by Mary Oppen
Russel Wright had wanted to continue with his first love, stage design, but his marriage to Mary made earning money imperative. He turned to industrial designing of objects for household use, and he became well known as the designer of “Russel Wright” dishes, which modern young couples bought when they set up their first homes. Mary and Russel planned their house, designing their furniture. They clung to possessions, but we wanted to travel. We had left college, and our education now meant looking at and thinking about the world we were in.
In April George was twenty-one, and his uncles Robert and Tracy Rothfeld sent him a case of fine port wine and insisted that George’s father relinquish his guardianship and leave us free to do as we wanted with our lives. I don’t think we were sufficiently aware of the Rothfelds’ attitude at the time, but I see now that they were protecting our interests. We decided to live our lives within as small a budget as possible so that the inheritance George received would continue to have this meaning: to free us from meaningless work, so that we would not have to follow a profession as William Carlos Williams did or try to seek political power as Pound later did, or do tedious work, as Reznikoff did at the law book company. We agreed that we would work when necessary to augment this income, and as it turned out George did most of the money-earning work.
When Zukofsky’s school year was finished we drove to Quebec with him and one of his students, Jerry, who had never been out of New York City. Louis sat in front, his head down, poring over the map and pointing out the window. “The White Mountains, the Green Mountains—this is Vermont.”
Looking at the sunset, Louis said, “Why should I praise it, I had nothing to do with it.”
Jerry, trying to contain his youthful excitement, said, “I wonder if they dance the same way here as in Yonkers?”
We stopped and walked along a stream by a meadow with cows; these two from the city had never been near a real live cow. We stayed overnight in Quebec, where we practiced our French and drove slowly through the beautiful countryside.
When Louis left the city the following fall to teach at the University of Wisconsin, we also left New York. Louis, George and I agreed on a plan for publishing books: Louis would be the editor, arranging and getting the books for publication, while George and I would go to France in a year to set up a household and find a printer. We would see the books through the printing and ship them back to Louis, who would market them. The plan was to print paperback books, reasonable enough in price that students and others could buy them. At that time no paperback books existed. We would pay for the cost of the enterprise, and Louis would be paid $100 a month. Louis chose the name To Publishers—“to” in the sense of “to whom it may concern,” as on a bill of lading, or as in usage before a verb to indicate the infinitive, “to publish.” Louis had already prepared material for a special issue of Poetry magazine; Ezra Pound had insisted that Harriet Monroe allow Louis to edit one issue of the magazine. At first Louis had been reluctant, but at Harriet’s insistence he provided the name “Objectivist.” Louis said later in an interview:*
. . . objectivism—I never used the word; I used the word “objectivist,” and the only reason for using it was Harriet Monroe’s insistence when I edited the “objectivist” number of Poetry . . . Well she told me, “You must have a movement.” I said, “No, some of us are writing to say things simply so that they will affect us as new again.”
“Well give it a name.”
“All right, let’s call it ‘Objectivists.’” . . . I wouldn’t do it today.
Of that group, appearing together for the first time in Poetry, very few did not achieve later recognition. Pound had served poetry in this way when he was in England before the First World War; Zukofsky, on home ground, was aware of the currents in poetry as it was being written in the 1920s and 1930s. Williams, Reznikoff, Oppen, Bunting, Rakosi, Niedecker, and Zukofsky himself have become known with the help of Pound and of Zukofsky; they owe a debt to both Pound and Zukofsky for bringing light to bear on their poetry at a time when they were struggling with lack of recognition. Louis was a great teacher as well—George has said many times, “I can never repay my debt to Zukofsky, he taught me everything.”
Louis, four years older than George, was a prodigy and a remarkable friend. We spent so much time together that we very nearly lived together. When Louis came to our apartment on Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, he stayed late talking endlessly about poetry or any of the topics which young people discuss, and we laughed and teased. We loved each other.
We went once with Louis to visit his friends Kate and Ted and their two-year-old son Joe, who played Bach for himself on a little wind-up phonograph. Kate, a heavy matriarchal woman, was huge with her second child, soon to be born; Ted was teaching in a Staten Island high school, and they were living in a non-Jewish neighborhood near Ted’s school. Louis, a bachelor and an elegant young man, moved between them with their old country culture and New York’s intellectual life. Kate and Ted clung to Louis, who was precursor for them in areas where they still felt strange and isolated. George and I may have been their first experience of a couple with no experience of the ghetto. Kate behaved as though she was jealous of Louis’ friendship with us; she was afraid, perhaps, that she would be abandoned by Louis, who indeed found them to be a heavy responsibility. He had brought us along to lighten the burden of that visit. Afterwards we went home first by train, then by ferry, and lastly by the subway to the hotel where we were living that winter. Next day Kate phoned me and said, “Mary, would you and George consider moving in with us, and would you take care of Joey when I go to the hospital?”
“I’ll discuss it with George and I’ll call you this evening,” I promised. We were puzzled that Kate chose us—why us? She had not appeared to be at all comfortable with us in her house. George would have to commute to work, but I was tired of city streets, and it was nearly spring. We decided to say yes, so I called Kate and told her, “We’ll move in; we’ll share expenses until you have the baby.”
