The Bohemian Poetry of Ernest Hemingway

 

 All 88 of Hemingway’s poems, including juvenilia, are contained in a modern edition edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis and readily available for borrowing online at https://archive.org/details/88poems0000hemi.

 

     Ernest Hemingway’s poetry is likely to be read primarily by those, diminishing in number these last few decades, who sufficiently favor his fiction to seek even relatively insubstantial new light that might illuminate his novels and stories.  The lyric oeuvre is slender, all right.  His editor has eked out eighty-eight short bits by including high school compositions, while he published maybe twenty-five poems during his life, including others in letters.  Apart from the small quantity of work, even a Hemingway enthusiast would be unlikely to make any great claims for these pieces, many of which seem to have been taken lightly by their own author.  Yet they are revealing in a way that tells less about Hemingway as an individual than about the nature of the modern avant-garde, the values and uses of an artistic bohemia, and the development of the concept of “hip.” 

     Reading these poems with a bit of distance from their composition, one conceives not so much a specific persona behind them, but rather a type, the young and rebellious artist.  While, of course, a good many details have dated, the flavor, the tone has much in common with the readings I have attended my entire life from hearing the Beats at Chicago’s Big Table Readings sixty years ago through my Poetry on the Loose Reading/Performance Series lasting twenty-one years in the Hudson Valley.  Poetry on the page tends to differ from that which is meant to be performed, but, even apart from these generic differences, Hemingway’s poems exemplify the attitudes that have come to be associated not with art as a whole, but with an artistic “underground.”

     Though the literary historian more commonly views the expatriate writers of the ‘twenties as individuals, they contributed as well to a collective scene that celebrated the values associated with artistic bohemias: experimentalism in art and radicalism in politics and morals.  Such milieux, while in part traceable far back in time, have been well-defined since the Romantic Age.  While each artist produced individual works with unique characteristics, many also contributed or assented to the formation of a counter-cultural paradigm. 

     Readings by writers who consider themselves adversaries of the established culture take place not at universities but in cafes, bars, and living room salons.  A goal at such gatherings, apart from the delectation of art, is the creation of a community sub-culture.  For the last two hundred years such milieux have been called bohemias. [1]  Radicalism in these settings not only suggests challenges to social, political, religious, and aesthetic orthodoxies both as proposals and as pure style.  The writers’ posture of revolt appeals to the expected readership all though it may be detached from any possibility of actual adoption. 

     An embattled contrarian protest in fact derives its energy and drama from its not being accepted by the majority.  The desire to “épater les bourgeois” [2] can be a motive in itself, with the potential to inspire both Baudelaire’s in-your-face dandyism, Whitman’s casual open-collared workman’s dress, or  punk safety-pin in the ear.  I recall observing at the first live poetry readings I attended that the greatest audience response was regularly generated by transgressive lines, either sexually explicit, politically revolutionary, or aesthetically outré.  Fifty years later, at one of my own Poetry on the Loose events, an artist displayed his naked rear as part of his performance.  The gesture was meant to offend, a direct descendant of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, though in Jarry’s time the opening word was sufficient to cause the play to be banned.

     An ambience similar to such live venues may be constructed from the content of journals as well.  Hemingway published many of his poems in “little magazines” which cultivated the creation of a community of those critical of the majority culture such as Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review and Der Querschnitt, founded by Alfred Flechtheim and later edited by Hans von Wedderkop.

     The very name of The Little Review highlights its dissent from social norms.  The first issue proclaims the journal’s intention to pursue “that untrammeled liberty which is the life of Art.”  In case any reader should mistake the editor’s intentions, she later included the slogan “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste” beneath the title. [3]  She serialized Joyce’s Ulysses, losing a censorship trial over the excerpts. [4]  The poet whose work appeared in The Little Review most often was the outrageous Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven whose work was often highly sexual as well as seeming to some incoherent.  In its pages frequent contributor Emma Goldman advocated not only anarchism but sexual freedom as well.

