Today it seems unfashionable—sadly—to love and cherish the forebears of the Western artistic tradition—whoever you want to say those forebears are. Wide, sweeping embraces and deep public confessions of love for dead artists (or your fellow living human kind, for that matter) ring false to many. Better to strike ironic, detached stances and keep said cards of adoration close to the vest. Many avoid real acknowledgment; maintain hard, solemn, unconnected poses. But for Agee, being an artist meant singing love songs to those he held in highest esteem (like Bob Dylan lovingly replicating the intonations of Woody Guthrie): Jesus Christ, of course, but also Beethoven (there’s a famous story of Agee playing blasting music in his office), Dostoevsky and Van Gogh, to name a few. The dedication to his collection of poetry, Permit Me Voyage (1934), which won the Yale Younger Poets Award, is a fantastic, eight-page song to those artists and thinkers—and others, including God—to whom Agee felt in debt. It is Agee’s deep humility and respect, his bowing down, his admission, that one cherishes: “Have mercy upon us therefore, O deep God of the void, spare this race in this your earth still in our free choice: who will turn to you, and again fail you, and once more turn as ever we have done. And make the eyes of our hearts, and the voice of our hearts in speech, honest and lovely within the fences of our nature, and a little clear.” Believers and nonbelievers, should, with a willing suspension of nit-picking and overall concern for the canon, be able to see that Agee’s dedication is, simply, beautiful in its supplication to the ideals of art.
In the end, Agee’s work seems to be about the limits of verbal felicity (as was, say, Beckett’s). It isn’t enough to be good with words, to sing with exciting dexterity or even to respect the material; without a moral conundrum at the center—that conundrum being what art is—you’re only left with interesting fluff. Art is the question, Agee says in his work, not the answer.
Kenneth Patchen:
“Hiya, Ken Babe, What’s the Bad Word for Today?”
Jonathan Williams
THEY’VE NEVER MADE a movie about Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972). Now they’re too late. The only guy who could play him, Robert Mitchum, has just died. He had the voice, the build and the sleepy eyes. He had the laconic barroom style to deliver a poem like “The State of the Nation,” whose last line I have altered in the title above.
It’s difficult to fathom why he’s not read by the young these days. Do the young have enough grounding to read any unconventional poet these days? Basil Bunting always insisted there were still plenty of “unabashed” boys and girls about, but their slovenly teachers had never trained them in the literature that mattered. There were three or four decades when Kenneth Patchen was a poet who mattered a lot to a lot of people. I was having lunch last autumn with J. Laughlin, Patchen’s old friend and his publisher at New Directions. He shook his head sadly, “They just don’t read Kenneth anymore—how can we understand that?” I don’t think we can understand. Each century produces a Blake and a Whitman, a Ryder and a Bruckner. They didn’t arrive out of the empyrean with fan clubs and web sites.
Patchen wrote at a time when most writers stayed home and wrote, in places like Rutherford, Old Lyme, Fort Atkinson and Sausalito. The previous generation was into celebrity and reporters followed them to Pamplona, the rue de Fleurus and Rapallo. Patchen had to stay home, and stay in bed—his wrecked back gave him no mercy. Except for a few sessions of poetry-and-jazz with Charles Mingus in New York in the late 1950s, and with the Chamber Jazz Sextet in California, Patchen was a private man, not on stage.
