Kora in Hell (1920): Prologue
PROLOGUE
THE RETURN OF THE SUN
Her voice was like rose-fragrance waltzing in the wind.
She seemed a shadow, stained with shadow colors,
Swimming through waves of sunlight.…
The sole precedent I can find for the broken style of my prologue is Longinus on the Sublime and that one far-fetched.
When my mother was in Rome on that rare journey forever to be remembered, she lived in a small pension near the Pincio gardens. The place had been chosen by my brother as one notably easy of access, being in a quarter free from confusion of traffic, on a street close to the park and furthermore the tram to the American Academy passed at the corner. Yet never did my mother go out but she was in fear of being lost. By turning to the left when she should have turned right, actually she did once manage to go so far astray that it was nearly an hour before she extricated herself from the strangeness of every new vista and found a landmark.
There has always been a disreputable man of picturesque personality associated with this lady. Their relations have been marked by the most rollicking spirit of comradeship. Now it has been William, former sailor in Admiral Dewey’s fleet at Manila, then Tom O’Rourck who has come to her to do odd jobs and to be cared for more or less when drunk or ill, their Penelope. William would fall from the grape arbor much to my mother’s amusement and delight and to his blustering discomfiture or he would stagger to the back door nearly unconscious from bad whiskey. There she would serve him with very hot and very strong coffee, then put him to scrubbing the kitchen floor into his suddy-pail pouring half a bottle of ammonia which would make the man gasp and water at the eyes as he worked and became sober.
She has always been incapable of learning from benefit or disaster. If a man cheat her she will remember that man with a violence that I have seldom seen equaled but so far as that could have an influence on her judgment of the next man or woman, she might be living in Eden. And indeed she is, an impoverished, ravished Eden but one indestructible as the imagination itself. Whatever is before her is sufficient to itself and so to be valued. Her meat though more delicate in fiber is of a kind with that of Villon and La Grosse Margot:
Vente, gresle, gelle, j’ai mon pain cuit!
Carl Sandburg sings a negro cotton picker’s song of the bol weevil. Verse after verse tells what they would do to the insect. They propose to place it in the sand, in hot ashes, in the river, and other unlikely places but the bol weevil’s refrain is always: “That’ll be ma HOME! That’ll be ma HOOME!”
My mother is given over to frequent periods of great depression being as I believe by nature the most light-hearted thing in the world. But there comes a grotesque turn to her talk, a macabre anecdote concerning some dream, a passionate statement about death, which elevates her mood without marring it, sometimes in a most startling way.
Looking out at our parlor window one day I said to her: “We see all the shows from here, don’t we, all the weddings and funerals?” (They had been preparing a funeral across the street, the undertaker was just putting on his overcoat.) She replied: “Funny profession that, burying the dead people. I should think they wouldn’t have any delusions of life left.” W.—Oh yes, it’s merely a profession. M.—Hm. And how they study it! They say sometimes people look terrible and they come and make them look fine. They push things into their mouths! (Realistic gesture) W.—Mama! M.—Yes, when they haven’t any teeth.
By some such dark turn at the end she raises her story out of the commonplace: “Look at that chair, look at it! (The plasterers had just left) If Mrs. J. or Mrs. D. saw that they would have a fit.” W.—Call them in, maybe it will kill them. M.—But they’re not near as bad as that woman, you know, her husband was in the chorus,—has a little daughter Helen. Mrs. B. yes. She once wanted to take rooms here. I didn’t want her. They told me: ‘Mrs. Williams, I heard you’re going to have Mrs. B. She is particular.’ She said so herself. Oh no! Once she burnt all her face painting under the sink.
Thus seeing the thing itself without forethought or afterthought but with great intensity of perception my mother loses her bearings or associates with some disreputable person or translates a dark mood. She is a creature of great imagination. I might say this is her sole remaining quality. She is a despoiled, moulted castaway but by this power she still breaks life between her fingers.
Once when I was taking lunch with Walter Arensberg at a small place on 63rd St. I asked him if he could state what the more modern painters were about, those roughly classed at that time as “cubists”: Gleisze, Man Ray, Demuth, Du Champs—all of whom were then in the city. He replied by saying that the only way man differed from every other creature was in his ability to improvise novelty and, since the pictorial artist was under discussion, anything in paint that is truly new, truly a fresh creation is good art. Thus according to Du Champs, who was Arensberg’s champion at the time, a stained glass window that had fallen out and lay more or less together on the ground was of far greater interest than the thing conventionally composed in situ.
