Mind
of Babyhood
when you’d let the faces
crack & mock
& yak & change
& go mad utterly
in your night
firstmind
reveries
talking about the mind
The endless Not Invisible
Madness Rioting
Everywhere
—from “17th Chorus”
You’ve got here a “mental” sound as in
A bubble pop, a foam snit
Time on a Bat—growl of truck.
which also has terrific consonant mantra properties.
The glories of simultaneity explode all over the text. How can Lester Young in eternity, Cleopatra’s knot, Rabelais, Marco Polo & his Venetian genitals, Charlie Chaplin, Joe McCarthy, Charlie Parker, various friends & family, and Buddha co-exist? They do so in the mind of the poet.
What I appreciated as a young teen girl growing up on MacDougal Street in Manhattan’s West Village was this poem’s particular accessibility. Its obvious relationship to jazz, to Dharma (I was seriously starting to read Buddhist texts at my Quaker high school Friends Seminary), to smoking pot (a hot experience & topic at the time). And how it was delineated by small notebook page. Perfect form/content marriage. I was writing shapely (goofy?) poems which had a look of e.e. cummings. But I wanted to be as romantic as Keats and Yeats with the cosmic consciousness of Whitman. These very tangible “Beat” literary poets were now walking my streets (Gregory Corso—quintessential poète maudit— lived just several blocks away on Bleecker Street), alive & in the world I too inhabited doing things I was doing. My friend Martin Hersey, son of the novelist John Hersey, was wandering around with a well-worn copy of Naked Lunch in his guitar case. I travelled to Greece & Egypt by the time I was 18, hitching around, sleeping on freighter-boats. 20 years old I caught a ride to the West Coast to the Berkeley Poetry Conference and then Lewis Warsh & I hitched to Mexico under false IDs (being underage) later that summer after founding our magazine Angel Hair at a Robert Duncan reading. One thinks of influence. The work? The life? I took a vow at Berkeley to dedicate my life to poetry the sangha (spiritual community) of poets.
Kerouac was in stride poetically with many of the writers—the consociates—of his own time, not just his particular buddies. Certainly his companions were conducting some extremely outrageous experiments themselves. Burroughs’s jump cuts, Ginsberg’s cosmic adjectives—wanting to get all the details in—Gregory Corso’s subtle autodidactic troubadour finesse, Gary Snyder’s Buddhist thinking & content. And the idea of capturing the sound of the physical world (like Gertrude Stein wanting to get the rhythms of her dog lapping milk). Synesthesia. Kinesthesia. Mix of senses. A saw, a hammer—rip rap. But think, also, of Frank O’Hara’s poetics statement “Personism,” as a comparable poetics. The poem as a phone call. Think of endless rapping with Friends. How he wanted to get Neal Cassady’s vocal rhythms down, Lucian Carr’s etc. And also a jaunty persona as in Frank O’Hara poems, who also names his world. Places, people, things. Duncan & Olson’s composition by field. Projective verse. Even Williams’s “No ideas but in things.” All this was in the air. And the example of Gertrude Stein (mentioned in Mexico City Blues) who also followed the grammar of her own mind.
Technically, aside from the phenomenal legacy of the prose, we have Poems as Poems—San Francisco Blues, Mexico City Blues, Book of Haikus, Poems All Sizes. The poems as poems. That look feel are defined as such. Pome: If I don’t use the cork/I may spill the wine/ But if I do? The insistent pitch of the blues poems.
Mexico City Bop
I got the huck bop
I got the floogle mock
I got the thiri chiribim
bitchy bitchy bitchy
batch batch
Chippely bop
Noise like that
Like fallin off porches
Of Tenement Petersburg
Russia Chicago O Yay.
*
Mr Beggar & Mrs Davy—
Looney and CRUNEY,
I made a poem out of it,
Haven’t smoked Luney
& Cruney
In a Long Time.