It is instructive, perhaps, to contrast this kind of life with that of two later poets who have recently died: Allen Ginsberg and James Dickey. Both of these men spent early years working in public relations on Madison Avenue and neither stopped jabbering for a single second thereafter. Ginsberg was a mensh. His desire to be the spokesman of his generation was the last thing I could imagine or would want, but we always enjoyed being together on what were rare occasions in San Francisco, New York or here in Dentdale. He upset a lot of squares, he opened up liberating avenues, he put himself on the line; but, may I be excused if I have to say that most of the poetry struck me as hard-sell advertising. I was reminded more of Walter Winchell and Gabriel Heater and Paul Harvey than of the Buddha. … Sheriff Dickey, more bubba than mensh, was unbelievably competitive. At a poetry occasion in the White House put on by Rosalynn Carter and Joan Mondale, Jim barely had time to shake my hand. He whispered to his wife, “Come on, honey, we got to go work the crowd.” He never forgave me for writing to someone that Deliverance was about as accurate about goings-on in Rabun County, Georgia, as Rima the Bird-Girl was in Green Mansions, by W. H. Hudson. I also made the mistake of quoting Mr. Ginsberg on Deliverance: “What James Dickey doesn’t realize is that being fucked in the ass isn’t the worse thing that can happen to you in American life.” Compared to these public operators, Patchen was as remote as one of the Desert Fathers. (The Desert Fathers is not a rock group.)
I sat in Concourse K at O’Hare Airport in Chicago recently, reading The New York Times and Fanfare and watching the Passing Parade for about three hours. This is very sobering work. I’m not sure I saw one individual who was dressed individually. Most people looked like mall-crawlers. Most people looked overactive and stressful. They were moving at speed, like the ants in a formicary. Others were merely bland and moved like wizened adolescents. It would be futile to suggest any sign of appetite amongst these citizens for Kenneth Patchen or J. V. Cunningham or Wallace Stevens or James Laughlin. A few people waiting for the evening flight to Manchester were reading paperbacks purchased at the airport. John Grisham and Danielle Steele and Dean Koontz were most in evidence. (One young man was reading Camus, but we must pretend he doesn’t exist.) I decided to buy The Door to December, by Dean Koontz, “a number one New York Times author who currently has more than 100 million copies of his books in print.”
Kenneth Patchen. San Francisco, 1954. Photograph by Jonathan Williams.
… Whatever the cause of his crumbling self-control, he was becoming undeniably more frantic by the moment.
Wexlersh.
Manuello.
Why was he suddenly so frightened of them? He had never liked either of them, of course. They were originally vice officers, and word was that they had been among the most corrupt in that division, which was probably why Ross Mondale had arranged for them to transfer under his command in the East Valley; he wanted his right-hand men to be the type who would do what they were told, who wouldn’t question any questionable orders, whose allegiance to him would be unshakable as long as he provided for them. Dan knew that they were Mondale’s flunkies, opportunists with little or no respect for their work or for concepts like duty and public trust. But they were still cops. …
That goes on for 510 pages. So, fellow-stylists, there is hope for us all, whether you like square hamburgers or round hamburgers. I go for the round ones, as I am sure Mr. Koontz does. McDonald’s has sold over ninety billion of the little buggers. Here’s to LitShit and a kilo of kudzu up the kazoo!
New York publishers calculate the fate of the American novel is in the hands of five thousand readers who will actually purchase new hardback fiction. At the Jargon Society we would be delighted to sell five hundred copies of the latest poetry by Simon Cutts or Thomas Meyer. It might take ten years. Of course, out there in the real world, thousands of verse-scribbling plonkers crank out a ceaseless barrage of what Donald Hall calls the McPoem. Oracles in high places proclaim a Renaissance of Poetry. A distributor tells me of the purchase of twenty thousand hardback copies by a woman poet I have never read nor heard of. The hermits and caitiffs I hang out with don’t explore other parts of the literary jungle and just stick to their Lorine Niedecker and Basil Bunting, and even drag out volumes of Kenneth Patchen when the fit is on them. We few, we (occasionally) happy few. …
How did we odd readers find our way to Kenneth Patchen? He, of course, would never have been in the curriculum at St. Albans Schoo
l or at Princeton, my adolescent stomping grounds. I stumbled across a pamphlet by Henry Miller, Patchen: Man of Anger & Light. Miller I knew about because evil Time magazine had so vilified his book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare that I took the next bus to Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., and bought it at the excellent bookshop run by Franz Bader. By the time I was ten I had the knack of discovering the books important to me beyond those required at school. But I was lucky. I had three good teachers in prep school and I lived in a city with real bookstores. And reading books was something you did. Nowadays, books are a form of retro-delivery-system with no cord to plug in. Way uncool.
