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Memoir The man who was a 'civil war' By Nissim Calderon Tags: Israel books, Haim Gouri  Haim Gouri's two-volume memoir of his life and poetry bears testimony to the ever-shifting axes of time and the written word Im hashirah vehazman: Dapim me'autobiografia safrutit (with Poetry and Time: Pages from a Literary Autobiography), by Haim Gouri. Mossad Bialik and Hakibbutz Hameuchad (Hebrew, in two volumes), 323 + 317 pages, NIS 96 Haim Gouri says that in the 1950s he read two lines by Yehuda Amichai - "I see you taking something out of the refrigerator, illuminated from the inside by a light from another world" - and at that moment he understood that one era in poetry was over and another beginning. Natan Alterman, he writes, would have illuminated her with candlelight; he, Gouri, would have illuminated her "with the fire of the Palmach bonfire, we have sinned and transgressed." So that, if, in Amichai, she was illuminated "by the practical and quiet light of the bulb in the home refrigerator, which is almost petit bourgeois," a new world had begun in Hebrew poetry. Advertisement I am citing this moment out of the 640 pages of pieces collected by Gouri because it contains, in a nutshell, some of the qualities that turn these two volumes into lively testimony about Hebrew poetry. A first characteristic is the hawk eye of the good reader. Gouri knows how to find the two lines that convey the essence of a poet like Amichai. A second characteristic is writing with passion. When Gouri finds something strong in Amichai, something he himself doesn't know how to write, a maelstrom of surprise-argument-desire to understand is aroused in him, a desire to stand his ground and also an elegant tip of the hat by one professional to another. Gouri does not write as a critic, he writes as a poet. He brings testimony from his writing studio at the moments when it is also a reading studio, and it is neither cold nor academic. It is the testimony of a poet with a passion for other poets, who feels a part of the generation of poets, learns from poets, argues with poets, and is also obsessed with poets with whom he has fallen in love and in whose wake he has negated himself. From Haim Nahman Bialik, Alterman and Amichai we received only scant, buttoned-up testimony about their reading-writing studios. From Gouri we receive the turbulence, the passion and the wounds as well. When Gouri comes to the words "the Palmach bonfire," he adds the words "we have sinned, we have transgressed," thus ironically hinting that he does not forgive the attacks against the Palmach generation that were carried out in Amichai's name, though without his consent. And perhaps he does not forgive either for the wounding comparison that has become common among teachers between his "Here Lie Our Bodies" and Amichai's "Rain on a Battlefield." A third characteristic: Arguing elegantly. Gouri wrote one of the best testimonies about changing taste in poetry, which is also one of the purest ones about the surprise and the bitterness involved in changing tastes. When he disagrees with a poet, he does not grind him into the dust. He remains a man of honor even in the most difficult moments of literary life. Perhaps this is because Gouri argues with himself before he argues with his rivals. In one of his poems he wrote: "I am a civil war ... and there, those who are right fire at the others who are right." Again and again he has written about the internal debate that he conducts with himself. That comes at a price but also has advantages, because he internalizes his rival's arguments instead of simply clashing with them. I don't know of a single other Hebrew writer who has written with such nobility about the lethal criticism that has been leveled at him, and who has been so ready, albeit with clenched teeth, to admit that the criticism was sometimes even justified. Gouri may not be the only poet who learns from colleagues who have offended him, but he is one of very few who describes this far-from-easy process with decency and humor. How many poets, and not only Hebrew ones, would be capable of writing the following?: "And some day, we will also tell ourselves that in the final accounting we must be grateful not only to those who favored us in their judgment, but also to those who made our lives miserable, since perhaps by their words they removed a stumbling block from the path of a blind person, because in several instances they taught us, even if with great cruelty, to know ourselves, to think twice. That is what we may say some day, on condition that we can admit to ourselves that we really did deserve some part of that." Vital and profound at 85 These two volumes constitute the best explanation of Gouri's singular ability to change and develop as a poet. And he is unique in that. Many poets develop, but only few develop as much, and continue to change and