Excerpt
CRANBERRY JUICE IN A GLASS
DANUTA BORCHARDT
Based on a few events from Charles Olson's life in Gloucester, Massachusetts
Was it "They that go down to the sea in ships./That do business ingreat waters," or was it blueberries in the center of the Cape, in DogtownCommon where long ago dogs and old people were the onlysurvivors of a war, or was it rocks and sand dunes as varied as thepeople who lay on them in the sun that made Mr. Maximus comeand cling to this fishtown on the coast of the Atlantic, it is not for meto tell. It could be these and other reasons. There were reasons toofor wanting to sip cranberry juice with Mr. Maximus in a cafe by thewaterfront, or anywhere for that matter. And watch ice cubes in hisglass, stirred by an occasional glint of sun rays coming through thewindow, change into a potion reddish-pink and crystalline. Mr. Maximuswas the chief poet of the town, and beyond. He liked the townand strolled around listening to gossipers, talking to fishermen andlocal intellectuals. No thought passing through the streets escaped hisscrutiny, and conversation with him would have been most entertaining.But as it happened it was not through conversation but through his comingsand goings, as he tried to carry this town on his humongous shoulders,that I was gradually drawn into the vortex of Mr. Maximus' deeplypersonal event.
Winter is the time of year, more than any other, when I think ofthe slow passing of Mr. Maximus. For it was on one of those cold daysthat many stood at his gravesite: poets, friends, gravediggers, while scantsnowflakes were falling and they lowered his coffin into the ground.With eyes big and flat, bigger than most peepholes and feeling heavy likean old toad on its way to the mortician, this is the time to look throughthe window and watch a fishing boat cut through the frigid waters of theharbor. While the sun is setting the water is a deepening blue, the sky istaking on emerald and the crystals of snow under my window becomepink, one of the shades of cranberry juice in a glass filled with ice cubes.(Heck, why not just say "the colors of Fitz Hugh Lane"?he painted thisharbor, not I.) As the day darkens it is time to watch the boat move alongthe distant horizon where it becomes no more than a brightly shininglight on its way to the fishing grounds, and like Our Lady of GoodVoyage bid it back, safely. Living on the Fort that juts into theharbor, Mr. Maximus would have watched it too. He must have watchedmany boats come and go and disappear into the fog. He must haveknown that their fate was guided by the sound of fog horns, bells andbuoys and yet....
Not far from the Fort was a buoy by whose song this side of townrose and went to sleep. But Mr. Maximus tired of listening to it moaningand moaning into his bedroom ear. Sailors lost their bearings a few yardsoff shore, half the town slept well past the hour of noon, fish startedjumping to see why it was so quiet one day when he prevailed on the cityfathers and mothers to have the buoy shushed. I too missed the sound,but Mr. Maximus' ear was big, bigger than mine, and probably heardtoo much, much more than its simple rhythmic chanting. "Hey," Ithought, "he must have had his reasons," but I started to watch morecarefully what Mr. Maximus was up to. Especially when his battles withcity hall moved closer to my home. Preservation of old houses was nomatter to some, but Mr. Maximus led his life caring, as I soon realized.He fussed and worried about an old abandoned house that stood almost,but not quite, on a curve in my street. It had style. Gray, weathered clapboards(the more they weathered the more stylish they became), gingerbreadon the pillars that propped up the overhang. Rats were poppingtheir heads through the cracks but mostly wiggling their behinds andlong tails after. City fathers wanted to straighten the street. "It's not quiteon the curve," Mr. Maximus argued for the house and for the rats. Buthe lost. The house was razed and the rats moved on. The street was neverstraightened because there were other houses there, on the curve exactly.And so he went on gabbling and gibbering by the waterfront or, as Ioccasionally noticed, in the most dingy of diners while eating the bestbuy in town?scraps of roast beef and mashed potatoes, with gravy,sometimes a spoonful of green peas thrown in. The diner was not likeone of those roadside establishments where truckers eat, where theyserve hefty meals, homemade meat loaf, banana cream and coconut custardpies. No saucy comments