     Though European and focused centrally on visual art with oblique and satiric references to politics, Der Querschnitt also insisted on its radical loyalties, publicizing innovative artists such as Klee, Chagall, and Max Ernst whose “Dada est mort, vive dada!” appeared in January of 1921.  The editors included coverage of boxing tournaments as well as of the most significant developments in art.  Its tone is suggested by the claim in its subscription promotion in 1923 that the journal had correspondents in “the great centers of Europe and America and among Negroes and Eskimos.”  It published as poetry Salvation Army songs and the “the war cry of the famous All Blacks', the Maori hakka, of New Zealand’s Rugby team” in the same issue with a song about Jesse James from Harry Archer’s musical revue. [5]

     Hemingway’s poetic contributions to these journals were in many ways discontinuous from his fiction, but most exhibit the characteristics of bohemian art: transgressive material: sexual, political, religious, and aesthetic, suggesting a general bent toward the Dionysiac in preference to the Apollonian in spite of a certain cynicism, and an insider hipness implying a coterie with privileged insight.  While the poem’s editor Nicholas Gerogiannis says that “the poems reveal Hemingway himself rather than a fictional counterpart” [6], their persona is in fact less the author as an individual than a projection of the generic bohemian artist.  The significance of the poetry’s outlaw pose is evident in the title of the earliest collection of his poetry, The Suppressed Poems of Ernest Hemingway. [7]

     The same emphasis is sounded when Hemingway refers to his poems in Querschnitt as “dirty,” writing to John Dos Passos “the ‘Schnitt also publishing a book of my dirty poems . . . Have you got any dirty poems you want me to sign? Jeeze I wish you were here to write a few good prurient poems for me because that is now my only source of income.” [8]  His off-hand attitude distinguishes these poems from the center of his serious literary work.  After this claim that the poems are merely a source of income and asking Dos Passos to contribute, he jocularly implies that his wife Hadley was the author of some of them. 

     In spite of this off-handed attitude, Hemingway thought enough of many of his poems to retain them, revise them, and to publish a good many during his life.  Still, they have found few admirers (though Wallace Stevens was one), particularly in contrast to his enormous popular success and substantial critical reputation toward the end of his life.  Many are occasional and seem very casual, tossed off while doing his more significant work.  Others are written for those in his personal circle, including allusions meaningless to the general public.  A good share are satirical or otherwise humorous, even whimsical.  Perhaps the most pervasive attitude they project is a devil-may-care, insouciant bohemianism, reflecting transgressive attitudes in a cheeky rebellion more willing to sound flippant than grave. 

     The simplest device to indicate transgressive counter-cultural attitudes is the use of vulgar language.  Taboos which have since diminished were through Hemingway’s life strict enough that his use of obscene, scatological, and racist language was still shocking.  Now that politicians and celebrities routinely use formerly tabooed expressions, it is difficult to realize the offense originally caused by words such as “cunts,” (“Sequel”).  He managed to include “shit,” “fuck,” and cocksuckers,” all in a single poem, “The Defense of Luxembourg.”  Whereas other writers pushing the boundaries of censorship were quite serious about their themes – D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and even, I would include, Henry Miller, Hemingway seems to indulge in what looks like juvenile play.  In “The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers” everything is “the shit” and his style is half Gertrude Stein and half restroom graffiti: “Home is where the art is, home is where the fart is,/ let us fart and artless fart in  the home.”  In “The Road to Avallon” he makes, perhaps, a bit more sense.

 

Dogs must shit as well as men
            I like dogs better
           Say: Amen

 

     He likewise engages in ethnic jibes, referring, for instance, to “wops” in “d’Annunzio,”  “nigger” in “The Road to Avallon,” and making thoughtless remarks about Jews in “[The rail ends do not meet . . .].”  Worse, he ridicules Dorothy Parker’s suicide attempts in “To a Tragic Poetess” and Scott Fitzgerald’s chronic depression in “Lines to be Read at the Casting of Scott Fitzgerald’s Balls into the Sea from Eden Roc (Antibes, Alpes Maritime).”  (He spoke of his own depression in “Black-Ass Poem After Talking to Pamela Churchill” with greater gravitas, a somber tone, and old-fashioned prosody.)   

     He repeatedly implies a free attitude toward sexual relations, joking about gonorrhea in “Oklahoma,” and declaring “FOR THE HARLOT HAS A HARDLOT.”  When he announces an intention to aim at monogamy since he is “in love,” he sounds still ecstatic.

 

I’m off’n wild wimmen

An Cognac

An Sinnin’

For I’m in loOOOOOOOve.