We returned to Arensberg’s sumptuous studio where he gave further point to his remarks by showing me what appeared to be the original of Du Champs’ famous, Nude Descending a Staircase. But this, he went on to say, is a full-sized photographic print of the first picture with many new touches by Du Champs himself and so by the technique of its manufacture as by other means it is a novelty!
Led on by these enthusiasms Arensberg has been an indefatigable worker for the yearly salon of the Society of Independent Artists, Inc. I remember the warmth of his description of a pilgrimage to the home of that old Boston hermit who watched over by a forbidding landlady (evidently in his pay) paints the cigar-box-cover-like nudes upon whose fingers he presses actual rings with glass jewels from the five and ten cent store.
I wish Arensberg had my opportunity for prying into jaded households where the paintings of Mama’s and Papa’s flowertime still hang on the walls. I propose that Arensberg be commissionedby the Independent Artists to scour the country for the abortive paintings of those men and women who without master or method have evolved perhaps two or three unusual creations in their early years. I would start the collection with a painting I have by a little English woman, A. E. Kerr, 1906, that in its unearthly gaiety of flowers and sobriety of design possesses exactly that strange freshness a spring day approaches without attaining, an expansion of April, a thing this poor woman found too costly for her possession—she could not swallow it as the niggers do diamonds in the mines. Carefully selected these queer products might be housed to good effect in some unpretentious exhibition chamber across the city from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the anteroom could be hung perhaps photographs of prehistoric rock-paintings and etchings on horn: galloping bisons and stags, the hind feet of which have been caught by the artist in such a position that from that time until the invention of the camera obscura, a matter of 6000 years or more, no one on earth had again depicted that most delicate and expressive posture of running.
The amusing controversy between Arensberg and Du Champs on one side, and the rest of the hanging committee on the other as to whether the porcelain urinal was to be admitted to the Palace Exhibition of 1917 as a representative piece of American Sculpture should not be allowed to slide into oblivion.
One day Du Champs decided that his composition for that day would be the first thing that struck his eye in the first hardware store he should enter. It turned out to be a pickaxe which he bought and set up in his studio. This was his composition. Together with Mina Loy and a few others Du Champs and Arensberg brought out the paper, The Blind Man, to which Robert Carlton Brown with his vision of suicide by diving from a high window of the Singer Building contributed a few poems.
In contradistinction to their south, Marianne Moore’s statement to me at the Chatham parsonage one afternoon—my wife and I were just on the point of leaving—sets up a north: My work has come to have just one quality of value in it: I will not touch or have to do with those things which I detest. In this austerity of mood she finds sufficient freedom for the play she chooses.
Of all those writing poetry in America at the time she was here Marianne Moore was the only one Mina Loy feared. Bydivergent virtues these two women have achieved freshness of presentation, novelty, freedom, break with banality.
When Margaret Anderson published my first improvisations Ezra Pound wrote me one of his hurried letters in which he urged me to give some hint by which the reader of good will might come at my intention.
Before Ezra’s permanent residence in London, on one of his trips to America—brought on I think by an attack of jaundice—he was glancing through some book of my father’s. “It is not necessary,” he said, “to read everything in a book in order to speak intelligently of it. Don’t tell everybody I said so,” he added.
During this same visit my father and he had been reading and discussing poetry together. Pound has always liked my father. “I of course like your Old Man and I have drunk his Goldwasser.” They were hot for an argument that day. My parent had been holding forth in downright sentences upon my own “idle nonsense” when he turned and became equally vehement concerning something Ezra had written: what in heaven’s name Ezra meant by “jewels” in a verse that had come between them. These jewels,—rubies, sapphires, amethysts and what not, Pound went on to explain with great determination and care, were the backs of books as they stood on a man’s shelf. “But why in heaven’s name don’t you say so then?” was my father’s triumphant and crushing rejoinder.
The letter: … God knows I have to work hard enough to escape, not propagande, but getting centered in propagande. And America? What the h—l do you a blooming foreigner know about the place. Your père only penetrated the edge, and you’ve never been west of Upper Darby, or the Maunchunk switchback.
Would H., with the swirl of the prairie wind in her underwear, or the Virile Sandburg recognize you, an effete easterner as a REAL American? INCONCEIVABLE!!!!!
My dear boy you have never felt the woop of the PEEraries. You have never seen the projecting and protuberant Mts. of the SIerra Nevada. WOT can you know of the country?
You have the naive credulity of a Co. Claire emigrant.But I (der grosse Ich) have the virus, the bacillus of the land in my blood, for nearly three bleating centuries.