Dem egges & dem dem
Dere bacons, baby,
If you only lay that
down on a trumpet
’Lay that down
solid brother
’Bout all dem
bacon & eggs
Ya gotta be able
to lay it down
solid—
All that luney
& fruney
As an active reader of classic novels, I always identified with the (mostly male) protagonists. I’ve talked to other women writers of my generation about this. Yes, we went with the hero. We were classic “puer” types—wanting the picaresque freedom the youths had. A kind of artistic bisexuality? You could say something about Kerouac’s stance as American male born 1922 in his life & in his novels & how that tugged on the particular heartstrings of understanding (maternal) women, the fruition of his generation’s identity problems around being soldiers (warriors) & all the attendant strands of his karmic stream adding up to the solid man, poet, writer, battling the expectation of whatever that could be in some eyes. Heroic? Certainly. So that was a lure. And he looked like a movie star! Normal, athletic, well built, handsome, smart. And from such & such a family that he loved so deeply, loyally, the underdog class thing had sentimental appeal. His language was Quebecois & working Massachusetts, and all the types & personalities around him fed that sound. But don’t forget he devoured literature, he was a true intellectual, thinking, thinking. He was extremely well read as an early letter to Elbert Lenrow (see Kerouac’s Selected Letters, 1940-1956, edited by Ann Charters, Penguin, 1995) indicates. Also the dominant outrider culture of the time: black jazz, scat singing. He was empathetic, symbiotic. But more than that Kerouac came through as a witness, a cosmic common denominator, one who would take the whole ride and then survive and tell you what it was like. And loving every minute of the telling. Propelled by an unnatural gift & original poetic idea to follow the grammar of his own mind & minds of others, a son of Gertrude Stein! Like the Tibetan “delog” who dies, travels & comes back to life to tell you what he or she “saw.” The shaman’s or poet’s call & duty. Because he took a lot “on,” Kerouac did.
He loved “scatting.” With a nod toward black improvisational music, he made amateur recordings of himself scatting with Neal Cassady & John Clellon Holmes. Holmes had a record-making machine where you could record your voice directly onto vinyl. He wrote his improvisations down as “Blues.” He read poems to Frank Sinatra crooning on the radio. He was drawn to this form for a number of reasons—he liked the spontaneous approach. He intended these blues poems to be heard, preferably with a jazz background, and made recordings for Verve & Hanover in 1958 & 1959. He performed with Zoot Sims & Al Cohn on one recording, with Steve Allen at piano on another. These now seem remarkable & unique auditory adventures. I could feel my own yearning toward performance (mixing poetry and music) back then. Composer/ musician David Amram who worked with Kerouac & Allen Ginsberg, others, became a close friend in 1962 (I was still in high school) & he’d take me around to some of the clubs. I met painter Larry Rivers at the Five Spot, another hipster linked to the poets. My former sister-in-law married Steve Lacy & I used to see Thelonious Monk at their loft. My mother was a nut for Mingus & Lacy. We listened to their music.
In “The Origins of Joy in Poetry” Kerouac conjures the new Zen-Lunacy. He speaks of the ORAL, of the exciting new poets like Lamantia and Whalen: They SING They SWING. “It is diametrically opposed to the Eliot shot, who so dismally advises his dreary negative rules like the objective correlative, etc. which is just a lot of constipation and ultimately emasculation of the pure masculine urge to freely sing.”
He speaks of the “mental discipline typified by the haiku … , that is, the discipline of pointing things out directly, purely
, concretely, no abstractions or explanations, wham wham the true blue song of man.”
So his poetics so sensible in my own sensibility are clear and traceable in his letters, exchanges, explications, responses. You only have to read him aloud to get the brilliant oral torque & command. Although I never met the man he was everywhere in my immediate surroundings, and still haunts the premises, a holy ghost.
Edith Wharton. 1905. The Granger Collection, New York.
Edith Wharton:
A Mole in the House of the Modern
Lynne Tillman
EDITH WHARTON’S PASSION FOR architecture was foundational, evidenced by her very first book, The Decoration of Houses, a non-fiction. Wharton disdained the merely decorative in rooms and buildings, she disdained it in her fiction. Her writing is severe, deliberate in its attacks and restraints, and lives in every detail and in the structure. Wharton’s novels and stories move from small moments to big ones (she manages to merge the two), from openness of opportunity and hope to inhibition and tragic limitation, from life’s transitory pleasures and possibilities to its dull and sharp pains and immobilizations. Traps and entrapment, psychological and societal, life’s dead ends become the anxious terminals for Wharton’s literary search for freedom and pleasure. In her book, pleasure is freedom’s affect.
