Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  When we shipped the books of To Publishers from France to Louis in New York, he found that he could only get the books by paying a duty. Customs declared them to be magazines, not books, but a loophole existed—if we wrapped them in bundles of twenty-five or less they could come in duty-free. This entailed numerous trips by us and by Louis to the Post Office. Louis hated to carry bundles, and he lived in a rented room, where storing the books was another problem. Charles Reznikoff stored them in his sister’s house, in the basement where he had his press, until his sister sold the house. Charles then gave each author his own books.

  In 1929, at the age of twenty-one, neither of us understood anything of business, and neither did Louis. It is perhaps surprising that we actually did get books printed. Financially we had taken on too big a burden; we could not support ourselves, Louis, and the printing and publishing of the books unless at least a small amount of money came back to us. And no money came back to us. The book-sellers called the paperbacks “magazines” and would not give them shelf room. When we returned to New York from Paris in 1933, George went from store to store, leaving books on consignment, but the return was negligible. Later, at almost the same moment that George and I terminated To Publishers, James Laughlin founded New Directions. Since then he has continued to publish fine books through the many years, and he deserves the credit for carrying the burden of running a business in the interest of publishing poetry.

  As the second winter approached we decided to go back to Paris; we had completed a year of life in the French countryside, and our only regret was that we had to sell Pom-Pon. Sadly we watched him go up our lane, past the Vinicole and out of our lives. Before going to Paris we went to Rapallo to visit Ezra Pound. We took rooms on the promenade, at a distance from Pound’s pension where he lived with Dorothy. Across the harbor lived Marian Bunting with Basil and their two children. Dorothy invited us to the tea-dance after our arrival; Pound asked me to dance, and, gravely, we danced. Dorothy always seemed diffident, reserved and remote. I met her always in the pension living or dining room, while George met Pound upstairs in his study; or we both walked with Pound on the promenade.

  Marian was lonely, and she seized on me, another American woman, to share her loneliness and her problems, but I was too much younger than Marian to do more than listen. Her family insisted she leave Bunting, give up her poet, but she found it hard to obey them. We rented bicycles together, took them on the bus to the top of the mountains behind Rapallo and came down on them—a breathtaking trip through the forests of cork, chestnut, and pine trees.

  Walking with us on the waterfront, Ezra pointed with a grand gesture of his cape and his cane in the wrong direction and said, “From there came the Greek ships.” He was telling us, “Read, study the languages, read the poets in their own tongues.”

  Our message to him would have been just as clear: “You are too far away from your own roots.” But we were twenty and Pound was forty, and respect for him as a poet forbade our telling him that we lacked respect for his politics and that he should go home.

  He asked us, “What do ‘girlfriend,’ ‘boyfriend’ mean?” New words were entering the language, and he didn’t hear them from the tongues of those who were giving them their meanings. We would have said to him, “Go home.”

  Back in Paris, we settled in a hotel on the Quai des Augustins, a fourth-floor large room, with windows from floor to ceiling looking out over the Seine near the Pont St. Michel. We carried with us a minute alcohol stove, a cooking pot and coffee; bread and food for Zee-wag we purchased each day, and we ate breakfast in our room. In the morning I woke and left George sleeping to attend my painting class. I painted from a model, which was not at all what I wanted, but I could not find my way alone to knowledge of the craft of painting. What I wanted to know was what paints to buy, how to mix them, what brushes to use, how to use gouache and watercolors, how to stretch canvas and what paper to use for watercolors. Instead I was standing in a crowded room, and the teacher made casual rounds. “You have made the nose too long, a sign of stupidity,” he would say, and I wondered if he meant my stupidity or the model’s.

  When I returned at noon, George and I ate lunch, went to the museums or sat in a cafe, and had our dinner, after which I slept while George worked late into the night. We lived in that way for several years, a successful system for good sleepers.

