American Poetry

by Bradford Morrow

  SWENSEN: But what do we mean by haunted? Is it an interior or an exterior thing? What do we want from ghosts?

  HOWE: It’s the threshold between the exterior and interior. What do they want is the question. Are the dead inside me in my voice, in my thought, or are they outside, in the landscape? The threshold is the border, the margin. Maybe all aspects of reality are continuous with one another. Peirce called his doctrine to that effect “synechism.” Ralph Barton Perry said that for William James “the idea of consciousness ‘beyond the margin’ or ‘below the threshold’ was a metaphysical hypothesis of the first importance.” The noun “threshold” contains its own psychic transition—active “thresh,” passive “hold.” In The Turn of the Screw, surely one of the greatest ghost stories ever written, the governess (who has no name) is a threshold figure. Her status is sexually and economically precarious. Ghosts and governesses are liminal figures par excellence, so are mediums. So are immigrants and their children.

  Perhaps I’m obsessed with the spirits who inhabit a place because my mother brought me up on Yeats. Before I could read, I heard “Down by the Salley Gardens” as a lullaby, and framed Cuala Press broadsides illustrated by Jack Yeats hung over my bed. Every time I move somewhere, I bring along the framed print of “Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” to hang on the wall for luck. Though the poem is untitled, the first line is printed as if it were a title, so, even for my children, the sight of those words recalls childhood and their grandmother, my Irish mother.

  I hope her pain at leaving Dublin in 1935, and then moving to Buffalo in 1938, was assuaged by his poems and plays; she knew many of them by heart, and she clung to them by reading them aloud or hanging them on the walls, as if they were windows. His poems were an escape route. But I couldn’t see through them. They marked a bond while breaking it. So there were always three dimensions—visual, textual, auditory. His writings married the spirit of melody with revolutionary principle. Waves of sound connected me, by associational syllabic magic, to an original but imaginary place that existed somewhere across water between the emphasis of sound and the emphasis of sense. I loved listening to her read. I felt my own vocabulary as something terribly mixed, at the same time hardened into glass.

  She loved Matthew Arnold’s “Scholar Gypsy” and could do heartrending recitations of “The Forsaken Merman” and Michael Drayton’s “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.” But the words echoed backward were not all sadness and regret. Her verbal wit was astonishing. She dealt her words like blades, and many people feared becoming the objects of her scorn. She was an illusionist of fact.

  In 1941, she directed a production of Comus in some rich Buffalonian’s garden, and I was cast as a water-nymph. So way back then “Sabrina fair,/ Listen where thou art sitting/ Under the glassy, cool translucent wave,” was as familiar to me as, “Rapunzel,” or “This little pig went to market.”

  “Oh, Hell, let’s be angels!” she said I said to a friend when I was five, referring to the roles we’d play in the Christmas pageant. She loved to produce and destroy meanings in the same sentence. So even if I hope I did say it, she probably made it up. These eccentric relations (authoritarian and iconoclastic, magic and mathematic, ancient and modern, serious and ludicrous, embroidered and bare) occur in Milton, Blake and Yeats (in Arnold, in spite of himself). You find similar twistings and turnings in documents left by various early Protestant splinter sects in America: Calvinists, Congregationalists, Anabaptists, Ranters, Quakers, Shakers, Sandemans, Rosicrucians, Pietists, as well as reformers, pilgrims, travelling preachers, charlatans, strolling players, mystics and imposters scattered throughout New England, Pennsylvania and New York up through the 19th century. Called away. “This way, this way—” I cling to them in my writing and teaching. Itinerantly. It’s my maternal Anglo-Irish disinheritance.

  Look at the James family. The paternal grandfather, William, was a farmer’s second son from County Cavan who arrived with next to nothing in Albany, New York in 1789. His Scotch-Irish ancestors were Presbyterian dissenters. Their father, Henry, was an unorthodox Presbyterian theology student when, on a trip to Ireland in 1837, he stopped in London and met Michael Faraday, lifetime professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution and the world’s leading authority on electricity. Faraday was a member of a splinter religious sect founded by Robert Sandeman. There were already small Utopian groups practicing Sandemanism in Connecticut, but I don’t think he ran across them here, and in the long run, Sandemanism, although attractive in its rejection of the ecclesiastical apparatus and in its sharing of material goods, had no room for the metaphysical and mystical speculation he yearned for. He found that in Swedenborgianism.