The architect Wharton is always conscious of the larger structure, with her meaning central in each scene. She meticulously furnishes a room, so that all the pieces and lines in it function as emotional or psychological props, conditions or obstacles. Like cages or containers, her interiors keep characters in a place, often an internalized place. They enter rooms, meet, sit, talk, then Wharton lets them find the walls, the limits. She observes them in houses or on the street in chance meetings, and they fix each other—the gaze is her métier—to a moment in time, a truth (about the other or themselves), to a seat in the social theater. Everything that happens happens with effect, building her edifice.
Wharton selected her words with a scalpel, as if with or without them her patient would live, die; she was precise in her renderings, otherwise the construction might fall, and other such metaphors. Her writing isn’t ever labored, though. Yet nothing’s simple, or simply an object, and never just an ornament. The ornament is redolent and may even be causal.
Think of “The Bunner Sisters,” the poor women whose fate hung on the repair of a timepiece. A twisted tale, but then Wharton is perverse, and sophisticated and surprising in her perverseness. Her version of the exchange of women among men might be “The Other Two.” Mr. Waythorn meets, not by choice, his bride’s two former husbands, men he didn’t really know about but who are now in his life (have been in his wife), and whose existence confounds his sense of right, order, possession. At the story’s end, Waythorn arrives home and finds the other two there. His wife, charming, composed, serves them tea. “She dropped into her low chair by the tea table, and the two visitors, as if drawn by her smile, advanced to receive the cups she held out. She glanced about for Waythorn, and he took the third cup with a laugh.” End of story. She’s in a lowly position, a vessel, the third cup, but he’s the third cup too. If who he is is what he possesses, the joke’s on him. He grasps that.
Wharton’s stately, measured rhythms let the reader linger over a sentence, then move along, languidly. One may be stopped dead by some piece of psychological astuteness, a blunt idea, by brutal clarity, or staggered by an almost excessive, because perfect, image. Slowly, Wharton draws beautiful portraits, deceptive pictures. (I sometimes wonder if Wharton ever felt rushed by anything, then I remember Morton Fullerton and her love letters to him, that rush late in her life.) Beautiful language serves—like tea, an elegant service—ironic and difficult ends. It lures one into a network of sinister complications and, transformed, beauty leads to dreariness and viciousness. The reader will be torn by the loss of that plenitude, by failure, by hopelessness.
But Wharton is economical about elegance, stringent about lustiness, display, every embellishment. Never extravagant. Maybe it’s because she understood position and space, knew she didn’t really have much room, no room for profligacy. She couldn’t run from reality, even if she wanted to (and I think she did), so she had no room to waste, certainly no words to waste. The inessential might obscure the clarity she sought. She wouldn’t let herself go, let her writing go. She understood the danger, she understood any form of complicity. Her often privileged protagonists fatally conspire with society against themselves, become common prey to its dictates, helpless to disown or resist what they despise in themselves and it. Wharton was profoundly aware that, seen by others, she was free to do what she pleased, a privileged woman dangling the world on a rich string. And wrote, perhaps explained, in The House of Mirth, “She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”
Architecture articulates space, the movement within walls and without them, delineates the relationships of the built to the unbuilt and surroundings. Wharton’s prose makes its own space. Her ideas were modern—she wanted to clear the house of nineteenth-century vestiges, stuffed chairs and stuffed shirts, to question conventions of all sorts, numbing traditions, but she was not a card-carrying modernist. Wharton was skeptical about the new, not positive that progress was progress, not sanguine about the future or the joys of speed and flight, as the Futurists were. She took off and looked back over her shoulder at the past. (Maybe she was presciently postmodern.) She doesn’t fit comfortably into the modernist canon.