 

     The ethnocentrism implied by his use of racial epithets does not extend to conventional patriotism.  In the poems concerning war, a deep cynicism prevails.  In “To Good Guys Dead” he says, “they sucked us in.”  His “Riparto d’Assalto” is almost reminiscent of Wilfred Owen, apart from its more casual structure and image of “a “warm and soft and sleepy whore.”

 

Grey, cold, bitter, sullen ride --

To splintered pines on the Grappa side

At Asalone, where the truck-load died.

 

A similar attitude is evident in “Champs d’Honneur” which notes “Soldiers never do die well” and proceeds then to specifics.

 

Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch

     All the world roars red and black,

Soldiers smother in a ditch;

     Choking through the whole attack. 

 

Never nationalistic, his poems about war insist on drunkenness and death as in “To Chink Whose Trade is Soldiering,” and “[Some day when you are picked up . . .]”. 

     The seriousness of what might seem political poems in part do not survive the general tone.  One poem, “[In a Magazine . . .]”, which describes police brutality, mingles that theme with belligerence toward the “Hun,” though the persona notes that he prefers his adversaries “unarmed.”   A poem dedicated “To Will Davies” (poet and “Super-tramp” William Henry Davies) seems to address an unequal justice system, capital punishment, and racism, but concludes with a distracting throwaway jocular reference to performer Bert Williams.  His observations on America often go no deeper than playful fancy, as when he says “They read the Saturday Evening Post./ And believe in Santa Claus.” and “they wear B. V. D.’s all the year round” in “I Like Americans by a foreigner.”

     Hemingway also defines his counter-cultural pose with irreligious remarks.  In “Chapter Heading” he says he “has danced to devils’ tunes” before “shivering home to pray,” thus serving “one master in the night,/ Another in the day.”  The church is for him an occasion for a joke.  In “[God is away for the summer . . .]” he whimsically comments that the minister’s summer vacation has caused to absence of the divine, and his “Neothomist Poem” includes a line-break pause worthy of a stand-up comedian: “The Lord is my shelter, I shall not/ want him for long.”  He later glossed the bit by saying it described “the temporary embracing of the church by literary gents.” [10]

     While making a show of spurning conventional proprieties in language, religion, patriotism, sexuality, and even, on occasion, human sympathy, he adopted avant-garde rhetoric, closely imitating Gertrude Stein whose work was ridiculed by many, though the criticism only increased her celebrity.  In a comment on his description of the Lausanne Peace Conference published as “They All Made Peace – What is Peace?” in The Little Review, he called Stein’s style “invaluable for analysing anything” yet referred to his own poem as “a joke.” [11]  In spite of this claim to levity, how own mature prose style uses repetitions and simple language doubtless linked to her influence.  In “The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers” he imitates Stein, though sounding careless and flippant while she often seemed measured and quite serious.

 

Home is where the art is,

home is where the fart is,

let us fart and artless fart in the home.

 

Stein’s importance is all the more impressive since Hemingway’s sexism led him to discount other “poetesses” in “The Lady Poets With Footnotes” which dismisses the leading female poets of the day. 

    It may be that Stein’s position as doyenne of the avant-garde attracted Hemingway at least as much as her specific model.  His poems include a number of friendly references to Ezra Pound though his fiction owes nothing whatever to the older poet.  In “The Soul of Spain . . .” published in Querschnitt he claims that “We have done a monument to Ezra,” in “The Age Demanded” he tropes on “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” and in “Kipling” and “[I think that I have never trod . . .]” he includes Provençal envois as a gesture toward Pound. 

     As the role of Pound suggests, what Hemingway valued was in part the coterie character of the literary set with its “hip” insider references.  He considered the smallness of the small magazines that published his work as evidence of their integrity, and he defended those in which he appeared against their rivals.  When Pound was trying to convince Robert McAlmon of the Dial to publish Eliot’s “The Wasteland” he also submitted Hemingway’s “Killed Piave – July 8 – 1918,” the rejection of which generated made Hemingway an enemy of the journal.

     The bohemian attitude led him in any event to discount critics in general, particularly what he perceived as establishment critics whom he attacked not with an aesthetic defense, but by impugning their virility.  Thus, Edmund Wilson’s 1930 introduction to In Our Time elicited his observation in “[Little Mr. Wilson . . .]” that in Wilson’s “pedantic” novel I Thought of Daisy “no one liked to screw,” and a general complaint about “All the ball-less critics/ all their cuntless wives.”  Contrasting the vigorous creative type with the effete intellectual, he insists in “Poem” that his life experience has given him something “that cannot be taken from us by an article/ or abolished by a critical agreement of professors.”  

