by Mary Oppen
Many evenings we spent playing parlor games. We also became acquainted with a family at the other end of the island in a very remote house, reached by water or by a long and primitive path through rough coral on the ridge of the island. In the summer the family lived in Connecticut, and every fall the trek to Nassau began by train and then by ship from Miami to Nassau, with many pets, children, and servants. They all came to this remote island every year. Communication to the larger island was only by their own launch, their house was indeed their castle, it was simple, but extravagantly isolated. This life was, for us, all that we had fled from when, much younger we had left San Francisco to find a life of meaning for ourselves, and we found it necessary once again to flee because this life endangered us, we lost ourselves. Perhaps we exaggerated, going to extremes to avoid this stasis, but we fled. We could not afford another winter spent in this way, the cost was too high in time-out of the life we had now to get on with, George of writing the poetry that had formed within him in twenty-five years of not writing—for me to find out what was to be my path in and around George’s writing, with some expression of my own to make a stand for myself of my own development and abilities. We had to be in control of our own lives, and now that our child was grown we could not spend more time in appeasing our remaining childhood problems. George valued New York, his roots there, his childhood, but for me it was not a place that in any way reflected my childhood, it did not arouse in me the basic childhood myths, memories and experiences out of which to build a beginning in art in some form. Going to Maine in the summers, living at Flossie Powers house began my first writing, the account of Flossie herself. I felt replenished and I understood her difficulties and the meaning of her life. In Brooklyn I had no clues, no childhood spent on city pavements to tell me about our neighbors. Even our friends in the arts were strange and mysterious, hard to understand, though I loved some of them. Charles Reznikoff especially. He took us on long walks which were like my long walks in the forests of Oregon. They were close to earth. For Charles I think the earth was formed mostly of New York City concrete out of which bloomed and blossomed the moon, the parkway trees, the bushes and blowing papers of which he made his city poetry.
After our return to Brooklyn the solution came to me. San Francisco! We were now the oldest of George’s western family, we could move there and live as we wished, without threat from his father and his way of life. Let them now watch out for us, we were now the elders. George could return as he wanted to New York on trips to keep in touch with the streets and friends there, to renew that experience as he felt he needed it.
In 1965 I flew out alone to visit Andy, our niece, and her children. As the airplane began its descent from the high Sierras my excitement grew. I sighted the bay from the southern end and I saw the salt flats lying red, purple, and shades of orange, drying salt out of this bay water, but the bay seemed shockingly smaller. I remembered a much larger body of water, and there had been no bridges. At the airport I planned to take the helicopter to Berkeley. I wanted to see more from the air, but its battery needed charging, it was not running. I engaged a taxi with some other disappointed travelers and we were driven over the new San Mateo bridge to Oakland where Andy and her little boy were waiting. We passed a few stranded old ranch properties on the east side of the bay, with old machinery rusting in the dry grass, barns tumbling, houses abandoned. The eucalyptus trees grandly over-towering the wreckage. In Berkeley I felt strange, grandmother age to all these young children of Andy’s, Andy who by her age could have been my daughter, her children, the oldest about eleven, the youngest Paul, a very little boy. My grandmother Mary may have felt like this herself, but when she arrives in the family of her children who live far away they say, “Grandma.” And I didn’t even know these children yet!
Declaration of Independence
Absurd, absurd, we were desperately searching for “the world” and they desperately tried to help us build a wall, a fortress. You were so young, so young and your legs so long, you were afraid for me, you kept taking care of me—tenderly, passionately. The jewel, you thought I was, the warrior, the infinitely precious, the vulnerable phallus. And of course you were right, are right: who but those who stand behind him are in greater danger or more helpless, than the warrior.*
He was handsome, women loved him, I never heard of a meeting between him and a woman in which he did not charm her, at least at first, depending on what she wanted her relationship with him to be. His success with women was so nearly complete that he did not notice that I was not charmed by him. I was under stress. I knew before I met him the difficulty for George in his struggle for independence from this powerful and charming father; and insidious power because it was generous and his father was witty and intelligent, as well as charming. My armor in this battle was my love for George and his love for me, and this battle was our first; it was a dangerous hazard, and one we had to meet and win.
George’s father, almost at once, rented the house next door for George’s older sister. We mentioned that we were thinking of getting a boat—George’s father found and bought for us a forty-two foot yawl, and joined the yacht club for us to use it too. (We might have rigged up a row boat with a sail, or we might have bought a twenty-foot boat.) My father-in-law was in and out of our two houses often until we had established ourselves with our friends in such a full life that he didn’t feel comfortably dominant among our student friends. Our houses overflowed on weekends with friends we hadn’t seen since we left the year before; Nellie and Jack, our most intimate friends, shared their friends with us, their friends soon were our friends too (Jack, the psychologist; Nellie, taking her degree in anthropology). We came together on the weekends to share our interests. The work we each pursued during the week piled up a need to discuss, to tell what we had been thinking during the time in which we had not been together, by the weekend we were bursting with all we wanted to share. We formed a community, and although George and I have lived in joint living arrangements at other times in our lives, this was the first and we threw ourselves into it without reserve—perhaps the threat of being engulfed in George’s father life, so near at hand, was part of our reason, for we impelled this intimacy, a protection that excluded him and his life, and in which we were strengthened—our own group in which we had status (a counter to his power), and in which we were accorded prestige and love.
