The time is not ripe

The Peruvian poet Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, born in 1911, published his first two books in 1933 and 1935. They were highly successful. His next poems appeared after a silence of 45 years. During this time, if asked, he always said “The time is not ripe”.

He seems never to have been translated into English, and his Wikipedia page is in Spanish. I got these details from ‘Bartleby & Co’ by Enrique Vila-Matas, a book about authors who chose not to write, or to stop writing. The title comes from Herman Melville’s story ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, about a clerk who, when asked to do something, always replies “I would prefer not to”.

We must be grateful to them – perhaps to those who don’t write at all, but more to those who limit their output, who choose not to publish the less-good stuff. The poets whose collected poems are slimmer than most selecteds. They do the weeding out so we don’t have to. I’m thinking of Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, of T.S.Eliot who produced no more poetry after Little Gidding in 1942, at the age of 53. And then there’s Ian Hamilton, who published ‘Sixty Poems’ around his sixtieth birthday, adding ten new poems to ‘Fifty Poems’, from ten years earlier.

‘So far as they can be said to be famous at all, Ian Hamilton’s poems are famous for being small in size and few in number’. Dan Jacobson.

Laura Riding deserves a quote here, too: ‘My history as one who was for long a devout advocate of poetry, and then devoutly renounced allegiance to it….. it is not my interest merely to add to the quantity of easily available poetic reading-matter’.

Vila-Matas draws our attention to these lines by Derek Walcott:

One could abandon writing
for the slow-burning signals
of the great, to be, instead,
their ideal reader, ruminative,
voracious, making the love of masterpieces
superior to attempting
to repeat or outdo them,

Vila-Matas claims the lines were sent to him by Robert Derain, who may or may not be the alter-ego of Jodi Lovet, a life-long friend from Barcelona. I assume these lines are from Walcott. I have yet to find them, though I only have the Selected Poems to hand. Vila-Matas does on occasion invent writers or works. I will have to, until I find otherwise, take his word for it.