Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  New York City

  1933–1937

  The people I see and talk to, the ways they earn their livings, the children I watch, the courting customs, the ways of parents with their children are all to me learning, and I re-evaluate my own ways and my country’s ways every time I travel. It is not comfort, ease, or previous knowledge that takes me traveling; traveling is never as comfortable as being at home, and I am thrown out of my accustomed style and habits on meeting situations and people for whom I have no preparation. I think I go traveling in order to be jostled and jolted and confronted with the necessity of thinking faster to meet fast-changing occurrences. 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. It is culturation simply to gain insight to yet one more country or city I never saw before; if I do not learn it well, at least I meet it freshly at the moment I confront it.

  In France in 1930, from the art of the Louvre, paintings speaking out of different times, from the streets of Paris which make their patterns and take their names from the earliest use the ancients gave them, from a cafe for writers, tourists, artists, or students, we looked on and tried to absorb the meaning to us of a culture which accepted living artists, writers and students into the social fabric with a freedom we had searched for in the United States and had not found. I think I travel to ask the questions which are hard to formulate about one’s own times because one is in the midst, at home, of all that one has seen so often that one does not receive the jolt that might confront one with the uncomfortable but important question. Not with answers—answers are not possible for one’s own times and in one’s own place. The answer only becomes obvious after time has passed, and we can see, if we have survived it, the predicament that we have passed through.

  In Paris the Impressionists were not yet all dead; in 1930 even their art was not yet in the old established museums, and we went to a private gallery to see Picasso’s latest show. I noticed Picasso himself watching us to see our reactions to his paintings, which were the first I had seen of women distorted into their social and emotional meanings, beyond the portraits of previous times. Meanings which were painful to accept I later found to be profound class judgments and beautiful in new ways, in their colors and design. After seeing these portraits, women on beaches and bourgeois women in cafes had a different meaning, in which Picasso had caught and held them. His contribution of fifty years as a painter, most of which time I have been alive, has put him on a list of those who will speak for us to a future time.

  Apprehension mixed with elation as we disembarked at Baltimore and began the drive to New York City. As we approached the first stoplight, grown men, respectable men—our fathers—stepped forward to ask for a nickel, rag in hand to wipe our windshield. This ritual was repeated every time we paused, until we felt we were in a nightmare, our fathers impoverished.

  Manhattan loomed across the New Jersey flats; it grew into pinnacles as sunset lit the windows, and we entered the long tunnel under the Hudson River. In Brooklyn we rented an apartment on Willow Street, the first of many apartments we have lived in at one time or another in that same neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights.

  Zukofsky, the slender dark young man, sloping along on his long stalk-like legs, head forward, shoulders hunched, a little close-visored cap on his head . . . Louis so delicate I didn’t think he’d live out five more years, Louis in my mind associated with his own Mantis . . . but as his long life has proven, Louis is hardy, more hardy than we knew. He has survived with Celia, refusing the attentions of the young who have come admiring him and his place in poetry. He survives, perhaps strengthened by his bitterness and feeling that he must be the only poet or he will not accept acclaim. Louis had not been to Europe; he had only corresponded with Pound, and I think it was Tibor Serly who spoke to us of the importance of Louis’ going to visit Pound. The problem was that Louis had no money; the trip required that Louis’ friends help to pay his way. Somehow this was done, and several of us made contributions; Williams, Serly, George and I bore the expenses of traveling, and Pound and Bunting provided housing and meals once Louis was in Rapallo.

  Lorine Niedecker, a student of Louis’ at the University of Wisconsin, followed him to New York; we invited her to dinner, and after waiting for her until long after dinner-time, we ate and were ready for bed when a timid knock at the door announced Lorine. “What happened to you?” we asked.

  “I got on the subway, and I didn’t know where to get off, so I rode to the end of the line and back.”

  “Why didn’t you ask someone?”

  “I didn’t see anyone to ask.”

  New York was overwhelming, and she was alone, a tiny, timid small-town girl. She escaped the city and returned to Wisconsin. Years later we began to see her poems, poems which described her life; she chose a way of hard physical work, and her poetry emerged from a tiny life. From Wisconsin came perfect small gems of poetry written out of her survival, from the crevices of her life, that seeped out into poems.

  When Louis went for a passport for his trip, he had to get a copy of his birth certificate, which had his name as Salikovsky. The certificate had been made out by a midwife who probably did not know English, and she may have unintentionally misspelled Zukofsky, but Louis was understandably upset. Misspellings happened often enough in immigration or in birth records, but it was a blow to Louis’ identity, and he was intent on setting the record straight; he finally got his passport in his correct name, Zukofsky.

  Walking with Louis when Discrete Series was in manuscript, George was discussing it with him before showing it to anyone else. Louis turned and with a quizzical expression asked George, “Do you prefer your poetry to mine?”

