On Silence, Cinema, and Hemingway

Niall Campbell on the unexpected poem

The blank page is silence. And silence is also the white page around the written poem. Silence seems something the poet should not overcome but only encroach upon. I have never heard a composer worry that they might never write another piece of music. Novelists, too, seem to have a relationship with character and plot that allows them the option of writing the bad novel rather than never write again. It is the poet who seems most tuned to that sometimes-stifling quietness, and how we return to it each time we start out on a poem – worried again that we cannot meaningfully negotiate it. We worry that our last poem might be the last poem we will ever write. It goes to the idea that connecting words in a line does not make a poem. Perhaps it is because words placed haphazardly on a page does break the stillness – and ours is an art that tries to preserve the silence, even as we contest it.

Silence is on my mind because I have been watching the 2005 documentary Die große Stille – Into Great Silence. I include the original title not from affectation but because I find the translation pleasing. It is not The Great Silence, which would have served as a truer literal translation, it is Into Great Silence. The ‘into’ is pertinent as the film follows the German director Philip Gröning’s six months in a Carthusian Monastery, where he lived a life of solitude, reflection and silence. It also suggests something of the audience’s relationship with the film, since they are transported into this same atmosphere.

The film is two and a half hours long. Bells are rung; snow falls across the rooftop of the monastery; the camera catches a plane flying overhead, so far off that its engines cannot be heard. The monks are called to prayer, and the high ceilings reverberate with coughs that seem lonelier than they should. Some images seem strenuously poetic: a candle flutters in its red jar. This shot lingers, monks begin to chant, and the scene now changes to a wide landscape shot of the monastery at night. The surrounding hills are capped in white; there is a starlit sky above. It is moving but not particularly so. Not compared to the images of an old monk working as a tailor in some private room of the monastery. He does not talk. No words are uttered. We close in on his wrinkled hands – not gnarled but leathered, if leathered still allows the possibility of softness. He runs his hand across the white fabric that goes into making a new monk’s habit as if he is folding a new seam along fresh, white moonlight. He makes a mark with the tailor’s pencil – and – like the good poem – he cuts, and the moving, creaking scissors both break and reaffirm the silence. It is a brief scene, maybe less than a minute – but, wordless, language-less, it seems to hold all the properties of a poem. The tailor-monk becomes the embodiment of those Norman MacCaig lines:

I’ll snip

a few yards off those millions of miles

and, tailor of the universe, sit quietly

stitching my few ragged days together.

This was not the only time this week that I felt that I found the properties of a poem in something that was not a written poem. The second occasion was in The Paris Review interview with Ernest Hemingway from 1958. Reading so many poems as part of my job as editor means it’s difficult to read poetry for pleasure. Recently I’ve been reading these collected interviews. Hemingway’s is famously intense. He has no issue with critiquing the interviewer’s questions: ‘When you ask some old, tired questions you are apt to receive old tired answers’, and the equally biting, ‘I see I am getting away from the question, but the question was not very interesting’. These offer little petty delights, but there is one answer that stands out for its poetry. Hemingway is asked about old friends. His answer is long and full – but I will only quote from towards the end:

‘I cared so much for Max Perkins that I have never been able to accept that he is dead. He never asked me to change anything I wrote except to remove certain words that were not then publishable. Blanks were left, and anyone who knew the words would know what they were. For me he was not an editor. He was a wise friend and a wonderful companion. I liked the way he wore a hat and the strange way his lips moved.’

To return to cinema: I often quote a Bergman line to students. Bergman is asked about realism, and he replies, ‘I am not trying to make it real; I am trying to make it alive’. Good poetry also lives. After the more ordinary compliments to his friend – what I sense in the close of Hemingway’s tribute is this absolute shock of aliveness.

Niall Campbell’s next event, Getting Ready for Publication: Getting the First Collection Right, is coming up on 6th June. Get all the details at northseapoets.com 🌊