019 brief ruptures. They undo the world, send the mind off, then bring everything calmly back together.<\/p>\n

no rest from the noise in my head
\ngarrulous gravelling hours.
\nTrespassed the first commandment
\nimages carved in the heart
\nfresh from Egypt I waken
\nfrom dream of coveted flesh.
\nWomen dust away morning
\nas doves the air thicken.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*<\/p>\n

One evening, Anne tells us, laughing, about the time she was sent an invitation to an opening of Arikha\u2019s work \u201cin the company of his widow.\u201d She wrote back to the gallery confirming her attendance and signed it, \u201cThe Widow.\u201d<\/p>\n

When my husband and I first met Anne, we also knew her as the wife of Avigdor Arikha and the friend of Samuel Beckett. And, like many people who meet her, we were excited to hear her stories of those times. Gradually, we realized how fortunate we were to know her, just her, without any other reference.<\/p>\n

Whenever we express admiration for her poems, Anne says, \u201cI was alone when I wrote them. I had to be alone.\u201d She tells me often that I must have a room of my own, to continue my writing. She says the only period she managed to write seriously was when she was lent a room by a friend. She tells me she should have given more thought to the passing of the days. But she never speaks of the past with resentment. It\u2019s her pureness of fabric, unblemished by bitterness, that I most admire. And it is I, not Anne, who feels indignation that she didn\u2019t have more space or attention for her work.<\/p>\n

One afternoon, I write to her that I\u2019m struggling with my work and she writes back, \u201cI hope you succeed in your noble quest for the right words for the right meaning your soul is looking for and your fingers typing \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Writing, for Anne, is responsibility. It is also devotion, like the full year she waited before she could write her poem \u201cDrancy\u201d after her visit to the camp. She fasted on the day she finally wrote it.<\/p>\n

Between the margins of this page
\nthe truth won\u2019t fit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Her poems admit the inadequacy of language in the face of suffering, with a reverence close to piety.<\/p>\n

what sad what grey what time
\nwhat earth what heart what dark
\nwords trampling boots bear down on the chest
\neyes close like umbrellas useless in a storm<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Faith looms large beneath her lines, slowly rising upwards and at times piercing the surface. Perhaps the effect is most astounding in \u201cMy Father\u2019s Lesson,\u201d about learning the motions to prayer.<\/p>\n

I try to call \u2026
\nfor an all-proof match in a laser age
\nto strike me
\nto light me
\nso that I may
\nflicker like a candle.<\/p>\n

Ask
\nto be able to ask, to sway,
\nat least on occasions.
\nReady myself for prayer
\nby praying,
\nsilent as ice that readies itself
\nfor cracking.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What unites all of her poems, from household rituals to prayer, is the paced music, repeating, wandering off, coming back altered.<\/p>\n

Music stops Anne in her tracks. When she hears a melody she pauses midsentence, raises her hand in the air for us to listen. Sometimes, she phones to tell us about the rapture of musicians\u2019 faces on television and asks whether we want to come up, just to see their expressions.<\/p>\n

She says that Simon and Garfunkel are geniuses, just like Schubert, because you hear in their songs that they have faith. One exception, she says, is the line in \u201cHomeward Bound,\u201d \u201cWhere my love lies waiting silently for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy \u2018silently\u2019?\u201d she asks every time. \u201cThat word doesn\u2019t fit. It\u2019s too complacent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her own poems, though quiet, are never complacent. They shine with inner light, a transformative force.<\/p>\n

They are walking but no sundown will receive them.
\nTheir feet are sore but fragrant need no water.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*<\/p>\n

In a letter of encouragement for Anne\u2019s work, Beckett wrote, \u201cPoetry is there faint and clear all the way, breathing through them all. You must find a way of going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

When we are with Anne, we see the poetry through and through\u2014in her mischievous smile, her small, firm hand resting on ours when she is moved, her voice choking when she recites poems. The poetry is there and is clear, not only in her work but in the cadences of her hospitality, her speech, her life recollected with beauty.<\/p>\n

And in her poems, Anne exists as we know her. This integrity, the imperceptible threshold between her life and her art, is perhaps the truest mark of greatness\u2014proof that she is made of music.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Aysegul<\/span> Savas is a writer based in Paris. Her first novel, <\/em>Walking on the Ceiling, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  We call her Upstairs;\u00a0she calls us Downstairs. From our ground-floor apartment in Paris, my husband and I can look across the courtyard to her apartment on the top floor, with its large, curved windows. \u201cDownstairs,\u201d she writes, \u201cbefore drawing the curtain for the night, stepped out on the balcony, and saw your light on; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1283,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[32623,32625,32627,7320,32626,32624,4429,32628],"class_list":["post-120563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-anne-atik","tag-avigdor-arikha","tag-billie-whitelaw","tag-henri-cartier-bresson","tag-horace-gregory","tag-roethke","tag-samuel-beckett","tag-words-in-hock"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Poet Upstairs<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Listening to our neighbor Anne Atik\u2019s stories of dinner parties with Beckett, there is the sense that we arrived in Paris too late.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/22\/the-poet-upstairs\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Poet Upstairs by Aysegul Savas\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 22, 2018 \u2013   We call her Upstairs;\u00a0she calls us Downstairs. 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