  Pound was generous; there was nothing he could do for us that he did not do. Hilaire Hiler, his friend, was experimenting with new techniques in order to publish a much-needed book on painting materials and painting techniques. Pound suggested to Hiler that I work with him, and Hiler invited me to come to his studio in the mornings, to test paints and papers and to try techniques demonstrated by artists whom Hiler invited to the studio. Dorothy Pound came up from Rapallo for one of these demonstrations of watercolor technique.

  Pound also said to us, “Go visit Brancusi,” and he gave us other addresses of his friends as well. We visited Brancusi at his studio, which opened on a garden with plants growing in the entrance way; it may once have been a stable and garden, but now it housed Brancusi and a great many of his sculptures. Brancusi was a bearded man so kindly and gentle that we felt welcome at once, although this was his “at home” day and many other visitors were there. He said to us, “Stay, after the others go.” He had been to the United States, and he was impressed with the homestead law. I supposed it was still possible to take a grant of land from the government, but the idea startled me. I thought homesteads were of my grandfather’s time, but to Brancusi free land meant democracy, freedom, generosity of spirit—it meant America. The sculptures which I liked best were the totems; many of them were hewn from log-like pillars with his adze. I especially liked the seats he made with the adze to fit the bottoms of his favorite visitors. He pointed to Ezra Pound’s seat and said, “If you come to see me often, I will make you seats too.”

  We visited Rodin’s studio, a museum preserving his statues in the place where he created them. Both Brancusi’s and Rodin’s statues spoke eloquently to us. Maillol’s statue in the gardens of the Louvre is a woman floating up, balanced on the upper round of the hip in a Yoga position, floating like a lily on a pond; yet she is heavy with all her female weight, and the meaning is one of tremendous strength—floating up, an aspiration of physical as well as of spiritual being, a grace and gift, herself. Rodin was of the times immediately before our own (we were both born in 1908, Rodin died in 1917), and his sculptures seemed extravagantly emotional. The extravagances of nineteenth-century stricture hung over Rodin, and to express his freedom from those strictures he leaned heavily on emotion; but by this excess the way for Maillol was cleared. The distance of twenty years between himself and Maillol gave him the freedom to present, simply, his meaning.

  We also visited Zadkine, whose sculptures we had studied at an exhibit. The sculptures were as much absences as they were presences in the stone; as one walked around one of his works, it seemed not entirely abstract, but more an abstraction of human shape. It became remarkable for design and form. Primitive African statues had this effect, but at the time Zadkine’s works were startling. Zadkine received us cordially, and asked us, as had Brancusi, to wait, “after these damn people leave.” He asked us to come again, plying us with cakes and tea.

  Mont St. Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams was one of the books we had taken with us on shipboard. We visited Mont St. Michel and Chartres, staying overnight as we do on every trip we make to France, and the visit gave rise to many thoughts. The conditions of society condition the times of each artist, and each period is propelled by the fingers and the intellect of its time, which claw and climb . . . up? We say so, in the belief that humanity must have a purpose. By definition history is the record of times past, times no longer living, dead times. But for each fact gathered from that dead past how many facts were not recorded? Which ones are the key to understanding? We looked for understanding by immersing ourselve
s in the works of art; nothing speaks across cultures and across time as does the human spirit expressed in its works of art. It was through the arts of a past time that we heard its people speak. The architecture of the churches at Chartres and Mont St. Michel is a key to the period in which they were built, a key that opens their time to other works of art and to the art of other cultures of the same time. As we understood more of our own world, we moved with more assurance in the world of art. As Sherwood Anderson said, “we wanted to know if we were any good out there,” and we grew respectful of the world we found “out there,” the world of times before our own as well as the times in which we were moving. We said to ourselves, “We have to be very good to be any good out there.” Henry Adams, as guide, was a great teacher and a fellow student. George and I moved in our own times, in and out of studios: an education.