from the waitress here either, only asmudge of brown stuff from the previous day stuck to Mr. Maximus'plate. Not that this was the fault of the high school kid washing thedishes. He insisted he was hired to shove them in the dishwasher, not toscrub them first. "What's the point?" the kid went on. The cook arguedwith him for everyone to hear what the point was, but Mr. Maximus toldthe cook not to squelch the teenager's independent thinking. There wasonce a movie house in town built originally as a live theater (a smallstage, orchestra, balconies, velvet curtains), this known only to historiansand to a few very old people, the same people who, as children, saw theelephants of the Ringling Bros. Circus stomp down the narrow MainStreet winding to the contour of the waterfront. Mr. Maximus had ahabit of sitting in the back of the cinema, watching whateverfilms came into town. In the back, so that he would not obstruct anybody'sview. He was so huge that were I to bump into him in the streetmy forehead would barely reach the middle of his torso and I would seenothing on either side of Mr. Maximus, no street, no sidewalk, only historso spread wide. As I walked into the cinema that night I saw Mr.Maximus sitting in one of the back rows, his threadbare coat over hisshoulders. I sat in one of the front seats. They were playing Blowup. Inever cared for the shapes that leaves and branches take on when no oneis looking, or shadows that they cast on the unwary, at night especially. Iwatched the final denouement of the film, when a man's face and belowthat the point of a gun come into focus on a photo of shrubs in a park,and I sensed my terror mounting. The gun was pointing at me, I wassure. Were I to turn around would Mr. Maximus pass me a slow, reassuringwink? I did not turn around, but that same night I unwittingly putmy foot in his heart. Feeling almost certain that Mr. Maximus did nothave a car, I went up to him after the movie and offered him a ride home.Maybe a glass of cranberry juice in my home first? Gracious acceptancemagnifies those around as they walk beside him, pure and elated. "Thouleadeth me" they sing in their soul. But 'tis all for naught if the giant cannotfit into a VW Bug. We walked up to the car. The small curved form ofmy Bug looked at me with questioning headlights. Mr. Maximus stoodtall, like a Martello tower over the Irish coast on watch for submarines,waiting for me to unlock the door. Too late now to decline the ride asgraciously as he had accepted it. I pushed and shoved and squished himtill he was in. Sweat on my brow, flushed with embarrassment, it felt hotin the car. But unsuspecting, without grief in my heart, I took him to myhome where for several hours his words filled my living room. He did nottell me though, but others did later, that his beloved wife had died in anaccident, in a VW Bug. Never again did I have a chance to sip with Mr.Maximus the juice from cranberries?skimmed off from flooded saltbogs?as they are bobbing up and down, little red balls on the water, andpressed into "Ocean Spray" or "Sweet Life," as sweet and sour as life.But as I look in the night at the copse of bushes where the old house oncestood and out of the intertwining branches, I see his face take shape, Iknow why he does not bless me with a wink. Yet there is the comfortthat the sun will light up the snow again, and with the hues and warmthof early morning offer me a thin film of potion, reddish-pink and crystalline.Were I to stick out my tongue and lick it.
PETE SEEGER ON CHARLES OLSON
PETE SEEGER
I have been reading with interest the poetry newsletter, Exquisite Corpse,and came across the article on Charles Olson. I never gotaround to reading his poetry, but you might be interested to knowthat I did know him. It was a little bit over 50 years ago. I briefly hada job as a cook in Boston when I was a student, and the man I wascooking for invited Olson and another Harvard instructor around tosupper; and I made so bold as to enter into the conversation andended up getting fired a week later. But I stayed briefly in touch withOlson for a few months before I left college, and then lo and behold, afull four years later, I'm walking down Eighth Street in Greenwich Village,and I run into this huge tall guy who, of all things, remembers andrecognizes me. "What are you doing these days?" he says.
"I'm living around the corner with some other guys, and we makea living singing songs, calling ourselves The Almanac Singers. Why don'tyou have supper with us?"
