Surely Aphoristic Poem by gershon hepner

The future perfect equals ablative that’s absolute,
I don’t know what that means but it is surely aphoristic,
the sort of thing I say that many people think is cute
which I abhor as much as being thought of as a mystic.


In 'Where Did It All Go Right? ' (William Morrow,344 pages, $25) (Merel Rubin, “A Man of Letters, A Man of Many Parts, ” WSJ, December 27,2000) , Mr. Alvarez (friends and family call him 'Al') looks back over the seven decades of his busy and colorful life. What makes his story especially enjoyable is the way in which he tells it. Mr. Alvarez has long been esteemed as a fine writer, but in this latest book he has attained a style that is both wonderfully relaxed and full of verve. It is the perfect vehicle for his understated humor and vivid recall of personal detail.
What is more, Mr. Alvarez is thoughtful about what he is remembering. His insights are on display on every page––whether he is describing his parents' quietly unhappy marriage, the wild excitement he felt as a schoolboy during the Blitz, his youthful stint as a deckhand on a rundown British freighter huffing and puffing its smoky way between Scotland and London, his infatuation with America or his disillusionment on meeting certain literary idols. When William Empson, the poet and critic, gives a talk at Mr. Alvarez's collegiate Critical Society, it is a bomb, and the society's members attend a party afterward 'waiting for some brilliant remark that would redeem the boredom and disappointment.' Finally, the great man announces that a passage from Eliot's 'Four Quartets' is really a 'grammatical statement' suggesting that 'the future perfect equals the ablative absolute.' Mr. Alvarez dryly writes: 'There it was, the aphorism we had been waiting for.'

12/26/00