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WRITERS ONLINE

Spring 1999
Volume 3, Number 2

Merlin Holland

Merlin Holland's elegant volume, The Wilde Album, mutes the vivid colors of Oscar Wilde's life, or at least of the popularized caricature's of his life, with the tones of "brown velvet"—a phrase once used to describe Wilde's voice itself. This book reassembles images from the family portrait albums that were dispersed after Wilde's death. The albums themselves are an apt image of the fate of their most famous subject, whose life and art were dismembered—the former irremediably, the latter happily not—by a society and age bent upon conformity in all things. We can be grateful to Merlin Holland for gathering those fragments—those bits of remembered and performed life—and stitching them together with a sensitive and insightful biographical essay. The Wilde Album, like those family albums, provides us with a fuller sense of Oscar Wilde in his time—a fuller sense of Oscar Wilde in our time is surely one of things that we can look forward to this evening.

We can be further grateful to Merlin Holland for taking on the risk of addressing a notoriously tough crowd. For it was just past this date in 1882 that Oscar Wilde ventured into Albany to lecture on the subject of "The English Renaissance." The Albany Evening Journal of the next day, January 28, contains the following report under the headline, "The Apostle of Aestheticism":

Neither the appearance nor the topic of tonight's lecturer, however, resembles those reportedly eliciting the derision or the ennui of Capital District residents over a century ago. Nor, let us hope, will the consequences of Merlin Holland's American lecture tour exactly replicate all of those of his grandfather's. For Holland, alluding to his Oscar Wilde's 140 lectures in 260 days in 1882, notes that: "If his transatlantic trial by fire had given him money and experience, it had also given him a life-long supply of gentle jibes at the Americans" (110).

We should, therefore, consider ourselves forewarned by history—myself and fellow literary critics doubly so, since Merlin Holland's subject this evening, like The Wilde Album itself, takes up the very issue of Wilde and his complex relationship with his many—sometimes hostile, often uncomprehending—audiences. So, if you will, please welcome, in good Albany fashion, Merlin Holland on the topic, "Oscar Wilde: Confounding the Critics and Surviving the Scandal."

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Times Union Article
Merlin Holland

A dispassionate discussion of blood is nearly impossible. Its very color is the color of emergency. It simultaneously suggests "life" and "death." All religious traditions endow it with potent meaning.

At the very same time, blood is a material substance with various properties. In the modern era, it has become an object of scientific investigation, an essential item in the modern medicine chest, and—although we may abhor the thought—a commodity that is bought and sold, often for profit.

Douglas Starr’s Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce (1998) tells the story of blood with wit and narrative energy. He allows us to participate in the excitement of medical discoveries, the race to develop better life-saving technologies, and the heroic efforts of particular individuals who contributed to the cause. Starr traces the development of transfusion equipment, surgical techniques, blood-typing, anticoagulants, storage methods, and screening for pathogens. The cast of characters—many of them driven, obsessed, eccentric or downright crazy—makes the book as riveting as any prime-time emergency room melodrama. So too, the nail-biting situations.

Consider the British pathologist Janet Vaughn who sets up a wartime transfusion facility in a London bar. During the bombing of Britain she comes across a child so badly burned that she can't find a vein. In desperation, she plunges a needle into the child's breastbone in the wild hope of transfusing directly into the bone marrow. The child lives and Vaughn’s method is later used to transfuse men on boats, where the constant rocking makes pin-pointing a vein too difficult. The method also leads to the development of needles with special flanges that prevent the medic from stabbing it clear through the breastbone, killing the patient.

Other heroes include African-American Dr. Charles Drew, medical director of Plasma for Britain and author of, at the time, the most authoritative text on blood storage. Drew dedicates his life to changing the perception that Negro doctors are qualified to be nothing more than "country practitioners, capable of sitting with the poor and sick of their race, but not given to too much intellectual activity and not particularly interested in advancing medicine." His efforts pave the way for several wartime programs that save countless lives and help win the Second World War.

But Drew’s important contributions in the 1930s and 1940s cannot liberate the subject of blood from its more irrational associations. ‘Blood’ means ‘race’ in the popular imagination, and many whites of the time refuse, without sense or scientific basis, to transfuse black blood into white recipients. Even the major not-for-profits, like the Red Cross, avoid collecting blood from African-Americans, though wartime supplies are insufficient and lives might be saved by the practice. Plasma for Britain welcomes black donors, but the organization gives into pressure to label blood by race so that needy recipients can refuse it if they wish.

The history of blood technology is also rife with foolishness. Starr tells the story of American founding father, Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of the most respected physicians of his day. Rush accepts the ancient art of bleeding patients as the most effective cure-all remedy in medicine. (Indeed, bleeding does appear to relieve patients of their unhappiness by making them light-headed. Its weakening effects also make it an appealing pre-modern means of "treating" and pacifying the violent and insane.)

In an effort to save the city of Philadelphia during the yellow fever plague of 1793, Rush runs himself ragged in an effort to bleed as many people as possible, "day and night, seven days a week. . . more than a hundred patients a day." While most of the rich and the healthy abandon the city, which deteriorates into a bizarre wasteland of the sick and the dead, Rush remains behind with the sole intention of saving lives. He writes a friend, "At first I found the loss of ten or twelve ounces of blood sufficient. . . but I have been obliged, gradually, as the season advanced to increase the quantity to sixty, seventy, and even eighty ounces, and in most cases with the happiest effects." Needless to say, Rush kills more people than he helps, but he does so with the best intentions and a devotion that is nothing less than saintly.

Some of the book’s most horrifying stories concern the "wildcat days" of the blood business in the 1960s and 1970s—a phenomenon that recalls earlier oil and gold rushes—when unscrupulous profiteers set up blood banks with the principal aim of tapping a resource and getting rich quickly. Starr tells of malnourished Nicaraguans and Haitians allowed to donate life-endangering amounts of blood in exchange for token payments at facilities owned by American entrepreneurs. He also describes "ooze-for-booze" operations in American cities that exploit the poor and addicted, facilities staffed by poorly trained technicians and using unsanitary equipment— places where doctors reportedly double as bouncers.

The later chapters are necessarily devoted to the AIDS epidemic, the biggest blood-related story of the recent era. As in previous decades, science must always contend with blood’s power to inflame superstition. The late 1980s is a period of easily-triggered hysteria, when the efforts to contain a disease threaten at times to become a witch-hunt. Starr cites Conservative doyen William F. Buckley’s call to tattoo everyone who tests HIV-positive on the forearms and buttocks. "Our society is generally threatened," says Buckley. Starr also devotes much of these chapters to the hemophiliac community’s tragic and little-chronicled encounter with AIDS.

Publisher’s Weekly called Blood, "a first-class science book," and named it one of the "Best Nonfiction Books of 1998." The New York Times called it, "A fascinating history," and Business Week, "A brightly written, intriguing and disquieting book, with some important lessons for public health."

Douglas Starr is codirector of the Graduate Program in Science Journalism at Boston University. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Sports Illustrated, Smithsonian and Audubon. He also served as science editor for the PBS series, "Bodywatch."

As young documentarians, my friend Charlie and I went out one night to the Film Forum in New York to see a double bill of SALESMAN and GIMME SHELTER. Albert Maysles was going to give a talk and field questions, and having seen a few of the Maysles’ early films we were excited to hear what he had to say. SALESMAN proved to be a revelation, and Albert a magician. He spoke for a long time that night, long enough to delay the last screening of GIMME SHELTER, but he could have talked all night as far as the audience was concerned. One story he told in particular captured my imagination.

"My mother told me the story about how my father and mother used to meet for lunch before they got married. They used to meet at Kennedy’s department store in downtown Boston. But what my mother didn't know is that my father would get there five or ten minutes earlier, place himself across the street behind the window of a shop and just gaze at her lovingly as she waited for him. That is how I like to approach the subjects of my films."

The day after the screening I faxed Albert a letter telling him how inspired I had been by his work and by his words, and would he consent to allowing my friend Charlie and I to make a short film entitled "Albert Maysles Rides the Bus," a verite portrait of his daily bus ride to his studio. Albert called us up the next day and invited us over to his studio in midtown Manhattan, and we went expecting a fifteen minute courtesy meeting, and instead spent the afternoon talking shop with Albert who kept saying "You really have to see this," and bringing tapes of his work into his screening room for us to watch. Three hours later we left Albert’s office filled with a desire to go forth and document.