improve even at the age of 70 or 80. I feel that Gouri has written strong and moving poetry during most periods of his life, but now, at the age of 85, he is writing poems more vital and profound than ever. The same happened to Avot Yeshurun, and it happened to William Butler Yeats, but it doesn't happen every day. One of the explanations for this is Gouri's ability not to stop moving on the axis between time (which changes) and poetry (which changes in a different manner). Gouri's life has an obsession: He reads a poem and thinks about time, usually the political time, outside the poem. He repeatedly returns to the unexpected and un-self-evident encounter between lines of poetry, on the one hand, and wars, and times of peace or half-peace, on the other. This movement enables him to fall in love with Alterman, but to get up one fine morning and to understand that Alterman's festive candlelight no longer suits the ordinary days of refrigerators, and Simcha Ehrlich [finance minister under Menachem Begin], and [1970s Mizrahi activist] Charlie Biton, and, as he writes in one of his recent poems, the Subaru of someone who was once a Palmachnik but today is only another Subaru owner in a Tel Aviv full of foreign workers. Gouri definitely allows himself to ponder the possibility that the wars that are no longer accompanied by a sense of absolute justice, he should observe - poetically - with the light from the refrigerator, not the light of the Palmach bonfire. But Gouri argues, he doesn't raise the flag of surrender. For years he recalls Amichai's refrigerator light, which signaled to him that poetry (including his) must give up the festive, the pathetic, "life on the edge." And then, he says, 20 years after he read about Amichai's refrigerator light, the Yom Kippur War broke out. Together with a friend, he arrived on a dark night at a front-line command post in Sinai that had to maintain a total blackout. He knocked on the door of the commander's quarters, only to be warned: "Take notice, the light works here in reverse to a refrigerator." When Gouri opened the door, the light went out; when he locked it behind him, it went back on. Gouri immediately experiences that same obsession to make the connection between lines of poetry and moments of history. And he thinks that even Amichai's refrigerator light, which wanted so much to remain ordinary and unglamorous, and even "almost petit bourgeois," encounters dramatic historical time. Even the refrigerator light appears once again, perhaps in spite of Amichai's wishes, at a political moment of "life on the edge," during the Yom Kippur War. This is the war in which there was failure and arrogance and great panic, and many casualties, and a dramatic end to the Labor movement in which Gouri was raised and to which he was connected heart and soul. Something in Gouri changed when he read Amichai, but something also refused to change when he read him. He didn't think it was possible to make do with the home refrigerator light, which flees from history, and he had the patience to wait for 20 years in order to continue the argument. But after 20 years, and after the Yom Kippur War, Gouri had a new reason to change as a poet, this time a reason that had its origins in time, not in poetry. 20 years' patience Gouri reads poetry politically, but he knows how to avoid drawing simplistic, vulgar connections between politics and poetry. He learned that from poetry as well. The fact that he fell in love at the age of 15 with Alterman's "Stars Outside" rather than another book provided him with some kind of natural immunity from the one-to-one relationship between a line in a poem and a political viewpoint. He fell in love with the distance of "Stars Outside" from everyday life in the Land of Israel. He fell in love with the autonomic world of Alterman's poetic inns. When S. Shalom and Avraham Shlonsky and Uri Zvi Greenberg offered him poetry rooted in Mt. Gilboa and the Gdud Ha'avoda work battalion, a sixth sense whispered to him not to fall in love with it. Poetry fascinated him because of its perspective, whereas a poem that lived in close contact with reality did not captivate him. Therefore Gouri also knew how to beware of the passing fashions of literary-critical taste. Thirty years ago, when it was fashionable to sever poetry from any political link, Gouri knew how to refrain from the absurdity of reading Yonatan Ratosh's poems without the Canaanite philosophy that is embedded in them. And today, when the opposite fashion automatically connects every poem to a political bent, Gouri also refrains from the other absurdity of finding post-colonial guilt in every refrigerator light bulb of Amichai's. The result is two volumes full of subtle distinctions and sensuality, full of life, about Hebrew poetry and about the period in which it was written. Anyone to whom the life of Hebrew poetry is precious will not permit himself to do