(Bloody snob. ’eave a brick at ’im!!!).…
I was very glad to see your wholly incoherent unamerican poems in the L. R.
Of course Sandburg will tell you that you miss the “big drifts,” and Bodenheim will object to your not being sufficiently decadent.
You thank your bloomin gawd you’ve got enough Spanish blood to muddy up your mind, and prevent the current American ideation from going through it like a blighted collander.
The thing that saves your work is opacity, and don’t forget it. Opacity is NOT an American quality. Fizz, swish, gabble, and verbiage, these are echt Americanisch.
And alas, alas, poor old Masters. Look at Oct. Poetry.
Let me indulge the American habit of quotation:
“Si le cosmopolitisme littéraire gagnait encore et qu’il réussit à étaindre ce que les differénce de race ont allumé de haine de sang parmi les hommes, j’y verrais un gain pour la civilization et pour l’humanité tout entière”.…
“L’amour excessif d’une patrie a pour immédiat corollair l’horreur des patries étrangères. Non seulment on craint de quitter la jupe de sa maman, d’aller voir comment vivent les autres hommes, de se mêler à leur luttes, de partager leur travaux, non seulment on reste chez soi, mais on finit par fermer sa porte.”
“Cette folie gagne certains littérateurs et le même professeur, en sortant d’expliquer le Cid ou Don Juan, rédige de gracieuses injures contre Ibsen et l’influence, hélas, trop illusoire, de son oevre, pourtant toute de lumière et de beauté.” et cetera. Lie down and compose yourself.
I like to think of the Greeks as setting out for the colonies in Sicily and the Italian Peninsula. The Greek temperament lent itself to a certain symmetrical sculptural phase and to a fat poetical balance of line that produced important work but I like better the Greeks setting their backs to Athens. The ferment was always richer in Rome, the dispersive explosion was always nearer, the influence carried further and remained hot longer. Hellenism, especially the modern sort, is too staid, too chilly, too little fecundative to impregnate my world.
Hilda Doolittle before she began to write poetry or at least before she began to show it to anyone would say: “You’re not satisfied with me, are you Billy? There’s something lacking, isn’t there?” When I was with her my feet always seemed to be sticking to the ground while she would be walking on the tips of the grass stems.
Ten years later as assistant editor of the Egoist she refers to my long poem, March, which thanks to her own and her husband’s friendly attentions finally appeared there in a purified form:
14 Aug. 1916
Dear Bill:—
I trust you will not hate me for wanting to delete from your poem all the flippancies. The reason I want to do this is that the beautiful lines are so very beautiful—so in the tone and spirit of your Postlude—(which to me stands, a Nike, supreme among your poems). I think there is real beauty—and real beauty is a rare and sacred thing in this generation—in all the pyramid, Ashur-ban-i-pal bits and in the Fiesole and in the wind at the very last.
I don’t know what you think but I consider this business of writing a very sacred thing!—I think you have the “spark”—am sure of it, and when you speak direct are a poet. I feel in the hey-ding-ding touch running through your poem a derivitive tendency which, to me, is not you—-not your very self. It is as if you were ashamed of your Spirit, ashamed of your inspiration!—as if you mocked at your own song. It’s very well to mock at yourself—it is a spiritual sin to mock at your inspiration—
Hilda.
Oh well, all this might be very disquieting were it not that “sacred” has lately been discovered to apply to a point of arrestwhere stabilization has gone on past the time. There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.
But in any case H. D. misses the entire intent of what I am doing no matter how just her remarks concerning that particular poem happen to have been. The hey-ding-ding touch was derivitive but it filled a gap that I did not know how better to fill at the time. It might be said that that touch is the prototype of the improvisations.
It is to the inventive imagination we look for deliverance from every other misfortune as from the desolation of a flat Hellenic perfection of style. What good then to turn to art from the atavistic religionists, from a science doing slavey service upon gas engines, from a philosophy tangled in a miserable sort of dialect that means nothing if the full power of initiative be denied at the beginning by a lot of baying and snapping scholiasts? If the inventive imagination must look, as I think, to the field of art for its richest discoveries today it will best make its way by compass and follow no path.
But before any material progress can be accomplished there must be someone to draw a discriminating line between true and false values.
The true value is that peculiarity which gives an object a character by itself. The associational or sentimental value is the false. Its imposition is due to lack of imagination, to an easy lateral sliding. The attention has been held too rigid on the one plane instead of following a more flexible, jagged resort. It is to loosen the attention, my attention since I occupy part of the field, that I write these improvisations. Here I clash with Wallace Stevens.
