Cy Twombly: A Rustle of Catullus1

Abstract

Cy Twombly: A Rustle of Catullus1 Anne Carson (bio) in what follows I would like to try thinking into Cy Twombly through the poems of Catullus. Twombly admired, quoted, misquoted, and painted Catullus. Their two spirits seem to me somehow in tune. Both of them were inventors of a new style. Both were boys at heart, or pretending to be boys. Both were very fond of naming people and things. So, my talk is organized in eight paragraphs, one for each letter of Catullus’s name. Beginning with C. 1 C is for Cy and for Catullus, and for convention, which they both repudiated. Like Catullus, Twombly was an artist so impressed by the past that he wanted to make it over again. Who needs abstract expressionism when you can look at a head of Apollo from the fifth century bce? But no one can make the past over again, you have to make it new. Catullus in first-century-bce Rome belonged to a radical literary circle calling itself simply poetae novi, “the new poets,” who venerated the versification of the archaic Greeks. As the foremost new poet of his day, Catullus basically invented lyric poetry for the Romans. He studied and imitated the Greeks, transformed Greek meters for Latin phonetics and translated texts of Sappho and Callimachus into fresh Roman masterpieces. His main energy was rebellious. The sober surface of Roman poetry bored him. He broke that apart. Conventional pieties made him impatient. He defaced them. His verbal style juxtaposes crudeness on the level of graffiti with songs of love or sorrow as delicate as Sappho’s. He changed the diction of lyric verse, opening it to the everyday Latin of the Roman street, admitting words like lotum (“piss”) and defututa (“fucked to [End Page 1] bits”). He had a special arsenal of obscenity for his enemies and, like Twombly, he sprinkled his work with penises—there are many words for these. Overall, it was a question of how to change the velocity of words or paint, how to speed up the surface. Catullus died at thirty. 2 A is for Achilles, Adonis, Aeneas, Agamemnon, Aphrodite, Apollo, Anabasis. Twombly liked naming names and he liked making the letter A. His A’s are often done in red, very pointy, aggressive, possibly phallic or at least radiating intense emotion. Names are said to give the namer power over a bit of reality—as with Adam in the book of Genesis or Robinson Crusoe on his island or, for that matter, Catullus who uses names all over the place in his poems: either to call out, denounce, and ridicule an enemy (in the poems of invective) or to luxuriate in the details of desire (in the love poems). But I don’t think Twombly is interested in power like this. Instead, perhaps, he is finding his way toward what Walter Benjamin called “the pure language,” the original connection between names and things. Walter Benjamin imagines a state of paradise where no one has to struggle with the communicative significance of words. Things just are what they say and say what they are. For Twombly a list of names of the heroes of Troy evokes the whole phenomenon of that myth directly, as well as the mood of “sentimental despair” that emanates from it, which seems to have been one of Twombly’s favorite moods. A is also for the misspelled A in the 1978 painting series inspired by Homer’s epic poem on the fall of Troy, Fifty Days at Iliam. Twombly spoke alertly, if not indignantly, about this misspelling in an interview with David Sylvester: I spelt it ILIAM which is not correct, it’s ILIUM. But I wanted that, I wanted A for Achilles, I wanted the A there and no one ever wrote and told me I misspelt it. . . . No one cares. (Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, 222–3) I am here to attest that someone cares. However, I appreciate Twombly’s instinct to have the anger of Achilles interrupt or insult the name of Troy, as did Achilles himself want to penetrate and sack the [End Page 2] city. Ancient poets often represented city-sacking...