Since that afternoon, I have come to regard Albert as a mentor, and have had the pleasure of spending many afternoons and evenings listening to his stories: The motorcycle journey he and his brother made from Munich to Moscow in 1956, shooting a film about the Polish student revolution along the way. Documenting The Beatles first visit to the U.S. How making a film on Truman Capote led to their desire to do in film what Capote had done with In Cold Blood, a desire which ultimately bore fruit in their non-fiction film classic SALESMAN. Going on the road with The Rolling Stones, filming a death at Altamont, getting death threats from the Hell’s Angels. Shooting a short dramatic film for Jean-Luc Godard. The collaboration with Orson Welles that never panned out.

The stories flow, and I am left with the feeling that I should always have a camera perched on my shoulder when I talk to Albert. But more than the stories, it is Albert’s sense of humanity and his sense of responsibility to his subjects that I have learned from.

"Most people never get the chance to have themselves truly represented and there’s nothing that they'd rather do than have people. . . somebody, and in the odd circumstance a filmmaker so much the better, pay attention to who they really are, to give them that recognition. It becomes a sacred duty."

Now, when I go out to shoot footage for a show or a film, I find myself holding up Albert’s work as the measuring stick.

The topography of American literature has undergone significant change in the past few decades. The literature we define as ours, we have come to realize, is in fact a body of literatures whose borders continually shift to include an ever-expanding community of disparate voices, each distinct in its own way, yet all of them integral to a complex American experience that constitutes our common heritage. It is a heritage still in the making in many respects. The works of African-American, Native-American and Asian-American writers, to name but a few of the many, have served to enrich our national literature in ways that are hard to fathom entirely at present. In recent years the contributions of Latin-American writers have stood out in particular, and works exploring the Latin-American émigré experience by women writers such as Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez have served to fuel the growing interest in this important segment of American society and culture. After the publication of her first two novels, Dreaming in Cuban (Knopf, 1992) and The Aguero Sisters (Knopf, 1997), journalist and novelist Cristina Garcia has established herself among the front rank of this new and exciting group of writers.

I was only two years old when I left Cuba but I remember everything that's happened to me since I was a baby, even word-for-word conversations. I was sitting in my grandmother's lap, playing with her drop pearl earrings, when my mother told her we were leaving the country. Abuela Celia called her a traitor to the revolution. Mom tried to pull me away but I clung to Abuela and screamed at the top of my lungs. My grandfather came running and said, "Celia, let the girl go. She belongs with Lourdes." That was the last time I saw her. (From Dreaming in Cuban)

In many ways this brief passage from Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban perfectly summarizes the underlying personal and ideological tensions that serve as the dramatic impetus for the story of the del Pino family during fifty years of turbulent Cuban history. The novel is constructed of interwoven stories that draw us deep into the lives of three generations of women struggling to come to terms with themselves and with each other in the wake of political events that have forced them asunder. The themes of rebellion, exile and loss, as well as of the reclamation of personal and family identity, all lie at the heart of this powerful debut novel.

The novel alternates between the primary settings of Santa Teresa del Mar in Cuba and New York City between 1972 and 1980. In its involved backstory, however, the narrative truly begins in the 1930s and works its way chronologically forward from Cuba's days as an American tourist haven, through the Batista regime and the subsequent communist revolution, culminating in 1980 when Castro opened Cuba's borders to those who wished to emigrate as refugees to other countries.

The focal center of this political family saga is the del Pino family matriarch Celia, a staunch defender of El Lider (Fidel Castro) and the Revolution, a woman of intense passion and conviction for whom "freedom...is nothing more than the right to a decent life."

While she is the most prominent of the female characters (the men pale in comparison to the women), Celia is actually a co-protagonist in this novel--as her two daughters and her American-reared granddaughter are given nearly equal voice and space as lead characters in the novel's multi-voiced narrative.

The eldest of her daughters, Lourdes, has bought into capitalist consumer culture and the American dream lock, stock and barrel. On the one occasion she returns to Cuba during her exile she spends much of her time running around demanding that people tell her how much money they make, only to inform them with gleeful derision how much more they would make for the same work in the United States. In New York, where she has resettled with her daughter Pilar and her gentle and tolerant (but unfaithful) husband Rufino Fuente, she owns a couple of successful Yankee Doodle Bakeries. Often she sends her mother triumphant pictures of her rich pastries: "Each glistening eclair is a grenade aimed at Celia's political beliefs, each strawberry shortcake proof--in butter, cream and eggs--of Lourdes' success, and a reminder of the ongoing shortages in Cuba."

The politics that separate mother from daughter are in one sense symptoms rather than causes of their mutual antagonisms, guises cloaking a deeper-seated inability to find peace with each other and within themselves. Celia first embraces communism as a redirection of the passionate impulses that collectively define her character, impulses that had seen their only complete fulfillment in her youth during a brief but consuming love affair with a Spaniard, Gustavo Sierra de Armas. A series of letters Celia writes but never sends to Gustavo form a journal of sorts, and serve as dramatic bookends between sections in the novel.

When Gustavo returns to Spain Celia settles for Jorge del Pino, an electric broom and fan salesman who spends most of his time on the road, neglecting his wife. His neglect is deliberate, an act of preemptive revenge for the unconditional love he knows he will never receive from her, for the passion she continues to have for her one-time Spanish lover.

Celia wished for a boy, a son who would make his way in the world. If she had a son, she would leave Jorge and sail to Spain, to Granada. She would dance flamenco, her skirts whipping a thousand crimson lights. Her hands would be hummingbirds of hard black sounds, her feet supple against the floorboards of the night. She would drink whiskey with tourists, embroider histories flagrant with peril, stride through the darkness with nothing but a tambourine and too many carnations. One night, Gustavo Sierra de Armas would enter her club, walk onstage and kiss her deeply to violent guitars.

If she had a girl, Celia decided, she would stay. She would not abandon a daughter to this life, but train her to read the columns of blood and numbers in men's eyes, to understand the morphology of survival. Her daughter, too, would outlast the hard flames. (From Dreaming in Cuban)

When Lourdes is born, however, Celia's dream of fulfillment dies. As she writes in one of her letters:

September 11, 1936

Gustavo:

The baby is porous. She has no shadow. The earth in its hunger has consumed it. She reads my thoughts, Gustavo. They are transparent. (From Dreaming in Cuban)

Lourdes becomes the survivor her mother imagines, but outlasts the hard flames with a vengeance unforeseen even by Celia herself. Born of disillusionment, Celia's lack of intimacy with Lourdes takes root like a weed in the child's spirit. This, as much as the atrocity of a rape she suffers years later at the hands of a revolutionary soldier, give rise to Lourdes' fanatical anti-communist positioning, which itself drives a wedge between her and her own daughter, Pilar.

Pilar is a precocious teenager (artist, anarchist, punk rocker) who finds the reactionary anti-communist politics of the larger Cuban-American community (and her mother in particular) revolting:

Just last week, the lot of them were celebrating--with cigars and sparkling cider--the murder of a journalist in Miami who advocated reestablishing ties with Cuba. Those creeps passed around the Spanish newspaper and clapped each other on the back, as if they themselves had struck a big blow against the forces of evil. The front-page photograph showed the reporter's arm dangling from a poinciana tree on Key Biscayne after the bomb in his car had exploded. (From Dreaming in Cuban)

Pilar dreams of the land from which she was exiled (literally, as well as culturally and spiritually), imagining it as a panacea for a domestic discontent that is hard to name, but ever present, for it is a discontent of absence, a sense of what is missing in her life. She dreams of returning to Cuba and being reunited with her grandmother Celia, with whom she has a somewhat vaguely defined telepathic connection of sorts. The more derisively her mother speaks of her grandmother, and all for which she stands, the more Pilar becomes drawn to her. What becomes clear in the novel is a sense of history repeating itself from generation to generation, with direct oppositional relationships between mothers and daughters, for which the opposing political orientations are but guises. For all their surface differences, all three women are remarkably alike: headstrong, defiant, unyielding. During their eventual reunion, Pilar interprets their futures using the I Ching. The prophecy for Lourdes could just as well stand for all of them. "‘Examine your motives,’ Pilar reads from her book, translating into Spanish as she goes along. ‘They will be the cause of your problems.’"

Like Pilar Puente, Cristina Garcia was herself whisked away to New York City at the age of two, severed from her extended family and forced into a life of exile by political forces beyond her control. Yet unlike her young narrator, Garcia admits that she hasn't a single memory of her first two years in Cuba.