 

We’ll write books.

They will not read them

but their children may

if they have children

 

In “[Little drops of grain alcohol . . .]’’ he wrote, “Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses/ better to see to kiss the critics’ asses.”

     Hemingway’s attitude in these poems is not only anti-academic, it is flippant.  The irreverence and willful immaturity of many of his lines justify the use of the term “smart-alecky.”  Consider, for instance, this excerpt from “[Little drops of grain alcohol . . .]”: “Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses/ better to see to kiss the critics’ asses.”  Or this from “[And everything the author knows . . . ].”

 

And everything the author knows

He shows and shows and shows and shows

his underclothes

are more important than the sum.

 

Or, in “Part Two of The Soul of Spain . . .”, “The wind blows and it does not snows look at the bull with his bloody nose.”  

     His “Valentine” with the line “stick them up your asses, lads” was published in the final number of The Little Review for which Margaret Anderson, in a gambit to overtop avant-gardism itself, had specifically asked for manuscripts which were not literature.  Yet some of his poems are far less bohemian.  Those addressed to his wife Mary, for instance, sound almost sincere: “First Poem to Mary in London,“ “Poem to Mary (Second Poem),” “Poem to Miss Mary, and “Travel Poem.”  Several if the war poems such as Captives” are similarly straightforward as is his lighter bit “To Crazy Christian” about his cat.  Some poems -- “Flat Roofs” and “Bird of Night” -- come to mind) are unironic Imagism.  “On Weddynge Gyftes” is a piece of journalistic entertainment.

     Nonetheless, the bent of his 88 Poems is predominately bohemian.  The poems are significant in establishing an adversarial relation to the received ideas of his day by mocking patriotism, religion, sexual morality, and the traditional standards for art.  He practiced rigorous rewriting for his fiction; he said he had rewritten the ending to Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times [12] and pronounced that “the only writing is rewriting” [13] most often approached his poetry in a casual fashion, because that off-handedness was a central part of his poems’ significance.  He found in bohemia a subculture that would support his artistic ambitions and he established his credibility within it by rebelling against social norms of every sort.  The themes that dominated his major fiction are largely suppressed, though both combat and bullfighting are themes of the poetry.  The primary meaning, though, was to present his bona fides for membership in the artistic bohemia of his age, reinforcing the gap between writers and the general public and fostering an attitude of hipness, implying the superiority of their subcultural view.     

      

 

    

1.  Popularized by Henri Murger's stories Scènes de la vie de bohème (1845), the term is first used in English in chapter 65 of Thackery’s Vanity Fair which appeared in Punch in July 1848. 

 

2.  Often attributed to Baudelaire, the term and very similar expressions were used by a number of writers including in 1854 by Aristippe Felix Bernier de Maligny in Nouveau Manuel Théatral: Théorique et Pratique (p. 85), in 1855 by Privat d’Anglemont (in the form “Je les ai épatés, les bourgeois”) in Paris Anecdote (1855) p. 282), and in 1860 by Alexandre Dumas (père) in Le père la ruine, p. 186.

3.  The line first appears in October of 1917. 

 

4.  Ten years later, Random House invited another prosecution by importing the book.  Though the case had to be pursued to the Supreme Court, it was decided in the most significant censorship litigation for a generation to be publishable, Judge Woolsey drily commenting “nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”

 

5.  Volume V, no. 4.

 

6.  Introduction, 88 Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis, xi.

 

7.  Published in 1929 Paris by The Library of Living Poetry.  It is undoubtedly the implication of naughtiness in the title that caused this collection to be pirated in the fifties and again in the seventies.

 

8.  Letter of 22 April, 1925 in Selected Letters ed. Carlos Baker (p. 158).

 

9.  In Nicholas Gerogiannis’ edition of Hemingway’s complete poems, 88 Poems, those which are untitled are identified by the opening words followed by an ellipsis and enclosed in brackets.

 

10.  Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming, note 50, p. 234.

 

11.  See 88 Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis, 141.  This poem was nonetheless admired by Louis Zukovsky who included it in his “Program: Objectivist 1931” manifesto as a model worthy of imitation. 