  Talking of eccentric juxtapositions, at this same period, Joseph Smith, the prophet and founder of Mormonism, was living in Ontario County, New York, practicing occult divination with seer stones and divining rods. Treasure-hunting diviners located metallic treasures in stones and then attempted to overpower guardian spirits by casting magic circles (like Comus!). They needed to be in a state of grace to achieve control over volatile metals, which may have contributed to the composition of the Book of Mormon, said to be translated by divine power from golden plates buried by the last survivor of ancient wanderers. Meanwhile, not far away, the Fox sisters were receiving messages, and Melville was writing Mardi.

  My point is that, during the ante-bellum years, scientists and philosophers were avidly questioning whether things are animate or inanimate, so it’s not surprising that this scientific experimentalism crossed with mediumship and communion with the dead. More and more, the ordinary world of material objects was shown to have invisible properties of the sort usually associated with spirits. If you could, in a rigorous, experimental way, understand the mysteries of chemistry you would understand the ultimate nature of reality, including spiritual reality. Chemistry was on the cutting edge. Peirce’s first degree was in chemistry, and he was strongly influenced by the concept of valence throughout his life.

  If you look at diagrams of mechanical apparatuses, with their wheels, ropes, pulleys, discs and charts designed for the purpose of scientifically demonstrating spiritualism, they are eerily similar to the ones that chemists used.

  Nowhere is the blending of science and religious imagination more evident than in spiritualism. You should see the plates in Spiritualism Scientifically Demonstrated, written in 1855 by Robert Hare, professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Duchamp and Yeats would have loved them. They could be bachelor apparatuses, or Ready-mades without the irony.

  As for “Brides stripped bare by bachelors even”—Kate and Margaret Fox were the most widely known mediums during the 1800s, and spiritualist enthusiasm reached a crescendo with the frenzy around them in Rochester in 1848. Scientists were always or almost always men, but mediums were usually women. Spiritualism moved to England in 1852, where, via a brief craze for table turning, it became respectable. Although the best known mediums—Mrs. Hayden, David Douglas Home and Mrs. Piper—all came to London from America, the parent Institute for Psychical Research was established in London in 1882. William James was one of the founders of the American Institute in 1885.

  Myriad phenomena and behaviors were investigated, recorded and composed in both institutes; spirit theory, table tapping, trance-mediumship, spirit-photography, fairies and vampires were hot topics, as were automatic writing, possession, hysteria and hallucination. Chemistry, poetry, folklore, psycho-pathology and psychical research met and mixed.

  William James was committed to a reconciliation of religion and science; so was Peirce, although differently. Neither would have thought the disciplines mutually exclusive. It was said of William that he was too fond of cranks. I love that about him. Peirce was one of the cranks, but he was also a trained mathematician and logician.

  Here’s a good James quotation: “We are founding here a ‘Society for Psychical Research,’ under which innocent sounding name ghosts, second sight, spiritualism
and all sorts of hobgoblins are going to be ‘investigated’ by the most high-toned and ‘cultured’ members of the community.”

  SWENSEN: Nice humor! He both veils and reveals his fear of the absurdity of it all. And thinking of The Turn of the Screw, there’s a similar, though not tongue-in-cheek, ambiguity/ambivalence beneath it. Was Henry James also active in such investigations? Or was it simply in the air?

  HOWE: I’ve been going on about William, but Henry James fits in perfectly, particularly The Turn of the Screw. There, and in other later writings, ambiguity and ambivalence extend to sentence structure, syntax, word choice, even punctuation. A great study could be done on the James brothers’ use of hyphens and dashes.

