Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  On the pier in the harbor at San Luis Obispo a man lent us a big crab net. With two hauls of the net we had several big crabs, all we could eat for that day and the next. The next stop was Morro Bay, after that San Simeon again, then the big hop to Monterey Bay. We found a small bight, a hole-in- the-wall on Point Lobos; we were following the sailing directions in the Coast Pilot book, with its dire warnings of the dangers in such narrow entrances. The craggy rocks all looked the same from seaward, and it was hard to see just where to enter the small harbor. George climbed the mast, and with his added height above the water he conned us in, shouting to me the way to steer. It was indeed a narrow entrance to a very small cove, but once in we were completely protected from storms and from all but the ocean swell, which reaches everywhere. A small building on the steep bank of the cove, once a whaling station, was now a cannery. The only boats were a small motorboat and two rowboats, which the motorboat towed out each day with Japanese divers, two to each boat. Each diver looked at the sea bottom through a glass-bottomed box pressed against the water surface, and when he saw abalones he dived; with the tire-iron in his hand he pried the abalone from the rocks. Toward the end of each work day the motorboat tooted once for each hundred abalones pried from the sea bottom, as it came into harbor.

  George and I have spent hundreds of days on the water, in boats ranging from twelve feet in length to the Thelma’s forty-two feet. The isolation, with our world at times a twenty-foot enclosure of fog in which we are complete in ourselves, is a repeated experience from which we absorb meaning. We have spent hours silently, returning from these absences refreshed and knowing ourselves and each other more deeply. This experience is one which holds our world together for us.

  As our year in Belvedere drew to a close and we were preparing to take ship for France, Kenneth Rexroth paid us visit. He had recently come from Chicago, and he probably looked us up because he was in correspondence with Louis; it was but a brief encounter.

  With Nellie and Jack we had an intimate relationship, one that can probably not be found in full adulthood. We were intimate, more intimate even than most siblings, because we chose to be together and all four of us threw ourselves into the friendship. We had a great deal to learn from one another, and my friendship with Nellie is the only one in which I have not kept the reserves that block such intimacy. Our ideas were open and shared with each other; it was a relationship based on mutual admiration and trust. Nellie and I had a wealth of knowledge to share inside our friendship, which reached its peak of understanding while George and I were in Belvedere and Nellie and Jack were in Berkeley. As years passed and we didn’t see each other often, we finally stopped writing to each other and drew apart. In 1939 I went to visit them; they were living in a restored New England farmhouse; Jack was teaching at a nearby renowned college, and Nellie, who had become a social worker in the 1930s, was working for the Red Cross in a disaster area. Although we never admitted the break in our friendship, the very ways we had severally arrived at the places where we found ourselves by 1939 describe that break. George and I had become leftists, and had functioned as organizers of the unemployed; Nellie and Jack had climbed the academic ladder with care and circumspection.

  In 1967, when George won the Pulitzer Prize, Nellie looked us up in San Francisco. We tried to bridge the years, but there was a stiffness. She said, “We never laughed again like we laughed together, the four of us.” It was true, our laughter never again had the same abandon; it had been the laughter of a time when we just wanted to laugh out of the sheer joy of life and our first independence, an independence that leaned on the strength of four. We supported each other in our wildest dreams and opinions. After Nellie’s visit in 1967 we sent notes back and forth, meaningless formalities, until I wrote, “Let’s break through or stop writing.” Nellie sent the following letter and poem:

  nov. 11, 1971

  Dear Mary:

  It’s been a long time since I talked with anyone. Mostly I try to cover up what I think. I’m tired of thinking but I can’t stop and I know how I feel but I don’t expect anyone to see with the same brutality and acceptance. I don’t really want people to know me but to wear dark glasses and watch as if being too aware will increase the capacity for being hurt. So a superficial discussion of the routes we take isn’t really non-revealing. We learn to read gestures of movement.

  . . . In short I can’t tell you how I think or what I think. I’m enclosing a couple of things put down today that perhaps will show my involvement. I’m sure they have no meaning for anyone else.