Going back to Cuba was instrumental in the resurgence of my own Cuban identity, which really didn't take hold until I began writing fiction. There's something in the excavation process that one goes through in creating a book that allowed me to reach areas that I didn't even know existed within myself. The Cuban aspect of my identity has, to my surprise, become my wellspring. It is now an indelible, strong, and very visceral part of my identity. (As quoted in "A Conversation with Cristina Garcia," Reader's Guide, Ballantine Publishing Group, 1998)

Dreaming in Cuban received immediate and virtually unanimous critical acclaim, prompting many critics to hail Garcia (a former correspondent and Miami bureau chief for Time) as one of the most promising and gifted new American writers to have come along in many years. Newsweek proclaimed her "a new star in the American literary firmament" while a reviewer in the New York Times expressed an almost incredulous astonishment at the power and maturity of her writing:

It is remarkable that this is a first novel: it is even more remarkable that Ms. Garcia achieves in her debut what many more experienced writers never even attempt. She has tackled the large historical theme of political and spiritual exile in this book, using the much abused form of the family epic, and she has produced a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekhov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani, February 1992)

To these comparisons should be added another. In its lyricism, its complex use of multiple perspectives and voices and in its deft handling of elliptical narrative, Dreaming in Cuban is reminiscent of a debut novel published 22 years before by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye. Both novels are concerned with themes of loss, history and family disintegration, and each constructs its central motif, as it were, through a kind of reassembling of disjointed narrative fragments as filtered through the eyes, mouths and minds of different key characters. But in its overall composition and effect Dreaming in Cuban is more complete and more seamless than Morrison's first novel. It also attempts (and succeeds in large measure) to weave its characters' personal histories into a larger fabric of social developments and political events that play a defining role in the shaping of those characters' very identities, as well as their destinies.

As young Pilar says: "Most days Cuba is kind of dead to me. But every once in a while a wave of longing will hit me and it's all I can do not to hijack a plane to Havana or something. I resent the hell out of the politicians and the generals who force events on us that structure our lives, that dictate the memories we'll have when we're old." At times Pilar's exasperation and longing for her second-hand native culture find more humorous expression, as in the following meditation on the origin of her own name:

I think about Granma, the American yacht El Lider took from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 on his second attempt to topple Batista. Some boat owner in Florida misspells "Grandma" and look what happens: a myth is born, a province is renamed, a Communist party newspaper is launched. What if the boat had been called Barbara Ann or Sweetie Pie or Daisy? Would history be different? We're all tied to the past by flukes. Look at me, I got my name from Hemingway's fishing boat. (From Dreaming in Cuban)

In its many variations and configurations, the political dynamic between the United States and Cuba, between Cubans who stayed and those who fled, form more than just the backdrop for the many stories that intersect and diverge in this novel; they are an integral and indispensable part of the novel's drama. It is quite fitting, then, that even Castro himself appears at one point, not as mere allusion, but as an acting character in a brief yet pivotal scene.

In Dreaming in Cuban Garcia has managed to perform a delicate balancing act. The novel's great allure lies in Garcia's ability to work with and bring to life so many voices and perspectives--no less than seven distinct perspectives are present in the work and her transitions between each (as well as between third-person limited-omniscient narration and first-person narration) are so deftly handled as to be virtually invisible. The humor in the book is convincing, and the moments of poignant pathos are carefully constructed, and selectively chosen. Add to all this Garcia's ability to negotiate confidently between straight realism and magic realism (Jorge del Pino, for instance, plays a larger role as a character after his death than before it), and what you have is a first novel of striking originality and deceptive technical complexity.

The novel is not without its flaws. Young Pilar, for instance, sometimes seems a bit too mature and worldwise for her age, and in one or two surreal scenes the magic realism treads a little more than lightly on the toes of suspended reader disbelief. These cases are more the exception than the rule, however, and they are certainly not worth overplaying, especially when viewed against the long ledger of all that Garcia attempts and accomplishes with skill, confidence and a maturity that first novelists and journeymen novelists alike would envy--and most likely will envy, if they read this book.

Dreaming in Cuban was nominated for a National Book Award and has been translated widely. Since its publication Cristina Garcia has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton and a Whiting Writers' Award. 1997 saw the publication of her long-awaited second novel, The Aguero Sisters, which has been greeted with enthusiasm by critics as a work that follows through on the promise of her much acclaimed debut. Cristina Garcia now lives in California with her daughter, Pilar.

Steven Hartman is a Ph.D. student in the English Department at the University at Albany and a Program Fellow for the NYS Writers Institute.

Who Is Hayden Carruth?

I have read his poems. I have read his essays and reviews. I have read all I can about him and by him in an attempt to pin him down. I had read him many times before in the prominent quarterlies that have featured his work regularly for more than fifty years, but never had I attempted to approach his body of work systematically.

Inevitably I am unequal to the task, for Hayden Carruth has published more than thirty volumes of poetry and prose since his first volume of poems The Crow and the Heart appeared in 1949. But I have managed what I can over a month of diligent reading, including the National Book Award winning Scrambled and Whiskey (1996), two volumes of collected work, Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 (1992) and Collected Longer Poems (1994), and two books of prose, Selected Essays and Reviews (1996) and Reluctantly: Autobiographical Essays (1998), all from Copper Canyon Press.

For weeks I am immersed in the words and in the world, in the mind and memories, of Hayden Carruth. It is an experience that is variously intense and sobering, sad and wonderful, even disconcerting at times, but rich in its rewards. I am trying to prepare myself for the rare opportunity of meeting Hayden Carruth in person when he reads on April 6, together with novelist Barry Callaghan, at the New York State Writers Institute in Albany.

The opportunity is rare not only because Carruth, at 78, is fast approaching an age when most poets find the rigors of readings and public appearances no longer to be worth the trouble, but because for most of his life he has shied away from such engagements with a timorousness uncommon in a figure of his accomplishments, opting instead for a life of quiet seclusion.

A strong case can certainly be made that Hayden Carruth is the major poet-critic of his generation in America. He has received nearly every major award and honor there is in this country, including a National Book Award in Poetry and a National Book Critics Circle Award. As early as a decade ago a number of America's leading poets and critics came together in the 20th Anniversary issue of the Seneca Review to honor him by devoting an entire issue to his poetic oeuvre. In the Act: Essays on the Poetry of Hayden Carruth featured essays by Philip Booth, Wendell Berry, Maxine Kumin, William Matthews and Carolyn Kizer, among many others, celebrating the poet's unique contributions to 20th century American poetry.

Carruth's contributions to contemporary American letters as an editor and critic are also a matter of record. Early in his career he was the editor of Poetry, and later the poetry editor of Harpers. He has edited three anthologies of poetry, among them the important The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (Bantam, 1970). Few living American poets can be said to have exerted a comparable influence, both directly and indirectly, on the poetry of the past few decades.

What makes this observation even more interesting, however, is the fact that Carruth has lived and worked largely apart from the core community of American poets. For decades he shunned the company of others and lived a life of self-imposed exile and poverty when most of the major poets of his own generation exploited the opportunities of the academic system of patronage and networking to advance their careers and to live and work in relative comfort. Though certainly not without its ideological underpinnings, Carruth's decision to live his life the way he has was never so much politically or ideologically driven as it was determined by the necessities of his unique emotional and psychological temperament. If Carruth has lived apart from the larger community of poets, apart even from society in general, he has done so not out of an aloof wilfulness but rather a deep-seated fear of public gatherings and social interaction, and all that they involve.