So Olson comes to supper and is completely charmed by WoodyGuthrie and ends up asking Woody to write an article for a little magazinehe is editing called Common Ground. The article was a beautifuldescription of folk music by one of the folks, "Ear Music," and startedoff with Woody explaining that by this term, he does not mean you plucka guitar with your ear.
Next thing, Angus Cameron, one of the editors at Little, BrownPublishers sees the article and writes a letter to Woody asking him if he'dlike to try writing a book. And Woody says, "Sure I'd like to try." Andduring the next year he's pounding out page after page rapid-fire, and in1943, a little more than a year later, the book, Bound For Glory, is sellingmedium-well. At any rate, you might be interested that that's howCharles Olson helped to get Woody into being a published author.
ROBERT DUNCAN: THE LIMITS OF ALLEGIANCE
DENNIS FORMENTO
Poet Robert Duncan formed his social and political ideas far inadvance of many of his own associates, including his ideasregarding sexual liberation and the status of homosexuals inAmerica. In 1944, he sought to publish in the leftist journal Politics,"The Homosexual in Society," a criticism of the hypocrisyof the straight liberal critics who depreciated or ignored the contributionsof gay artists?and also of the insular behavior ofwhat he termed a "homosexual cult of superiority" that maintained aprivate autonomous zone mirroring the hierarchy of the straight world inorder to save itself. The article also called for homosexuals to come outby declaring their oppression a "battlefront toward human freedom."Before and after its publication, Duncan, anarchist, faced criticism fromall quarters.
The editor of Politics, Dwight Macdonald, was concerned aboutthe future of Duncan's career if he published the piece under hisown name. "Outing" himself that way even in a literary world thatincluded W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender would expose him toridicule and blackballing, but not from heterosexuals only; the problemsthat the gay poet had to face in 1944 did not come just from straightsociety. Sure enough, in its wake, Parker Tyler, editor of the surrealistjournal View, attacked Duncan's description of a homosexual elite"filled with an unwavering hostility and fear" for the heterosexualworld. Tyler believed Duncan to be full of self-hatred and guilt. ButDuncan had insisted upon affixing his name to the piece, writing toMacdonald that "The whole thing has no meaning if it is not signed"(Faas, 150).
There were more problems "at large." John Crowe Ransom, theneditor of the conservative Kenyon Review, called Duncan's essay "courageous,"but in the same breath rejected Duncan's poem, "An AfricanElegy," after having already accepted and typeset it. Ransom explainedhis last-second rejection by saying that since he had learned Duncan'ssexual orientation, the poem could only be "obvious homosexual advertisementand, for that reason, not to be eligible for publication" (Ransom,319). According to Duncan biographer Ekbert Fass, Duncanhimself allowed that the sexual inferences in the poem were"inescapable" (a word suggested by Ransom in examining his own readingof the work). But later Duncan argued that the theme of the poemwas "not homosexuality, but the unknown" (Faas, 153). "Negroes,Africa and the black of love are all symbols of subconscious forces,"Duncan wrote in a letter, yet Ransom wasn't persuaded to print thepiece. Why did Duncan choose Ransom's journal for his poem, an organof the New Criticism and the Fugitive Poets, bards of the Solid South andstepchildren of T. S. Eliot? Fugitive magazines ought to have been the lastthat Duncan sought out. Poetry to them provided an escape from personalemotion; Duncan's romantic work, even without homoerotic content,didn't fit this script. But an unknown writer as Duncan was at the timewould look high and low for reputable magazines that might bring outhis work, sometimes with more hope than foresight.