  Henry wasn’t active in psychic investigations, but both brothers were close to the Sidgwick family and their circle. Henry Sidgwick, one of the most rigorous figures in the history of British moral philosophy, was the first president of the Society for Psychical Research. He also promoted higher education for women, and his wife Eleanor was the principal of Newnham, the first women’s college at Cambridge University. He claims to have first heard the governess’ story that incited The Turn of the Screw while staying at the country house of Edward Benson, Sidgwick’s cousin and brother-in-law. During this period, experimental psychology was being developed as an ultra-scientific discipline, and William was considered a bridge between this approach and the nuttier stuff. In 1889, the International Congress of Experimental Psychology chose him to compile a census of hallucinations. The great thing about Henry’s story, published in 1898, the official birth year of both Pragmatism and Dracula, is that we’re never sure. Is it a ghost story or a study of hysteria? The Varieties of Religious Experience was written in 1901—is it meticulous science, or oddball religious philosophy?

  SWENSEN: Are Peirce’s logical tables another product of ambient spiritualism? Was he trying to get at something beyond reason with his graphs?

  HOWE: I think Peirce was trying both to get at something beyond reason and to diagram the logical structure of reality. Toward the end of his life, he wrote to Victoria Lady Welby: “These moving pictures exhibit the action of the mind in thought; they graph the dialogue between various phases of the ego. Expression and thought are one.”

  Many of his logical graphs, and also his calculations, are like poems. Some resemble concrete poetry, others prefigure drawings by Paul Klee, Agnes Martin, Robert Smithson, Hannah Darboven. Some remind me of Joseph Beuys’ drawings on paper and blackboards, or work by Artaud and Duchamp. That doesn’t make the graphs any less philosophy, mathematics and science. And, like Duchamp, Peirce was an avid chess player, but I think he felt as Poe did, that whist was superior to chess for sharpening one’s investigative skills.

  Even if some of Peirce’s manuscript notebooks and pages remind me of Duchamp’s notes in The Green Box, there is a difference. Peirce has no box. There may be numerous approaches to the disorderly collection at Houghton, but Houghton is a library to which few people are allowed access. Papers rot unseen in archives. Octavio Paz says “The Large Glass is a comic and infernal portrayal of modern love, or, to be more precise, of what modern man has made of love.” Peirce lacked Duchamp’s comic sense. He was searching for a system. Ideas were to remain true. He loved logic. He couldn’t retail it.

  SWENSEN: Your connection between Peirce and Duchamp is interesting—both based in a radical reconfiguration of space, and both going back to Mallarmé, though Duchamp more directly. Space—aesthetically, scientifically, philosophically, etc.—was in crisis at the turn of the century, and Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés is an important early instance.

  HOWE: So much attention has been paid to Mallarmé’s radical use of page space, but the idea that in late nineteenth-century America Emily Dickinson and Charles Sanders Peirce went to similar extremes in their writing practice seems unacceptable to many readers and editors here, and abroad.

  SWENSEN: Mallarmé’s work may have gotten more recognition because, compared to Dickinson and Peirce, he was less socially and artistically marginal. Unlike Peirce, he’d declared poetry as his field, and unlike Dickinson, he’d been recognized as an important writer. Perhaps this gave him more room to experiment.

  HOWE: It’s complicated. Just look at the varied meanings of “experiment.” Peirce was developing his graphs at a time when mathematical logic was being created as a discipline.

  Also, the American Civil War caused a disruption in American culture, to say the least. The Jameses, Peirce and Dickinson were all young adults during that war. It marked them, even if they didn’t fight in it. I know there were political upheavals in France during the same period, but surely they weren’t as climactic.

  SWENSEN: Actually, they were as much or more so—the revolution of 1848, the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of 1870, the Commune—and not only these events in themselves, but the fact that they were the last wave in a one-hundred-year-long series that demolished a way of life a thousand years old. Yet after a certain point, you can’t talk of horror in relative terms, and events in both the United States and France during this period passed that point.