 

12.  George Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway” quoted William A. Glasser, “A Farewell to Arms,” The Sewanee Review Vol. 74, No. 2 (Spring, 1966).

 

13. “Art of Fiction No. 21,” the Paris Review, issue 18, 1958.

 

Another Look at Vachel Lindsay

 

     Once upon a time, when I was too old for nursery rhymes and young yet for T. S. Eliot, Vachel Lindsay was one of my favorite poets.  Along with works like Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” Byron’s "The Destruction of Sennacherib," and the works of Edgar Allan Poe (my favorite was “Ulalume”), I relished Lindsay’s strident rhythms.  Alone, I would read aloud “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” or “The Congo” for the sake of sound, hardly noticing themes.  By high school I had abandoned him in favor of the High Modernists of his era, reproducing the evolution of taste that led to the diminution of Lindsay’s reputation in the ‘twenties.  Lindsay’s pounding cadences which had seemed innovative, even avant-garde, seemed suddenly vulgar, and his work was discounted and then ignored.  Renewed interest was nearly always defensive. 

     Attempts to rehabilitate him could sound almost apologetic.  One friendly critic argued for a “redefinition” of Lindsay’s significance taking into account the total body of his work, “even if such a survey decided that no reassessment of Lindsay’s literary merit was justified.” [1]  Another, recognizing that his literary reputation was “dead,” asks  “might he be taken as in any sense now a serious poet?” [2]  Because “Lindsay is not seen much these days,” vanished from anthologies and textbooks, a scholar must remind readers that he “was once considered a giant of ‘The New Poetry,’ one of the handful of major poets in the second or third decades of this century who seemed capable of shaping the American idiom in verse for the modern age.” [3]  Yet another concedes, while making a plea for portions of his work, that he was himself “largely responsible for the decline in his reputation,” since his “critical judgement” was “deficient,” resulting in the fact that “none of his books is free of shoddy.” Not to mention the “slovenly proofreading.”  [4]

    Yet when new his work had been greeted in The Little Review as “perilously near great poetry, broad in sweep, imaginative, full of fire and color,” and Lindsay was proposed to be “the next great American poet.”  To this critic the obstacle to Lindsay’s recognition was not his playing to the masses, but, on the contrary, his advanced technique.  “Like every artist who creates a new form,” she observed, he must “educate his public.” [5] In 1920 future British poet laureate John Masefield called him “the best American poet.” [6]

     The respect the poet received from critics was more than matched by popular acclaim.  Whereas he had tramped across the country in 1906 and 1912, he now sold out large halls before paying audiences.  A literary historian notes that “during the early 1920’s Vachel Lindsay was undoubtedly the most widely known and popular of contemporary American poets.” [7]  He himself was uneasy with aspects of his celebrity.  Having coined the term “the Higher Vaudeville” to describe his more sensationally bombastic pieces, he was then chagrined to find that his audience knew nothing of his other work.  Referring to bookings at intellectual centers such as universities, he noted that he had been “frosted in Boston and hissed at Bryn Mawr” [8] and observed that “most schools do not want me but once.” [9]  He complained that he did not wish to be “the ‘Casey At-The-Bat’ of American poetry.” [10]

     Though Lindsay was well aware of the tensions between popular art and high art, he felt he could lure the less refined masses into enlightenment and progress by convincing them it was all a lark.  He thus cultivated “a sort of rag-time manner that deceives them into thinking they are at the vaudeville.” [11]  Since he considered that he was slipping art to his readers or listeners without their quite knowing that it is good for them, he sometimes called the Higher Vaudeville the Higher Irony. [12]  In this way he differed from proletarian authors like the Wobblies’ T-Bone Slim (Matti Valentin Huhta) or the Communists’ Mike Gold who considered their own aesthetics to be those of the masses.

     Lindsay for his part rejected other innovators of his own time.  He dismissed imagism as an “Aesthetic Aristocracy singing on an island to one another while the people perish.” [13]  For him cubism in painting was a trend that would rapidly be forgotten. [14]   Though he was called “the jazz poet,” he had no taste for jazz which he, as an opponent of alcohol, associated with drink.  He wrote at a time when the split between popular art and high art was becoming ever greater and commodified mass culture was replacing traditional folk culture.  Many artists, the Symbolists and the High Modernists in poetry as well as Dadaists and Surrealists, reacted defensively, producing defiantly unpopular work, sometimes intentionally obscurantist, while Lindsay went out of his way to use demotic idiom..

