Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  We were in search of an esthetic within which to live, and we were looking for it in our own American roots, in our own country. We had learned at college that poetry was being written in our own times, and that in order for us to write it was not necessary for us to ground ourselves in the academic; the ground we needed was the roads we were traveling. As we were new, so we had new roots, and we knew little of our own country. Hitchhiking became more than flight from a powerful family—our discoveries themselves became an esthetic and a disclosure.

  It is a youthful, romantic vision, as well as a serious statement about the relationship between art and life, bound to their times—an aesthetic of discovery that seeks a life in art and art out of life.

  Romance (against romanticism) is what encapsulates Meaning a Life most for me, a romance of the mind and heart, not a fairy-tale romance, though at times it almost reads like a fairy tale, but a romance with real ups and downs, immersed in the empirical world, lived through their travels in France by horse and cart, through the rise of fascism in Europe that they saw firsthand, through the Great Depression, the Second World War—when George worked a seventy-hour week as a machinist in an airplane factory in Detroit before being drafted into the army at age thirty-six, then sent to fight in the Rhineland for a year before getting seriously wounded in a foxhole, his fellow infantrymen killed—and on through nearly a decade of political exile in Mexico in the 1950s, due to the real threat of persecution under the Smith Act for their work with the Communist Party. A twentieth-century American romance of consciousness on the open road; a book of travel where the autobiographer is not the usual singular self at the center of the story but the union of two individuals. Unlike, for example, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s devastating memoir Hope Against Hope, written as a testament to her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, while the externals of her own life remain undisclosed or inconspicuous. As Mary writes, “It must be remembered that we were always two; we learned from reading and from what we saw, but conversation never ceases between us.” She echoes this in a journal she kept on their visit to Israel in 1975 at the invitation of the mayor of Jerusalem: “Of course I am I and George is most certainly George, his accomplishments are his and mine are mine, but the composite life we live is us.”

  “The composite life” meaning to place with, or together. Of their beginning, setting out on their new life into the unknown, they would quote a line by Sherwood Anderson: “we wanted to know if we were any good out there.” They recalled this line in letters and interviews, as George did in 1973, writing to Dan Gerber, “the cadence produces the statement of ‘out there’ as a thing that exists, the line has more than a novelistic quality.” It also appears in a poem in Primitive, and it comes up in Mary’s book when she’s recalling their four-year stay in France with their dog Zee-wag during their early twenties. Before that, in the “strange limbo” of George’s stepmother’s drawing room in San Francisco, his stepmother who required Mary to wear a girdle and gloves when she visited, she mentions reading Lewis and Clark’s accounts of their Northwest expeditions, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, and Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta. Again, they fled George’s domineering family for New York, sailing a catboat from Lake St. Clair in Michigan, navigating the rivers to the Erie Canal and through its system of locks, to Albany and down the Hudson River to Seventy-Ninth Street, the whole journey accomplished with only a road map as their guide.

  While in New York she mentions reading Proust (“sinking deep into his memories and awakening to intuitive knowledge of my own”), Henry James, and Virginia Woolf (“her writing meant to me the flash of insight while a leaf falls, the knowledge of complex relations that comes in a moment of understanding”). At a party they met the poet Louis Zukofsky, who introduced them to the poet Charles Reznikoff, both poets becoming two of their closest contemporaries, particularly Reznikoff with whom they took long walks around the city and would visit often, and whose verse, Mary wrote after his death in 1976, “remained with me since I was twenty years old.” Zukofsky would edit a special issue of Poetry magazine in 1931 that was focused on a group of poets, the “Objectivists,” whose work he thought sought the “objectively perfect” in “the direction of historical and contemporary particulars.” He pointed to Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Reznikoff, and Robert McAlmon as practitioners, and included exemplary poems by George Oppen, Basil Bunting, Reznikoff, Williams, and Martha Champion, among others, as well as Emanuel Carnevali’s translations of Arthur Rimbaud. Furthering his statement about the meaning of objectivist, Zukofsky refers to “the lens bringing the rays from an object to focus,” that the aim of the poem was to achieve “the totality of perfect rest” as formed by “sincerity, the accuracy of detail in writing,” for “in sincerity shapes appear concomitants of word combinations, precursors of (if there is continuance) completed sound or structure, melody or form.” In an interview Zukofsky described it simply as “thinking with the things as they exist.” Reznikoff related the term to a quote by the eleventh-century Chinese writer Wei T’ai that the translator A. C. Graham had used as an epigraph to his Poems of the Late T’ang: “Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words; this is how poetry enters deeply into us.” Or as Mary quotes George who attributes Zukofsky:

  the necessity for forming a poem properly, for achieving form. That’s what “objectivist” really means. There’s been a tremendous misunderstanding about that. People assume it means the psychologically objective in attitude. It actually means the objectification of the poem, the making an object of the poem . . . the attempt to construct meaning, to construct a method of thought from the imagist intensity of vision. If no one were going to challenge me, I would say, “a test of truth.” If I had to back it up I’d say anyway, “a test of sincerity”—that there is a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction.