My father-in-law proposed a trip up the Sacramento River on the new boat: he would bring along George’s little sister, and we would spend several days on the trip. This was his first trip on the boat, although George and I had sailed the boat and knew her quite well, and could handle her by ourselves. At The Brothers, rocks which jut up in the northern part of the bay, we stopped to fish; striped bass were running and we caught a fine big fish for our supper.
“But how will we eat it?” my father-in-law asked.
“I’ll cook it—I know how to cook,” I replied with a little scorn, and we turned eastward, sailing briskly up the river with the wind behind us and the tide pushing us along.
“Let’s anchor in the first good place we come to,” said George. “It’s almost supper time.” George said to me, “Drop the jib and I’ll round up to anchor over by the shore there, where I see a pier on the riverbank.” Coming up to anchor with the wind and the tide behind us, I stood by the anchor which hung over the bow of the boat, the chain coming up through a hole in the deck with a notch in the housing which allowed the chain to be stopped. The end of the chain was securely fastened around the mast below deck. When George yelled, “Let her go!” I picked up the anchor chain and let it slide slowly through my hands until it hit bottom. I was paying it out slowly to give the anchor more scope, when my father-in-law, impatient man, ran forward, and before my astonished eyes took the chain from my hands and began throwing it out—the boat picked up speed in the wind and in the tidal current which was now running fast, but when he tried to stop the chain from running, he could not hold it
against the boat’s weight. George yelled to his father, “Let it go, let it go, Dad, it’s fastened on the end.” But his father could not hear. George came running up and grabbed the chain too, to help his father. George’s father, taking a new hold on the chain, put his hands behind George’s hands, until it reached its end, and they could then extricate their mangled hands. George’s hands seemed to be a bloody mass; his father’s hands were injured too.
Ashore, hands bandaged in a hospital which fortunately we had found nearby, and back on our boat again. The little sister, all this time, looking on, terrified, quiet. And as I cooked the fish for our supper, both men lying in the bunks, with their helpless hands lying out beside them, I said to my father-in-law, “Do not meddle in our lives again, we will live our lives as we want to live them, not in your shadow, stay out of our lives.”
* * *
* Editor’s note: See George Oppen, The Anthropologist of Myself: A Selection from Working Papers, edited by Rachel Blau Duplessis (Eastern Michigan University, 1990).
After a Conversation with G.
(dated 12/4/75)
I say we make the choice and call that luck.
The times in which I live (G. too) are not divorced from the choices we have made. Our first break from what our families expected of us was to choose each other. Luck? or choice. The next was choosing to go hitchhiking—(I have written of this at length so here I’ll only mention it.) The choice was to escape from the somewhat fragile ties that class holds on youth in the US. We had to make that break and it was a real trauma, no question it was mostly new ground for George out of his German-Jewish, upper-class background. With my father’s death and my life in Grants Pass I had already been through most of that trauma. I was already free and I blamed my mother and my brothers for my freedom and for not realizing their own potentials. Why did I think they were not doing what they chose to do? I think now that they chose to do what they did. I think I chose to do something quite other than my family’s choices. Therefore I think I chose. I think George chose.
At each step of the way I have felt a cultural surrounding that was there or was developing in our society for me to be in—in my choices. We found a Bohemian world when we said Artist. When we found the Communists we found a world that would have rejected Bohemia, or our class backgrounds. When we returned to writing, George, in 1958, found a reception, a world that included him. His first book had not been neglected, the Beats, Duncan, Creeley had looked up Zukofsy and he had mentioned the others of that tenuous group, Objectivists. Rago, of Poetry magazine knew and remembered George’s work. Pound was a recognized poet in 1958 and George’s first book had a foreword by Pound. All this made a time and a place and an audience for George’s poetry when he began to write again.
I left the plastic arts when I understood the meaning of the Art world in New York, the hold the dealers had on that world, the role of the museum of Modern Art and the flourishing of Dada, Surrealism, Happenings, Found Art, (giant Campbell soup cans, the American flag on the seat of Levi pants, etc.). The disappearance of the real in the natural world. Of course I know that the surrealists are also real. The Art which has emerged in the last twenty years has become the Art of that period by destruction of what went before. It is hard to think that a flower, or a human face or a figure will ever be portrayed again as Rembrandt painted, nor do I think that Art should repeat what has been done. The artists of the last twenty years did make something new and that art represents the cultural period as much as it came out of it or as much as it helped to create the period: an art of alienation, a dithyrambic art, wild and boisterous Dionysian participation. For me to be an artist in the plastic arts is impossible now, it is a world I am not at home in. I am not alienated from the real.