     Lindsay’s “Gospel of Beauty” was entirely bound up with his concepts of reforming American culture.  A devotee of what he called “the new localism,” his “Gospel of Beauty” was one not only with “the love of the hearth and the Village.” but also with “the love of God.”  Eschewing “art for art’s sake,” for him a “theory of aesthetics” and a “theory of the new Localism” were portions of the same system. [15]  Beneath his artistic practice lay a vision of social justice, and beneath that a vaguely Swedenborgian mysticism of his own invention.  Even his apparently political “Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket” concludes with a wholly spiritual motive.

 

Come, let us vote against our human nature,

Crying to God in all the polling places

To heal our everlasting sinfulness

And make us sages with transfigured faces.

 

In this way he advances in the twentieth century Whitman’s vision of a spiritual democracy by using language to uplift, unite, and enlighten his fellow countrymen.

     His work is problematic in the first place because his search for a popular idiom was driven less by his innate verbal genius as by his ambition to have an effect on society, to advance his program to bring America around to a mystical socialism more exotic than the existing American varieties, among them the Christian socialism of Francis Bellamy, author of the Pledge of Allegiance (and brother of Edward Bellamy, whose Looking Backward inspired the Nationalist Clubs); the populist partisanship of Julius Wayland’s Appeal to Reason (published in Girard Kansas), and the perennial socialist campaigning of Presbyterian minister Norman Thomas.  Even these trends, more palatable to some Americans than the I. W. W. with its heavy immigrant membership and willingness to sanction violence, however, were extirpated with the vigorous suppression of all shades of anti-capitalist activity.  Lindsay’s visions had by the mid-twentieth century, long seemed obsolete.

     Whatever assessment one may make of the aesthetic value of Lindsay’s oeuvre, he has an undeniable place in several sub-narratives of American literature.  In both performance poetry and in Tendenzdichtung his place is secure next to Carl Sandburg, another once-celebrated poet now neglected for being accessible even to ill-educated readers.   His unique style of recitation, chanting and singing, stretching and compressing words, is fortunately preserved in recordings made during the last of the eighteen years he toured the country.  [16] 

     Lindsay did write a good deal apart from his declamatory poems.  He composed a number of quieter lyrics in conventional forms meant to be read in calmer fashion.  The contemplative “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” doubtless due to its theme, was highly popular despite being quieter than his poem to “John Brown.”  Lyrics like “On the Garden Wall” and “Shakespeare” which lack Lindsay’s fiery energy, are palpably second-rate.  “The City of Glass” is pretty in the manner of a Maxfield Parrish print.  “Buddha,” while otherwise unremarkable, may engage the reader’s attention through its topic.

     In addition to his poetry, Lindsay produced prose pieces detailing his “Gospel of Beauty” and his wanderings on the open road, a treatment of the art of cinema, short stories, a novel too strange for most readers, visual art and photography, all neglected today. 

     His book on movies The Art of the Moving Picture first came out in 1915.  Its date alone makes it a groundbreaking work, and Lindsay was a serious filmgoer.  Every page of his study is filled with specific examples of stories, sequences, and actors to illustrate his points, in spite of the fact that feature length films were still in their infancy.  His respect for popular entertainment anticipates Gilbert Seldes’ study The Seven Lively Arts which productively treats comic strips, vaudeville, circuses, and other popular entertainments as art.  His larger schemes such as the division of films into those focusing on action, intimacy, or splendor may no longer seem useful, though at least it does foreground the visual character of the medium, but many of his comments are insightful.  His book is replete with clever and provocative observations such as his comparison of Mary Pickford with a figure in Botticelli. [17]

     Lindsay had considered his novel The Golden Book of Springfield likely to prove the chef d’oeuvre of his career.  He said shortly before its release “I am making it the one thought of my life, and hope when it is done, it will be the one book of my life.”  Buoyed by optimism about his visionary project, he said “I feel younger, and may sail to the end of the world, yet!” [18] yet a short time later he noted sadly of The Golden Book “I am afraid it is a failure.” [19]  The book indeed proved to be a popular and critical failure, by some accounts the starting point of the depression that led to his suicide.  It has found few readers since and has been pronounced unreadable by some who approached it.  It is utopian and yet dystopian, socialist yet individualist, realistic and fantastic.  In the rapid changes from 1918 to 2018, from “prognostication” to future incarnations, never knowing when the book itself will come flying through the air, it is little wonder that many find Lindsay’s most ambitious project a dizzying mess.