  “Yes,” answered George, and the friendship was at a breaking point.

  George gave a copy of the manuscript of Discrete Series to Charles Reznikoff, who gravely discussed it the next time we were together. Charles pointed to the lines inside quotation marks, “‘O city ladies.’” “Now this,” said Charles, “is the only line that sings.”

  George also sent a copy of the manuscript to Ezra Pound, who replied with a gift: the foreword. “. . . I salute a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man’s sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man’s books. [signed] Ezra Pound.”

  George’s father (also named George) was accosted one day in 1934 in his club in San Francisco by a man who drew forth Discrete Series by George Oppen. “Here,” he said, “did you write this?”

  “No,” answered George’s father. “But my son did.” The man began to sputter. George’s father asked him, “What would you do if your son wanted to write poetry?”

  “I’d shoot the bastard.”

  The Gotham Book Mart bought some of the books; very few were sold, and the rest were stored. Politics were dominant and danger was imminent. In German neighborhoods in New York City and New Jersey, right-wing organizations were drilling in fascist military style. Father Coughlin was using the radio as it had not been used before; every Sunday, especially in working-class neighborhoods, the windows were thrown open, radios were turned up full blast, and the voice of Father Coughlin, the Radio Priest, blared divisive, vituperative anti-Semitic fascist propaganda. Many people in the United States were beginning to think about politics. We had seen the beginnings of fascism in Europe, and now we tried to understand the reasons for the collapse of the economic systems of the western world. We were reading leftist papers, and we asked Jesse Lowenthal, a friend of Louis, to take us to meet the son of Daniel de Leon, the founder of the Socialist Labor Party (S.L.P.). He explained their program: when the workers of the United States arrived at the realization that the answer to the collapse of capitalism was the socialization of the means of production, then the S.L.P. members would present themselves—well-read, educated and ready for the great day. The S.L.P. was doing nothing at the time to alleviate the
problems of the workers with whom they planned one day to ride to power. We looked on at Trotskyites who spoke publicly of revolution, and sometimes caused police attacks by their provocative tactics. The unemployed were the victims who had no desire for revolution; what they wanted and were willing to fight for if necessary were jobs, food, and rent money.

  We found ourselves suddenly involved in these events which swept over everyone. In 1929, when the stock market crashed in New York, a very few men jumped from windows when they found they were no longer rich. By 1934 despair had swept the whole population, from the richest to the poorest, as factories slowed and then stopped production, railroads had no loadings, ships had no cargo, and the country was bursting with products that no one in the United States or elsewhere had money to buy.

  The United States was lagging behind many other countries in social legislation. Welfare organizations in the 1920s, before the crash, were mostly philanthropic, and they soon ran out of money in this overwhelming emergency. People were frightened and helpless and in many parts of the country irregular ways of obtaining food seemed the only way to avoid starvation. The propaganda of fascism and the authoritarian state appealed to many who saw no other solution to the economic collapse of the United States. They had been through some hard years with President Hoover—fathers of families had been given apples to sell on street corners instead of useful work or temporary food-orders and rent money. Men felt guilty when they became unemployed and could no longer support their families, and many left their homes in despair. Young men roamed the country.

  In the last days of February and the first days of March, 1933, at the moment we returned to the United States, President Roosevelt’s first act as President was to declare a bank holiday. In effect the U.S. Treasury was empty as President Hoover went out of office. Depositors had lined up in front of banks to remove their money. Some banks went bankrupt, and the depositors’ savings were lost; with no insurance of depositors’ funds they quickly ran out of money and closed their doors. Some banks had speculated with depositors’ money, and Wall Street had sold them out; but most of them re-opened with the assurance that government would pass legislation as soon as possible to protect deposits in the banks.

  During the last days of Hoover’s presidency the depression had deepened, and in the election year of 1932, ten to twenty thousand Bonus Marchers, veterans of World War I, marched on Washington to demonstrate to President Hoover and to the nation their demand for full payment of their bonus certificates. Hoover had vetoed that legislation; there was actually not enough money in the Treasury to pay the veterans’ demands. The marchers were held on Anacostia Flats, across from Capitol Hill; they were attacked by troops with fixed bayonets and by tanks, and one was killed while several were wounded.

  In the farm country of the middle west, demonstrations prevented foreclosures of mortgages; when the sheriff arrived with an auctioneer to sell the farm and all the farmer’s possessions at auction, the neighbors gathered, and with a pre-arranged plan someone bid one dollar for the farm. “Sold!” cried the crowd, and the buyer returned the farm with ostentation to the farmer. All the items were sold the same way, and although the atmosphere seemed festive, the farmers were united and the authorities did not use force. Farmers were tenacious in their hold on their land, they did not intend to be thrown off it, and farm organizations grew apace.