I started to write with the rise of the Women’s movement, although I have not been active in a political way, but I fully appreciate the victories of the women. I find I have an audience and when I write I am thinking of them. I know who will appreciate what I am saying. I count on men too, but without the women’s movement my writing would not have been respected, in the first instance, enough to break through the male writing world. Again, I (we) have chosen. I have chosen to write at the time culturally prepared for me. I also helped prepare the culture. My political years still reap victories. I think that those seeds planted in the thirties have borne fruit. With the rise of the Third World whose seeds were also planted and culturally nourished we may be overcome, (I’m sure we will be swamped), by such ways do we choose. We rise, and we see the change brought about, in which we choose again. We have in our own contribution throughout our lives contributed significantly to what exists, we have no great complaints. I am happy to be writing, very pleased with the loss of shyness that took almost sixty-seven years to accomplish. I feel that my faculties are available to me and that gives me confidence, and I find my memories and my thought interesting.
“Does she think she is a legend?”
I looked up the etymology of legend: to collect, to speak. Perhaps, “One who speaks magic words.” Back to the Greek, lingo; live. Back to logos; speech, word, reason.
A young man said of Meaning a Life: “Does she think she is a legend?”
What I was writing was my autobiography, but yes, I suppose George and I are a legend. We have been here so long now that we qualify.
Yes, of course George and I are a legend—“thrown here” we have enlarged the space we and our spirits make, into a recognized place in the culture of our times. A book is a monument, a record put forward, and if it is a work of art it is the only way I know of speaking to other times than our own of what meaning is to us in our time; speaking to times to come as well as to our peers who recognize and who form a circle around us. A small thing? But the meaning is not small. The young man, though he has not yet been able to write poetry that has meaning, wants the life of a poet, but it is without the poetry that must come from within him, from his own life. His position is false, but it is, fortunately, almost impossible to arrive at poetry without the life that caused that poetry, or to write poetry out of a life only lived in order to be a poet or a writer. A poem if it has a life of its own, if it is new in the world will take on a life of its own. The human who made the poem searches to find from whence it came. I think all that one can arrive at, in the wonder of this event of a poem, is to say, it came out of my life. The poem stands by itself. It has its own position in the world as a work of art, with its own voice: this voice speaks or the poem has failed.
I am not unkind to the young man, I even found him interesting to talk to; bright, handsome, but afraid for his manhood. He is living his life in protection of that spark of manhood, this protection maybe the very thing that prevents taking the risk that a poem is, the exposure that allows the eyes and ears of the world to see into his life. Not the spark that is poetry. If he does not expose himself as an artist he is not a legend nor will he be, and attacking a legend in no matter how small a way and in no matter how small a way that legend is a contribution to the meaning of our times, does not speak well of his spirit.
Existential as defined by Simone de Beauvoir speaks of living each moment with its own import, fully, giving oneself to its meaning. Meaning for whom? Well, at least to that person who is doing the living; to feel fully the position of being human—“thrown here” out of the Void—to live, to be until the Void closes for us, that is the meaning I want for me, for me and George, for Linda, my daughter, and Alex, for those close to me, for any humans who think. To make their time here on this earth as full a living as they can—to live and to come out as well as they can.
George says Courage—that what we had was courage, true, and I think that we were courageous but I am not “being courageous.” I am being—I am, for almost any moment I can conjure, being myself, living my life as fully as I can. Sometimes I falter, sometimes we faltered and then I’d say, “Courage”; that it took courage to go on—to find a way
through to confidence in being. To live fully.
On a Dark Night
(Saint John of the Cross)
On a dark night
With love-longings aflame
Oh, unearthly adventure!
I went out without being noticed
My house being now still.
In darkness and secure
By the secret ladder
Oh, unearthly adventure!
In darkness and in ambush
My house being now still.
On that night foreknown
In secret, for no one saw me
Nor did I glance at anything
Without other light and guide
But that in my burning heart.
This guided me
More certainly than noonday light
To where he awaited me
Whom I have known so well
Where no one else appeared.
Night which itself guides
Night more lovely than the dawn
Night that itself unites
Lover with beloved
Loved in lover transformed.
On my flowering breast
Which I kept for him alone
There he stayed sleeping
And I caressed him.
Fanned by the cedars
The wind from the turret
Blew through his hair.
With his serene hand
On my wounded neck
And all my senses suspended
