It’s rare to come across a book written over nearly half a century. The Cantos and “A” are among the few. In the case of Atlantis, An Anthropology spanning the years 1973 to 2019. It is truly sui generis, without comparison. As autobiography it resists the ploddingly chronological, though a furtive timeline prevails. It’s also a wonderful contribution to the species called “essayism” by Viennese novelist Robert Musil. Some of the “Throws” (Tarn’s term for chapters) would handily make a collection of essays. Essayism here, though, pecks at the rich scatter of a life lived, not as detritus but as nutrient.

The pages turn with the kind of momentum depicted in old movies with leaves blowing off a desk calendar. It’s a resoundingly inviting experience: one reads with the quaintly misguided expectation that Dorothy on her way to Oz may show up at any moment. Its aura of wonder reflects a remarkably varied life—a life of contrasting careers, as anthropologist and as poet. Tarn often beguilingly presents himself in the third person, an item of remotely quizzical interest—as much to him as to the reader. He has also invested in endearingly original sentence structures: often without a verb, or in phrasal fragments that are more concise and welcoming than a dutifully completed sentence might have been. It’s para-cinematic in the sense that one instantly discerns a glimpsed scene amidst the jump cuts, thankful for not having to endure laborious set-ups, introductions, segues.

The device of the “throw” is a procedural gambit that pays off—not least because it is a wager in a double sense, as (I assume) homage to Mallarmé’s famous poem Un coup de dés, and as compositional experiment. As Tarn describes it, “the notion of ‘throw,’ requiring that delivery should be once only, utterly clear and unrecuperable” (conceding that “Of course, this is the method of a ‘control freak’”). Later, another telling disclosure: “It continues to be hard to commit to the ‘throw.’ Fear of my own energy continues to prevail.” It’s sensible to include such moments of self-reflection amidst the ongoing flow, written as it was over so many years. At one point, with endearing solicitude, Tarn addresses the reader with a parenthetical hug: “(Dear reader are you still there?).”

Atlantis, An Anthropology wears its wealth of learning loosely and invitingly. Clearly, Tarn understands that those conversant with poetry and those conversant with anthropology will each need some guidance in negotiating the shift of focus from one to the other. But, taken as a whole, these twin focal points dissolve into and promote a larger whole, one that extends an additional invitational gesture to the reader, for it is nothing less than the register of large cultural shifts that accompany our lifetimes, and the lifetime of a ninety-year-old makes for a particularly panoramic constellation.

In this cavalcade of memories, Tarn proves to be an honest—which is to say fitful and even fretful—chronicler. Of a well-heeled branch of his family, he registers having met two of them once, but “No recollection.” Concerning his mother, who we’re told was quite beautiful, “I have not been able . . . to feel any emotion whatsoever,” whereas of his father he confesses to “overwhelming regret that I never found out who he was.” These are striking reflections, but they also harbor the regal register—the comely resignation—of Wallace Stevens’ lines from his late poem “The Rock”:
In a way, Tarn’s disclosures reinforce the sense of a bashful young person, head in the clouds, inattentive to the sorts of detail that conventionally throng autobiographies—precisely the “the small boy skulking in a 46 year old frame” as he describes himself around the time he began these “throws.” “Such timidity cost dear,” he reflects at one point. “On visits to Paris, Chiva had offered introductions and meetings with Paul Celan and Henri Michaux but felt he had little to offer. I gasped at the squandered opportunity to have met two of the great poets of the twentieth century. But no matter, as the number of comparable figures Tarn not only met but spent considerable time with more than compensates, including Michel Leiris, Claude Lévi-Straus, André Breton, and Salvador Dalí (just to cite Parisian encounters). The observations at times are deliciously if disconcertingly framed, as when Tarn reflects on his friendship with English novelist John Fowles, only to find in the posthumous publication of his journals an anti-semitic reference to “the European Cocktail Jew Tarn.”

A book of remembered people and places can grow wearisome, but Tarn skirts this liability by striating his “throws” in terms of method and subject. An account of academic life in America may be followed by an essayistic disquisition on research protocols of an anthropologist in the field, quirked with an excursion on poetics. We’re exposed to the compelling yet wayward yarn of a raconteur. Strict chronology and traces of cause and effect are hard to come by. They’re (mostly) here somewhere, but this is neither an exegesis nor (despite a plethora of references) a documentary text. As an imaginative composition, it invents its own procedures as it goes along. The essayistic plunges redirect the attention with the force of a sudden zigzag—even as, amidst some prolonged autobiographical narrative, lucid asides may suddenly erupt. One example: traveling to Tehran after India, “The effect on the mind of abstract design after India’s plethora of figuration was extraordinary.”

Tarn’s bifocal vocation as anthropologist and poet provides the thematic ground against which everything else is scrutinized. Anthropology was his first career, sparked by the “initiative ravishment” of a visit to the Trocadero in Paris, leaving “an impression that the future was entering into one’s body.” After professional training in Paris and Chicago, Tarn undertook fieldwork in Burma and Guatemala, accounts of which are richly developed. His self-portrait takes on another dimension in these passages, as he periodically revisits the trauma for a bashful fellow to seek out and quarry information from informants. After giving up his career as anthropologist, “the sense of relief at no longer having to ask questions was overwhelming.” As he later reflects, linking one vocation to another: “There comes a point…when the anthropologist gets tired of asking questions and wants to become an informant. It is here, no doubt, that the anthropologist becomes the poet.” And it is here, in turn, that the poet invents a new idiom, autoanthropology . This delectable neologism is a potentially ‘professional’ corrective to Tarn’s admission that “the poet is the eternal dilettante in everything but poetry.” But I take dilettante in this context as an honorific. It’s a way of gesturing to his prodigal interests—in book collecting, heraldry and the broader symbolic repertoire of signifying artifacts; the compulsion to be exposed through travel to the plenitude of the world, both natural and cultural, peregrinations in which excited attention and fatigue combine in a kind of arduous ecstasy.

Tarn is no less informative about his life as a poet than as anthropologist, detailing an immersive sense of the “poetry world” he came into in the Sixties and Seventies, and how it has subsequently devolved. He pointedly concludes with sustained meditations on poetry as “the privileged place in which the suggestibility of the unknown parts of any whole become so potent that we speak/write as if the unknown were equal in opportunities to the known.” Comparable bezels of hard earned insight and wisdom are plentifully scattered throughout, reminding us that Tarn’s Janus-faced career as anthropoet (to collapse the two into one) is mirrored in his linguistic background: with a childhood in Paris and Belgium, and subsequent years in England, forcing the realization that “bilingualism was a major obstacle”—not the automatic advantage one might suppose, but an impediment when embarking on that most acute engagement with language, writing poetry. In the end he forfeited French, realizing he’d never amount to more than “twenty-fifth rate Apollinaire.” He chose wisely. And we can be grateful for the sagacity enables by that decision. Tarn’s journey—both life and book, + life as and as in a book—is a form of wayfaring, wayfaring as envisioned by cultural anthropologist Tim Ingold in Lines (2007). Wayfaring is a way of knowing as you go. Following a trail rather than studying a plan or a map. A journey made, not an object found. It’s a form of mobile habitation. It’s as efficient as the observation (adopted by Ingold as a compass) by Bauhaus master Paul Klee, “a line goes out for a walk.” The anthropoet, walking with the line, walks the line in Atlantis, An Autoanthropology.

---

Jed Rasula has taught at the University of Georgia since 2001, and is the author of a dozen scholarly books, from The American Poetry Wax Museum (1996) to Wreading (2002), as well as several books of poetry, including Tabula Rasula (1986) and Hectic Pigment (2017).