The Beauty of the Husband
by Anne Carson
Summary
The Beauty of the Husband calls itself a fictional essay in twenty nine tangos, and the form is the meaning: the tango is a dance you cannot do alone and cannot do without being hurt, and Anne Carson uses its alternating advances and retreats to tell the story of a marriage from first adolescent dazzlement through adultery, separation, and the strange loyalty that outlives both. The wife narrates; the husband, beautiful, faithless, and a liar of real artistry, is the object of an inquiry that is also still, humiliatingly, desire. Each tango opens under an epigraph from Keats, because the book's true subject is his equation, beauty is truth, truth beauty, tested against a man for whom beauty and lying were the same gift; Carson, a classicist by profession, conducts the test with the tools of her trade, quotation, etymology, cold precision, applied to material that is anything but cold. The long and short lines stagger down the page like the dance, and the writing moves between aphorism and raw transcript, wounds delivered in the tone of a lecture, which makes them worse. It is as painful and exhilarating a book about marriage as modern poetry offers. The Beauty of the Husband won the 2001 T.S. Eliot Prize, making Carson its first woman winner after shortlistings in the two preceding years, along with the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and it consolidated the reputation of the most original poet then writing in English, a writer whose books, part poem, part essay, part something unnamed, had made the categories themselves look tired.
Historical Context & Significance
Carson came to fame in the 1990s from a professorship in classics, and her hybrid books, Autobiography of Red above all, had built a following that crossed poetry's usual borders; The Beauty of the Husband, published in 2001, was the one the prize culture could not ignore, and its Eliot win, the first by a woman in the award's nine years and by a Canadian in any of them, was overdue on both counts. The tango structure has invited stagings and dance settings since. Carson went on to accumulate nearly every honor available in the language while insisting she is a visual rather than verbal artist, a claim her readers enjoy disbelieving, since no one has done more with what words look like on a page.