It’s one of those uncanny pieces of fate—less colloquially, historical overdetermination—that her reputation, her literary place, is inflected not just by her idiosyncratic relationship to modernism but also by three biographical facts: she was female, upper class and Henry James’s younger friend. Not mentioning James in relation to her is not mentioning the naked emperor in the room which she did not design. Her critical reputation stands mostly in his large shadow. (Her primary biographer R.W. B. Lewis’s first sentence in his introduction to The House of Mirth begins “Henry James … ”) Few U.S. writers who are women make it, as the song goes, to standing in the shadows of love, critical love. The ironist Wharton might have appreciated, in her perverse way, the secondary or minor position. (Perhaps in the way Deleuze and Guattari appreciate minor literature.) Ironically, undidactically, Wharton teaches that separate isn’t equal; difference shouldn’t be but usually is hierarchical, and change in any establishment or tradition is, like her sentences, slow.
William Faulkner. Photograph by Martin Dain. Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi.
The Sound of the Fury:
Faulkner’s Aerial Surf
Paul West
I.
GLADLY MYTHIC FROM HIS early days, William Faulkner became my Palladium: a mustachioed equivalent of the five-foot Barbie doll of Pallas made by Athene and kept in the citadel at Troy. On this Temple Drake of a girl with her legs squeezed tight together, and equipped with spear and distaff, the safety and well-being of Troy depended. She personified both virginity and war or, say, the military impenetrability of Troy itself. So long as Troy held on to this statue, Troy could not be taken; but, once Odysseus and Diomede, as some tales have it, had found the underground path into the citadel and seized the Palladium, Troy could be had, even if only by treachery. And it was, plundered and destroyed. My own cranky version of this myth has to do with how minimalists and their ilk, through a not so underground way, have plundered Faulkner and all he stands for, thus suburbanizing the American fiction of our time.
Such is one way of recapturing Palladian Faulkner from the days when my image of America was one of Benny Goodman, king of swing, rolled into one with Count Basie and Woody Herman. I no sooner read those Chatto and Windus pocket Faulkners in their blue and gold uniform than I was hooked, and the face of America was his, no longer that of the kings of swing. I began, I think, with Intruder in the Dust,
an odd overture, followed by Wild Palms and Old Man in one volume, alternating, and then The Sound and the Fury. I must have been eighteen because Intruder came out in 1948, and I now wonder what a little under-financed public library in an obscure coal-mining town bang in the middle of the Sitwell Derbyshire estate was doing with a hot-off-the-press Faulkner, who, from what I knew, was nowhere nearly as well established as Hemingway, although his stature increased like my physical one over the forties, even if not in France for he had always been revered in that educated country. The name of our exotic female librarian was Joyce Bramhall. Why was she accumulating Faulkner on his own shelf (by 1948 some ten volumes)? I see her now, leggy, with slightly swollen belly in a tweed skirt, her mouth a gash of scarlet, her glasses thick and opaque as if some tart secret infected the lenses. Her nails flashed scarlet too, her stiletto heels were huge, tottery and sleek. Was she La Belle Dame sans Something? A corncob woman? On I read, born addict who had at last found a drug more potent by far than swing. Only four years later I was reading Requiem for a Nun in New York City, a young Hamlet (my nickname then and there) at Columbia sent to roam Manhattan because I knew too much to be in William York Tindall’s elementary graduate seminar, as he himself described it.
Thanks to Faulkner, to the very thought of him, between forty and fifty I began to feel unassailable in spite of everything. I wasn’t, of course, but I felt that way, enough to get on with my writing and to mop up like high-calorie gravy such praise as came my way. If you fix one eye on Faulkner and the other on Melville, and you remember some of what Keats said about negative capability, you can just about manage to commit the delectable autonomy known as writing for its own sake—for the glory, the rebirth, the illusion of doing what nobody has ever done before. There’s nothing more unassailable than that, even as things fall apart around you and you see the fruitflies ascending to power without composing so much as a paragraph. Vary the image a bit, amassing the bestiary of the foul, and you can add Zola’s toad of disgust, which he said you have to swallow every morning before getting on with the work. Swallow it, note the hegemony of the fruitflies, and indeed the demise of yet another noble unicorn gone to roost in Paris or now plying trade on Wall Street, and you then become clear enough to write for the next few hours as if the world were waiting for your sun to rise and would do nothing serious without you. That’s the feeling, the pumped-up, inspired elation that lofts you—me—from novel to novel even while the tweetie-pies of Stodge College, Oxbridge cough up some dark perilous matter and plaster it into their album of envious sorrow.
Tributes Page 12