     Even Lindsay’s more sympathetic critics have regularly qualified their praise until it nearly vanishes.  Even during his heyday, when Time magazine saluted him as “a true poet,” its critic added that, “a great deal of his work will probably last much longer than some of our elaborately sophisticated cognoscenti believe.” [20]  The scholarly consensus since has been cooler yet.  Virtually every mildly positive comment on him sounds defensive, apologetic, hedged about with qualifications.  One if his most acute defenders focuses quite rightly on Lindsay’s his role as a reformer, moralist, and shaper of a new American culture rather noting a specifically artistic legacy.  ““Perhaps we can again value his vision of America, the words, rhythms, and experiences of the many, sung or sounded with imagination and authenticity.”  When read aloud, Lindsay might still afford a a glimpse of “Lindsay’s vision of America . . . a rich, troubling, musical, and fantastic view of our culture. [21]

     This praise follows Lindsay’s own preference for a social rather than aesthetic role.  Anticipating the publication of The Golden Book of Springfield he wrote “I hardly see myself as a poet any more. I see myself as a kind of a forecaster and maker of dreams in Springfield.” The goal of leading his fellow-citizens to a more enlightened way of life had always underlain his work; the Higher Vaudeville gave him a huge audience and with it an income for a time, but he recognized as well as the critics the limits of such work.  Like a good deal of spoken word today, orally performed poems are generally free of contradictions, mysteries, and ambiguities; they are typically simple enough to be digested at first hearing.  The dramatic spectacle of recitation does not survive the occasion, however exciting the live show may have been. 

     In the end another look at Vachel Lindsay may only remind readers of the twenty-first century that more than one lineage may be accommodated in literary history.  The coexistence of a variety of genres can only enrich American literature.  Vachel Lindsay’s bombastic performance pieces are, in their own way, beautiful and significant as are the blues lyrics of Robert Johnson, toasts like “the Signifying Monkey,” the Wobbly songs of Ralph Chaplin, Baxter Black’s cowboy poetry, and raps by Tupac Shakur.  Lindsay’s intention to push toward a new vision of America is fundamentally a spiritual and a social program, best measured against fellow American dreamers from the nineteenth century Owenites and Fourierists, through Bellamy’s Looking Backward, to the Haight-Ashbury communalists of the ‘sixties and beyond.  He is worth remembering if only for having made Johnny Appleseed an American saint.

 

1.  Ann Massa, “The Artistic Conscience of Vachel Lindsay,” Journal of American Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (Oct., 1968).

2.  Edwin H. Cady, “Vachel Lindsay Across the Chasm” in Indiana University Bookman 5 (1960).

3.  John Chapman Ward, “Vachel Lindsay Is "Lying Low," College Literature Vol. 12, No. 3 (Fall, 1985), pp. 233-24.  Note the article’s title.

4.  Albert Edmund Trombly, “Listeners and Readers: The Unforgetting of Vachel Lindsay” in the Southwest Review Vol. 47, No. 4 (autumn 1962), pp. 294-302.

5. “Eunice Tietjens’ review of The Congo and Other Poems in The Little Review April 1914 (I,4).

6.  The English and American Muse,” The Bookman, Volume 57 (February 1920).

7.  Trombly’s article (cited in note 5).

8.  Handwritten 1919 marginal note on Lindsay’s copy of “A Letter About My Four Programmes, For Committees In Correspondence.”  Repeated in a July 20, 1919 letter to Sara Teasdale.

9.  April 21, 1919 letter to A. J. Armstrong,

10.  June 16, 1927 letter to Frederic Melcher, quoted in the Vachel Lindsay number of the Indiana University Bookman, no. 5, December 1960, p. 41. 

11.  Letter of Vachel Lindsay to Jessie B. Rittenhouse, quoted in Jessie B. Rittenhouse My House of Life, p. 316. 

12.  See Ann Massa, “The Artistic Conscience of Vachel Lindsay,” Journal of American Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (Oct., 1968).

13.  “A Letter About My Four Programmes, For Committees In Correspondence” p. 6.

14.  The Golden Book of Springfield, p. 13.

15.  Letter to Witter Bynner April 6, 1912.

16.   A rich selection of Lindsay’s performances is available at https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lindsay.php. 