The imagination goes from one thing to another. Given many things of nearly totally divergent natures but possessing one-thousandth part of a quality in common, provided that be new, distinguished, these things belong in an imaginative category and not in a gross natural array. To me this is the gist of the whole matter. It is easy to fall under the spell of a certain mode, especially if it be remote of origin, leaving thus certain of its members essential to a reconstruction of its significance permanently lost in an impenetrable mist of time. But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus the so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life. He who even nicks the solidity of this apparition does a piece of work superior to that of Hercules when he cleaned the Augean stables.
Stevens’ letter applies really to my book of poems, “Al Que Quiere” (which means, by the way, To Him Who Wants It) but the criticism he makes of that holds good for each of the improvisations if not for the oevre as a whole.
It begins with a postscript in the upper left hand corner: “I think, after all, I should rather send this than not, although it is quarrelsomely full of my own ideas of discipline.
April 9
My dear Williams:
…
What strikes me most about the poems themselves is their casual character.… Personally I have a distaste for miscellany. It is one of the reasons I do not bother about a book myself.
(Wallace Stevens is a fine gentleman whom Cannell likened to a Pennsylvania Dutchman who has suddenly become aware of his habits and taken to “society” in self defence. He is always immaculately dressed. I don’t know why I should always associate him in my mind with an imaginary image I have of Ford Madox Hueffer.)
…My idea is that in order to carry a thing to the extreme necessity to convey it one has to stick to it;… Given a fixed point of view, realistic, imagistic or what you will, everything adjusts itself to that point of view; and the process of adjustment is a world in flux, as it should be for a poet. But to fidget with points of view leads always to new beginnings and incessant new beginnings lead to sterility.
(This sounds like Sir Roger de Coverly)
A single manner or mood thoroughly matured and exploited is that fresh thing … etc.
One has to keep looking for poetry as Renoir looked for colors in old walls, wood-work and so on.
Your place is
—among childrenLeaping around a dead dog.
A book of that would feed the hungry.…
Well a book of poems is a damned serious affair. I am only objecting that a book that contains your particular quality should contain anything else and suggesting that if the quality were carried to a communicable extreme, in intensity and volume, etc.… I see it all over the book, in your landscapes and portraits, but dissipated and obscured. Bouquets for brides and Spencerian compliments for poets.… There are a very few men who have anything native in them or for whose work I’d give a Bolshevic ruble.… But I think your tantrums not half mad enough.
(I am not quite clear about the last sentence but I presume he means that I do not push my advantage through to an overwhelming decision. What would you have me do with my Circe, Stevens, now that I have doublecrossed her game, marry her? It is not what Odysseus did).
I return Pound’s letter … observe how in everything he does he proceeds with the greatest positiveness etc.
Wallace Stevens.
I wish that I might here set down my “Vortex” after the fashion of London, 1913, stating how little it means to me whether I live here, there or elsewhere or succeed in this, that or the other so long as I can keep my mind free from the trammels of literature, beating down every attack of its retiarii with my mirmillones. But the time is past.
I thought at first to adjoin to each improvisation a more or less opaque commentary. But the mechanical interference that would result makes this inadvisable. Instead I have placed some of them in the preface where without losing their original intention (see reference numerals at the beginning of each) they relieve the later text and also add their weight to my present fragmentary argument.
V. No. 2. By the brokeness of his composition the poet makes himself master of a certain weapon which he could possess himself of in no other way. The speed of the emotions is sometimes such that thrashing about in a thin exaltation or despair many matters are touched but not held, more often broken by the contact.
II. No. 3. The instability of these improvisations would seem such that they must inevitably crumble under the attention and become particles of a wind that falters. It would appear to the unready that the fiber of the thing is a thin jelly. It would be these same fools who would deny touch cords to the wind because they cannot split a storm endwise and wrap it upon spools. The virtue of strength lies not in the grossness of the fiber but in the fiber itself. Thus a poem is tough by no quality it borrows from a logical recital of events nor from the events themselves but solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance giving them thus a full being.
* * It is seldom that anything but the most elementary communications can be exchanged one with another. There are in reality only two or three reasons generally accepted as the causes of action. No matter what the motive it will seldom happen that true knowledge of it will be anything more than vaguely divined by some one person, some half a person whose intimacy has perhaps been cultivated over the whole of a lifetime. We live in bags. This is due to the gross fiber of all action. By action itself almost nothing can be imparted. The world of action is a world of stones.