The truth, as readers of my work know, is that I've suffered all my life from chronic psychiatric disorders that were acute during my thirties and have been slowly and painfully — and imperfectly — overcome in the years since then. The decade before I moved to Vermont was spent in almost complete invalidism, including a long spell of hospitalization and a longer spell of reclusion. When I married at the age of forty, I was well enough to shift from reclusion to seclusion, but I still could not do what literary people normally do with their lives — work in offices or classrooms, live in a city, use public transportation, go to theaters, literary parties, etc. So I couldn't earn much money and I needed a quiet and private place to live. That's why I found myself in the backcountry of northern Vermont with a young wife...When our friends in the counterculture of the 1960s, many of whom had come from Bethesda or Greenwich and had nice little independent incomes, praised my wife and me for living in "voluntary poverty," we laughed. (From Reluctantly, Copper Canyon Press, 1998)

One hallmark of Carruth's writing is his disarming and ultimately alluring candor; another is the tone of unaffected humility, often bordering on self-effacement, that runs through much of his work without being, or seeming, false and contrived. Poets and critics as diverse as Adrienne Rich, Maxine Kumin and Wendell Berry have praised Carruth's poetic vision for its integrity just as they have admired his ability, as M.L. Rosenthal has put it, to "send out currents of communion to all of us from his intimately personal realm of reverie and emotion, even when the predicaments out of which [his poems] speak are most particularly his own." Galway Kinnell has echoed this sentiment:

One of the most striking things about [Carruth's] work is his ability to enter the lives of other people...I think this is so because he knows them through their speech. There is a reciprocity in all this, however. In telling their tales, he finds a means to express his own inner life. He gives them a voice, they give him a language. (From the "Foreword" to The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth, Collier Books, 1985)

The care, fidelity and love with which nature is evoked in his poems have led some critics to describe Hayden Carruth as a "nature poet," a designation he neither embraces nor appreciates. It is not so much that he wishes to disavow nature's prominence in his poetry. He is bothered more by the associations and preconceptions terms like "nature poet" and "naturalism" bring to mind.

One spends one's life trying to establish independence, to escape the categorizations others wish to impose. No doubt this imposing is part of basic human necessity, and no doubt we all do it, I as much as anyone: put people into classes and assign them to types. And no doubt most people are always trying to escape — except that I think in fact most people, the immense majority, take comfort from being categorized. I too have envied that comfort from afar.

I've lived in the country, yes, but never as an undivided participant. I've worked on farms but never been a farmer. I've observed nature closely but never written as a naturalist. I've been a poet but rarely in the company of other poets. Certainly I have never been a part of any literary group.

The possibility of being where I am — wherever, however, whenever — a single eye, an autochthonous imagination, full of sympathy but apart, apart even from myself — is what I always wanted to demonstrate to myself. Where I am is the cosmic individual. Nothing grand, nothing romantic. A duck blown out to sea and still squawking. (From Reluctantly)

Carruth's sober cynicism does not preclude wonder or joy, but it most definitely lies at the heart of his unwillingness to embrace Romantic ideals that elevate nature inordinately. The irony inherent in his view is that such reverence inevitably results not in a true elevation of nature, but rather in its debasement, since the Romantic's take on the natural world and our place in relation to it is essentially delusional and destructive.

Carruth may be a rationalist and a pragmatist, but he also considers himself highly spiritual. His poetry is infused with spirituality. He does not go in for the dualistic simplification that makes spirituality and rationalism incompatible. Mysticism, on the other hand, is another matter. In his fascinating essay "Suicide," in which he writes about the aftermath of his attempt to take his own life in 1988, he says:

I have argued for the notion that spiritual and mystical experience are different...Spiritual, as distinct from mystical, knowledge is all knowledge of the human spirit in its surpassing material cause in Aristotle's sense of the word. The human spirit is human, grounded in our bodies, but it is still spirit. Spirituality is an extension of materiality...The differences between spiritual and esthetic experiences, or between either of them and emotional experience...entail discriminations among states or levels of feeling and have more to do with the ways the feelings are evoked or produced than with their intrinsic qualities. (From Reluctantly)

Murmuring of the brook in late
summer darkness, after moonset,
as I lay sleepless on the porch cot.
A music extraordinarily variable.
Each passage of water against its stone
sounding a different pitch and rhythm.
It was an uncivilized music in the
foothills of the mountains, continuing
long beyond the endurance of a human
singer, almost beyond the endurance
of a human listener, syllables
of unknown meaning, notes on an
unknown scale. A few fat yellow
stars above the northern horizon.
Without art, the song was perfectly
artistic. The unmeaning music
and the unknowing listener were one
in the loneliness of those distant
late summer nights in Vermont.
Truly the music meant nothing,
no intimation, which was why
I liked it so much, my brook
murmuring all night in the darkness,
and I meant nothing, and I liked that too.
(From Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, Copper Canyon Press, 1996)

Carruth's beef with Thoreau is a longstanding one and has been memorialized in his essay "The Man in the Box at Walden" (Selected Essays and Reviews, 1996). In his most recent book of autobiographical essays, Reluctantly, Carruth cannot resist donning the gloves briefly to take another parting shot at the 19th century Transcendental giant:

I have explained my aversion to the lovelessness, arrogance, and egomania of Henry D. Thoreau in his book called Walden...the connection between Thoreau's so-called Transcendentalism, i.e., his flight from reality, and the violence and irresponsibility of the American frontier...are now in a fair way to becoming the national way of life...It isn't that when you pick up the book review section of the Sunday New York Times you will find that half the reviews emit a Waldenesque smell; it is rather that a great number of those who are reading the reviews will, once they put down the paper, go out on Sunday birdwalks with all of Walden's snobbery and righteousness and sentimentalism crammed in their heads. I believe no other book in English has been more widely read by the American middle class, by millions and millions of comparatively well-heeled and powerful people. It is a touchstone even for those who work with nature — scientists, forestry professors, veterinarians...and so on....Everyone ha[s] been affected — and infected. We need a national antitoxin. (From Reluctantly)

Fragmentary and incomplete as autobiography, uneven as a book of essays, Reluctantly nevertheless is very successful at what it attempts: an account of the life of a poet's mind as seen through the prism of a few key formative and transformational moments. Clearly the essay "Suicide" is the centerpiece of the book, exploring as it does the elating effect of having gone through death and survived to live with a renewed lust and sense of purpose. This essay alone is a major accomplishment that makes the book worth reading.

The book also includes a smattering of the kind of anecdotal material we have come to expect of literary biography, as when Carruth recounts his one meeting, as a young man, with Kenneth Burke.

I met Burke only once, at a party on the south side of Chicago, I think at Harvey Webster's apartment in 1948 and 1949. I had fortified myself beforehand, as usual, but at the beginning of the party I was still very tense. I found myself on a sofa beside Burke. He chatted, I listened. I tried to act as if I were comfortable, as I supposed the editor of Poetry should be, while the party began warming up and getting noisier. People standing in clusters, looming above us, talking loudly, etc. Burke leaned toward me and said: "I wrote a poem this afternoon. Would you like to hear it?" I said: "Of course." (What else?) He recited it in a low voice directly into my ear, and I didn't catch a word — not one. But because the poem was brief, because the occasion was social and cheery, I assumed the poem was funny, some sort of epigram, and I laughed. Immediately Burke drew back. He looked at me with shock, indignation, and injury.

I had blundered. I saw in him instantly the soul of the devotee, as I had seen it so often in all kinds of people. Burke took his poems seriously, even if no one else did. And in truth they weren't great, I think, though I haven't looked at them for many years.

I accused myself bitterly. What stupidity! Here was a person I would have liked to know, to be friendly with — if circumstances permitted — someone I admired genuinely, i.e. for his work. It was more than that; it was the mind revealed in the work, the intellectual exuberance, which for me remains the most attractive quality of that era. How I miss it now, surrounded as I am — we are — by apathy and mediocrity. But my timorousness, unrelenting from infancy until this moment, had caused me to offend Burke, so that again I had lost the chance I wanted to know my own kind; and because I was so good an actor, like most anxious people, and could disguise my fear in suavity — though not real suavity, just the alcoholic kind — Burke did not conceive why I had done it. Laughter in the face of poetry. It was unaccountable.

(From Reluctantly)

The answer is in the work, to which I return with renewed interest, looking further back and forward. When he appears next Tuesday at the New York State Writers Institute I am hopeful that he will read something from his latest book Beside The Shadblow Tree (Copper Canyon Press), to be published later this spring. After the reading, perhaps I will have the good fortune to pass a word or two with him. Though I have no history of anything like the inveterate shyness of Carruth himself, I will probably be sufficiently anxious about what I say and how I phrase it. It's hard to know in advance how such as encounter might pass, even if it were to happen. But one thing I can say. If by chance he leans toward me and whispers a line or two of poetry made unintelligible by the ambient din of voices, I will be sure not to laugh.

Steven Hartman is a Program Fellow at the New York State Writers Institute.

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Hayden Carruth

Talking to Hayden Carruth
Two Conversations with the 1996 National Book Award Poet

On November 6, poet Hayden Carruth was presented the National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, his 29th collection of poems. It was the latest in a long list of honors for the 75-year-old Carruth, including fellowships from the Bollingen Foundation, the Guggenhiem Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lenore Marshall Award, the Ruth Lily Prize, and the National Book Critic's Circle Award for his 1992 Collected Shorter Poems.