Kenyon Review was reputable, maybe, but not very open-minded.Writing to Duncan on October, 26, 1944, Ransom observed that whilethe "homosexualists" possess "this superior perception, sensibility,I do not doubt, in many cases," they should "sublimatetheir problem, let the delicacy and subtlety of their sensibility come out inthe innocent regions of life and literature,"?whatever those may be?"inthe same sense, that is, in which repressions cause great works of artwhich have no recognizable relation to the repressed desires." Behaviorthat would be viewed by mainstream society as aberrant would especiallyfind no place in Ransom's magazine. In addition to asking what areaswould be innocent enough for the gay writer to repress himself in, onewonders what would happen to the "homosexualist" who was discovereddallying there. Where Duncan saw homosexuality simply as one of manyways of loving and experiencing the world, Ransom evidently regarded itas an abnormality so unthinkable that he was ready to call the law: "I amnot sure whether or not state and federal laws regard it so, but I thinkthey do; I should not take the initiative in the matter, but if there are lawsto this effect I concur in them entirely" (Ransom, 320). His "get out oftown, boy," attitude shows the depth of resistance to candid discussion onthe subject even in the most elite intellectual circles of the World War IIyears.
Still, the real controversy behind Duncan's article lay not inrevealing his identity as a gay man, but in his criticism of alleged self-segregatinghomosexual cliques. "Although in private conversation, at everytable, at every editorial board, one knows that a great body of modernart is created by what almost amounts to a homosexual cult; althoughhostile critics have opened fire in a constant attack as rabid as the attackof Southern senators upon `niggers'; critics who might possibly view thehomosexual with a more human eye seem agreed that it is better thatnothing be said" (Duncan, Politics, 209). Denial and fear weren't theexclusive property of the gay elites or homophobes Duncan criticized butalso of the "liberal body of critics" who feared to criticize either or to beassociated with the topic. "Pressed to the point," Duncan continued,"they may either, as in the case of such an undeniable homosexual asHart Crane, contend that they are great despite their `perversion'?muchas my mother used to say how much better a poet Poe would havebeen had he not taken dope," i.e., pointless moralism on one hand, andoutright denial on the other that homosexual artists had contributedanything at all to modern art.
But what Duncan's article aimed at mainly was the allegedingroup hostility of homosexual elites. These were the "most articulatemembers" of a shadow society who "have been willing to desert that primarystruggle" (i.e., for total human liberation) in order to gain at theprice if need be of any sort of prostitution, privilege for themselves, howeverephemeral ..." (Politics, 209). The creation of elites whose troublingdifference is condoned as long as they mirror the elitism of the dominantsocial order is nothing new. For instance in Jim Crow New Orleans, anindividual who could disguise his identity could "passer blanc,"and benefit from the privileges accorded to whites there, just as a"straight-acting" homosexual could disguise himself or herself today,say, in the offices of a conservative political party. Yet light-skinnedblacks (the term itself upsets conventional notions of race) such as JamesWeldon Johnson emerged from a life of passing to join the struggle.What Duncan wanted was for gays to emerge then, twenty-five yearsbefore Stonewall. But Duncan's criticism also reported a cult of superioritycomparable to the exclusive Creole hierarchy. He proclaimed thatthese homosexual elites had cultivated "a secret language, the camp, atone and a vocabulary that is loaded with contempt for the human,"which survived far beyond the limits of rank and file "queers" (Politics,210).
Those people he attacked must have felt themselves betrayed. Ifthey were not honest about their orientation but responded, they wereouted, and straight society would have another excuse to keep gayslocked in the closet. Even the left couldn't openly face the homosexualquestion; Macdonald's suggestion to Duncan that he publish the articleanonymously indicated this lingering disability. Mainline Marxismregarded homosexuality to result from capitalism's repression of women;even according to some contemporary traditional Marxists, homosexualityis an abnormality that will disappear with the triumph of the proletarianrevolution and the liberation of women from their inferior (andunlovable?) social status. Duncan's anarchistic limits of allegiance towhat might be called "interest groups" even today might be considereddivisive and homopohobic by single-issue reformists whose dependenceupon mainstream political parties eliminates the possibility of a morefundamental movement for total human liberation. But what some gaysin the forties read as denunciation and betrayal by a still unknown writerwas actually a call to "take in his own persecution a battlefront towardhuman freedom." What Duncan wished for was a gay movement thatopenly joined with labor and racial-equality activists. What he was riskingwas rejection not only by the Ransoms of the world, but also by theleft and the gay world itself. In a time when the working class movementhad enslaved itself to Stalinism, progressive forces were also divided overfighting against the Axis or non-cooperation with any state's war. Shadowsocieties like the gay community remained deep in the back of society'smind, their political potential unexplored.