XV. No. 1. Bla! Bla! Bla! Heavy talk is talk that waits upon a deed. Talk is servile that is set to inform. Words with the bloom on them run before the imagination like the saeter girlsbefore Peer Gynt. It is talk with the patina of whim upon it makes action a boot-licker. So nowadays poets spit upon rhyme and rhetoric.
* * The stream of things having composed itself into wiry strands that move in one fixed direction, the poet in desperation turns at right angles and cuts across current with startling results to his hangdog mood.
XI. No. 2. In France, the country of Rabelais, they know that the world is not made up entirely of virgins. They do not deny virtue to the rest because of that. Each age has its perfections but the praise differs. It is only stupid when the praise of the gross and the transformed would be minted in unfit terms such as suit nothing but youth’s sweetness and frailty. It is necessary to know that laughter is the reverse of aspiration. So they laugh well in France, at Coquelin and the Petoman. Their girls, also, thrive upon the love-making they get, so much so that the world runs to Paris for that reason.
XII. No. 2 B. It is chuckleheaded to desire a way through every difficulty. Surely one might even communicate with the dead—and lose his taste for truffles. Because snails are slimy when alive and because slime is associated (erroneously) with filth the fool is convinced that snails are detestable when, as it is proven every day, fried in butter with chopped parsely upon them, they are delicious. This is both sides of the question: the slave and the despoiled of his senses are one. But to weigh a difficulty and to turn it aside without being wrecked upon a destructive solution bespeaks an imagination of force sufficient to transcend action. The difficulty has thus been solved by ascent to a higher plane. It is energy of the imagination alone that cannot be laid aside.
* * Rich as are the gifts of the imagination bitterness of world’s loss is not replaced thereby. On the contrary it is intensified, resembling thus possession itself. But he who has no power of the imagination cannot even know the full of his injury.
VIII. No. 3. Those who permit their senses to be despoiled of the things under their noses by stories of all manner of thingsremoved and unattainable are of frail imagination. Idiots, it is true nothing is possessed save by dint of that vigorous conception of its perfections which is the imagination’s special province but neither is anything possessed which is not extant. A frail imagination, unequal to the tasks before it, is easily led astray.
IV. No. 2. Although it is a quality of the imagination that it seeks to place together those things which have a common relationship, yet the coining of similies is a pastime of very low order, depending as it does upon a nearly vegetable coincidence. Much more keen is that power which discovers in things those inimitable particles of dissimilarity to all other things which are the peculiar perfections of the thing in question.
But this loose linking of one thing with another has effects of a destructive power little to be guessed at: all manner of things are thrown out of key so that it approaches the impossible to arrive at an understanding of anything. All is confusion, yet, it comes from a hidden desire for the dance, a lust of the imagination, a will to accord two instruments in a duet.
But one does not attempt by the ingenuity of the joiner to blend the tones of the oboe with the violin. On the contrary the perfections of the two instruments are emphasized by the joiner; no means is neglected to give to each the full color of its perfections. It is only the music of the instruments which is joined and that not by the woodworker but by the composer, by virtue of the imagination.
On this level of the imagination all things and ages meet in fellowship. Thus only can they, peculiar and perfect, find their release. This is the beneficent power of the imagination.
* * Age and youth are great flatterers. Brooding on each other’s obvious psychology neither dares tell the other outright what manifestly is the truth: your world is poison. Each is secure in his own perfections. Monsieur Eichorn used to have a most atrocious body odor while the odor of some girls is a pleasure to the nostril. Each quality in each person or age, rightly valued, would mean the freeing of that age to its own delights of action or repose. Now an evil odor can be pursued with praise-worthy ardor leading to great natural activity whereas a flowery skinned virgin may and no doubt often does allow herself to fall into destructive habits of neglect.
XIII. No. 3. A poet witnessing the chicory flower and realizing its virtues of form and color so constructs his praise of it as to borrow no particle from right or left. He gives his poem over to the flower and its plant themselves that they may benefit by those cooling winds of the imagination which thus returned upon them will refresh them at their task of saving the world. But what does it mean, remarked his friends?
VII. Coda. It would be better than depriving birds of their song to call them all nightingales. So it would be better than to have a world stript of poetry to provide men with some sort of eyeglasses by which they should be unable to read any verse but sonnets. But fortunately although there are many sorts of fools, just as there are many birds which sing and many sorts of poems, there is no need to please them.
* * All schoolmasters are fools. Thinking to build in the young the foundations of knowledge they let slip their minds that the blocks are of grey mist bedded upon the wind. Those who will taste of the wind himself have a mark in their eyes by virtue of which they bring their masters to nothing.