  My family in Grants Pass grew closer together during the Depression. At Christmas time they cut trees which they took to San Francisco to sell, and later, as the Depression eased, two brothers continued to cut and sell Christmas trees and to enlarge the project until it could support one family well. Noel then dropped this work and went to work in the lumber industry, piling logs on the big rigs that took the fir logs down to the sawmills. It was dangerous work, and although my brother was a strong man, it exhausted him utterly by day’s end. I asked him once, “Why?”

  He replied, “A test of manhood.”

  My mother spent a couple of years during the Depression running a nursing home. Paul was bitterly disappointed in himself, and his wife Julia and his children were prisoners of his desperation; they moved to the woods, where he and Julia could feed their large family by hunting and by a big garden, which in Oregon can be grown year round. In 1934 George and I and June, George’s younger sister, visited them. They lived at the end of the road, deep in forest, with no neighbors. Business in Grants Pass had come to a standstill, and my father’s store had gone bankrupt; all the lumber mills had closed. Paul and George went hunting, although it was not hunting season. George said afterwards, “We stood at the top of a ridge, and I said to Paul, ‘But what if the warden is around?’ Paul replied with a sweep of his arm, ‘Do you think a warden would be damn-fool enough to walk across one of those valleys?’” We ate fresh venison and garden vegetables, and sometimes Paul sat and played his clarinet or his saxophone. His fingers were so hardened by rough work that they were no longer suited to the instruments, but he still played. Noel was operating a gambling place in Grants Pass. He always gambled, and he always had money. The speakeasy was in an inconspicuous house in a back street. We danced a few dances and tried the gambling, but we were wary of the bootleg gin.

  Before his inauguration, Roosevelt proposed that the Blue Eagle symbol on posters be displayed by employers who pledged to comply with him in a promise to keep wages at their previous levels in an attempt to maintain the slipping economy. It was this same Blue Eagle on the front pages of newspapers in Europe that had seemed to us a symbol of possible military significance and had precipitated our return from Europe.

  We spent the summer of 1934 in a visit to Mexico with our friends Jack and Nellie from Berkeley. Mexico was the first undeveloped country we had seen, and the steps toward socialization which they had taken seemed an effective way to develop their country. The ten-year-old boys were the first educated generation, and they joyfully fulfilled the responsibilities of being literate. In the square in Taxco, an English lady with a wide shade hat and her watercolor pad in her lap asked a small boy to pose for her. He held up his thumb and forefinger, a little space between them—“Momentito,” it meant, I’ll be right back. He returned with his watercolor box on his thumb, and he sat for her while he sketched her on his own pad of paper. All the male children of Taxco were artists; Kitagawa, a Japanese artist living in Taxco, helped them to make their own watercolor boxes from gasoline tins. They made their own colors and he gave them brushes. The boy in the square took us to see an exhibit of their works; I still have a program of this show, and the work was beautiful child-art. Kitagawa was concerned that all the boys of the town were artists, and he asked us, “What will become of such a town?” We met these competent children in the public markets, in the streets, in the plazas, beside the adults, helping in any dealings requiring reading, writing, or arithmetic. Children guided us, and they were both avid learners and teachers—neither shy nor bold, they were responsible and proud of their country with a new pride. They were the generation that was taking Mexico from colonialism and “peonage” into equality of nationhood.

  We too were learning as we saw the ideas of socialism applied in a poverty-stricken nation. We saw nationalization of oil, railroads, and public education; welfare laws that applied to the whole family of the worker; freeing of fallow land held by absentee landlords to give it to impoverished landless peasants, who formed “ejidos,” a form of traditional commune, to improve agriculture and to plant forests in a country that had been bereft of its trees. We admired Cárdenas, the President of Mexico, and we observed that Mexico was coming to a new life. I think it is the only time that artists have been the principal carriers of the ideas of a revolution. Rivera, Orozco, and Siquieras were political artists whose murals covered walls of government, schools, and public courtyards. Hundreds of walls were entirely covered with the message to the people of Mexico of the country’s struggles. In the public places in Mexico City, after years of exclusion under
the Porfirio Diaz regime, peones walked in their traditional white clothes past the murals, stopping until they understood what they saw in the murals. The pictures portrayed the whole pharmacopoeia of Mexico, with the foods which were made available to the rest of the world when this continent was first discovered. Mexico, a gleaming white city such as the conquistadores had not seen before, was also pictured in the murals. The peones saw foreigners also examining with respect the record of Mexico and her revolution.

  We went to California on our return from Mexico. In San Francisco in 1934 a general strike had been called by the Longshoremen’s Union, and San Francisco’s upper classes were in an exaggerated state of fear. Some had left town, others barricaded themselves in their homes with quantities of food. Gangs of strike-breakers were organized on the Berkeley campus, to break up sympathy meetings and try to frighten families of workers. But on the day we entered San Francisco the bay was quiet—not a ship moved.