In presenting the award, the National Book Foundation praised Carruth's poetic voice as "unique in American poetry: disarmingly personal but always informed by an acute historical and political intelligence,'' adding that his work is, "linguistically demotic and direct while prosodically complex and diverse.'' The Foundation went on to cite the poet's "perfect pitch for Northeastern American speech," and his "writer-scholar's intimate knowledge of a plethora of world poetries.''
Carruth's writing "makes and keeps his readers aware of poetry's cathartic, redemptive possibilities in the midst of human tragedy,'' the citation observed.

On October 26, 1993, Hayden Carruth appeared at the Writers Institute for a seminar and reading as part of the Visiting Writers Series. The afternoon seminar was informal. "I don't have anything to say unless you prod me,'' Carruth joked as the session began, but he was generous and genial, addressing a variety of subjects, including his working habits, the importance of jazz in his poetry, and his views on what constitutes a useful education for an aspiring poet. Carruth, his voice raspy and soft, greeted questions with his customary plain-spokeness and erudition; he seemed to be hitting his stride just as the seminar was brought to a close after an hour.

While at the Institute, Carruth was also interviewed by then-associate director Tom Smith, a discussion that, among other topics, had Carruth speaking for what may be the first time about the poems that won the National Book Award. The transcript below contains excerpts from both question sessions. It begins with the afternoon seminar. Carruth has been asked to describe the writing of his book-length poetic sequence, The Sleeping Beauty.

Carruth: Well, it took a long time -- from the very beginning to the conclusion was almost 20 years. But the first eight or nine years of that were just spent in brooding and letting things happen in my head. I knew that I wanted to write a poem based on the myth of the Sleeping Beauty, because my wife at that time was named Rosemary Dorn. She came from eastern Germany, actually, from Silesia, which is now Poland -- she was a refugee -- and the name of the Sleeping Beauty, the German name, is Dornroschen, which means, literally, little thorn rose, and she was named after the Sleeping Beauty. That's why I had this idea to write the poem.

The poem has very little to do with my wife; in fact, it doesn't really have anything to do with her. As it developed, it became a poem in which I was trying to write about the Romantic tradition in a critical way, I was trying to write about the situation of women in history and society; I was trying to write about my ideas of how to deal with the problems of life, which are very much influenced by the mid-century existential writers of Europe, Camus, Sartre and people like that. The thing took shape very slowly and over a long period of time.

The individual sections are written in a form which I invented when I was young, back in the early 50s, which I call a paragraph, and which other people often call a sonnet, although it isn't a sonnet. It has 15 lines, and the lines are of varying length, and the rhymes are not the same as the rhymes of a sonnet. When I invented it I wanted to avoid writing sonnets. I wanted a different form.

Gradually, as I worked on [the poem], it came together. There are no pieces of the poem written in the voice of the poet, except for the very last line. This is a book-length poem in 120-odd sections, each one 15 lines, and the last line is the one I wrote first, and it is My name is Hayden, and I have made this song.' That's the only place in the poem where the word I appears in reference to me. I wanted to write an impersonal poem, a poem that was broader, bigger than any individual's perceptions or attitudes.

Question: Are you proud of that work?

Carruth: I don't think pride is something that poets ought to feel, since every poem is flawed, and you always wish you had done it better. It was big, I put everything I had into it, there's no doubt about that, I was happy with many of the sections, I was unhappy with some of the sections that didn't seem to work out as well as I would have liked. The main question in my mind, and I think it's always the case when you do something big like that, is whether anybody understands it, whether anybody gets out of it what I was trying to put into it. That's something you can't ever tell (chuckles). I don't know.

There have been points in your career when you have been in and out of fashion. Do you have any explanation for why that happens, what makes a poet popular at one point and not at another?

No, I don't, really. I have certain crass and cynical explanations, everybody does. Beyond that, it's very difficult to say. Why did the poets of the central part of the American 20th century fall out of favor so quickly? Some of them are wonderful poets, people like Richard Wilbur and J. V. Cunningham, Howard Nemerov and Anthony Hecht. Then their immediate forerunners, people like Alan Tate, Louise Bogan. I don't know if anybody reads those poets very much at all anymore -- my students certainly didn't, when I was still teaching. The pendulum swings, fashion changes, and I think it's necessary. I think the Beats came in in the 1950s -- Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Gregory Corso -- and introduced a lot of salutary things into American poetry, that needed to be in it. At the same time the Black Mountain Poets came along -- Olson and Duncan and Creeley and people like that, and some of the students they had down there, like Ed Dorn and Cid Corman -- and they popularized William Carlos Williams a lot more than he had been earlier, although he was never unpopular.

Tastes change. Fashions change. One of the things I would say about this is that today, when a change occurs, it takes harder and lasts longer than it did previously, because our educational system is so awful (chuckles from the audience). It's just absolutely awful.

My students, who were graduate students at Syracuse University, had no idea of what was written before 1900. Their colleges, their high schools, didn't give it to them. It was late by the time they got to me. So the fashion that prevails right now, and has prevailed for the past 20 or 25 years, is all they know, and when they sit down to write a poem they can't think of any other way to write it. I think that's very unfortunate. Not because there are not fine poems -- there are many fine poems -- in the contemporary mode; just because it's getting pretty dead, it's worn out, and there needs to be a change, and young people are the ones who ought to be making the change.

But they don't really know enough about the evolution of literature, or the sociology of literature, or the whole process of the way poetry functions in a society and among people. They don't know enough about that to even, I think, in many cases, see any possibility of change. And I do blame schools for that.

I know -- I'm 72 years old, and I know -- when I was the age of my students at Syracuse, there were some things that they knew that I didn't really know, but there was a hell of a lot about literature that I knew that they didn't know, and never will know. They could not read a sonnet of Shakespeare. They could not read a sonnet by e.e. cummings. They did not know how to do it. They had no insight into what makes those poems go. I think all the workshops in the United States ought to be wiped out and replaced by courses in the history of literature -- how to read. It would do young writers immensely greater good than fiddling around with line endings all the time.

When you sit down to read for pleasure, what do you read?

Once in a rare while, when I get a chance, I like to read 19th-century fiction. I like to read a novel by Hardy, Dickens, somebody like that. I like to read books that are written in a language as far away from our contemporary language as I can get. I'll even read essays by Macaulay, Gibbon, somebody like that, just to get those sentences running in my head again, those wonderful long, involved sentences. But most of my reading is professional.

Could you talk about when you first got into jazz, the personalities of jazz, and also the rhythms of it, and how that effected your writing.

I began listening to jazz when I was a boy, almost a child, in the 1930s. I've been listening to it ever since. I've written a lot about it, and yet I can never demonstrate that my poetry has been influenced by jazz, and I don't think anybody else can either, because you might find another poet who has exactly the same prosodic effects in his poems that I have in mine, and he never listened to jazz at all. So it's hard to show that there is a direct connection.

I believe there is in my case. I believe that the tonalities of my poems, the timbre of my poems, has been influenced by jazz and the blues. To some extent, rhythmic effects are influenced by jazz, although not very much, because a drum beat is a very different thing from the meter of language. To me, jazz music is the only native American art that amounts to anything, it's separate from all the other arts, it has connections, philosophical, sociological connections with the history of our culture, but it is not the same as poetry and, although more and more poets are influenced by jazz, I still think it would be very difficult with any of them to show the influence except in a very superficial way.

Would you please talk about your personal work habits, and how they have evolved.

They change. They've been different at different times in my life. It depends on what I've been doing.
A lot of my poetry was written in Vermont when I was very poor and living in seclusion, because I was also rather ill. I was working on a farm, I was woodcutting, I was also doing a certain amount of hack writing for anybody who would employ me. I worked for encyclopedias, I did ghost writing for people who wanted to write books, I did a lot of book reviewing, newspaper reviews. So I wrote my poetry mostly between the hours of 5 and 6 in the morning, after I had been working all night on other things. I wrote it very fast. Everything I've ever written at all, as far as that goes, I've written very fast. I guess I got that way because I started out as a newspaperman, when I was very young.

Nowadays, I've changed somewhat, because I get so tired I can't work at night anymore. And also, since I've retired, I don't have to go to work. So I get up in the morning and I turn on some music and I drink some coffee and I smoke a lot of cigarettes and maybe every third or fourth day a poem occurs. That's my best time now. Not when I get up, like some people. I can hardly find my way downstairs when I first get up. I have to have three, four cups of coffee, half a pack of cigarettes, then I can do it.