* * All things brought under the hand of the possessor crumble to nothingness. Not only that: He who possesses a child if he cling to it inordinately becomes childlike, whereas, with a twist of the imagination, himself may rise into comradeship with the grave and beautiful presences of antiquity. But some have the power to free, say a young matron pursuing her infant, from her own possessions, making her kin to Yang Kuei-fei because of a haunting loveliness that clings about her knees, impeding her progress as she takes up her matronly pursuit.
* * As to the sun what is he, save for his light, more than the earth is: the same mass of metals, a mere shadow? But the winged dawn is the very essence of the sun’s self, a thing cold, vitreous, a virtue that precedes the body which it drags after it.
* * The features of a landscape take their position in the imagination and are related more to their own kind there than to the country and season which has held them hitherto as a basket holds vegetables mixed with fruit.
VI. No. 1. A fish swimming in a pond, were his back white and his belly green, would be easily perceived from above by hawks against the dark depths of water and from below by larger fish against the penetrant light of the sky. But since his belly is white and his back green he swims about in safety. Observing this barren truth and discerning at once its slavish application to the exercises of the mind, a young man, who has been sitting for some time in contemplation at the edge of a lake, rejects with scorn the parochial deductions of history and as scornfully asserts his defiance.
XIV. No. 3. The barriers which keep the feet from the dance are the same which in a dream paralyze the effort to escape and hold us powerless in the track of some murderous pursuer. Pant and struggle but you cannot move. The birth of the imagination is like waking from a nightmare. Never does the night seem so beneficent.
* * The raw beauty of ignorance that lies like an opal mist over the west coast of the Atlantic, beginning at the Grand Banks and extending into the recesses of our brains—the children, the married, the unmarried—clings especially about the eyes and the throats of our girls and boys. Of a Sunday afternoon a girl sits before a mechanical piano and, working it with her hands and feet, opens her mouth and sings to the music—a popular tune, ragtime. It is a serenade. I have seen a young Frenchman lean above the piano and looking down speak gently and wonderingly to one of our girls singing such a serenade. She did not seem aware of what she was singing and he smiled an occult but thoroughly bewildered smile—as of a man waiting for a fog to lift, meanwhile lost in admiration of its enveloping beauty—fragments of architecture, a street opening and closing, a mysterious glow of sunshine.
VIII. No. 1. A man of note upon examining the poems of his friend and finding there nothing related to his immediate understanding laughingly remarked: After all, literature is communication while you, my friend, I am afraid, in attempting to do something striking, are in danger of achieving mere presciosity.——But inasmuch as the fields of the mind are vast and little explored, the poet was inclined only to smile and to take note of that hardening infirmity of the imagination which seems to endow its victim with great solidity and rapidity of judgment. But he thought to himself: And yet of what other thing is greatness composed than a power to annihilate half-truths for a thousandth part of accurate understanding. Later life has its perfections as well as that bough-bending time of the mind’s florescence with which I am so discursively taken.
I have discovered that the thrill of first love passes! It even becomes the backbone of a sordid sort of religion if not assisted in passing. I knew a man who kept a candle burning before a girl’s portrait day and night for a year—then jilted her, pawned her off on a friend. I have been reasonably frank about my erotics with my wife. I have never or seldom said, my dear I love you, when I would rather say: My dear, I wish you were in Tierra del Fuego. I have discovered by scrupulous attention to this detail and by certain allied experiments that we can continue from time to time to elaborate relationships quite equal in quality, if not greatly superior, to that surrounding our wedding. In fact, the best we have enjoyed of love together has come after the most thorough destruction or harvesting of that which has gone before. Periods of barrenness have intervened, periods comparable to the prison music in Fidelio or to any of Beethoven’s pianissimo transition passages. It is at these times our formal relations have teetered on the edge of a debacle to be followed, as our imaginations have permitted, by a new growth of passionate attachment dissimilar in every member to that which has gone before.
It is in the continual and violent refreshing of the idea that love and good writing have their security.
Alfred Kreymborg is primarily a musician, at best an innovator of musical phrase:
Kreymborg’s idea of poetry is a transforming music that has much to do with tawdry things.
Few people know how to read Kreymborg. There is no modern poet who suffers more from a bastard sentimental appreciation. It is hard to get his things from the page. I have heard him say he has often thought in despair of marking his verse into measures as music is marked. Oh, well—
The man has a bare irony, the gift of rhythm and Others. I smile to think of Alfred stealing the stamps from the envelopes sent for return of MSS. to the Others office! The best thing that could happen for the good of poetry in the United States today would be for someone to give Alfred Kreymborg a hundred thousand dollars. In his mind there is the determination for freedom brought into relief by a crabbedness of temper that makes him peculiarly able to value what is being done here. Whether he is bull enough for the work I am not certain, but that he can find his way that I know.