The baby was delayed, and we were well acquainted but still strange to each other by the time Kate went to the hospital. The next day Kate’s mother arrived, a nearly blind old-country woman who traveled alone about the city. Joe and I were having a simple time: I fed him, we went for walks, he played his records while I read, and I put him to bed at his usual times. I was honored that Kate had chosen me to care for her precious first-born. But Kate’s mother, who observed the religious food-laws, brought her own food and touched no dish, fork, or knife in her daughter’s house; she was suspicious of me and communicated antagonism by pulling Joe to her protectively. But Joe struggled away from her and came back to me, “Shiksa,” the non-Jewish young woman.
When Ted came from the hospital he proudly announced, “Another boy!” He took his mother-in-law to the train to start her back to Manhattan—blind, fearful old woman, who survived in spite of the gentile world that surrounded her world of the ghetto. Ted, who had concurred in choosing me to care for their child, dismissed us as soon as he returned from the hospital, “Another boy!” The baby was born and he, Ted, needed us no longer, but Kate wasn’t yet home and we were eating supper, Ted was very high with the birth of one more son. He began telling me in great detail how to accomplish each act of housework within the house that I had been doing, apparently satisfactorily, with Kate’s approval. Ted was busily demonstrating how to dispose of garbage, wrapping it in newspaper, tying it with string. Somehow he had forgotten that it was Kate who had carried and given birth to the baby, also satisfactorily. Ted was filled with his own importance, his son, his sons! Males, like him! He became rounder and puffed with his own role—George and I were not audience enough. I was annoyed and wished to bring him back to some simplicity and awareness that he still needed me; that Kate was not yet home from the hospital and that I was going to be there with the first-born tomorrow when Ted went to work. I stood before him and not being able to break through his
talk walked up to him and began unbuttoning his jacket, his vest, symbolically to strip him of his unbearable masculine take-over of the roles of two women on whom he was dependent.
Kate came home after ten days in the hospital, and the next day we left. “We want to be alone now with our new baby and Joe,” she said. Louis later told us of another strange incident, when Joe was a few years older. As he played with the kids on the block, Kate watched him skate on borrowed skates. She stood with tears streaming, and as Joe skated up to where she stood, she patted his head and said, “Skate, Joey, skate, just like the Goyim.”
Remembering that very young people, when they trust each other, throw away all guards to enter into each other’s lives, I can try to recreate the relationship we had with Louis. We were all looking for an identity different from our families’ identities, and we found strength in bonds of love and friendship such as we had with Louis, which gave our lives shape and intensity. Reaching for clarity of vision, we gave each other freely whatever the other could take from us, and this giving was our friendship.
Louis had an elegant accent in his spoken English; we three had different accents. My way of speech comes from my Montana birthplace, and it is clear, clipped, and very hard on all consonants. George speaks with an upper-class New York City accent, almost dropping R’s in the middle of words and occasionally adding R’s to the end of words. Our accents have been tempered over the years by living in different places. When I visited my family in Grants Pass after having been away for many years, both they and I were a little shocked—they by my changed accent and way of speech, and I by realizing how my speech must have once resembled theirs.
Louis had to choose his way of speaking English, as his family did not speak it, and his mother and sister never left the Bronx. I think Louis chose the accent of John Dewey; when Louis was at Columbia, Dewey was a leading figure and a great influence there. Students who graduated from Columbia in that period, in many cases, had what was recognized as a Columbia accent. In any case, Louis had beautiful speech, and he was a great mimic; he saw the Noh plays with a famous Japanese actor who toured the United States several times, and he delighted us with imitations of this actor. Louis was the center of a considerable circle, and we met and talked and visited within this group. Mary and Russel Wright and Louis remained our friends for many years; the others, if we met again, would no doubt interest us, but Louis was the best friend we had, and we both miss his friendship. In an interview in 1969 George stated, “I learned from Louis, as against romanticism or even the quaintness of the imagist position, the necessity for forming a poem properly, for achieving form. That’s what ‘objectivist’ really means. There’s been 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 other point for me, and I think for Louis, too, was 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.”
In the same interview, George said, “I can name the poets who really have been of decisive importance to me—Charles Reznikoff and Zukofsky as a person, his conversation, not his poetry—although again as with Pound, while I can make an awful lot of objections to parts of A, the opening words, ‘A / Round of fiddles playing Bach,’ have rung in my ears for a long time and always will, I imagine. Reznikoff has been the most important to me, consciously at least. And otherwise this is what I have to explain—really Blake is more important to me than Williams, and several philosophers may be more important to me than Pound. The contemporary poets aren’t the most important thing in my life, with the exception of those few things that really matter to me. Wyatt’s poems and several Middle English poems, among other antiquities, mean more to me than any except one or two of the contemporary. It must be some habit of life that makes it seem to a young poet that all the other young poets are the major factors in his life. At any rate it’s not true.”