without Gouri when he looks - and this is a partial list - at Amir Gilboa (with awe at the great muse that dwelled within him), and at Avraham Halfi (with moderate love), and at the poetry of the Lebanon War (with understanding of the dimensions of the crisis), and at Yocheved Bat Miriam (with royal pomp, more toward the woman than toward the poet), and at Ayin Hillel (with sweeping brotherly love) and at Mahmoud Darwish (with respect for a rival, even with a bit of envy of his local rootedness), and at the comparison between the Israeli occupation and the Nazi destruction (he protests, but is more afraid of the depth of despair caused by the occupation than by the groundless comparison); about Greenberg (with admiration for the depths in him and anger at the arrogance in him), about Ezra Sussman ("I now love more poets than I did in my youth"), and also about the moment when many birds chirped from atop many rooftops, that from the literature of the Palmach generation, "only Gilboa and Yizhar" - and not Gouri, as some critics said - will remain. All the generations Though these two volumes say a great deal about the many crossroads between Hebrew poetry and Israeli politics, the Kadum affair is missing in the book. In 1975 the Gush Emunim movement tried to settle in Sebastia, in the West Bank, and each time was evacuated by the government, until, with Gouri's mediation, its members were permitted to settle in the military camp that became the basis of the Kedumim settlement. Gouri does not omit the story of his signing of the formative document of the Greater Israel movement and the slow and tortured process of change in his opinions. But the Kadum affair was not just another negligible detail: It was a critical moment, in which Gouri the poet, not Gouri the man, played a critical role in a formative political event. He did not flee from this subject in his writing. He analyzed it, claimed that he was manipulated, accepted partial responsibility, expressed partial regret. When he left those pieces out here, he created a sterile space in a non-sterile book. The Kadum affair is a localized issue in these volumes. A non-localized issue is "a meeting of all the generations." Gouri changed many things in his articles over the years, but there is one thing he didn't change: He does not speak in his own name but in that of all the generations of Jews. I don't believe that there is such a voice; that all the generations of Jews agreed among themselves about anything. On the contrary. They differed with one another about everything. To belong to tradition is to choose from among possibilities (not unlimited, but many and contradictory), and Gouri conceals his clear and even revolutionary choice behind "a meeting of all the generations." There are Jewish generations and Jewish opinions from which a cautious person will distance himself. Nor is it advisable for Gouri to gather all the Jewish generations and ask them for permission to speak in their name. It is well known that on the two issues closest to his heart, and mine - Jewish political sovereignty and a Hebrew language that serves all purposes - Gouri has become part of a small minority. Most of the Jews in most generations wanted religious sovereignty - and not always even that - but certainly not political sovereignty; they wanted Hebrew as their holy language, but consciously and deliberately not as a living language. "A meeting of all the generations" also robs Gouri of the advantages of his declaration that "I am a civil war." The hesitation, and the internal battle - when they are part of some whole that balances out all his contradictions - enable Gouri to blur decisions that he made. Here there is a difference of opinion between Gouri and me, but if I knew that Gouri was continuing with it in his poems, I would be able to live with it. Readers of poetry are accustomed to enjoying those whose ideas differ from theirs. But a significant part of the unique development of Gouri's poems is the change he made in the authority of the speaker in his poems. There, in the poems, he knew that he would sound more authentic if he began to speak in his own name and in the name of the choices he made in the past. There he knew that the poet who did not begin from ABC, but assumed some dim echo behind every word of his, damaged the precision of his statement. That is not the case in his articles. Here the distinctions are sharp, attention is primed, the tone is noble. But the narrator does not heed the advice of his own poems, and grants himself authority that never existed. I know that this is not an elegant conclusion to this article; Gouri would have ended it better. Prof. Nissim Calderon is a researcher of Hebrew poetry and a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Back in the Mideast Carter may meet with Hezbollah officials during his visit in Lebanon. 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