  NAIVETÉ

  When the news came

  we rushed to the street

  grabbing the aluminum dishpan

  and an agate spoon

  we joined the crowd

  marching down the streetcar tracks

  on Columbia Ave.

  Banging the pan

  Seeing the blue flakes fall from

  the spoon

  pushing, shoving, laughing

  Celebrating

  the Armistice

  We went home

  on back streets and paths

  shortcuts from school

  routes unthinking

  like Uncle Charlie lying dead in a doorway

  beaten and robbed for his pension check

  from the Great War

  or

  my mother opening the door to a stranger

  pointing to me

  an Alien child full of dumb savagery

  Rigor Mortis

  How could I tell you

  Death is a friend

  Coming in peace

  The struggle is in the meeting

  And Could I shield you from this

  with my caring

  so that you knew, thinking of that

  and the ice cooling your blood gently.

  And I’m mailing this before second thought—

  Nellie

  It was a poem written directly out of our twenty-year-old lives, a poem such as she had been writing when our lives were intertwined. But it would be hopeless to try to recapture that relationship; in its time and in its place, it is perfect.

  * * *

  *Contemporary Literature, Spring 1969

  Alice Conklin Colby, my mother

  Ora Colby, my father

  Mary Oppen, Kalispell, Montana, 1917

  George Oppen, New Rochelle, New York, 1914

  Mary Oppen, Corvallis, 1926

  Mary and George Oppen, San Francisco, 1928

  William Carlos Williams, at our house to discuss publishing, Brooklyn, 1933

  Mary and George Oppen, San Francisco, 1929

  Mary Oppen, 1936

  Charles Reznikoff, New York, 1934

  George, Mary, and Linda Oppen, 1942

  Mary and George Oppen, Long Island Sound, 1936

  George and Linda Oppen, Mexico, 1956

  Linda and George Oppen, Detroit, 1942

  George Oppen, France, 1943

  David Ignatow, George Oppen, and Harvey Shapiro, Long Island, 1970

  Mary Oppen, Mexico, 1957

  Mary and George Oppen, 1951

  Mary Oppen, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff, San Francisco

  George and Mary Oppen, Little Deer Isle, Maine (photo taken by Rachel Blau DuPlessis)

  George and Mary Oppen, San Francisco, 1977

  France

  1929–1932

  We were eager to travel, to have
a view of our own country from a distance and from another culture. Many American writers, poets and artists were living in Europe, and we wanted to visit those who especially interested us. In 1929 Europe was already full of American students, and it was very late in that hejira. While British artists at the same or at a slightly earlier time were drawn to Germany, our antipathy to Germans and things German, even before Hitler, governed our travels; we chose France, and briefly Italy. We were in a narrow stream influenced by Pound, by Eliot, and by the Impressionist painters.

  With our dog Zee-wag we embarked on a small French freighter from San Francisco, destination Le Havre, a thirty-day trip. As our ship passed through the sea it removed us from the continent as though it were a planet, and we touched back occasionally to see if it was still there. We stopped in at Nicaragua on the day of a great earthquake, and a mother with her children came aboard to take the only places vacant on the ship. We spent hours each day in our cabin; George worked at poetry, and I sketched and worked with watercolors. George wrote me a Valentine:

  he de dark

  handsome

  young man has

  for her

  de fair

  maiden Uh

  present,

  de darling

  We read, strolled on deck, and talked with other passengers. Once we descended into the hold with another young couple who wanted to establish their status with us by giving us a view of their Cadillac, which they had brought along to drive across France to Cannes.