It wasn't identity as a gay man alone that Duncan wanted to carryinto battle. "What I think can be asserted as a starting point is that onlyone devotion can be held by a human being a creative life and expressionand that is a devotion to human freedom, toward the liberation ofhuman love, human conflicts, human aspirations. To do this one mustdisown all the special groups (nations, religions, sexes, races) thatwould claim allegiance" (Politics, 211).
What Duncan valued above all was the "struggle of all humanityfor freedom," a conviction that he didn't profess lightly. He had only afew years before he objected to military service by writing to his draftboard: "The illusion of possession is a manifestation of the ego; possessionof a body, a name, a person, an object, a country, a law. In so far aswe defend or seek to secure these, then we yield to this illusion, we dwellin the ego separation and we are at error" (Faas, 139). He could haveended up as did poets William Everson and Robert Lowell, among others,in detention as a conscientious objector; instead, after induction andtraining, he was detained as a psychological case by officers unaccustomedto that kind of philosophical speculation among draftees, andeventually discharged.
To his list of ego attachments Duncan could have added, "aclique, a claque, a cabal." Duncan's rigorous self-examination and spiritual-psycho-logicalstudies had led him into regions where personal identitydissolves and sympathy must be extended to the suffering of any soulregardless of its current existence as a straight, a gay, a German, a Jew. Itwasn't through desire to betray his "own milieu," as Parker Tylercharged, or his own self-hatred. Nor was it a matter of convenience.Duncan's struggle with his homosexual nature took the same forms ofcrossdressing and rough-trade cruising as thousands of other men havealso pursued. He was far from a model of easy self-acceptance. His internalstruggles pushed him to study shamanistic practices of transvestism(Faas, 95) in which the male shaman dresses and behaves as a woman inthe belief that only through experiencing the totality of human feelingcan an individual pass into the spirit world and gain wisdom. As early as1939 he declared himself a "shamanistic poet" and filled notebook pageswith poems of ritual dismemberment. His detachment was hard-wonand real. His anarchism was based in spiritual conviction that eschewsallegiance to a part for loyalty to the whole, and rejects conventional partisanpolitics completely.
One can easily see the result of Duncan's policy of intense self-examination:"Faced by the inhumanities of society I did not seek a solutionin humanity but turned to a second out-cast society as inhumane asthe first" (Politics, 210). These private communities "offered a family,outrageous as it was, a community in which one was not condemned forone's homosexuality, but it was necessary there for one to desert one'shumanity for which one would be suspect, `out of key'" (Politics,210-11). Therefore Parker Tyler's accusation of "a confession of a moreor less personal guilt-feeling." It's possible to read this that way only ifyou ignore Duncan's strong sentiments regarding "those troubled emotions,the deep and integral longings that we as human beings feel, holdingus from violate action by the powerful sense of humanity that istheir source, longings that lead us to love" (Politics, 211). Hesensed as a source of love in self-doubt the need for forgiveness and theneed to forgive. Duncan characterized gay alienation in the 1940s as the"gaiety" of a closeted population, "a wave surging forward, breakinginto laughter and then receding, leaving a wake of disillusionment, a disbeliefthat extended to oneself, to life itself." Ironically, this sounds likethe result of the kind of self-evasion that Ransom recommended as thecorrect "sublimation" for gays. Realizing that you can't openly love orreturn the scorn of a scornful society leaves the "different" personcrowded out of his own life by emptiness and impotence. The solutionDuncan argued was not to extend alienation into numbness and decadencebut to realize the universality of alienation and to seek its reversalin love and political action.
Copyright © 1988-2000 Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-57423-141-3