A somewhat petulant English college friend of my brother’s once remarked that Britons make the best policemen the world has ever witnessed. I agree with him. It is silly to go into a puckersnatch because some brass-button-minded nincompoop in Kensington flies off the handle and speaks openly about our United States prize poems. This Mr. Jepson—“Anyone who has heard Mr. J. read Homer and discourse on Catullus would recognize his fitness as a judge and respecter of poetry”—this is Ezra!—this champion of the right is not half a fool. His epithets and phrases—slip-shod, rank bad workmanship of a man who has shirked his job, lumbering fakement, cumbrous artificiality, maundering dribble, rancid as Ben Hur—are in the main well-merited. And besides, he comes out with one fairly lipped cornet blast: the only distinctive U. S. contributions to the arts have been ragtime and buck-dancing.
Nothing is good save the new. If a thing have novelty it stands intrinsically beside every other work of artistic excellence. If it have not that, no loveliness or heroic proportion or grand manner will save it. It will not be saved above all by an attenuated intellectuality.
But all U. S. verse is not bad according to Mr. J., there is T. S. Eliot and his, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
But our prize poems are especially to be damned not because of superficial bad workmanship, but because they are rehash, repetition—just as Eliot’s more exquisite work is rehash, repetition in another way of Verlaine, Beaudelaire, Maeterlinck,—conscious or unconscious,—just as there were Pound’s early paraphrases from Yeats and his constant later cribbing from the renaissance, Provence and the modern French: Men content with the connotations of their masters.
It is convenient to have fixed standards of comparison: All antiquity! And there is always some everlasting Polonius of Kensington forever to rate highly his eternal Eliot. It is because Eliot is a subtle conformist. It tickles the palate of this archbishop of procurers to a lecherous antiquity to hold up Prufrock as a New World type. Prufrock, the nibbler at sophistication, endemic in every capital, the not quite (because he refuses to turn his back), is “the soul of that modern land,” the United States!
Blue undershirts,Upon a line,It is not secessary to say to youAnything about it—
I cannot question Eliot’s observation. Prufrock is a masterly portrait of the man just below the summit, but the type is universal; the model in his case might be Mr. J.
No. The New World is Montezuma or since he was stoned to death in a parley, Guatemozin who had the city of Mexico levelled over him before he was taken.
For the rest, there is no man even though he dare who can make beauty his own and “so at last live,” at least there is no man better situated for that achievement than another. As Prufrock longed for his silly lady so Kensington longs for its Hardanger dairymaid. By a mere twist of the imagination, if Prufrock only knew it, the whole world can be inverted (why else are there wars?) and the mermaids be set warbling to whoever will listen to them. Seesaw and blind-man’s-buff converted into a sort of football.
But the summit of United States achievement, according to Mr. J.—who can discourse on Catullus—is that very beautiful poem of Eliot’s, La Figlia Que Piange: just the right amount of everything drained through, etc., etc., etc., etc., the rhythm delicately studied and—IT CONFORMS! ergo here we have “the very fine flower of the finest spirit of the United States.”
Examined closely this poem reveals a highly refined distillation. Added to the already “faithless” formula of yesterday we have a conscious simplicity:
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.
The perfection of that line is beyond cavil. Yet, in the last stanza, this paradigm, this very fine flower of U. S. art is warped out of alignment, obscured in meaning even to the point of an absolute unintelligibility by the inevitable straining after a rhyme, the very cleverness with which this straining is covered being a sinister token in itself.
So we have no choice but to accept the work of this fumbling conjurer.
Upon the Jepson filet Eliot balances his mushroom. It is the latest touch from the literary cuisine, it adds to the pleasant outlook from the club window. If to do this, if to be a Whistler at best, in the art of poetry, is to reach the height of poetic expression then Ezra and Eliot have approached it and tant pis for the rest of us.
The Adobe Indian hag sings her lullaby:
The beetle is blindThe beetle is blindThe beetle is blindThe beetle is blind, etc., etc.
and Kandinsky in his, Ueber das Geistige in der Kunst, sets down the following axioms for the artist:
Every artist has to express himselfEvery artist has to express his epoch.Every artist has to express the pure and eternal qualities of the art of all men.
