GLR January-February 2023

“Your loving son,/ John,” Howard clarifies little. It’s the poem’s title that indirectly tells us who’s speaking. Denmark Hill was the home where John Ruskin grew up and where his parents continued to live. When I first read the poem as an undergrad uate, I could make little sense of it. Later on, I took pleasure in the inside jokes, often hidden in parentheses, as when Ruskin tells his father: (Effie of course declares, each Day, that we must leave [Venice]: A woman cannot help having no heart, but That is hardly a reason she should have No manners) Who is Effie? She is Ruskin’s wife, and she will ultimately di vorce him because Ruskin has never consummated the mar riage. Who is the one without a heart or manners? The poem is a letter that Richard Howard imagines Ruskin wrote in answer to his father’s news that J. M. W. Turner has died. Turner was the great painter that Ruskin devoted the first of his five-volume series, Modern Painters , to defending. One

would expect that Ruskin would have been devastated by this news, and he does express some grief. He tells his father that Turner had “taught [him] to see” in the “red vertical cliffs ... a tremor/ Of light.” As important as this lesson was in the past, “How much more I feel/ This now.” But then Ruskin immedi ately adds: “(perhaps it is worth noting here/ The appearance of my first/ Gray hair, this morning).” It tells us something about the nature of Ruskin’s grief that he felt the appearance of his first gray hair to be something “worth noting.” It is through his subtle use of language and detail that Howard builds up his complex and vivid monologues. Ruskin is unaware of what he reveals about himself; it is the reader who must recognize the significance of small gestures. So, even if you know nothing about Ruskin, the following lines should make you queasy. Here, Ruskin writes to his father about the beauty of Italians. Even the people Look to me ugly, except children from eight To fourteen, who here as in Italy Anywhere are glorious … At fifteen They degenerate Into malignant vagabonds or sensual Lumps of lounging fat. Yes, it is creepy. Howard will not ignore Ruskin’s creepiness. But with the word “degenerate”—one of the many terms that preceded “homosexual”—Howard (or is it Ruskin?) suggests a queerness that is disruptive to Victorian society. Readers are made uncomfortable because they must confront the dark as pects of their dark desires as well as their nicer ones. If Ruskin is so creepy, so narcissistic, and so insensitive, why write a six-page poem in his voice? Why read Ruskin or read about him? Howard answers that question with Ruskin quoting himself. Howard borrowed for his poem a line from the multi-volume study, Stones of Venice (1851–53), whose first volume appeared in the year the poem is set. “The shore lies naked under The night, pathless, comfortless and infirm In dark languor, still except Where salt runlets plash Into tideless pools, or seabirds flit from their Margins with a questioning cry.” This is not just any sentence. It’s a sentence that has been cited as “the most gorgeous prose styles of the nineteenth century.” But not only has Howard quoted Ruskin, but he has placed Ruskin’s words in his own snaky syllabic pattern—the lines 5, 7, 9, 11 syllables in length. They are, therefore, no longer just Ruskin’s lines; they are Howard’s as well, the words now reshaped by a hand a century in the future. For Howard, the past is never gone or finished. It is living with us and in us, even if we are ignorant of its presence. We do harm to our selves by ignoring the past or remaining ignorant of it. The discomfort we face in Howard’s work comes from his insis tence on placing us under the moral obligation to be aware of ourselves, of our past, and of the future. In forty years, Richard and I had only one squabble. It started in a rare telephone call. I was in Baltimore; he was

Fixer Upper Maybe a dilapidated ranch in the canyon, where the sun burns lawns to a gray suede. When the realtor pushes open the door to the screened-in porch, blushing, apologizing for the fox carcass, I’ll know the place is ours. Something came here to die, I’ll whisper. Good juju … Like when my family’s Labrador, bleeding, pawed his way back under the neighbor’s fence to collapse in our yard. Afraid the realtor might think I’m crazy, I’ll ask you to pocket the skull. A souvenir , you’ll say. And I’ll know the place is ours. Our first home. With enough room for a vegetable garden we’ll never plant, a swing set for kids we’ll never have, an in-ground pool we’ll never afford, still paying off the car parked outside on the pocked pavement, that canyon sun hunching into the rear view, making it impossible to look back.

M ICHAEL M ONTLACK

The G & LR

18