In the spring we sailed the cat-boat around Manhattan Island to Long Island Sound to New Rochelle harbor. There we rented a small house and lived in it with almost no furniture—I remember only the bed, a beautiful carved swan-bed. We bought Zee-wag, a wire-haired fox terrier who accompanied us for several years. She was an over-eager dog, always falling off docks or out of windows, but she was so intelligent that, with sighs, grins, and facial expressions, she tried to talk.
Sailing on Long Island Sound was nearly ideal for our cat-boat. Winds and storms announce themselves with more advance warning than on the Great Lakes, and harbors are everywhere on both sides of the Sound. We sailed every weekend past the estates, villages, harbors, and beaches along the Long Island shore. I love to fish, and I prefer flounder to any other fish; at times we anchored over sandy bottom and caught a flounder for our supper. Once, sailing along, we looked over the side of the boat, and keeping pace beside us was a large head! It looked as though a black moon had fallen into the sea, and though we observed it all the time it stayed alongside, we could never believe what we saw or figure out what it was. We also sailed with big sailing ships, lumber-schooners bringing lumber from Maine. We sailed faster than they, but while we were alongside we talked to the crew, then came about and sailed with them again. Louis often came on weekends to sail and to talk.
When Aunt Helen and some of George’s father’s friends came by our house they showed their shock at its emptiness. We had the swan-bed, a new puppy and wooden boxes to sit on. We were changing class, and we did not have the kind of house, the symbol of class and of power, that Aunt Helen and her friends assumed we would have.
At the end of summer we walked away from the cat-boat, which we left moored in New Rochelle harbor. In 1963, Jim Weil of the Elizabeth Press came to visit us on Henry Street in Brooklyn. “I’d like to see New Rochelle; I’ll return your visit,” said George, who wanted to remind himself of this village and harbor near the house where he was born. The train passed large apartment buildings that George did not remember, but the station was the same familiar building. Jim Weil’s address in hand, George started walking, and after several blocks he asked directions. He was told, “Oh, you had better go back to the station and get a taxi.” In the taxi he was driven on winding roads for several miles.
“Can this be New Rochelle?” George asked Jim. “I lived in a house on the water, near the harbor, in a small village.”
Jim replied, “What village, what harbor?”
In 1929 George, Zee-wag and I took ship for California. We shipped second class and found ourselves among our own age group, young people who were going to California to attend the University or to look for jobs. The crew of our ship, the Virginia, was British, and we made friends with the men who came on deck in the evenings to flirt, sing and talk with us; nights were warm, and we slept on deck when our cabins below grew too hot. I remember one young passenger who strode toward us, arm extended, and said, “My name is Cone, c-o-n-e,” so that we would not for a moment mistake him for a Jew. As always on ship travel, the passengers were removed from their previous lives and felt suddenly free, and during the ten-day trip romances flourished.
We made a stop in Havana, and with several hours to spend we asked a young taxi-driver to take us to his favorite places and show us Havana. He was not an expert driver, and he was impressed with the difficult and different gear-shift of his Dodge. When time was growing short for us to return to our ship, George suggested, “Perhaps I had better do the driving.” Our taxi man, who was no older than we, agreed, as he was no longer in a condition to be driving at all; but he was concerned about the mysteries of the gearshift. George demonstrated that he could master the shift, and we arrived back at our ship
just as the gang-plank was being taken up.
We wanted to spend a year in San Francisco writing and assimilating our New York experience and getting together the money for the To Publishers venture. The house we rented in Belvedere was built over the water, and we soon had a boat moored out in front of the house. We sailed in the bay and up the Sacramento River, but the sailing did not compare with the trip on Lake Erie or the small-boat sailing on Long Island Sound.
George’s older sister Libby rented a house near ours on the beach in Belvedere, where she and her two little girls spent a few days each week.
Libby came from a time far back, from the times of rich young women of a previous generation, in which a girl prepared to marry and then to live within the marriage as though everything she was to be was decided at the moment of the wedding. Parents, even grandparents had nodded wisely and approved Libby’s first marriage.
Libby’s mother had described Libby, “A satanic child, difficult, unmanageable.” I would have said, “Lost, lonely, tragic.” I could say satanic too, but it is enough now to say that she was always that same child.
Libby tried to get from her younger brother what she needed from the world “Out There,” a world she never entered. He, who was two years younger, could not tell her from superior experience what she wanted to know about men and boys, and her infatuations embarrassed him. He could not help her because he, too, was isolated. Libby attended a convent school. He went to a boys’ military academy, and the information he could have given her would not have been acceptable to her; he could have told her that the boys in his school dreamed of catching a glimpse of a bared breast, but that her cleverly contrived and memorized conversation in preparation for meeting a man probably would not aid her in arousing his sexual interest. She tried with bright colors, high heels, a long cigarette holder—but she was on the outside looking in, circling an imagined world, an imagined life, with herself at its center, conversation flowing around her clever remarks, and her quotation of poetry and her epigrams holding a circle of men spell-bound. She quoted:
