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Last August 15 and 27 we discussed Franz Wright’s impressive
poem, “To Myself.” Here’s “Postcard 2,” a darker work from FW, in Poetry (May 2012):
Upon reading “Postcard 2” I found myself wondering (again) how
much public, confessional condemning of parents is worthwhile. Even if the
accused is guilty, how dirty should the laundry be when you’re asking others to
share, care about, find meaning in it? Then again, dirt sells. "Yay, dirt,” we seem to say quite often. Dirt is a disproportionately large
part of what we want to know about each other, and here we have one Pulitzer
Prize winning poet offering some dark topsoil about his Pulitzer Prize winning father,
the major, major American poet, James Wright. Surely we’re delighted.
And surely you can hear my skepticism. But keep reading.
I also wonder about T.S. Eliot’s “objective
correlative”—does Franz Wright (hereafter, FW) give us enough simple, objective information (and action, observable behavior) to correlate to his emotions and cause us to share, or at least
understand, his angst?
However, a few factors in the second half of the poem raise it
above the mean, vengeful self-indulgence it seemed headed for, or some overwrought competition with
Plath, Sexton, et al, over who had the worst parents ever, the worst life
ever.
First, there are the touches of irony and humorous hyperbole
in “Postcard 2” as FW raises the possibility that he was “to blame” for his
father’s flight; he was the straw that broke the 
camel’s back after his
father’s ill-fated marriage to that “raving bitch,” FW’s mother. I don’t think
FW believes that, unless he means that his father indulged in the flight from
paternal responsibility to which so many men succumb. When FW says, "I
am the reason he left, actually. I am the one to blame.
And yet he did his best; he did all that he was
capable of doing," I hear a sarcastic speaker. He knows it was only as any child, not as Franz Wright, that he was such a nuisance his father took off (and became bipolar, depressed, alcoholic, the victim of
multiple nervous breakdowns, and dead of cancer at 52).
camel’s back after his
father’s ill-fated marriage to that “raving bitch,” FW’s mother. I don’t think
FW believes that, unless he means that his father indulged in the flight from
paternal responsibility to which so many men succumb. When FW says, "I
am the reason he left, actually. I am the one to blame.
And yet he did his best; he did all that he was
capable of doing," I hear a sarcastic speaker. He knows it was only as any child, not as Franz Wright, that he was such a nuisance his father took off (and became bipolar, depressed, alcoholic, the victim of
multiple nervous breakdowns, and dead of cancer at 52).
There’s also irony, or downright sarcasm, when FW claims his
father "did his best." The same line on a
postcard every year is no one's best, is not all any father can do, and FW knows
that.
But did you forgive him, FW?
If so, why are you sharing the ugly aspects of him with the world?
However, the italicized line from James Wright is indeed lyrical, subtle, profound, and it’s here that “Postcard 2” turns from puerile petulance (in which
we all engage at times) to a grownup speaker’s earned sense of complication and grief. James Wright’s
annual line to his son was: “The blizzard I visit your city disguised as
will never be over and never arrive.”
Imagine a father who’s able to say such things—such clever
and maybe deep things, such body blows, the same stale, rehearsed, but eloquent punch
every year, so that the son has to wonder how genuine it is. How
self-pitying and manipulative is the father’s blow, masquerading as affection
and regret—and coming as it does from a man who wears a robe of distance and
eloquence? The father will not reveal himself, so how is the child supposed to
respond?
Those complications also prepare us for the son’s final, powerful two sentences, in which he seems to understand the father’s psyche aching within himself: “. . . at some point I’d begin to notice I was freezing, wasn’t dressed right, had nowhere to go, and was staggering into a blinding snow that no one else could see. I think he meant, the cold will make you what I am today.” In that final sentence, there's also something of the quizzical Eastern manner of his father's line about blizzards.
I find all of that painful and moving. While I don’t think the information
on FW’s parents is enough to provide the emotional content of the poem, I do sense
something earned and genuine in FW’s psychological portrait of the coldness, confusion and
isolation swelling within him, inherited from a father who spoke from afar, from an intellectual height, in poetic riddles. That is indeed a force to be reckoned with.
And finally we realize that FW has connected to
his father. “I get it, Father. Now
I understand the coldness, which was always coming and never arrived; I get the
paradox of you. And your presumptuous prophecy was right—your coldness is
what I am today. So in a way we are one; you inhabit me—a fact that does not
warm me or clear my head, or welcome the past, or soften anything at all.”
That connection between the two poets, son and
father, is hardly an ideal way for parents and adult children to bond, but it
squelches my initial urge to criticize the son for exhibitionism and melodrama.
In the end, I trust the honesty of FW’s inner cold and the coldness of what he
knows of his father. 
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