How do you feel your work has changed in recent years?

It's changed in part because I've changed it. I have great admiration and envy of poets who can write in a straight line all their lives. I just think that would be wonderful to evolve a single, unitary mode from beginning to end. I have never been able to do that. I get very bored with my own work that I have to make changes. So my work is very miscellaneous.

Sometimes these changes have been extremely deliberate. It's hard to make people understand. When I moved from Vermont, where I lived a long time, I got a job at Syracuse, at the university, and I moved over there and ended up in Liverpool, which is a suburb north of Syracuse. I was living right on the strip. It was a total 180-degree change in my life, from living in the woods, from being self-employed to working for a big institution -- and all that. And when I got there, and I got my apartment, a couple of weeks after I moved in I sat down and I took a legal pad and I wrote down a poem in an absolutely arbitrary new form that I had never written in before. Eight syllables, six syllables, eight syllables, six syllables, the second and fourth lines perfectly rhymed, absolutely perfectly rhymed -- in other words, I rhymed the and a -- I rhyme according to the way people actually pronounce words, rather than how they're spelled -- and I cast against this very, very tight form the loosest conceivable colloquial language that I could find, that I could invent, that I could overhear.

I used to go to the Pizza Hut, and the Burger King, and all the rest of the places along the strip in Liverpool and I'd carry a notebook with me and I'd write down what the people in the booth behind me were saying, then I'd work it into a poem. I don't know if those poems are successful or not -- some people like them quite a bit. I think other people don't. But they are absolutely totally different in tone, structure, even in their objectives, in some degree. But I had to do that. I could no longer write Vermont poems in Liverpool. It would be ridiculous. That is rather an extreme case, but it is, at the same time, similar to the changes I have made in my work any number of other times.

My work started out like most young people's work. I didn't go to any workshops, because there weren't any in those days. I started off imitating poets that I liked, especially Yeats. Also Ezra Pound, and to some extent Wallace Stevens. I did a lot of that kind of work, and they were terrible poems. I wasn't until I was in my 40s that I really began writing with some kind of freedom, confidence. I didn't publish my first book until I was 40. I was a slow driver.

The following day, Carruth was interviewed by Tom Smith, then-associate director of the Writers Institute and professor of English at the University at Albany. The interview was done for The Book Show, a 30-minute interview program broadcast in Albany by public radio station WAMC.

Tom Smith: Hayden, you've been writing poetry for half a century --

Carruth: At least.

Smith: -- and you've been recognized as a master of many many different poetic modes and forms for quite a long time. How and when did you begin as a poet. Did you begin all of a sudden? Did you always know that this was your vocation?

No, it was a gradual thing. I read poetry when I was a kid, I had poetry read to me, I came from a family of writers, editors, journalists and collectors of books. My grandfather published a number of books, and he had the same name that I do, so that causes a certain amount of confusion.

I began writing poetry, I believe, when I was about 4 or 5 years old, and on through high school and college I continued to write. I didn't know what I was doing very well. I had very little instruction. I imitated Shelley, and tried to write what I thought were Shakespearean sonnets, and things like that. I went to college at the University of North Carolina before the war, and it was a wonderful place to be -- very isolated and quiet. I met a great many good people there, but we did not know anything about 20th-century literature. I don't believe I read any 20th-century poets except Sandburg and Frost when I was an undergraduate. And immediately I got married and went into the Army.

I got out after the war was over and I decided I didn't want to work. I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago and immediately became just surrounded by contemporary American writing of all kinds. Many of my fellow students were practicing writers. I quickly became very serious about my writing; up till that time I hadn't been. I began submitting my poems to magazines and things like that. I had some poems published in Poetry , and then was asked to be a reader for Poetry and then, a year later, I became editor of the magazine.

In your early years as a professional poet, I'm talking about the 1940s and into the 1950s, what characterized the vocation of poetry in contrast to recent decades? The role of the poet, the idea of the poet in those years, in contrast to the last 20 years, let's say.

Well, it seems to me, and I hope it's not simply nostalgia, that in the middle of the century, American poets had some kind of functional relationship with society. There was a readership that was not simply limited to professional writers and critics -- it wasn't a big one, but nevertheless. We were writing with knowledge that Eliot was still living, Stevens was still living, Williams was still living, we knew these people, we talked to them when they came to Chicago. They had an audience, they were affecting the official culture to some extent, at least, and we thought that we had a chance to do the same thing. I feel that the young poets today are so isolated from what's really going on in this country, and so inbred through their interlocking networks of academic jobs and workshops and things like that, I don't think they entertain the hope of this kind of a relationship.

You've written admirably about the natural world, but in one of your essays you state you don't like to be described as a nature poet. There's a kind of philosophical stance vis-a-vis nature.

Well, there is. I suppose the way most people [discuss] it when they're talking to me or about me is through my essay about Thoreau, whom I attack as being an elitist and a mystic and all kinds of other things.

My feeling is that nature is the most beautiful thing we have. I love it, I love to live in it, I love to be part of it, I wish I could be part of it more than I am. But at the same time, nature contains everything. It contains our death. It contains all of our injustices, and all of our pains and anxieties. It is not simply a benign presence in our lives. All we have to do is look at floods and earthquakes. I'm always aware of that, that the blossom on the rosebush contains, by inference, at least, all of this difficulty and burden and hardship that the human race has to sustain.

Do you regard yourself -- I'm talking about the persona of your poetry -- as part of nature, but also not part of nature?

No, I don't say that. My feeling is we're all part of nature, everything. Nature is everything. It is reality. From the point of view of somebody on Mars, for instance, a poem has the same existential reality as a broccoli plant or a stone or anything else, and we have the same existential reality as the elephants or the kangaroos. We are separated from the animals, which is part of our problem, and I've written about that. I think that when the human race withdrew from the rest of the animals, which probably happened in the caves in France when they drew the bison on the wall, we developed a sense of great sorrow and loss in our racial consciousness, which has always been there, and still is there. Attenuated, obviously, in most people, but still it's there.

Politics, at least in this country, has been thought to be not a suitable subject for poetry, and yet over the years you've written powerful political poems; poems about war, poems about the body politic. But was Auden right -- does poetry change nothing? And have you changed at all, in the last 40 or 50 years, since you've been writing political poetry.

Oh yes, of course I've changed, although the beliefs that I formed when I was in high school are still the ones that I hold today. But of course I changed and developed along the way.

Auden -- I've always disliked that aspect of Auden. I've written about it, and disagreed with him, his idea that there are these two worlds, the world of poetry and the world of everything else. I don't like that idea at all. I partly don't like it because I don't believe that poets are that different from any other people. I think we do have different skills that are specialized, and we have certain ways of looking at the world which may be specialized, but essentially what we're doing is trying to make sense out of everything, and so are plenty of other people, plumbers and carpenters and all kinds of people.

I think that politics certainly belongs in poetry. It's in all the great poetry -- The Illiad is a political poem, The Divine Comedy is a political poem, and Paradise Lost.
But it does seem to be a constant in your poetry.

Oh, it is. It is.

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Hayden Carruth

It's the waning months of the old century, and you are, perhaps, a historian searching for a person whose life and work embodies and mirrors nearly a hundred years of America. You want to employ a cornucopia of media--the visual, the auditory, the literary in rendering the vast changes that the country and its culture have seen. You want to work inductively, showing truths of the whole from the perspective of one person. In a country now desperately in need of elders and the wisdom that both experience and compassion bring, you want someone at least eighty years old and still going strong, whose diverse achievements are, of necessity, on par with that vanished entity known as a "Renaissance man"; whose force of character against great odds, coupled with tremendous creative will and vision and commercial success, show him to be "quintessentially American"; whose scope of accomplishment defies hyperbole simply by its having been done.

You choose, with no small measure of admiration, Gordon Parks Sr.

Photojournalist, filmmaker, memoirist, novelist, poet, composer: Gordon Parks has not only succeeded in these fields, he has triumphed. Yet Parks told an interviewer for Parade magazine three years ago, "My goal every day is to stretch my horizons. At 83, I'm a better writer, a better photographer, a better musician--a better everything--simply because I keep an open mind."

Gordon Parks is also African-American. And so his career is all the more hard-won, considering that most of the fields in which he has been commercially successful were, for much of this century, circumscribed for African-Americans. Yet Parks never accepted that reality. "My mother used to say,'You can do anything if you want it badly enough...Nothing limits you unless you allow it to'...She did not want me coming home, complaining about being black...Her motto was, 'If a white boy can do it, you can do it too. And you better do it better.'"

Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, the youngest of fifteen children, Parks is perhaps best known for his work in two fields at the visual heart of American art and culture: photojournalism and film. He was a staff photojournalist for LIFE Magazine for twenty years, and has directed ten films, including Shaft and The Learning Tree, the latter based on his best-selling autobiographical novel of 1963. But he has also written sixteen books, including five autobiographical works, and composed classical music (a symphony, sonatas, concertos, a ballet libretto), as well as scored many of his films and written blues and popular music. He was a founder and the editorial director of Essence magazine in the early '70s; he has received thirty-nine honorary degrees in literature, fine arts, and humane letters from colleges and universities across the country; and his vita lists a roster of awards and honors that are an embarrassment of riches.

Yet you, the historian in search of the face of America, find that like your own search, Parks' artistic vision is nearly always captured in a specific image, a talisman of time and place and circumstance that, by illuminating the situation of one, speaks for all. Perhaps his single most famous photograph, American Gothic, Washington, D.C., 1942, still personifies this country's heart of darkness for the poor as well as its promise of opportunity and hope. The picture is of Ella Watson, an African-American cleaning woman who worked for the Farm Security Administration in 1942. Parks posed Watson, in a dotted charwoman's dress, like the farmer in Grant Wood's famous painting American Gothic, 1930. But instead of a farmer's pitchfork, she holds a broom and mop. Behind her hangs an American flag. "I made it in innocence," Parks recalls of the photograph, "in an impulse of despair. It was a strike against intolerance. But I have come to realize that you don't put everyone in that same pit."

Nearly thirty years later, in the un-innocent late Sixties, at age fifty-nine Parks opened yet another door by writing, directing, producing, and scoring his film The Learning Tree, about racial intolerance in small-town Kansas. It was the first feature film by a black director to be financed by a major Hollywood studio, and in many ways it paved the way for Shaft (1971), the urban action thriller scored by Isaac Hayes which forever (and finally) changed the screen image of African-Americans by portraying its hero as a positive role model.

In a review of the new book Half Past Autumn, representing the first major retrospective show of Parks' work which brings together his films, novels, poetry, music and photographs, Donna Seaman wrote in Booklist: "Parks does not 'take'; pictures; he gives them...he chose his 'weapons' wisely, the camera and the pen, and set out on what became not only an aesthetic quest but also a mission of compassion...whatever his medium, he is always an artist of conscience."

Historian, take note: as we balance on the edge of the millennium, Gordon Parks has plenty to tell and show us about our culture so far: the syntheses of conscience, art, vision, and compassion; the power of visual, musical, and literary art to change culture; what race, poverty, intolerance, and achievement have to do with how we lived then and now. Parks' retrospective, currently touring the country, runs through 2003. That's plenty of time to see where both he and we have been, and time enough to understand, through his eyes, where we're going.

Books:
• Flash Photography (1947)
  
• Camera Portraits: Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture (1948)
  
• The Learning Tree (1963)
  
• A Choice of Weapons (1966)
  
• Gordon Parks: A Poet and His Camera (1969)
  
• Born Black (1971)
  
• Gordon Parks: Whispers of Intimate Things (1971)
  
• Gordon Parks: In Love (1971)
  
• Moments Without Proper Names (1975)
  
• Flavio (1978)
  
• To Smile in Autumn (1979)
  
• Shannon (1981)
  
• Voices in the Mirror (1990)
  
• Arias in Silence (1994)
  
• Glimpses Toward Infinity (1996)
  
• Gordon Parks, Half Past Autumn (1997), in conjunction with the retrospective show curated and organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Films:

• The Learning Tree (1969)
  
• Shaft (1971)
  
• Shaft's Big Score (1972)
  
• The Super Cops (1974)
  
• Leadbelly (1976)
  
• Solomon Northup's Odyssey (1984)
  
• Martin (1990; filmed ballet)
  

Documentaries:

• Flavio (1961)
  
• Diary of a Harlem Family (1968)
  
• Moments Without Proper Names (1986)

Life is Elsewhere: Work by Four Young Novelists

First novels are typically autobiographical. The four young novelists featured in "New Voices in Fiction," a series of readings sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute, elect to take a different road. Instead of exploring the familiar, they explore what is far afield. Instead of reimagining autobiography, they often invent protagonists who differ from themselves in striking ways: in age, in gender, in national culture, and in life experience.

Peter Rock's first novel, This Is the Place (1997), is narrated by an elderly, down-and-out card dealer whose life is turned upside-down by his romance with a pious 19-year-old Mormon girl. The novel represents an exploration of the unfamiliar at least to the degree that the author, a Utah native, chooses to inhabit a protagonist nearly three times his age. Carnival Wolves (1998), though centered on a character perhaps loosely based on the author himself (both worked as museum guards in upstate New York), is even more straightforwardly a journey into the strange.

Alan Johnson of Carnival Wolves, an emotionally atrophied young man who never talks to or touches anyone, embarks on a quest from New York to California in search of some remedy for his isolation. The author introduces a number of new characters along the way-the kind of oddballs indigenous to picaresque literature and the monsters that inhabit quest literature. One woman has a tail, another a kinky interest in tigers. One man owns an attack chimp. Another, a taxidermist, builds literal monsters-chimeras-out of mixed animal parts. Rock's exploration of the exotic is given focus by his preoccupation with the boundaries and definitions of the wild and the tame, the human and the non-human. He appears to say that meaning lies not in the self (Johnson's self is a prison, a sensory deprivation tank) but in an engagement with "otherness."

Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called Carnival Wolves, "A beautifully written, funny, deliberately twisted travelogue across the geographic and emotional states of America . . ."

The Foreign Student (1998), a first novel by Susan Choi, tells the story of a romance between a Korean immigrant and an American woman in Tennessee in the 1950's. Although the principal character is based on the author's father, the novel is by no means an exploration of familiar territory. Indeed, Choi maintains that the main attraction of her father's story was its remoteness, its almost unimaginable difference from her own life. Choi, a former fact-checker at the New Yorker, grew up in American suburbia in Indiana and Texas in the 1970's and 80's, whereas her father had survived torture and prison camps during the Korean War. "...it just blew my mind," said Choi in a Newsday interview, "I've never known that kind of experience of extremity at all."

In The Foreign Student, the familiar American landscape is rendered exotic, even threatening, by the perspective of Choi's Korean protagonist. Like Rock's Alan Johnson, Chang Ahn and Katherine Monroe are both loners, isolated souls trying to escape themselves. Their friendship requires a daunting engagement with "otherness," a negotiating of profound cultural barriers during the pre-multiculti era of the 1950's.

Novelist John Gregory Dunne called The Foreign Student, "A novel of secrets that unfolds like the leaves on an artichoke . . . a mosaic of betrayal in peace and war that marks the debut of a gifted young novelist wise beyond her years."

Claire Messud's first novel, When the World Was Steady (1994), recounts the separate adventures of two sisters in their fifties, Virginia and Emmy. Born during the bombing of London, they have chosen different paths through life: Emmy fled her London childhood to marry an Australian rancher, while Virginia stayed in London to care for a cantankerous mother and seek solace in God. But despite their different choices, both find themselves isolated and abandoned as they approach old age. Emmy's husband leaves her for her best friend, and Virginia finds spiritual comfort increasingly elusive.

Virginia and Emmy are driven by dissatisfaction to embark on searches for meaning and self-discovery. In the tradition of quest literature, they head to more or less remote, exotic and reputedly magical places: Virginia to the Isle of Skye, and Emmy to Bali. Neither knows precisely what she seeks, but as in Rock's novel, meaning is sought not at home but elsewhere, in "otherness." Each would prefer to escape the past than reengage it. Their quests are perhaps doomed by the fact that they flee to islands: from isolation to isolation.

Novelist Cynthia Ozick wrote, ". . .Claire Messud's technical hand is so sure, her psychological wisdom so ripe, her narrative so canny, that one imagines the ghosts of E. M. Forster and Barbara Pym somehow still at work, resident in a new generation."

Sandrofo, the central enigma-if not the central character-of Debra Spark's first novel, Coconuts for the Saint (1994), also flees a past life to an island. After the death of his Puerto Rican wife, he abandons his Jewish mother in Brooklyn to begin anew as a baker in Puerto Rico, bringing with him his triplet daughters. In the tradition of travel literature, Spark deliberately heightens the exoticism of the new environment by emphasizing sensory novelties: tastes, colors, smells. Herself a one-time temporary resident of San Juan, Spark extends her personal investigation of a foreign culture into fiction.

