Walk the Beat with a Clever Gumshoe in Howard Nemerov's Poem 'The Private Eye'

Fedora and trench coat optional

[photo: Michelle Ding/Unsplash]

It’s hard to resist the romance of the lone wolf PI — a little battered, maybe even a bit jaded — but on a quest for justice, rules and danger be damned.

In this poem from 1961, American poet Howard Nemerov takes us inside the thoughts of a gumshoe whose story ends, appropriately, with the bourbon and the blond.

Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) was born into a creatively-inclined family in New York City. His Russian-Jewish parents owned Russeks, a glamorous department store on Fifth Avenue — and his sister was the acclaimed photographer Diane Arbus.

Howard Nemerov earned a BA from Harvard and served in WWII as a pilot and first lieutenant in the US Army Air Force's Royal Canadian unit. He was the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress twice — from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990; in 1978, his book The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov won the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

In a review, The New York Times said, 'Howard Nemerov was the very model of the postwar campus wonder boy. He refused to dress up for formal occasions, devoured martinis (the wetter the better), and was something of a walking factory for tart apothegms about the writing life.'

The Private Eye by Howard Nemerov

To see clearly, not to be deceived
By the pretended burial of the dead,
The tears of the bereaved,
The stopped clock
Or impenetrable lock,
Or anything that possibly was said
Simply to see who might have been mislead

To dig down deep enough to find the truth,
To penetrate and check, balance and sift,
Pretending to be uncouth
And a little dumb
Till the truth come,
Till the proud and wicked give away their drift
Out of security — that is my gift,

To seem omnivorous in my belief,
Ready to swallow anything at first,
(Knowing the corrupt chief
Had rigged the raid
So no arrest was made)
And, acting guileless as an infant nursed,
Believe in nothing till I get the worst.

I know what cannot possible be known,
And never know I know it till the end.
When justice must be done
I give the word
To the honestly bored
Survivors of my lust to apprehend,
And then, with the bourbon and the blond, unbend.

[Originally posted on Strong Sense of Place]