  However, because many events in France occurred on the streets of Paris, their impact on young, innovative writers and thinkers including Mallarmé must have been enormous. And the streets themselves! Even “at peace,” they were destroyed and reconfigured by Haussmann. It’s too easy to draw parallels between social upheaval and artistic upheaval, between a disruption of daily space and a disruption of expressive space, so I won’t, but …

  HOWE: But I will. I insist on it. The Civil War is our Iliad. Four million troops took part in it. The total casualties exceeded 617,000 dead and 375,000 wounded. It was the first “modern,” “total” war in that it was a war in which the industrial potential of the victor determined the outcome. It was the first war to be photographed. Photographs of the dead, the wounded, the captured were available to everyone. There is no way of overstating this particular war’s importance to the American psyche.

  My life has been spent in the shockingly disruptive second (more than) half of the twentieth century. The fact that I was born in 1937 into what became World War II to a mother who was born in Dublin in 1905, and didn’t come to the United States until 1934, who was cut off from returning home during the world war years, and then, for the rest of her life, moved restlessly between Ireland and New England, has profoundly affected all of my writing. There is conflict and displacement in everything I write—in the way I arrange words on the page, in the way I hear and react to other languages—that I can’t edit out.

  When I was turning from painting to poetry, I remember pouring over Un Coup de dés loving the way the lines spread across facing pages, so few words to a line; it was elegant, musical, infinitely intelligent, alluring, subtle—foreign. At the same time, I first encountered Olson in the Cape Goliard edition of The Maximus Poems IV, V, VI in all its blustering, chopped nervousness—I felt an immediate shock of recognition. It was his voracious need to gather “facts,” to find something, a quotation, a place name, a date, some documentary evidence in regard to a place. To collate the collection quickly with something else without explaining the connection. Melville may have shown him the way in the “Extracts” section of Moby-Dick. There’s a nervous sense of dislocation, abbreviation, connectives made without connections. It’s there in Eliot, in Moore, in Williams, who catches it in his great essay on Poe. Recently, I read an interesting piece on Eliot by F. W. Bateson, “The Poetry of Learning,” in which he says “the ‘learning’ in Eliot’s earlier poems must be seen as an aspect of his Americanism. As scholarship, it is wide-ranging, but often superficial and inaccurate.” He called this quality “tourist erudition.”

  I discovered the essay at my local library in Guilford because I couldn’t get to Sterling Library at Yale due to a traffic jam on the highway. I was snobbishly sure I wouldn’t find any criticism there worth seriously considering, but I was wrong. And it struck me that for women of my generation,
there was usually a sense that major libraries were off-limits or out of reach in a way that has made me suffer from permanent “tourist erudition” in the academy. I wonder if late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American writers and philosophers felt the same about European culture. They wanted to be let in, to connect, rather than to remain in the tourist-position. It’s an unsettling posture. Paradoxically, in order to make connections, you need to remain outside. Even Wallace Stevens depended on postcards from abroad.

  That’s why The Large Glass is so brilliant. Paz says that Duchamp’s attitude “teaches us—although he has never undertaken to teach us anything—that the end of artistic activity is not the finished work, but freedom.” Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy says the same thing. Perhaps that’s what my mother was trying to tell me through his words. The poem is the account of a young student who leaves the university to live with the gypsies; from them he learns the art of mesmerism. Arnold based it on a passage from The Vanity of Dogmatizing, by the seventeenth-century philosopher Joseph Glanvill, sometimes called “the first mesmerist.”

  SWENSEN: Yet, displacement and its effects—“the way of arranging words on a page,” for instance, seems to me precisely a way of editing in, of increasing your raw materials, and their flexibility. That’s what Mallarmé was doing, and perhaps another reason his work attracted attention was that he announced it, contextualized it.

  He knew that he was doing something new, and furthermore, that it was time for it. In his preface to Un Coup de dés, he says it contains “nothing new except a certain distribution of space made within the reading”—the redistribution of space was his conscious goal. Later, he remarks, “In my work, which has no precedent …” It was a highly intentional and theorized experiment, impelled by both a radical philosophy of aesthetics and an acute perception of his time.

  He was also clear about why he did it—to move toward a fusion of sequential perception and simultaneous perception—to emphasize both temporal and spatial apprehension at once. And to fully engage both eye and ear. As a result, he pushed poetry in two disparate directions—toward visual art and toward musical performance. He recognized their inherent affinity, and that poetry is their common denominator.