  We had planned this time in France to be for as long as we liked, in order to paint, write, and continue the conversation we had been seeking before we met and now were pursuing together. We wanted time to “look, gape, gawk, to dawdle”—to try to comprehend what was before our eyes. We wanted to talk with the people we were seeing for the first time, and we wanted to find what France had to offer two young Americans. The United States at this time was a place in which one did much better not to admit being an artist or poet or writer, especially if one believed in oneself. We did believe in ourselves, and we believed in each other, but we could not yet demonstrate our work because we had done very little. Writers, poets, and artists who were important to us were not yet recognized in the United States, and we needed to find our generation, to meet the poets and artists of our times and to find a way of life in which the poetry we felt within us could come out of our lives.

  We arrived in Le Havre, and as we watched the other passengers stream to the boat-train for Paris, we hung back. We said, “Let’s not rush to Paris; let’s stay overnight in Le Havre and see France—not only Paris.”

  We needed time, so we decided not to travel by train or automobile, or even by bicycle, but we and our dog could not conveniently walk and carry our belongings. A horse! Looking out our hotel window the morning after our arrival we saw that here we could travel with a horse. We told our taxi-man, whom we’d met when we left the boat, “We want to buy a horse and cart.”

  He drove us to the nearby countryside, where his brother, an Algerian banana merchant who took bananas from ships as they arrived from Central America and peddled them in the streets of Le Havre, had a horse he would sell to us. The horse was Pom-Pon, a beautiful slender “Anglo-Arab,” half-Arabian half-English thoroughbred gelding, steel-gray dappled and accustomed to the wagon he pulled daily. A cart and saddle were included in the bargaining, at which our taxi-man and his brother were much more expert than we, but we were delighted with the horse and with our plan for travel. Pom-Pon was ours, the cart and saddle too. We and Zee-wag started back to the city, driving our horse and cart. In her fox-terrier excitement Zee-wag fell from the cart, and our own cart-wheel passed over her and left her screaming and unable to move. We gathered her up, but her back seemed broken and her hind legs paralyzed. We found a veterinarian and undertook his plan for her recovery; massage, careful exercise and time, he said, would recover for her the use of her legs.

  We launched into the life of France. We drove out in our cart to explore the narrow streets of Le Havre, and we and Pom-Pon soon learned to know each other. At first he would not give us his hooves to be cleaned, but his manners were perfect, except that he loved too much—bananas, babies, and young women particularly. If an unwary banana-eater came near, Pom-Pon yearned toward the banana; when a woman with babe in arms came near, we had to dash out of the cafe or restaurant to hold his head and keep him from nipping. Pom-Pon was frightened when the cartwheels scraped corner curbs, and we had to reassure him on very sharp turns or up steep streets.

  We started on our travels. We planned to cross France, to stop briefly in Paris, and then to search for a place to live, work at writing and painting, and establish our publishing venture. We were in pursuit of a style of life for ourselves, for we did not yet see ourselves in the perspective of our own culture or of our own country’s history; we were searching for something more than a life of “making a killing,” as my mother said. The United States we had just left was rich, with an affluence of new cars and talk of the stock market. We wanted a way of life that allowed us to paint, write, think, and converse in friendship with those who were on our same path.

  We traveled thirty or forty kilometers a day, stopping over a day and a night after every five days of travel, for Pom-Pon needed to rest and to eat more than he had time for while traveling. The slow progress suited us, and we found the long stop-overs a time for talking to people, wandering, and observing. Pom-Pon’s needs gave us a long lunch-time too. We unharnessed him beside the road, gave him his hay and threw down straw for him to stale; he was such a polite little horse that in harness he was inhibited. He munched his hay and switched his tail in contentment. We found hotels with a courtyard and a stable for horses, family-run hotels with very good meals. These were our stopping-places all across France; they bustled with activity on market day, but on other days they were quiet, with few people in the dining room. I learned to speak French with words I needed in the market, for the horse and for our hotels. I think if I spoke French now it still would come out of me with words from this time: vétérinaire, écurie, ménage, paille, avoine. Our room in the hotel usually overlooked either the street near the market or the courtyard of the hotel. We drank our breakfast bowl of hot milk flavored with chicory, we ate our baguette of French bread with fresh butter and we talked with the hotel keepers each morning. On market day we observed the busy life that went on in a market town. A farmer brought his produce to market by horse-drawn cart, and the horse had to be stabled and made comfortable before the farmer could attend the market. Meanwhile, the farm woman was already in the market with the produce—fruits, vegetables, cheeses, eggs, or any of the many products so perfectly grown in France. The men drank a glass of wine together before going to market, or they bargained together over animals to be bought or sold. We harnessed our Pom-Pon and made our way out of the town.