  George and I avoided joining the groups that surrounded the artists and writers we visited. We had found our beginnings in our own roots, and we had found Zukofsky, Williams, and Pound; we were twenty-two years old and full of ourselves. We wanted to observe and learn from the impressions we received as well as from the reading we were doing. Attachments beyond these would have been an encumbrance; we were searching for freedom in which to pursue our own truths. We did not claim the people we met, and I think we avoided also any claim on us. We were the “new generation” to Pound, Williams, and Brancusi, and we may have seemed to hold the future opinion of their work in our hands. They certainly respected us, and it seemed to us that they looked upon us as their heirs as we looked on them as our precursors. We respected them, but our position was different from those who were expatriates. We were thoroughly children of the United States, and we intended no other allegiance. We claimed the United States, but since our education had been interrupted when we met we intended this traveling to be our education. It must be remembered that we were always two; we learned from reading and from what we saw, but conversation never ceases between us, and our critical views of our elders kept us from depending on them for our daily intellectual sustenance. We made our visits brief, but discussion of these visits was long, sometimes life-long; we have discussed and discussed again in the light of learning more about what we had already concluded. Our rising concern with politics made us more anxious, especially concerning Pound’s reference to “The Boss,” Mussolini. He also disclosed that he did not understand that the term “The Boss” is not attractive to American workers.

  Pound wrote that he’d be in Paris; we were to meet at a restaurant in Rue de l’Odéon. We had to tell him that we could not continue paying for all the expenses of printing unless a return came to us on the books, and letters from Louis indicated that no money would return. Also, we had read Pound’s ABC of Economics and discussed it between ourselves; we thought it absurd. Pound wrote, “When I gather chestnuts on the hills of Rapallo I step outside the Capitalist system”—Pound trying to circumvent Marx, Pound who couldn’t have read Marx and hold the views he aired. Pound, we knew, lived on income derived through capitalism, and without confronting capitalism he was trying to change the system, proposing as an example his grandfather’s system of scrip issued to workers for trade at his grandfather’s store. To us this seemed to be the company store of the fur-traders or the tenant-farm system of our southern states, in which workers are compelled to trade at the company store at the trader’s or the owner’s prices. Perhaps Pound could not think clearly about economics; at any rate, we could not agree to publish the book.

  In Berkeley in the 1960s we attended a production of Pound’s Villon lavishly mounted. In a prologue, excerpts from Pound’s works were read by two actors outside the curtain, declaiming dramatically Pound’s poetry and including the anti-Semitic curses and indecent language blacked out in the Faber and Faber and New Directions editions of Pound’s works. George walked out of the auditorium; the usher, a girl student, said, “Sir, if you go out now I can’t let you in again until the intermission.”

  “I have to kill those actors if I don’t leave,” he replied, “and I think perhaps that would be wrong.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps,” she said.

  The Villon itself was attractive, and at moments it was beautiful, especially in a lovely duet. We never found out who made that decision to include Pound’s invective—someone with his or her own anti-Semitic hates, no doubt. George says, “Every poet who ever talked to Pound or corresponded with Pound or read him has reason to have loved him; though the madness was real, it was not in him, it seemed—but somehow there.”

  “The Boss,” Pound said, “The Boss,” with awe translating “Il Duce.” It was the sudden intrusion of a madness, for no man has ever been more pure or more generous than Pound.

  The year that we lived in the countryside at Le Beausset we had received a subscription to Time magazine. We had never read a newspaper every day and had paid little attention to economics or to politics, but we read Time magazine each week and discussed what we read. We were shocked and aghast at the schemes carried out in the last year of Hoover’s administration—food was being dumped while people starved. Although we were far from the United States, we had perhaps the advantage of that distance, and our friends the butcher and the hotel-keeper had been educating us. We were innocent of preconceived views, and we looked on at poverty in France, at children so thin and tubercular that they were almost transparent, and our minds began to dwell on politics. Our education was conducted each week by Time.

  George’s father left us a small car that we were to bring back to the States when we came home. It had a removable top, and we could ride along; it was almost like riding in the cart with Pom-Pon, the difference being that we no longer conversed with everyone we met on the road. However, we made friends in Paris with students, mostly Americans, who were of our own generation.