So we have the fish and the bait, but the last rule holds three hooks at once—not for the fish, however.
I do not overlook De Gourmont’s plea for a meeting of the nations, but I do believe that when they meet Paris will be more than slightly abashed to find parodies of the middle ages, Dante and Langue D’Oc foisted upon it as the best in United States poetry. Even Eliot, who is too fine an artist to allow himself to be exploited by a blockheaded grammaticaster, turns recently toward “one definite false note” in his quatrains, which more nearly approach America than ever La Figlia Que Piange did. Ezra Pound is a Boscan who has met his Navagiero.
One day Ezra and I were walking down a back lane in Wyncote. I contended for bread, he for caviar. I become hot. He, with fine discretion, exclaimed: “Let us drop it. We will never agree, or come to an agreement.” He spoke then like a Frenchman, which is one who discerns.
Imagine an international congress of poets at Paris or Versailles, Remy de Gourmont (now dead) presiding, poets all speaking five languages fluently. Ezra stands up to represent U. S. verse and De Gourmont sits down smiling. Ezra begins by reading, La Figlia Que Piange. It would be a pretty pastime to gather into a mental basket the fruits of that reading from the minds of the ten Frenchmen present; their impressions of the sort of United States that very fine flower was picked from. After this Kreymborg might push his way to the front and read Jack’s House.
E. P. is the best enemy United States verse has. He is interested, passionately interested—even if he doesn’t know what he is talking about. But of course he does know what he is talking about. He does not, however, know everything, not by more than half. The accordances of which Americans have the parts and the colors but not the completions before them pass beyond the attempts of his thought. It is a middle aging blight of the Imagination.
I praise those who have the wit and courage, and the conventionality, to go direct toward their vision of perfection in an objective world where the sign-posts are clearly marked, viz., to London. But confine them in hell for their paretic assumption that there is no alternative but their own groove.
Dear fat Stevens, thawing out so beautifully at forty! I was one day irately damning those who run to London whenStevens caught me up with his mild: “But where in the world will you have them run to?”
Nothing that I should write touching poetry would be complete without Maxwell Bodenheim in it, even had he not said that the Improvisations were “perfect,” the best things I had ever done; for that I place him, Janus, first and last.
Bodenheim pretends to hate most people, including Pound and Kreymborg, but that he really goes to this trouble I cannot imagine. He seems rather to me to have the virtue of self absorbtion so fully developed that hate is made impossible. Due to this, also, he is an unbelievable physical stoic. I know of no one who lives so completely in his pretences as Bogie does. Having formulated his world neither toothache nor the misery to which his indolence reduces him can make head against the force of his imagination. Because of this he remains for me a heroic figure, which, after all, is quite apart from the stuff he writes and which only concerns him. He is an Isaiah of the butterflies.
Bogie was the young and fairly well acclaimed genius when he came to New York four years ago. He pretended to have fallen in Chicago and to have sprained his shoulder. The joint was done up in a proper Sayre’s dressing and there really looked to be a bona fide injury. Of course he couldn’t find any work to do with one hand so we all chipped in. It lasted a month! During that time Bogie spent a week at my house at no small inconvenience to Florence, who had two babies on her hands just then. When he left I expressed my pleasure at having had his company. “Yes,” he replied, “I think you have profited by my visit.” The statement impressed me by its simple accuracy as well as by the evidence it bore of that fullness of the imagination which had held the man in its tide while we had been together.
Charlie Demuth once told me that he did not like the taste of liquor, for which he was thankful, but that he found the effect it had on his mind to be delightful. Of course Li Po is reported to have written his best verse supported in the arms of the Emperor’s attendants and with a dancing-girl to hold his tablet. He was also a great poet. Wine is merely the latchstring.
The virtue of it all is in an opening of the doors, though some rooms of course will be empty, a break with banality, the continual hardening which habit enforces. There is nothing left in me but the virtue of curiosity, Demuth puts in. The poet should be forever at the ship’s prow.
An acrobat seldom learns really a new trick, but he must exercise continually to keep his joints free. When I made this discovery it started rings in my memory that keep following one after the other to this day.
I have placed the following Improvisations in groups, somewhat after the A. B. A. formula, that one may support the other, clarifying or enforcing perhaps the other’s intention.
The arrangement of the notes, each following its poem and separated from it by a ruled line, is borrowed from a small volume of Metastasio, Varie Poesie Dell’ Abate Pietro Metastasio, Venice, 1795.
September 1, 1918
Kora in Hell: Improvisations, by William Carlos Williams, is in the public domain and is available at Project Gutenberg.