  The style of the houses and churches, even the costumes of the people changed with each region. The land that was farmed lay outside the villages, and the streets of a village lay between high walls; but it was behind their own walls that the villagers really lived. They went to the fields each day, taking the animals with them, and they drove the animals home each night to their household in the village, with its courtyards and outbuildings in which they carried on the many tasks that make the careful life of peasant farmers in France. At the center of each village were always the same shops: the tabac that sold matches and tobacco, a boucherie with a red flag flying on butchering day, and a boulangerie with the ovens visible behind the store counter where we bought our daily bread, as did every family in France. There was also a bistro, a place where men dropped in for an early morning drink of white wine or for beer and conversation at day’s end. The market town nearby and the need of almost every farmer to go to town on market day, either to buy or to sell, made other shops unnecessary in the villages. Always there was the Church. The women did the churc
h duties, going to early morning Mass and stopping in briefly if they passed the church during the day. When the farm woman went with the farmer to the market town, she had her own stall; she arranged her produce so beautifully that it always seemed to me a sacrilege to take a bunch of radishes, but she would quickly rearrange the remaining bunches. She also bought provisions to take home at the end of the day. Food shops in the towns were like playstores or jewel boxes; there was a shop for each type of food, little shops in a row on the narrow streets—Charcuterie, Fromagerie, Laiterie, Patisserie. In the villages the man did the errands and helped out in busy moments, but the woman ran the store, kept house, fed the family and maintained a lively conversation with her customers. The men had more free time when they were in the town; they sat sometimes in a bar and talked loudly with friends over a glass of beer.

  Unlike the United States, class differences were not reflected in comforts. Quite rich townspeople did not yet have flush-plumbing or electric appliances. As we accommodated to these lacks, we began to define a style of life different from our life at home. We now lived out-of-doors as did the people among whom we were living; we were to be observed as much as they were. In our hotel room we bathed from a water pitcher and a bowl and dressed hurriedly, or hopped into bed between coarse-woven, pure linen sheets and covered ourselves with the big red down comforter with which every bed was provided.

  In Rouen we passed under the Horlogerie to find a hotel. While Pom-Pon rested, we explored the streets of the town. A small row of houses of ancient red brick, built with blackened cross-timbers, had been preserved from a much earlier time in Rouen; these houses were tiny, but so perfect that each was a work of art. As we explored, wondered, and talked, we began to learn about the people who had been here before us. In wash-houses along the streams and rivers of France women knelt with sleeves rolled up and sweaters buttoned, their knees on a board, and pounded the laundry with big paddles, commenting on all that they saw. Women of artisan and peasant class lived more out-of-doors than did women of similar class in the United States, and they lived more in comradeship with one another; there was more of a sisterhood than we had seen at home. These women worked in the fields, took care of the cows, geese, and chickens and shared the work of house and garden; women in the United States rarely have shared in the heavy outdoor field-work of farm life. We have put European ways behind us so fast that the changes are hard to understand. At first in France we were shocked, and then we began to understand that the old ways had qualities that some of the newer ways in America have lost. The market was a place set aside at the heart of the town, or sometimes it lay outside the ramparts of towns that had been walled. Climbing to the tops of walls which remained, we tried to imagine the life of earlier times—the castle high and safe, the smaller houses below, and the hovels and huts of the very poor at the outskirts. We realized that here in Europe the class into which one was born was accepted as inevitable, by the lower as well as by the upper class. We found it hard to penetrate and to understand this acceptance of a limit beyond which aspirations were not to rise.