  Sylvia Beach’s book store in Paris had a lending library, and I borrowed Trotsky’s History of the Soviet Union, which George and I both read. At first political ideas had seemed to concern others and not George or me, but with Jewish refugees pouring into Paris from Germany in 1932, I could not help seeing their distress and feeling the threat to us, too. I had to try to understand the politics that were affecting events all around us.

  Among our new acquaintances in Paris was a young woman doctor, Eva Klein, who because of her presentiment of Hitler’s horror was an early refugee. She had opened a summer camp for Jewish refugee children in Paris. Through her and her mate Dan, an American medical student, we met her circle of acquaintances among the refugees and had our first experience of the life of refugees. She took us to a party of White Russian refugees from the 1917 revolution in Russia; here we met a Russian prince, a nervous man who had a sort of tic of shuffling used matches in an empty match-box. George asked him, “What do you think of the results of the Revolution in your country?”

  “I would be a traitor to all I was born to if I said a good word for it,” he replied. At this same party Chaliapin, the singer, arrived in a magnificent full-length black coat, and as he swept it off and into the hands of a servant, I saw that it was lined with sable.

  One Sunday we went into the country with Eva and Dan and stopped at the country house of some of her Russian friends. We were admitted by a servant and shown into a parlor to wait; it was a damp, cold, cheerless habitation. Eva sniffed and said, “Smells like goldfish pee.”

  Dancing in the park one night to the music of a wind-up phonograph, we stopped dancing and were leaping back and forth over a small iron railing beside the road in the Bois de Boulogne. As I vaulted, my feet slipped on the dew-wet grass, and I hit my head on the iron railing. In no time I was covered with blood, and our two doctor friends directed George to a nearby hospital. Dan rushed into the emergency room, washed up, and was treating my wound before the bewildered nurse in charge could forbid him. George was left standing after having driven us all there; no one was watching, but we heard a thud—Eva looked around and saw George l
ying unconscious on the floor.

  Before our return to the United States, we made a trip to Venice and to Florence to visit museums and to see a little of a country other than France. In the Piazza San Marco, we were suddenly surrounded by Black Shirts pouring into the Piazza from all the entrances so fast that we could not escape. We were pinned against the monument at the center of the Piazza by the press of the crowd, crying, “Il Duce—pericolo del morte.” Mussolini’s life had been threatened, and we were trapped in this sudden, impressive demonstration. We saw no differences of expression on the faces of the young men, only a blind fanaticism, in ecstasy and worship of Il Duce.

  Roosevelt had been elected President of the United States in November 1932, and in that winter the Blue Eagle was introduced in the States. Blue Eagle posters were pictured on the front pages of Parisian newspapers, and the military-looking symbol frightened us. We were afraid it meant that fascism was rising in the United States too. Germans in Venice, military men, had said to me as they passed, “Guten morgen mein Taube.”

  It was 1933, and the next war was ominously looming. We could feel more than we could understand of the threat to Jews, to artists, to all freedoms. I was determined that fascism was not going to strike this pigeon! We saw Jews, the lucky ones who had fled early. Born in Germany, they had been citizens, but they were now threatened, bewildered people who did not yet know the worst that was still in abeyance. We began to understand that this threat was portentous for us as well. We returned to Paris and took passage on the first ship home. We had to get home to see what had happened in the two years that we had spent out of our own country.

  Eva and Dan came to New York soon after we had returned, and we shared an apartment, a “railroad flat” on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights. All of us were gone from the apartment all day—Dan to work at the Rockefeller Institute and Eva to study for the exams which would qualify her in her second change of country as a doctor. Sharing a living place became our style of living for the following ten years or more. We did not make a rigid system for this sharing; it was conducted very simply, with a piece of paper hung in the kitchen on which each one who spent money wrote down what had been spent. We found it a cheaper way to rent a much bigger and better apartment, we could afford to pay someone to clean the place, and each couple had living rooms and sleeping rooms apart. We shared the kitchen and the cooking duties, and of course we were in agreement as to the amounts to be spent on food, entertainment, etc. I found it a desirable way to live during the years that we were both working, and later, when we had a child, we often shared households in order to extend our family group and to have another child in the group for the sake of our only child.