By the time I was twenty and had dropped out of Princeton to study painting and printmaking and graphic design, I was into Patchen in a big way. I read him along with Whitman, Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, Edith Sitwell, Robinson Jeffers, Hart Crane, Kenneth Rexroth, Thoreau, Randolph Bourne, Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Henry Miller and Paul Goodman. Before I was twenty-five I owned the manuscripts of The Journal of Albion Moonlight and Sleepers Awake. I had over forty of Patchen’s painted books and a few watercolors. I’d published KP’s Fables & Other Little Tales during my stay in the medical corps in Germany. What was the attraction?
Patchen was an original. Someone said, equally, of Babe Ruth: “It’s like he came down from out of a tree.” He was ready to play. Patchen and the Babe were heavy hitters, and nobody struck out more. There is a towering pile of Patchen poems that amounts to not much. But he really does have twenty or twenty-five poems that seem as good as anybody’s. He had power, humor, intuitive vision and a kind of primitive nobility. He knew his Blake and Rilke. He loved George Lewis’s clarinet and Bunk Johnson’s cornet. He drew fabulous animals and painted very well. There was nobody like him.
A few examples. “The State of the Nation” is from First Will & Testament (1939):
Understand that they were sitting just inside the door
At a little table with two full beers and two empties.
There were a few dozen people moving around, killing
Time and getting tight because nothing meant anything
Anymore
Somebody looked at a girl and somebody said
Great things doing in Spain
But she didn’t even look up, not so much as half an eye.
Then Jack picked up his beer and Nellie her beer
And their legs ground together under the table.
Somebody looked at the clock and somebody said
Great things doing in Russia
A cop and two whores came in
And he bought only two drinks
Because one of them had syphilis
No one knew just why it happened or whether
It would happen again on this fretful earth
But Jack picked up his beer and Nellie her beer again
And, as though at signal, a little man hurried in,
Crossed to the bar and said Hello Steve to the bartender.
Painting by Edward Hopper, piano by Hoagy Carmichael—very evocative stuff. The music in the poem is slow, bluesy, uncomplicated. Here’s another I like in a similar vein, “Lonesome Boy Blues,” from Orchards, Thrones & Caravans (1952):
Oh nobody’s a long time
Nowhere’s a big pocket
To put little
Pieces of nice things that
Have never really happened
To anyone except
Those people who were lucky enough
Not to get born
Oh lonesome’s a bad place
To get crowded into
With only
Yourself riding back and forth
On
A blind white horse
Along an empty road meeting
All your
Pals face to face
Oh nobody’s a long long time
And then there is the Patchen of social injustice, who keeps asking “I wonder whatever became of human beings?” “The Orange Bears,” from Red Wine & Yellow Hair (1949) sets you up and asks just what kind of punch you can take:
The orange bears with soft friendly eyes
Who played with me when I was ten,
Christ, before I left home they’d had
Their paws smashed in the rolls, their backs
Seared by hot slag, their soft trusting
Bellies kicked in, their tongues ripped
Out, and I went down through the woods
To the smelly crick with Whitman
In the Haldeman-Julius edition,
And I just sat there worrying my thumbnail
Into the cover—What did he know about
Orange bears with their coats all stunk up with soft coal
And the National Guard coming over
From Wheeling to stand in front of the millgates
With drawn bayonets jeering at the strikers.
I remember you could put daisies
On the windowsill at night and in
The morning they’d be so covered with soot
You couldn’t tell what they were anymore.
A hell of a fat chance my orange bears had!
Severity, gravity and wistful sadness. Patchen worked this combination to great effect in The Famous Boating Party (1954). He tells the poem like a good shaggy-dog story and he knows how to time and place the punchline just right. Here are two prose-poems, “Soon It Will” and “In Order To”:
SOON IT WILL
Be showtime again. Somebody will paint beautiful faces all over the sky.