17.  On p.28

18.  Both phrases are in a May 30, 1919, letter to Sara Teasdale.

19.  December 7, 1920 letter to Sara Teasdale.

20.  In a review of Lindsay’s Collected Poems, July 09, 1923.

21.  John Chapman Ward, “Vachel Lindsay Is "Lying Low," College Literature Vol. 12, No. 3 (Fall, 1985), pp. 233-24. 

Notes on Recent Reading 46 (Kleist, Didion, Soupault)

The Prince of Homburg (Kleist)

     To me the most striking thing about this play is not the prominence of an extreme military code of discipline not irrelevant to the author’s family, for centuries prominent in the Prussian army.  The Prince wins a great victory, but, due to his love-dreaminess, violates orders.  For this he is condemned to die.  In the end the Elector pardons him buts finds him (temporarily) too scrupulous to accept this mercy.  We may be reminded of a samurai story, though for Kleist the whole tension is, I suppose, between heart and mind.  Among the numerous complications even this thread of the plot engenders are the questions of whether the Elector had been sincere (he certainly seemed to be) when threatening the firing squad and what role the unanimous petition from other soldiers may have had.  The most dramatic and radical questions arise with the final words of the play in which the Prince, who had been subjected to a mock execution, asks if he is dreaming and Kottwitz replies “Ein Traum, was sonst," causing the protagonist to fall into unconsciousness again. 

     Perhaps the most emotionally powerful portion of the play is the pathetic passage in which the noble and courageous warrior is reduced by fear of death to abject begging. 

     The play has been justly compared to Shakespeare’s late romances for its hovering between comedy and tragedy and its magical resolution. 

 

 

 

A Book of Common Prayer (Didion)

     In Joan Didion’s reports from Central America in the New York Review of Books, later the basis for her 1983 book Salvador, the revolutionary crisis was unforgettably described.  There can be little doubt that her fierce images and ideological restraint informed the opinion of at least the American intelligentsia.  Before the violence, supported always by a pernicious US influence, became so widespread, she had depicted a fictional banana republic in her 1977 novel, set in a Boca Grande that is strikingly reminiscent of O. Henry’s Anchuria in Cabbages and Kings.   The utter and complete corruption, the domination by wealth and guns, the oligarchy that always governs in spite of democratic and left-wing charades, are historically accurate and unfortunately remain the norm in Central America.  Even when revolutionaries came to power they turned into the tyrants their younger selves had despised. 

     That society, though, is purely the setting, establishing the tone of cynical self-absorption that is normal in Boca Grande, within which the drifting Americans, in particular the distrait Charlotte Douglas, pass their time.  The narrator Grace Strasser-Mendana, who, like everyone else, has no political values, is practically the only realistic dependable observer, her accuracy buttressed by her scientific training.  Yet in the last line she reflects, “I have not been the witness I wanted to be.”

     Marin comes across with very little personality, hardly even a true believer, so dulled she is in defensive insouciance.  She seems purely a reflection of the then-current news of the Symbionese Liberation Army (though the originals were more touching and true and finally tragic).  I would have thought that there might have been room for a few manifestations of idealism or nobility from the Boca Grande guerilleros as well.  Ah well, once again, history has vindicated cynicism.

     For me the best passages were those in which the characters tossed aggressive verbal barbs amongst themselves, getting nowhere at all.  At times they sounded almost like Ronald Firbank characters.  Good fun there.

 

 

 

Lost Profiles (Soupault)

     The subtitle of this slim 1963 volume, “Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism,” is better justified than the title itself.  The old avant-garde has been canonized and what had once been rebellious groupings apart from the prior artistic power structure have now becomes standard art history.  Which is not to say boring.  Here one may find reminiscences of Breton, Crevel, and Reverdy from a central figure in Paris Dada and a co-founder of Surrealism (though he was expelled for refusing to join the Communist Party).  He conveys the ambience of the early twentieth century counterculture, emphasizing rebellion and the role of scandal.  Those who came of age in the sixties might find his account of the scenes of his youth particularly engaging. 

     He records portraits of Apollinaire, Henri Rousseau, and some less likely figures such as Proust and Joyce as well as an appreciative piece on Baudelaire.

     This edition was translated by Alan Bernheimer with a pleasant afterword by Ron Padgett and published by City Lights.