  All of this bears significantly on Oppen’s autobiography—her intellectual interests, her approach to prose, how she distills her memories and experiences, proceeding chronologically as a whole while moving back and forth in time within. In some respect her writing makes me think of the nineteenth-century Maine-lover Sarah Orne Jewett—her deep interest in local folks, her plainspoken narratives, her generous spirit, her lack of artifice. While the method, in her own graceful way, feels objectivist inclined, which is not to say that it lacks warmth and humor as that would be untrue.

  In France they used Henry Adams’s modernist treasure Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres as a guide, his philosophical travelogue through medieval architecture, poetry, and glass, a Baedeker of the luminosity left of Mary in Majesty, her reign in a time when “theology turns always into art at the last, and ends in aspiration.” They read Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution while Jewish refugees poured into Paris. Before they had left New York, they decided to start a press with Zukofsky called To Publishers, using some of the inheritance money George received from his mother’s family when he turned twenty-one, and while in France printed three paperback titles: Zukofsky’s An “Objectivists” Anthology, Williams’ A Novelette and Other Prose, and, in one volume, Pound’s How to Read and The Spirit of Romance. Zero copies sold and the press folded. They visited Pound in Rapallo, when Basil and Marian Bunting lived nearby with their two children. Pound introduced them to Constantin Brancusi, Auguste Rodin, and Ossip Zadkine in Paris; Mary, who had turned to drawing and painting when she stopped writing, studied with other artists at Hilaire Hiler’s studio.

  Hiler, an American expat who lived in Paris for fifteen years, also pops up in Anaïs Nin’s Diary and the Canadian poet John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse. Glassco probably wrote most of his book long after his three-year j
aunt with a friend in 1920s Paris, though he claimed to have written it in his early twenties; it first came out in 1970. Hiler, described by Nin as “big, loud, overflowing,” appears pseudonymously in the Memoirs as Sidney Schooner, “gigantic American painter . . . lover of whores”; McAlmon also plays a part in Glassco’s moveable feast, as a sort of foil for the memoirist. (Memoir, I’ve gathered, can often be understood as autobiography’s more confessional twin, both born from the union of diary and history.) Glassco says that he wrote his reminisces “to record, and in a sense relive, a period of great happiness,” the happiness of exchanging prostitutes in a brothel with Schooner and friends, and dining on snails, or Welsh rarebit, with them. A circus of savory literati parades through his loosely fictionalized pages, giving readers, as the poet Stephen Scobie once noted, “the image of the self he never and always was.” For Oppen, “Happiness comes in the conversations and the learning that I have to master, even in the barest knowledge of how to get from here to there.” She steers clear of the sensational; measures the actual with the particulars of her memories; probes for insight and clarity without complaint or passing judgment. Here are two different approaches to autobiography, neither more “correct” than the other, both welcome in the autobiographical canon, Oppen occupying the actual in the historical and reflective, Glassco the fictive.

  The short chapter “1938–1941: Transition” must have been one of the most difficult for Oppen to write. She says,

  Birth . . . I think I am afraid to try to write of it. In childbirth I was isolated; I never talked about it even to George. He was surprised to learn that giving birth was a peak emotional experience and so entirely my own that I never tried to express it. Exposure of the experience has been attempted, and although I concur with the attempt, I do not think it has yet been told in a form in which it is whole. I would wish it to remain whole, and I have preserved the wholeness of my own experience of birth by not telling it; it is too precious to me.

  She proceeds to write around birth by confronting death. She speaks about her many stillbirths—holding one dead fetus in a hospital pan—about an infant who died in the cradle at six weeks, the guilt, isolation, and loss she felt because of those deaths, and how she became obsessed with desire for a child. The chapter was published in the journal Feminist Studies the same month her book came out, with different opening and closing paragraphs bracketing a similar middle section, and titled “Breath of Life.” It is a more private, more personal piece, written on the day Bird died, the small, lifeless body of their pet blue budgie recalling the smallness of their baby boy’s death years before. “Transition,” like the rest of her autobiography, deftly threads together inner and outer moments, moving seamlessly between public and private matters so that, for instance, Chamberlain’s signing of the Munich Pact, celebrated when they are in Utica with the ringing of church bells, occurs while she’s struggling with the desperate desire to have a child. Novelists have been doing this for ages, often as a strategic way of using historical events to give the personal greater significance, but it doesn’t come across like this in Meaning a Life. In an unpublished review of the book, Anita Barrows writes about the Oppens’ “sense of life engaging both inner and outer worlds, where neither is overwhelmed by or absorbed by the other.” Through Mary’s words, the reality of their inner life converges with external events as one continually changing occurrence.