Somebody will start bombarding us with really wonderful letters … letters
full of truth, and gentleness, and humility … Soon (it says here) …
IN ORDER TO
Apply for the position (I’ve forgotten now for what) I had to marry the Second Mayor’s daughter by twelve noon. The order arrived at three minutes of.
I already had a wife; the Second Mayor was childless: but I did it.
Next they told me to shave off my father’s beard. All right. No matter that he’d been a eunuch, and had succumbed in early childhood: I did it, I shaved him.
Then they told me to burn a village; next, a fair-sized town; then, a city; a small down-at-heels country; then one of “the great powers;” then another (another, another)—In fact, they went right on until they’d told me to burn up every man-made thing on the face of the earth! And I did it, I burned away every last trace, I left nothing, nothing of any kind whatever.
Then they told me to blow it all to hell and gone! And I blew it all to hell and gone (oh, didn’t I) …
Now, they said, put it back together again; put it all back the way it was when you started.
Well … it was my turn to tell them something! Shucks, I didn’t want any job that bad.
I hope some of you reading this will connect with Kenneth Patchen—he’s real good people. New Directions keeps quite a few paperbacks in print. My copy of the Collected Poems is inscribed from Kenneth to me, September 1969:
as we were, we are, my friend
If the Lord is willin’
And the creeks don’t rise
The Visionary Art of Henry David Thoreau
Joyce Carol Oates
Life too near paralyzes Art. Long these matters refuse to be recorded, except in the invisible colors of Memory.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
HENRY DAVID THOREAU WAS my first love. Insomniac, restless, exhilarated to an almost unbearable degree by late-night sessions of writing, and of reading, when the rest of the household was asleep, I discovered Thoreau at the age of fifteen and found him the very voice of my inarticulate soul. The voice of romance, and of searing common sense. A poet’s voice, an artist’s eye. The intransigent, abrasive, quarrelsome soul of rebellion. “My arrow aimed at your hearts, my friends!” Ralph Waldo Emerson gloated, anticipating how his young Concord friend would unsettle his Boston literary acquaintances Margaret Fuller and James Russell Lowell, among
others. And so Thoreau has been, through the decades, an arrow aimed at the collective heart of America.
There are writers so explosive to the adolescent imagination—Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, as well as Thoreau—that to pick up their books is to bring a lighted match to touch flammable material. Many of us have been permanently altered by a single book, and Walden is frequently that book. Beyond the almost too exquisitely written sentences of Walden we may discover the more spontaneous, vivid and conversational passages of the Journal, one of the great, though relatively little-known, of nineteenth-century works. For here is a poet of the near-at-hand. A visionary whose certitude is, if we are honest, our own. Thoreau addresses us with devastating directness. He honors us by setting for us the highest standards of integrity. We can never live up to his expectations. Yet even to fail is to have been illuminated, touched by grace. He is a poet of doubleness, too, warning us against the virtues of youth that are his own: “The scythe that cuts will cut our legs.” Perhaps the razor-sharp scythe that Thoreau wielded, flashing in the dullish light of his world, cut him, to a degree. For never has a man so wounded by life (by the repudiation of his first love, Ellen Sewall, by the ghastly, protracted death from lockjaw of his beloved older brother John) so defiantly redefined himself. Born “David Henry Thoreau,” he baptized himself “Henry David Thoreau.” Out of the rough, seemingly unpromising materials of his background he forged a personality that would in turn write the essays, poems and books, and the great project of his life, the many-volumed journal. We who are writers stand in awe of Thoreau who created “Thoreau” by a continuous exertion of will. We marvel at his confidence that he could, and would, forge a new American prose. A self-proclaimed critic of mere fiction (“one world at a time”), Thoreau was the most inspired of fiction-writers. His gift for language has given us his brilliant prose, and his gift for imagination has given us the man, Thoreau.
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