In the early 1970s Nathaniel Tarn, like Gary Snyder, left the academic practice of cultural anthropology for poetry. Atlantis, An Autoanthropology is the latest work to demonstrate that he is still working toward “a ‘new’ language in which to write certain kinds of cultural anthropology, a language that would not depart from scientific exactitude and rigor but would not, either, abdicate one jot of its literary potential.” (243) At every level—structure, contents, diction, syntax—the author (one of the most slippery in literature, here) fuses both disciplines: the lyric poet seeking words for beauty and loss spoken from the center of “ideal time” and the experienced observer connecting years of field data into a coherent whole.

The book is a complex site. Stratigraphic analysis suggests it is built from diaries kept from 1939 onward; an early draft beginning of the Autoanthropology in 1975; later entries; and revisions and rearrangements from the mid-2000s onward. The first section of the first “throw” contains material from Tarn at Cape May in 1973, in Guatemala in 1969, and in Toulouse in 1983—plus a reference to William Penn in what would become Bucks County in 1681. Here, and throughout, this kind of layered fusion works. It is the point.
The book is composed of “throws,” numbered units of composition with subsections, that are not sequential yet adhere to the chronology of a life. Tarn describes the “throw” as a single artistic act: the potter throwing the clay, the Zen master wielding his brush to make a perfect circle with a single motion. Like an arrow, “requiring that delivery should be once only, utterly clear and irrecuperable.” (77) A fearful moment, part alchemy, part certainty of failure, discussed at length in Throw 5.10.

Some Throws feel like traditional memoir, accounts of Tarn’s family and early life in Belgium, France, and the UK before and during World War II, and then Tarn’s move to the US and eventually to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Some detail far-ranging travel (it would be easier to list the places Tarn has not been, but I can’t think of any). Some detail professional encounters and accomplishments. Others introduce, or circle back to, intellectual frames and compelling themes that run through this most amazing life: a passion for accumulation, selection, and classification (the “heraldic” ordering of varying components on an established “field”); a deep curiosity about religion and symbolic systems; endless desire and bafflement faced with the Great Feminine and her sensuous local avatars; a fascination with birds and flight; a pervasive fear of spiders and scorpions; the importance of a community of friends and poets; the decline of poetic values, humanity, and the planet; the tragedy of being unable to halt or turn back time. The Throws are hymns, and elegies, for Beauty.

Tarn describes the book with an anthropologist’s precision: this is not the account of a life but “a thematic study of a structure provisionally baptized Nathaniel Tarn.” (7) This feels scientifically exact. Tarn was not, of course, baptized at all. He was Jewish, born of a Lithuanian-British father and a Rumanian-French mother, and named Edward Michael Mendelson. The observed and observing self is presented as present from the start:
He was Michael Tavriger in Paris in 1945-1950. (10) He took “Tarn” from a French river where he spent time in 1963. He has yet to reveal the source of “Nathaniel.” (10) “Nathaniel Tarn” was his pen name and became his legal one upon his arrival in America. Tarn has, at every turn, defied constraints, pushed any limit. Inspired by the British pilots that he saw overhead during the Battle of Britain (and in the local pub in Gerrard’s Cross, near RAF Northolt), Tarn learned to fly in his western desert in the early 1990s and—finally defying earth’s claim on him—soloed in July 1992 at the age of 64.

Atlantis is an account of defiant and passionate explorations—of geographies, languages, disciplines, and identities. Tarn is candid about the personal, professional, and economic costs of these choices—evident from what he shares and in what he explicitly declines to share.

The fluidity of movement and perspective—of speaker and subject matter, of observer and informant, of perhaps unreliable diarist—is enacted at the level of the language itself. There is the autobiographical informant, present in the text at various moments across the life: “I leap demonstratively toward my mother” (6), “I have called the ground of this anxiety ‘the demon of the arbitrary’” (70), “I have not done with the past” (170), “I will then hope that the new ‘poetries’ will be more generous to us than we have been to them” (289). There are ostensibly objective reports from the keen observer: “Tarn enjoyed being on the ‘international circuit’” (137); “It was clear that Tarn was somewhat cavalier in his approach to publishing and its protocols” (156); “At Princeton, Tarn taught in the Romance Languages Department” (177). And in places primary actors disappear completely: “An apartment was rented” and “a first book was dreamed up” (63); “The major trip of this period was made by car all over the Shan States” (113). Shifting and absent speakers report, implore, exhort, sing, and exude longing and regret.

This is both a telling and the documentation of a life (at least so far) that is as vast and varied as can be imagined, spanning continents, diverse academic and literary worlds, and networks of individuals whose names form a roster of post-World War II global culture. Two of Tarn’s major themes are visible, structurally, throughout.

First, the work itself is documentary proof, I think, that Tarn won a major gamble: his life has been a bet that the binary choice Gary Snyder posed was a false one. He may have left academic anthropology but this work is clearly composed by both an anthropological observer and an elusive informant, a memoir co-authored by these Janus-faced trickster figures “provisionally baptized as Nathaniel Tarn,” who remains true to a course he acknowledged in 1970:
As he writes in The Beautiful Contradictions,
Secondly, Atlantis gives us, across a life, a dynamic Tarn articulates in his work (poetry and prose) and has described in different ways. It’s an arc that moves from initial accumulation and totalization, through a sparagmos, a dismembering or scattering or breaking apart, into a retotalization, a choral unity. Or so it would appear. A field report and a lyric work, compiled and composed by the collective authors here bundled as “Nathaniel Tarn.” Readers of Atlantis, An Autoanthropology might do well to recall his note at the end of his “Fragments from the Prayers Made on Behalf of Nathaniel Tarn by the Zutuhil-Maya Priest N. C. of Tziquinaha, The House of Birds, Guatemala, 1953 & 1969”:
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is a poet, translator, and corporate consultant. Poetry collections include Salient (New Directions 2020) and Series | India (Four Way Books, 2015). Her translations from Persian include Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, selected poems of Forough Farrokhzad (New Directions 2022) and Wine and Prayer: Eighty Ghazals from the Divan-i Hafiz (d.1389) (White Cloud Press 2018). She serves on the Boards of Kimbilio Fiction, Friends of Writers, The Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation, and Human Rights and Democracy in Iran. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College.