In Puerto Rico, Sandrofo becomes engaged to one Maria Elena, who becomes obsessed with uncovering the secrets of her fiance's family. The novel is structured in part as an investigation by Maria Elena into Sandrofo's character and that of his daughters. The triplets present a threefold enigma (made more enigmatic by the fact that one of them never speaks, one lies compulsively and one is preternaturally wise). The baker is even more elusive: he rarely speaks and rises only at night to bake. The bakery is named La Madeleine, an allusion to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, but Spark's novel unlike Proust's is not about the recovery of memory-it is about the recovery of other people's memories, an investigation of "otherness" that resists investigation.

Reviewer Abby Frucht said in the New York Times Book Review, that Spark has "a knack for the unpredictable that makes reading her novel a process of incremental discovery. The openness of her mind, the generosity of her narrative spirit, bring life to the book in . . . a magical way."

Mark Koplik is a Program Fellow at the New York State Writers Institute.

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New Voices in Fiction

Few literary people enjoy the celebrity that George Plimpton has had throughout his career. Fewer yet have indulged in as many fantasies as this charismatic and affable writer-editor. He once escorted the future Queen of England to a ball. He fought the bulls (calves, actually) with Hemingway in Pamplona. He played a Bedouin in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (the first of a long history of bit roles). He boxed an exhibition match with the light-heavyweight champion of the world, Archie Moore, pitched an inning to the line-ups of both the National and American League All-Star teams at Yankee Stadium, played "third-string rookie" quarterback for the Detroit Lions, goalie for the Boston Bruins and forward for the Boston Celtics. He has tried his hand variously as a stand-up comic in Las Vegas, a trapeze artist in the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus, a centerfold photographer for Playboy Magazine and as a percussionist with the New York Philharmonic under conductor Leonard Bernstein. The more apt question may be: What has George Plimpton not done?

Mr. Plimpton's many exploits and misadventures as a "professional amateur" have been well documented among the more than seventy articles he has written for such magazines as Harpers, Sports Illustrated and the New York Times, as well as in his books Out of My League, Open Net, The Bogey Man, Mad Ducks and Bears and Shadow Box, some of which have gone on to become best-sellers and the most popular of which, Paper Lion, has been called "the most arresting and delightful narrative in all of sports literature" (Book Week). Originally written between 1961 and 1985, these must-have works of participatory sports journalism were each reissued in new editions with updated introductions by Lyons and Burford in 1993.

At its best Mr. Plimpton's writing is hilarious. He has a gift for understatement and a sense of comic timing that few writers are able to exploit to such advantage. Together with his droll sensibility, his penchant for self-deprecating irony and his seasoned editor's instincts for narrative pacing, these qualities combine to produce writing that is delightfully quirky, as in the following passage from Shadow Box:

Much of the humor in Mr. Plimpton's articles and books derives from a scenario he exploits time and again to its best advantage: that of the fish out of water. Whether on the football gridiron or the pitcher's mound, under the intimidating eye of the unforgiving maestro or on the receiving end of a looping left hook, George Plimpton is, to steal from the title of his first book of participatory journalism, forever out of his league. The comparison to Walter Mitty has come up many times among his critics, but at least one critic has astutely observed that it does not hold up, for unlike Thurber's unforgettable character Plimpton actually has taken part in these impossible scenarios and also unlike Mitty he fails miserably at them, often with humiliating results, as any amateur would among professionals. It is to his credit that he can step back from his humiliations and offer them to the reader with wry self-effacement.

Much of the charm and allure of these books lies as well in Mr. Plimpton's deft ability to weave threads in and out of the larger narrative fabric that take them beyond mere sports reportage. He has an acute cultural and literary awareness, and when this is combined with the disparate fields of reference on which he draws (first-hand experience among vastly different social groups and walks of life), the result can be a fascinating intersection of the high- and the low-brow, of the privileged and the poor and all that lies in between. The phenomenon of meteoric celebrity in the world of sports seems to transcend social barriers. The sports star as cultural icon, as in the case of Muhammad Ali, becomes the great leveller, eliciting awe from one and all, whether it be Howard Cosell or Norman Mailer, Malcolm X or Marianne Moore. And this observation often implicitly runs through the best of his books on sports, making them critiques--cultural, social, historical--in which sports become significant for what they reveal about our society and culture at all levels.

George Plimpton wears several hats, of course. When he isn't out placing himself in impossible situations he is busy editing what can arguably be called one of the most influential English-language literary journals to have emerged since World War II.

After his Harvard years, while George Plimpton was a student at King's College, Cambridge, he was invited by novelists Harold Humes and Peter Matthiessen to be the editor in chief, at the age of 26, of a new magazine that John Ciardi referred to as an "8th rate imitation of the New Yorker."

Plimpton accepted the offer and moved to Paris, where the magazine was run until it was moved to New York in 1965. Under his directing hand the Paris Review became anything but a knock-off of the New Yorker. In fact, the magazine can be credited with having helped to revolutionize the role (not to mention the shape and feel) of non-commercial literary magazines.

The Paris Review's considerable reputation and influence rest in large measure on the merits of its now famous interview series, but it can also be attributed to Mr. Plimpton's vision and guidance as an editor. When the magazine first appeared in 1953, the major quarterlies of the period (among them the Partisan Review and the Hudson Review) devoted their pages largely to scholarly criticism, leaving space for perhaps a single short story in each issue. From its inception the Paris Review had a different aim: that of publishing as much original creative prose and poetry as its pages would allow, while steering clear of the pedantry of literary criticism and avoiding strong ideological and political stands.

For Plimpton and his editors the sole criterion for including a work of poetry or prose in the magazine has always been aesthetic merit and originality. Writers whose first published creative works appeared in the magazine include Philip Roth, Terry Southern and Samuel Beckett, among a long list of others who have risen to prominence. In the place of critical articles, the magazine did something quite different in its first issue by printing an in-depth interview with novelist E.M. Forster instead. In its historical context, the idea was a novel one and it paid off, tapping a vein that attracted new and interested readers and catching on, eventually, with other budding literary magazines.

In its more than forty-five-year history, the Paris Review has continued its interview series, providing detailed encounters (a forty-page interview is not unusual) with many of the world's most respected and sought-after authors (William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Aldous Huxley, Mary McCarthy, Robert Frost, Carlos Fuentes, Bernard Malamud and Gabriel Garcia Marquez among so many others that it would be absurd to list them). A number of writers well known for their reticence have agreed to give the only interviews of their careers in the Paris Review. Only a few authors have ever declined an interview with the magazine: these include J. D. Salinger, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Thomas Pynchon.

If it did not quite invent the art of the literary interview, the Paris Review Interview Series certainly refined it, and in so doing the magazine has served as a prototype for literally hundreds of other literary journals that have since been launched in America and abroad. The formula may now seem obvious, even requisite among literary journals, but the idea of providing a large space for original creative work while giving established authors the opportunity to bypass critics and speak for themselves was hardly self-evident when the Paris Review first appeared.

Mr. Plimpton has collected these interviews in a series of more than 10 volumes titled Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (Viking). He also edited The Writer's Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit and Advice from the 20th Century's Preeminent Writers (Viking) in 1990, which culls commentary and observations from nearly 200 of the writers interviewed in the first 35 years of the magazine's history, organizing them into four categorical headings (The Writer: A Profile; Technical Matters; Different Forms; and The Writer's Life) and a number of sub-headings. Both the Writers at Work series and the Chapbook are useful resources for writers, students of writing and serious readers.

In a recent interview in Frank, Plimpton had this to say about the two hats he wears the most, that of editor and of writer:

George Plimpton's most recent books include his collection of essays The Best of Plimpton (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), his slim volume The X Factor (revised, W.W. Norton, 1995), a meditation on what sets champions apart from other competitors, and Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career (Doubleday, 1998), an "oral biography" along the same lines as Plimpton's earlier bestselling oral history (together with Jean Stein) Edie: An American Biography (Knopf, 1982), an account of the meteoric rise and tragic life of model and Warhol protégé, Edie Sedgwick.

George Plimpton's latest passion is birdwatching, which he has been doing avidly these past couple years in South America. Articles continue to appear, of course, on this and the hundred or so other interests he is currently pursuing.

Steven Hartman is a Program Fellow at the New York State Writers Institute.