  Choosing to write again during the period of second-wave feminism, Oppen benefited from a fertile field of twentieth-century women autobiographers like Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells, Emma Goldman, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mary Austin, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Day, Mary McCarthy, Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Margaret Mead, Maxine Hong Kingston, Angela Davis, and the naturalist Sally Carrighar, whose Home to the Wilderness: A Personal Journey Oppen quotes in a journal entry: “One’s mind has to be emptied, then it fills in an unaccustomed and very rich way.” Their work, among many others, opened up the autobiographical form to a multiplicity of subjectivities that inhabit and engage the world in formerly unwritten spheres of thought and experience. Their lives made way for their words; their lives and their words “culturally prepared” the times in which Oppen returned to writing. “In defying the traditional injunction to silence for women,” Margo Culley notes in her edited collection American Women’s Autobiography, “the autobiographical act itself contests WOMAN.”

  When Oppen turned from writing to the fine arts in her early twenties, it wasn’t a passing phase but became a devoted practice of making pictures until the end of her life. She did have some gallery success early on, and, something she fails to bring up in her book, later in life was even included in the 19th National Exhibition of Prints at the Library of Congress in 1963. The public side of the enterprise, however, didn’t sit well with her. This is the entirety of an unpublished piece she titled “Fame”:

  I know ambitious women, so I know that not only men are ambitious for worldly fame, but women do with less, at least in these times. Other things than fame satisfy me: the fame of the world let into my life threatens me, I don’t really want it. I am uncomfortable with it, I don’t want to meet the world eye to eye nor do I want to maintain a public stance. I would have to learn, master, become that. I prefer the grace of my life, lived with an ambiance that is familiar— It is a romantic vision, and that is what my life is; it is not only the vision, but it is what I’ve made, I would defend it, do it again. The public fame for me would have been hell. One person’s heaven may be another person’s hell. I’d choose my own way again, and it is heaven.

  Fame as a threat, as hell in opposition to its lack being heaven, inverts the usual order of our contemporary aspirations. It feels like a particularly radical inversion for our times, a choice proscribed for self-preservation as an act of self-forgetting, true to her sense of individuality and freedom.

  Oppen’s papers are archived in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California San Diego. Besides drafts of poems, stories, and essays with typed corrections on pasted paper strips, vignettes of people she knew, journals pasted with scraps of real estate listings, notebooks filled with diary entries, poems, dreams, pasted recipes, and quotations (Camus, Teilhard de Chardin, Rilke, Chekhov, Thomas Traherne, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard . . .), there are nearly two hundred pieces of finished artworks, along with numerous sketchbooks and photograph albums. The images are constructed from a variety of materials and mixed-media, and are of the things Oppen saw around her: cityscapes and seascapes, trees and poppies, canyons and cordilleras, portraits of women and dancing girls, abstract figures, a still life of vases, a conch shell, clothesline, torso, kitchen, bulrushes, ports, and flowers. Watercolor, oil, gouache, acrylic, charcoal, crayon, pencil, or ink are rendered on paper, cardboard, wood, particle board, or tissue on paper. A tree is stitched onto burlap, a swan stenciled on cut paper; there are etchings of horses, owls, a frog, and a Greek goat, an embroidery of a tree, as well as collages, mostly of flowers, and most strikingly an almost two-by-two-foot portrait of George. There is a collage-like portrait of a boy looking down at his yellow tie, raised gently with his fingertips as if sewing; he might have just used it to wipe his red upper lip, the subtly shifting colors of his face a landscape of moods and reflections.

  Mary Oppen talks very little about painting in her autobiography, save for a humorous anecdote about an art class in Paris, a brief aside on Hiler, and then later, as political refugees in Mexico, she says that they both took classes at “an art school,” without mentioning it was actually the renowned La Esmeralda National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking, where José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and many other prominent artists taught at some point or another. Instead, Oppen’s lifelong engagement with painting is more immanently evident in Meaning a Life, in the writing itself, through her vivid observations, her imagistic compression, her distillation of memories in a nonlinear linearity, and th
rough the very structure of her book, which Barrows fittingly describes in her review as “a series of portraits.” Barrows writes, “So the meaning of a life: not necessarily the obvious, not ‘narrative’ in a strict sense, but rather a series of portraits where outstanding details tend to capsulate the whole. More than a style of writing, I think, this is a way of seeing: a kind of integrity evident as much in the facts of Mary Oppen’s life as in the work, refusing to dramatize, exaggerate, defend, but allowing experience to stand for itself.” Meaning an honest record of experience, of not wanting to forget, that enriches our life. Meaning constructed from moments of conviction, extracted from memories, the meaning of life meaning a life.

  I visited Mary Oppen’s archive twice, first in December 2011 and then in August 2018, to see if there might be more autobiographical material she had written in the last decade of her life. Some of this work appears in the appended section of this book, “Other Writings.” The following three fragments from her papers I’ve included here as they each speak to a different aspect of her autobiography. The first reproduces the text of a scrap of newspaper clipped inside a red folder that contained a draft of Meaning a Life; the second reproduces a typed page titled “To See”; the third reproduces the last section of a typed, three-page piece in a folder titled “At Home in the World”: