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The Influence of French Poetry
on American
People, especially French and American people, tend to forget that the heart
of the United States was once French. Not only was all of Canada and all of the
Mississippi drainage from the Alleghenies to the Rockies under the French flag,
as everybody knows, but French and French-Indian mountain men had penetrated to
the West Coast before any of the officially recognized explorers and
discoverers, for whom they were in fact often the guides. Deep in the Northern
Rockies is the town of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. In Nevada, Wyoming, Oregon, many of
the leading merchants in the small towns are descended from the French, and they
often still name their children Pierre, Jeanne and Yvonne — conspicuous among
the recent rash of movie-star first names, dictated by the mysteries of
Hollywood “numerology” which cause the Roman Catholic clergy such distress at
baptism. Not only are towns all over the Middle West named such things as
Prairie du Chien and Vincennes, not only are their leading families named
Sublette and Le Sueur and Deslauriers, but — something very few people realize
— French life survived intact in hundreds of small isolated communities until
well into the twentieth century.
When I was a boy, during the First World War, I took a canoe trip down the
Kankakee River from near Chicago to the Mississippi. We passed through many
villages where hardly an inhabitant spoke a word of English and where the only
communication was the wandering tree-lined river and a single muddy, rutted road
out to the highway. There is a book about it, Tales of a Vanishing River,
and there was a popular humorous dialect poet, Drummond, who used to recite his
poems in high-school assemblies and on the Chautauqua Circuit (a kind of pious
variety tent show for farmers, now vanished) back in those days. “I am zee
capitain of zee Marguerite vat zail zee Kankakee.” This was not off in the
wilds somewhere — it was a long day’s walk from the neighborhood of Studs
Lonigan.
Midwestern Naturalism of the first quarter of the century was essentially a
French-inspired movement. Its sources were in Zola and Turgenev, and in a
lesser, but then more popular writer, Maupassant. In Theodore Dreiser, Zona
Gale, Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland, down to Vardis Fisher and H.L. Davis in our
own day, the very conception of the “family epic” is Balzacian, modified by
Zola, and the locale is in each case — even Idaho and Eastern Oregon — a land
first trod by French moccasins. Zola and Balzac taught the novelists of the
early twentieth century method, Flaubert and the Goncourts taught them style.
Not only is Main Street a flimsy and unironic imitation of Madame
Bovary, but Sinclair Lewis never realized how very like Carol Kennicott’s
Gopher Prairie were the small French towns which broke the hearts of thousands
of self-dramatizing Duses of the Second Empire.
I myself was born in South Bend, Indiana, on the site of an old portage of
the voyageurs, and in sight of a monument to the Chevalier de La Salle,
whose flowing locks in pigeonlimed bronze were my first intimation that people
had not always looked like twentieth-century Americans.
Henry James, of course, owed everything to Flaubert — the conception of the
novel as an extraordinarily complex organization of what a later generation was
to call “abstract art.” This is a false conception — there is nothing
“abstract” about a novel — and the French influence in Henry James and his
like is literary and artificial. Actually, he writes like an etherealized
Trollope or Jane Austin. Nothing in criticism, unless it is some of the dreadful
blunders of Sainte-Beuve, or the silly enthusiasms of Poe, is quite so comic as
Henry James’s book on French novelists, with its utter inability to understand
what those novels were about. They might as well have been in Swahili or
Etruscan for all Henry James understood them, for the simple reason that his
life and background were totally different. The Midwest Naturalists responded to
French nineteenth-century literature because it was about a life they could
recognize as very much like their own, and its values and aims were theirs.
Baudelaire to Rimbaud, Balzac to Ibsen, there is one factor operating in
Western European literature too seldom recognized, and for the suffering authors
it was sometimes the most important. This is de-provincialization — the
struggle for metropolitan community with the new, emancipated and uniform
standards of a new level of capitalist culture. It is seriously open to question
if the system of values represented by the lycanthrope Borel is superior to that
of Charles Bovary. It is just more citified. By the end of the First World War,
Ben Hecht in Chicago, who had just gone through the Munich Commune, thought of
himself as completely a member of the same City State as Ernst Toller, Louis
Aragon, Blaise Cendrars or George Grosz. In 1923 Sam Putnam, Lawrence Lipton and
myself, led a Dadaist movement in Chicago known as “The Escalator” which was
quite as lunatic as anything ever managed by Max Ernst or Francis Picabia or
Tristan Tzara. Notice the names — German, Catalonian, Rumanian — the Western
European City State community has not only arrived, it has grown sick of itself.
Where did Nora go when she escaped from the Doll’s House? She went to town
and got a job. Henry James’s characters go to art galleries to resolve their
mysterious tragedies. His women are already completely emancipated — as
emancipated as the authoress or the heroine of the Princesse de Clèves.
But this is artificial; like Malraux’s art, it is writing which has fed on
writing. In the long run archaism in the arts is of interest only to the very
refined — it is a brave and very precious sort of soul that finds Abadie and
Violet le Duc more exciting than Phidias, and Sacré Coeur more fun than Amiens.
When the chi-chi has died away, cannibalism is an uncommon curiosity, in art as
in anthropology.
It should be made clear, in a sort of parenthesis, that the New England
tradition so ably reinstated by Van Wyck Brooks is neither characteristic of the
rest of America nor really essentially British in inspiration. It is a
reflection of the dominance of the German universities in the first half of the
nineteenth century. Emerson, Longfellow and their friends were typically
Teutonic in so many ways, and even Thoreau is not Rousseau in the woods near
Boston but Rousseau as filtered through the German Romantic notion of natural
self-sufficiency — a very different idea from Rousseau’s essentially communal
concept. As a matter of fact, the only Englishman all the New Englanders liked,
and who liked all of them, was that most Teutonic Scot, Carlyle.
This brings us to Whitman. It is true that Whitman filled his poems with
pidgin French. It is also true that his poem on the defeat of the Commune is the
best poem, in any language, that still unhealed schism in the French soul
inspired. It is true that he looked to what he thought of as the French spirit
as the leader in a revolution of morals — especially sexual morals. But I am
afraid he thought of France entirely in terms of Fourier, Proudhon, St. Simon,
Blanqui — the mother of free communes and free love. America in those days was
dotted with Fourierist Phalanxes, Etienne Cabot’s Icaries, and similar
French communalist experiments. The American Warren ran a Time Store in
Cincinnati which not only anticipated Proudhon by several years, but which
actually made “mutualism” work.
France, of course, in Whitman’s day was not the France he imagined. That
France existed largely in books read by cranks. It was in America that it came
to life in Group Marriage, Comradely Love, Vegetarianism and Funny Money.
Whitman, I am afraid, for all the doctors of comparative literature try to do
with him, is an autochthone, a real original, and if his roots are anywhere
except in the pre-Civil War North with its swarming cranks, reformers and
humanists, they are in Isaiah.
Which brings us back to poetry and the twentieth century. How many Americans
would be prepared to admit that the greatest American poet of the turn of the
century did not write in English at all, but in French? How many have ever heard
of him? Hardly any. I am referring of course to Stuart Merrill. Yet who is there
to compete with him? Trumbull Stickney? George Santayana? I do not care for
Edwin Robinson or Robert Frost myself, so I would say that Stuart Merrill
remained the best American poet until the end of the First World War, with the
sole exception of Carl Sandburg. Of course, if you prefer, you can have
Vielé-Griffin.
One of the most hilarious examples of intercultural error known to me is G.E.
Clarcier’s statement: “Merrill . . . fondant aux États-Unis le mouvement
socialiste.” The American Socialist movement is at least as old as Babeuf —
and the Social Democracy of his day never heard of Merrill. Alas, he was what
the Bolsheviks call “a petty bourgeois dilettante,” although a very admirable
one, but he loved to entertain French admirers around café tables with fairy
tales of his career as a revolutionist in the States.
Before we go on, two minor points should be cleared up. Frost and Robinson
are presented in the contemporary academy in America as intensely American
writers. They are nothing of the sort. Robinson is a rather vulgar imitator of
the early nineteenth-century British narrative poet Crabbe, when he does not
imitate those incredibly soft and sentimental productions, the narrative poems
of Tennyson. Robert Frost discovered himself as a British Georgian poet. In his
young days he lived near and was greatly influenced by the man who has slowly
emerged as the best of the Georgian poets — Edward Thomas — and he belongs
squarely in that tradition.
Now we come full circle. Who was the idol of the Georgian poets? Francis
Jammes. Now that the dust of the explosions of the epoch from Apollinaire to
Georges Schéhadé is dying away, it does not sound so incredible to recall that
the great international influences in poetry in the early years of this century
were Jammes and Verhaeren. They wrote about different things in different ways,
but they were two faces of the same coin, two poles of the same literary
universe — the world of H.G. Wells and Theodore Dreiser, of Gerhart Hauptmann
and Romain Rolland, the world which was given international viability in the
criticism of Georg Brandes, and which found poetic expression in the English
language in figures again as diverse as John Masefield in Britain and Carl
Sandburg in America. The Marxists are perfectly right, incidentally, in pointing
out that this literature, realistic if not naturalistic, and always with at
least an undercurrent of social criticism, is the last artistic expression of
capitalist culture to believe in its own health. All artistic expression after
these times starts by calling itself decadent. Recently, when the Nobel
Prize went to modern Russia for the first time it went to a poet [Boris
Pasternak] who, whatever his varying favor with the Bolsheviks might be, was for
one thing the leading living disciple of Francis Jammes.
Literary epochs play leapfrog with one another. French poetry after
Apollinaire ignored the recent past and went back to Rimbaud and Mallarmé —
finding in them of course not Symbolism, but a revolutionary syntax of the mind.
The most powerful current immediately before the First World War was
programmatically anti-Symbolist. If this was true in France it was even more
true in the English-speaking world where Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarmé meant
the sentimentalities of Oscar Wilde and Ernest Dowson, and the pallid Art
Nouveau descendants of the Symbolists, the disciples of Maeterlinck, seeking
the blue flowers of their souls under purple and green lights on a stage masked
in heavy scrim, like pea soup.
Derème, Toulet, Carco and the poets of Le Divan could be thought to
have had a considerable influence in America. There certainly existed a large
number of poets, more or less their contemporaries, who wrote much like them.
The average literate poet of the early years of this century owned and read the
Mercure anthology. But I doubt if this was a real influence. Rather it
was what biologists call “convergence.” Modern taste has never revived these
writers, and today the average young American poet has never heard of them.
There is nothing to compare to the revival of Toulet and Carco in France — let
alone to the remarkable contemporary reputation of O.V. Lubicz-Milosz. Arthur
Davison Ficke, even the still living and quite good Witter Bynner, are largely
forgotten, and only Edna St. Vincent Millay survives, read by passionate
high-school girls.
Did Edna Millay read Renée Vivien or Lucie Delarue-Mardrus? Although she was
married to a French intellectual, I would be willing to wager a considerable sum
that she never heard of them. Instead, she attempted what is probably the worst
translation of Baudelaire — a personality utterly beyond her — in any
language. Again, as part of the revolt against provincialism and for a
world-wide liberated urban culture, I imagine she thought of herself as standing
for French values against New England Puritanism. But, alas, even worse than
Whitman, I fear she thought of French culture pretty much the same way as a G.I.
out for the night in Gay Paree. It is very simple — Tristan Derème is read
today in France and Arthur Davison Ficke is not read in America for the reason
that Derème is an incomparably better writer.
The best poet of the Divan style in America is the critic Edmund
Wilson, who has a genius for conveying the very taste and smell of old, unhappy,
far-off seductions — a regular heterosexual Cavafy. His rigorously
unsentimental contemporaries refuse to take him seriously as a poet.
Similarly, a large body of bad Parnassian or Verlainean verse might be
extracted from bygone American magazines, but like minor and provincial French
verse of the same kind it is better left forgotten. On the other hand, there is
in America, as in France, a vast amount of good, but forgotten, provincial
verse. For two generations the American hinterland has produced innumerable
poets of the kind and quality of Pomairols.
While discussing this period it occurs to me to ask: Where
was the Prince of Poetry in those days? The God of the
Closerie des Lilas, did he have no influence in America? I think Paul Fort is
too intensely French to travel. In certain formal and syntactical ways, yes, but
in any real sense, no. Amy Lowell wrote a book titled Six French Poets
(Regnier, Samain, Spire, Fort, Jammes and Verhaeren). In it she pays tribute to
Fort. She borrowed several devices from him, notably what she called
“polyphonic prose.” Unfortunately, although she was an extremely powerful
personality — a little like Gertrude Stein — she was not one of America’s best
writers and her influence never extended much further than the reach of her
personality. “Polyphonic prose” was never taken up by anyone else.
Amy Lowell does, however, bring us to the first major climacteric in
twentieth-century American poetry, the Imagist movement. This was a bona fide
movement of the Parisian type, with members, leaders, its own tradition, its own
magazine and annual. For this reason any number of doctoral theses have been
written demonstrating its connection with French poetry. I think this is so much
waste paper. The connection is almost nonexistent.
Did Imagist theories of free verse owe anything to the tireless propaganda of
Vielé-Griffin? I think not. There is a simple, obvious reason why not. Vers
libre is “libre” of the French alexandrine and the syllabic
structure of French poetry. American free verse is free of the accentual
pentameter and the quatrain. In fact, as free verse in America became more
sophisticated, it often adopted syllabic structures, as in Marianne Moore, whose
verse is not free at all, but counted. Of course, poetry in the English language
has always been free in Vielé-Griffin’s sense. The rules of classical French
poetry have no counterpart in even the strictest English prosody.
Imagism is part of the world-wide movement of the time — anti-Symbolism. If
we had nothing but the Imagist Manifestoes to go by, we might think it was very
like the poetry of Reverdy — that it was “literary Cubism.” It was not. It
was much more conventional syntactically and it was actually, however
anti-Symbolist its program, influenced at second and third hand by certain
Symbolists, notably Gourmont and Laforgue, who were favorites of two of the
leaders, Richard Aldington and Ezra Pound. The notion of any intelligent
influence can be dissipated instantly by a perusal of Ezra Pound’s essay on
leading French poets of those days, in which he names as the great hope of
French poetry — Max Elskamp! This at the height of the careers of Apollinaire
and his colleagues! Pound himself was a sort of late-born Symbolist, actually an
Art Nouveau poet — the last of the Pre-Raphaelites. A bitter struggle
broke out between Pound and Amy Lowell for leadership of the Imagists, and
partly it revolved around who knew best what was the latest thing from Paris,
France. Amy Lowell was a little out of date — Spire and Fort were getting
usé in 1920 — but at least she knew French poetry. But Pound was on the
scene, he drank with Georges Fourrest and flirted with models who had slept with
Willy, and he seized the loudspeaker of authority and clung to it. And today
many an American Ph.D. thinks Pound is the “founder of Imagism and the first
American to introduce modern French poetry to the United States.” Georges
Fourrest and Max Elskamp!
One American Imagist who was thoroughly conversant with the French poetry of
his time was John Gould Fletcher. In fact his major work, a series of reveries
called Blue Symphony, Red Symphony, Green Symphony, etc., can best be
characterized as a deliberate attempt to turn Imagism into a kind of
Neo-Symbolism. It is not easy to pinpoint any one French poet as the inspiration
for these poems. None of the later Symbolists fit exactly. There are ideas
derived from Merrill, Vielé-Griffin, St.-Pol Roux, as well as the early work of
Salmon and Apollinaire. But basically the resemblance is closest to the
Belgians, and it is my opinion that the school of Maeterlinck is not Symbolist
at all, but a literary parallel to Art Nouveau in the plastic arts. The
theories behind John Gould Fletcher’s practice, however, came straight from Remy
de Gourmont . . . as might be guessed from the very idea of symphonies in color.
The Blue Symphony in particular was very influential in its day and
prepared the way for the long philosophical reveries which are so characteristic
of modern American poetry — Eliot’s Waste Land, Pound’s Cantos,
Williams’s Paterson, Zukofsky’s Poem Beginning “A,” Lowenfels’s
Some Deaths, Tyler’s Granite Butterfly and much of the work of
Conrad Aiken. Five long poems of my own are all deeply indebted to John Gould
Fletcher. Had he written in French, Fletcher would have been a recognized
landmark in literary history. As it was, he went out of fashion in his middle
age, was little read, changed his style, much for the worse, and finally, as
have thirty other important American poets in the twentieth century — committed
suicide.
The British Imagist F.S. Flint, who later gave up writing altogether, did
know contemporary French verse very well indeed. His translations of Cendrars,
Aragon, Éluard, Soupault, Jacob and the rest, from their classical period,
remain the best translations of modern French verse in English, and they were
done over thirty-five years ago. They seemed to have had no influence on the
Imagists, however. They encouraged them in their practice of free verse, but the
problems of French poetry in the early Twenties were either over the heads or
outside the interests of English and American writers.
The leading Imagist, and the only one still read today, was H.D. (Hilda
Doolittle, then the wife of Richard AIdington). She was more influenced by
Meleager and the Choruses of Euripides than all of French literature rolled
together. Her personality greatly resembles Renée Vivien; some of her poetry has
the same scene and subject as Les Chansons de Bilitis. But there the
resemblance ends. She is a far harder, brighter, cleaner poet than Louys or
Vivien — a much better one, if you will.
Imagism was a revolt against rhetoric and symbolism in poetry, a return to
direct statement, simple clear images, unpretentious themes, fidelity to
objectively verifiable experience, strict avoidance of sentimentality. I suppose
this is the actual programme of all good poetry anywhere. The Enemy of the
Imagists was Tennyson and Victorianism generally. I doubt if anybody writing in
France in 1912-25 was consciously engaged in a struggle against Lamartine or
Hugo.
There was an important but usually ignored influence. All the Imagists were
familiar with Judith Gautier’s Livre du Jade — that precious minor
classic of French letters. From it they got their first intimation of Chinese
poetry — a poetry which fulfilled and surpassed the Imagist Manifesto beyond
the abilities or dreams of even the best of the Imagists. Amy Lowell’s (with
Florence Ayscough) Fir Flower Tablets, Witter Bynner’s The Jade
Mountain (The 300 Poems of T’ang), Ezra Pound’s Cathay are
translations from the Chinese, and are in each case incomparably their
respective author’s best work. Judith Gautier not only was almost certainly the
first inspiration for this interest, but she provided the Americans with her
special interpretations of Chinese poetry — a mood of exquisitely refined
weariness and excruciating sensibility which is not, as a matter of fact,
characteristic of Chinese poetry until the eighteenth century. None of these
authors, including Judith Gautier, read Chinese — yet they made the best
translations in any language.
Even those Imagists who could not read Le Livre du Jade in French read
beautifully translated selections in Stuart Merrill’s Pastels in Prose.
This was a translation of French prose poems from a wide variety of writers,
mostly Symbolist, and was an attempt to acclimate the prose poem in America. It
is the only work by which Merrill is known to most Americans. It failed in its
purpose. Not only have few prose poems of any importance ever been written in
English, but from Baudelaire to Léon Paul Fargue there are no good translations
from the French. It seems to be a medium singularly unfitted to the spirit of
American poetry. In fact, the only important prose poems in America are to be
found in William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell, a sort of prose Vita
Nuova which shows a familiarity with Max Jacob and Fargue.
There is one other curious influence, one of those vagaries of history due to
the “personal element” that eludes the strict mechanists. Pound knew Georges
Fourrest and tried vainly to write witty epigrams like his — “Here lies George
Fourrest under the sod. / He never feared the cops, syphillis or God.” Pound
never managed anything as good as that. But F.S. Flint knew a considerable poet
then teaching in London — Jean de Bosschère. He introduced him to the other
Imagists and their own concepts of free verse probably had some influence on
Bosschère rather than the other way around. He certainly had a definite
influence on Flint himself, to a lesser degree on Aldington, and probably on
Pound’s “Villanelle of the Psychological Hour” — the only poem Pound ever
wrote in anything like the idiom of modern French verse. Then Bosschère
published in London and Chicago in a face en face edition, French and
English, his Closed Door. This contained the famous “Ulysses Builds His
Bed,” the first competent example of dissociation and recombination of elements
in the “cubist” manner that most poets who read no French had ever
encountered. Its effect was tremendous. Out of it came the germinal idea for
Joyce’s great epic. Out of it came the technique of The Waste Land.
Anthropologists are familiar with phenomena like this in what they call
“acculturation” or in “diffusion” of culture elements. Something not of
primary importance in one culture will be transmitted to another almost by
chance, and find a niche unoccupied in the other culture pattern and proliferate
all over the place. It is like the spread of the English sparrow and the
starling all over America, or rabbits in Australia. Pascal Covici, then a
Chicago book dealer and later one of America’s largest publishers, was
especially fond of Bosschère and published practically everything he wrote,
while Cendrars is, to the best of my knowledge, except for his Anthologie
Nègre, represented only by a poor translation of L’Or, made long ago.
Such are the exigencies of the diffusion of culture and of comparative
literature.
Meantime, literary cubism was coming into existence in English. Gertrude
Stein’s Tender Buttons and the abstract dissociative poems of Walter
Conrad Arensburg antedate the fully developed style of Reverdy by ten years or
more. Both were wealthy Americans who had lived for long periods in France and
who were very much alive to what was going on in the most advanced circles.
Arensburg gave up writing, became the leading exponent of the Baconian heresy —
the idea that Bacon wrote Shakespeare — to prove which he spent thousands. He
was a close friend of Marcel Duchamp, and, aided by Duchamp, he built one of the
two or three largest collections of modern painting in the world — now in the
Philadelphia Museum. (It contains almost the entire oeuvre of Duchamp
himself.)
(Incidentally, Arensburg made, some forty years ago, the best translation of
“L’Après-Midi d’un Faune” in English. In the notes he pointed out that
the afternoon which is the putative subject of the poem takes place after the
poem is over . . . “Tard succombent au fier silence de midi:” I know of
no other American writer who ever attached any importance to this line.)
Until just before the Second World War, when she became a great world
celebrity like the Aga Khan or Brigitte Bardot or Princess Margaret, Gertrude
Stein published her books at her own expense and was read only by a tiny
coterie, mostly of Americans living abroad. She is one of the most intensely
American writers that ever lived. Her words, her ideas, her materials, all are
the purest Americanese, and even her extraordinary syntax is simply a
development of tendencies latent in typically American speech. Yet she is also
an American writer whose work stands fully in the mainstream of French poetry
from Apollinaire to Surrealism.
Arensburg and Stein both lived abroad, they both wrote for small coteries of
sophisticates, they both contributed to the magazine Others edited by
Alfred Kreymborg, and it is with this magazine and the group that grew up around
it that modernism in American poetry really begins. William Carlos Williams,
Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, T.S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, Marsden
Hartley, Wallace Gould, Alfred Kreymborg himself, Maxwell Bodenheim, and the
socialist poets Lola Ridge and James Oppenheim, the anarchist Arturo
Giovannitti, dozens of others — Kreymborg produced them all suddenly on the
literary stage in America, like a conjurer pulling rabbits from a hat. The
effect on the press and the conventional poetry circles was terrific. It
surpassed by far the noise made by the Beat Generation or the alcoholics of the
Hemingway-Fitzgerald Lost Generation. American literature was never the same
again, and of course today many of these names are modern classics, poets loaded
with honors and taught in the grammar schools and endlessly and exhaustively
explicated in hundreds upon hundreds of Ph.D. theses. Their influences are,
without exception, largely French.
French they may have been. Up to date, except with a few exceptions, they
were not. It takes as long almost for new poetic idioms to cross a language
barrier as it does for the use of the blowpipe to travel from one tribe to
another in the Amazon. The time lag was considerable. Pound had just discovered
Laforgue and was translating his prose extravaganzas and singing his praises to
all comers. Laforgue is the principal influence on most of these people. All the
early work of T.S. Eliot is extremely Laforguean. He now attributes that special
spleen and irony to Corbière, but it is extremely doubtful if he had ever heard
of Corbière prior to 1920. The real leader of the group to which Eliot and Pound
belonged in London was the novelist, polemicist, and very great painter, Wyndham
Lewis, and Lewis’s narrative style is Laforgue reduced to a formula: “Describe
human beings as though they were machines, landscapes as though they were
chemical formulas, inanimate objects as though they were alive.” This is pretty
much the formula of the Laforguean poetry of the English poetess Edith Sitwell
too, and she had a considerable influence on American poets. Marianne Moore is a
poet very like Edith Sitwell, but without her depth. She not only took over the
Laforguean aesthetic, but she wrote in syllabic verse which structurally often
resembles specific poems of Laforgue’s. Aiken’s poetry was much like Laforgue’s
in its choice of inadequate, spleen-ridden and troubled narrators — the first
person of the poem almost always sounds like Eliot’s Prufrock or a slightly
healthier Laforgue himself. But Aiken’s long, mellifluous, easy line with its
obvious sonorities and sentimental rhythms sounds much more like Valéry Larbaud.
Dozens of Aiken’s poems are pure Barnabooth.
It is very important to understand that modernist American poetry — and
English, as well — of the generation just before and after the First World War,
the generation of Supervielle and Cendrars, of Reverdy and Breton — was
hopelessly stuck on Laforgue. This peculiar blockage is extremely difficult to
understand and merits a long essay — or an American Ph.D. thesis — in itself.
Puzzling about this, I comfort myself with the memory that shortly after the
Second World War, Roger Caillois informed me that the best American novelist was
Horace McCoy.
Actually the Socialist-Populist writers were more aware of contemporary
French literature. They read the French socialist and anarchist press and wrote
in a sort of international Whitmanesque revolutionary idiom like many of their
now forgotten compeers in the French journals of the “movement.” I suppose
their favorite foreign poets were Verhaeren and the German, Richard Dehmel. But
they were aware of what was going on, as the aesthetes of this period were not.
They had a living contact with intellectuals in Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin,
Munich, Geneva. The Laforgueans had derived their knowledge of the latest thing
from courses in French literature at Harvard and I doubt if either Pound or
Eliot has ever heard of Herman Gorter to this day. When Gorter and his friends
seized power in postwar Rotterdam, weeping men and women recited hastily made
translations of his poems from soapboxes to ragged crowds in the slums of New
York and Chicago. Mayakofski’s poems were translated into American before they
were into French. Sandburg wrote one of the first poems to Brancusi in any
language, and it is still one of the best.
The large Yiddish-language press, then by far the most civilized journals in
America, published translations of poetry from all over the world, and the
American Yiddish poet Yehoash was translating Japanese haiku and
introducing ideas derived from Apollinaire into Yiddish verse before anybody
ever dreamed of doing such things in English. A section of New York, utterly
unknown to the “real Americans,” was an international capital with an
international language into which literature from all over Europe was
translated, dozens of magazines and newspapers of higher quality than anything
in English, and the best theater in the Western hemisphere. It must not be
forgotten that almost all Jewish poets of those days still read Yiddish,
although they wrote in English, and were thus exposed to international
influences unknown to their Gentile colleagues. “Cosmopolitanism” somebody in
Russia called it a few years back.
If the proletariat had an international culture, so did the rich. Walter
Conrad Arensburg moved from specific imitations of Mallarmé, “Reflets dans
l’Eau”: “The swan existing / Is like a song / With an accompaniment /
imaginary . . .” through imitations of Toulet: “Sleepy head / Lay aside your
sandals / That have fled / Down a night of candles / By the bed . . .”
to the pure cubism of “A drink into home use indicates early Italian,
otherwise the elements of how keep outside. Use what listens on Sundays and
catchy elms will oxidize pillows. Blunders are belted in cousins . . .” to
“abstract” poems with titles like “Axiom” and “Ohm,” which can be compared
only with Picabia, but which, quite unlike Picabia or Tzara, were written in
dead earnest.
Mina Loy somewhat resembled the early Soupault, although when she wrote her
best verse it is unlikely that she had ever heard of him. Later she married the
boxer Arthur Craven, a famous figure of the great days of Dada. Gertrude Stein,
of course, was plugging away, writing poetry and prose which might well have
puzzled Barzun (the father, not the son), but she did not contribute much to
literary magazines until ten years later.
Marsden Hartley was one of America’s greatest painters. Working in Germany
and Paris before the First World War, he was one of the first abstract
expressionists and in those days he wrote some rather odd poetry, obviously
French in inspiration. When he returned to the States he abandoned all this and
painted for the rest of his life in a powerful, rocky, Fauve-like style the
landscapes and seascapes and people of his native Maine. His poetry underwent a
similar change. It is simple, direct, painfully honest, unabashedly personal.
Little appreciated in the long period of academic English-inspired metaphysical
verse of the self-styled Reactionary Generation, he is coming back into favor,
at least among young poets.
Now we come to the last two poets of this group, whom I have held back
because they are by far the best. (A comparative study like this must pass by,
at least to an extent, questions of value and concentrate on historical
connections. Arensburg, Oppenheim, Bodenheim, several others, are not very good
writers. I forgot poor old Bodenheim, by the way. He was a sort of hobo
Laforgue, a poor and rather absurd poet who spent his life cadging drinks in the
Bohemian quarters of New York and Chicago and living off the fringes of “the
movement” — first the anarcho-syndicalist IWW, later the Communists. Like all
such pathetic people, he had a rather frightening dissolute integrity of his
own. He was, I suppose, the most Laforguean of all, but Laforgue came to him
through the worst of all channels, the English Decadents, Wilde, Dowson, Symons
— and Ben Hecht!)
To resume the thread — Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams are poets
of world importance, completely devoid of the provincial, derivative character
that marks most of these people. They have, vis-à-vis French poetry, none
of that flavor of the backwoodsman seeing Paris for the first time that we
associate with even such important figures as Rubén Darío.
Wallace Stevens might be said to have fulfilled and completed Laforgue, more
than anyone in French poetry, or any other language for that matter. (Rimbaud
does not fulfill Laforgue — no two life attitudes could be less alike.) Stevens
shares Laforgue’s irony and his sensual wisdom, but he has something Laforgue
lacks as a poet and lacked as a man — a very simple thing: good health. The
bitterness of Laforgue’s irony becomes a tonic rather than a corrosive
bitterness in Stevens and produces a skepticism and animal faith, a completely
laïque affirmation beyond the capacity of a dying and unhappily exiled
man. The pure Voltairean malice in the Laforgue tradition is revealed in all its
innocence and grandeur.
Today it is William Carlos Williams who emerges as the greatest of this group
— the classic American modernists — and as America’s greatest living poet. He
was partly educated in France. He has lived there for extended periods. He knows
personally most of the heroic generation of post-World War I poets and has
translated a novel of Soupault’s. He was a friend of Valéry Larbaud and the
American editor of Commerce. Intensely personal, local, antiliterary,
absolutely devoted to the achievement of a truly American vision, he is none the
less the one American poet who ranks with the best of his French contemporaries,
who speaks to them as an equal in a language they can understand. I would say
too that the ordinary French reader today could get more out of him than from
any other American poet except Whitman. It is the true autochthones who
circulate most freely in all lands. Williams could be said to belong in the
Cubist tradition — Imagism, Objectivism, the dissociation and rearrangement of
the elements of concrete reality, rather than rhetoric or free association. But
where Reverdy, Apollinaire, Salmon, Cendrars, Cocteau and Jacob are all urban,
even megalopolitan, poets of that Paris which is the international market of
objects of vertu, vice, and art, Williams has confined himself in single
strictness to the life before his eyes — the life of a physician in a small
town twenty miles from New York. In so doing, his localism has become
international and timeless. His long quest for a completely defenseless
simplicity of personal speech produces an idiom identical with that which is the
end product of centuries of polish, refinement, tradition and revolution.
The next generation, the young men and women who began to write during and
just after the First World War, had more connections with France and were more
alive to what was actually going on there. The reason was obvious — they were
there. Many of them went abroad as soldiers and stayed on, traveling about
Europe and living as cheaply as possible off the inflated currencies with their
hard dollars. This is the famous Lost Generation. They weren’t very lost. They
had a ball in Europe. They all started publishing their books and selling their
paintings in their early twenties. Most of them came back to the States to
enormously successful careers or very highly paid jobs. Ernest Hemingway, on
safari hunting rhinoceros, has never looked very “lost” to me. Although the
First World War broke the isolation of America and pulled it into the general
orbit of Western civilization, the experiences of Europe in the war actually had
little meaning for these young Americans. Malcolm Cowley, one of their leaders,
and a poet who became a successful editor and publisher, wrote a book about
those years, Exile’s Return. It is a good book, and a fine study of the
mind of his generation of Americans abroad, but it shows less than no
understanding of what had happened to the European spirit. A good deal of it is
taken up with the high days of Dada. To Cowley, and to most of his well-off
friends, Dada was just a continuation of the American-college-boy pranks they
had known at Princeton and Harvard. They might be able to write about it, but
they could never understand in their hearts that the war and the
counterrevolutions that followed it had destroyed the foundations of the
Humanist tradition, that the very word civilization had come to stink of
blood. Perhaps it was a Nazi who first said, “When I hear the word culture,
I reach for my revolver.” But it was Max Ernst who exhibited a billet of wood
with an ax chained to it and the card, “If you don’t like this piece of
sculpture, you dirty bourgeois, make one for yourself.” And who was it who
wanted to show, in the same Rhineland Dada exhibition, a loaded pistol mounted
in a frame and pointed at the spectator, with a little string on the trigger and
the caption: Please pull. The state of mind behind this state of affairs
was totally incomprehensible to the average American poet drinking Pernods which
cost him two and a half cents American money on the terrasse of the Dome
and congratulating himself on what a rebel he was — against American
Prohibition. No happy man has so much einfuhling that he can truly
comprehend a broken heart.
Still — they did their best. They bought drinks for the leading personages
of the period if they could persuade them to visit their tables. They financed
literary reviews. They helped stage demonstrations and plays in which people
continuously shot off pistols and cranked klaxons. (Ah, the klaxons! The true
Mona Lisas of the Twenties! Where would we have been without them?) The exiles
were always good for a loan which seemed very sizable on the receiving end,
translated into francs, but which was cheap at half the price. They bought a
taste of the disorderly old age of a culture. In other words, they were like
schoolboys who discovered they could make love to a decrepit and dissolute but
unbelievably depraved duchess for less than the price of ten minutes in a
short-order whorehouse back home.
Duchesses in dissolution, alas, are over the heads of schoolboys, and so,
like Malcolm Cowley, the exiles returned — to good jobs. What had they
accomplished, the young men of the Twenties, the expatriates? A good deal, some
of it unwittingly. They broke for a moment the continuity of American culture.
They introduced to America the alienated and outraged European avant-garde, and
although few of them understood what they were doing, there were others, in
America and expatriated, who did. They started a tradition of publishing the
most vital American writing, as well as a lot of translation from modern French
writing, in Paris — a tradition which persists, more or less on dying momentum,
to this day. They ran a number of reviews, expensively gotten up by European
standards, which may have had little public support but which were studied
avidly by every alert writer and painter back home. Similar magazines,
necessarily cheaper and less worldly, proliferated all over America.
The Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, started
in Chicago and moved to Paris, where it finally died in Gurdgieff’s dude ranch
in Fontainebleau. Broom was founded and edited by Alfred Kreymborg and
Harold Loeb in Rome, Paris and Berlin, and eventually was taken over by Malcolm
Cowley and Matthew Josephson and moved to America — where it promptly died.
Contact was edited by WilIham Carlos Williams and Robert MacAlmon and
included a book-publishing venture. The Transatlantic Review was edited
by the dynamic and endlessly fertile British novelist Ford Madox Ford, but
published mostly American and French writers. There were many others. At the end
there were still plenty, and they and their editors were more closely integrated
with European life and more comprehending. Eugene Jolas’s transition and
Sam Putnam’s New Review were even read by Frenchmen!
Most of these magazines also published good reproductions, and so laid the
foundations, not only of modern American abstract art — but of the fabulously
successful American art market. Institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the
Arensburg Collection, and the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, the beautifully
organized collection of modern French painting in the Chicago Art Institute, as
well as the millionaire art dealers of New York — this would all have been a
much poorer thing had it not been for these apostles of acculturation who often
had to hide from their printers till money showed up at American Express from
Grandma in Sheboygan, Michigan.
Then came the Stavisky riots, the manifesto for the United Front (signed by
dozens of American writers and artists in France), the Spanish War, Munich —
the thunderous footsteps of the Golem marching toward the door — and everybody
left for America . . . except Henry Miller, who didn’t have the fare and didn’t
believe in politics anyway.
Let us give what the American commerçants call a brief rundown on the
leading poets of that period.
Malcolm Cowley started out as a populist poet, but from Harvard, not the
Middle West. For five years in Europe his work was full of echoes of
Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Cendrars, Soupault — (Soupault and Duchamp seem to have
been very congenial minds to the Americans) — even Tristan Tzara and Roger
Vitrac. Then he went back to the States, wrote the best poem on the death of
Sacco and Vanzetti, gave up poetry and became an editor of a political weekly,
The New Republic.
Hart Crane worshiped Rimbaud, or at least the Rimbaudian legend. He never
learned to speak more than a few words of French, but his “Voyages” are the
best recreation of Rimbaud that exists in English and his whole life was a sort
of acting out of “Bateau Ivre.” Formally, however, as a prosodist, he was
quite conventional and influenced mostly by early Elizabethan blank verse —
probably because he also thought of himself as an avatar of Marlowe. He spent
quite a bit of time in France in the last years of his life, but he had more
trouble with the police than he did contact with his French colleagues.
Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse ran a very ambitious publishing house, the
Black Sun Press. They wrote together a book of beautiful erotic poems,
Sleeping Together, which bears comparison with the Golls’ Dix Milles
Aubes. Then they returned to America and Crosby shot himself at a drunken
party. His work somewhat resembled Artaud’s, if Artaud had been mad for the sun
instead of the way he was.
Archibald MacLeish lived in Paris in those days and his best poem is
“Portrait of a Man,” in memoriam to Harry Crosby. It is a very deliberate
imitation of Apollinaire’s “Zone.” Larbaud, St.-John Perse, Apollinaire,
Cendrars — especially their use of tourism as a symbolic system — MacLeish was
deeply influenced by them and he echoed and imitated them quite consciously. In
his young days he was almost a new Stuart Merrill, whom he greatly resembled in
personality.
Matthew Josephson wrote a sort of Dadaist poetry, went back to America,
became first a successful advertising man and then an even more successful
biographer and forgot about poetry, Dadaist or otherwise.
Jolas spent several years trying to shift the basis of Surrealism from Freud
and Marx to Jung and St. John of the Cross, publishing in transition
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and imitating it in polylingual poems full of
neologisms which nobody read. He and his friends launched “The Revolution of
the Word,” complete with manifesto (which he persuaded all sorts of French
personages to sign), but nothing came of it and he went back to America. As an
apologist for his own brand of Surrealism, he was, if anything, a more cogent
and learned polemicist than Breton himself, and to his door can be laid the
beginning of the present popularity of Jungianism, with its chaos of undigested
symbology and its antinomian mysticism. Out of him come the pseudo mahatmas of
On the Road — but, alas, all devoid of his curious and amusing learning.
Yvor Winters suffered from tuberculosis and was forced to go from Chicago,
not to Paris with all his colleagues, but to the New Mexican mining town of
Raton, high in the desert mountains. He actually knew more about French
literature than any other practicing American poet of his generation and in his
early work did a better job of intelligent assimilation of the whole tradition
from Baudelaire to Aragon and Breton than anybody else. He cannot be said to
have shown specific French influence. Like William Carlos Williams, his work was
his own completely but it was part of the world of modern European literature.
Only he of all poet-critics of the time in America had any comprehension of the
profound spiritual crisis which this evolution embodied. Suddenly he identified
himself with the antimodernism of Valéry or Maritain and became the strictest of
contemporary Parnassiens. This is a phenomenon typically French again, so much
so in fact that his poetic style and critical opinions are still very little
understood in America. He once wrote a long attack on H.D. which was at the same
time his own farewell to Imagism — hers and his own dissociative, Reverdy-like
brand of it. Now this essay has an odd note about it of never quite
comprehending H.D. and of somehow missing the whole point of her work. The
reason is simple. In its original form it was not about H.D. It is very close to
being a paraphrase of Charles Maurras’s famous attack on Renée Vivien, “Le
Romantisme Féminin: Allégorie du Sentiment Désordonné.”
In the meantime, there was growing up in Vanderbilt University, one of the
few institutions of learning in the American South, a little coterie of
political reactionaries, under the leadership of their English professor, John
Crowe Ransom. Their roots were in Europe, too, though not in the antimodernism
of Maritain and Valéry, but in the antimodernism of Léon Daudet, Maurras, and in
the theories of Pareto, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Major Douglas — the
“social credit,” “classless syndicalism” and “new agrarianism” which came
to so disastrous an end in a gas station in Milan and a fiery hole in Berlin.
Their idol was T.S. Eliot, “Classicist, Anglocatholic, Royalist.” They
tolerated Fernandez, but thought he was too broad in his tastes. They approved
of Ezra Pound but wished he paid more attention to the rules of verse. They
believed Nigras should be kept in their place. Their real mentor, who imported
these ideas for them — they lacked the languages — was a political professor
named Donald Davidson, whose writings somewhat resemble those of a literate
Senator Eastland and who is one of the leading think tanks of the modern South.
They numbered one genuine poet in their ranks, a then young girl named Laura
Riding. The association was fortuitous. She did not share their ideology. Like
Williams, Stein, Winters, she was a genuinely autochthonous American modernist.
Her poetry bore a slight resemblance to Reverdy’s but I am sure this resemblance
too was accidental — convergence again. She left the Ransom group (who called
themselves “The Fugitives” — fugitives from modernism, liberalism,
humanitarianism, socialism, interracialism, and all the other cusswords of the
reactionaries), migrated first to London, where she was one of the early muses
of W.H. Auden, and then to Paris and Majorca, where she ran a press and a
magazine for several years with Robert Graves. She is without doubt America’s
most unappreciated good poet. Unfortunately her best poetry is small in bulk and
came early. Later she broke down into a dull wordy chaos and then stopped
writing altogether. She is one of the many casualties of the permanent crisis of
the modern mind, like René Crevel, Rigaut, Artaud, Mayakofski, Hart Crane, Harry
Crosby, Dylan Thomas, and the rest — but for a while she was one of the very
finest poets of her day in any language.
Walter Lowenfels lived in Paris for many years and was one of the better
American contributors to transition. He published a series of books —
printed by Darantière, who printed so many of these people — called “Some
Deaths,” the deaths being those of D.H. Lawrence, Apollinaire, Hart Crane,
Rimbaud and a couple of others whom I have forgotten. Structurally they bear
considerable resemblance to Apollinaire. Lowenfels, a fairly wealthy man,
returned to America after the Stavisky riots (he was one of the first signers of
the famous manifesto), gave up poetry and became a correspondent for The
Daily Worker and editor of its Pennsylvania edition. Only in recent years,
arrested under the Smith Act outlawing the Communist Party, was he moved to
return to poetry. In his young days he was certainly one of America’s best
poets, and one of those most in the current of contemporary French life. He is,
incidentally, the hero of the very amusing episode “Jabberwhorl Cronstadt,” in
Henry Miller’s Black Spring — which shows how much comprehension Henry
has of the refinements of modernist verse. Miller, of course, is another writer
so American he is completely assimilable to French culture and stands at ease in
the small company of Restif, Céline, and Sar Péladan.
e.e. cummings lived in France after the First World War, but for him Paris
seems to have been a place of beautiful streetwalkers and abundant liquor. He is
a conventional and sentimental poet whose typographical and syntactic oddities
are the pranks of an incurable Harvard Boy. They certainly have nothing to do
with the sickness of the European heart which began in 1848 and became fatal in
Père Lachaise in 1871. Everybody pretends not to notice that among his comical
cut-ups are some of the most scurrilous bits of anti-Semitic doggerel in any
language, including German. Anti-Semitism is unknown in America except among
lunatics. So in the sense that he is a sane and educated man and an
antidreyfusard, he may be said to show French influence. It is a little ominous
that he is just beginning to be appreciated in France.
John Brooks Wheelwright was a different kind of Bostonian, a perfect
descendant of the revolutionary humanists and eccentrics of the 1840s. Descended
on both sides from ancient Mayflower families, and moderately wealthy, he lived
for a while abroad and read a great deal of modern French poetry. But he had his
own ideas about what kind of modernism he wanted, and he again was a true
indigène, and so, a good European. Too hot for the orthodox, he became an
impassioned Trotskyite, Anglocatholic and several other kinds of violent and
peculiar exceptionalist. Walking home one night, he was killed by a drunken
driver near the bridge across the Charles River in Boston which his father had
built. Dead in his prime like so many American poets, he was not, like most of
them, already burnt out. No one has ever taken the place of this dynamic,
inexhaustible and lovable mind and completely original talent. Had he written in
French, he would have died loaded with honors. As it is, few people have ever
heard of him.
Already revolutionary politics has begun to intrude into this narrative. With
the onset of the permanent world economic crisis, the rise of fascism and the
development of war economies, the Americans went home from Paris, and other
international movements than those founded by Picasso and Apollinaire captured
the allegiance of American poets. Aragon’s Front Rouge was recited to
jazz trumpets and drums in John Reed clubs (the American Union of Revolutionary
Writers) in San Francisco and Chicago — the “trip to Kharkov” caused all
sorts of convulsions in advanced literary circles. Mimeographed magazines of
Proletcult poetry flourished in provincial towns. The theses of Leopold Auerbach
were passionately debated in unheated furnished rooms and rattling boxcars. This
movement produced some excellent prose — the early work of Mike Gold, Dos
Passos (Dos Passos was strongly influenced by the program, but not the practice,
of Jules Romains’s “Unanisme.” In fact, “Unanisme,” which had produced a
poetry either monstrous or dull, or both, found in Dos Passos’ USA its
major realization), Farrell, Richard Wright and others, even Steinbeck in a
sense — but the bitter fact is that it produced almost no poetry of any
consequence whatsoever. The American Roman Catholic Church is the most
ultramontane in the world. Similarly the American Communist Party has always
been more Russian than the Russians, more Staliist than Stalin. The
witch-hunting — or “petty-bourgeois hunting” — of the bureaucracy, the
tedious “let’s play we all work at the Pulitov Iron Works”
pseudo-proletarianism of the Bohemians of Greenwich Village drove most bona fide
writers away or out of proletarian literature and into actual trade-union work,
and robbed those who stayed of the self-respect essential to poetry. With the
exception of Mike Gold, who has not done any important writing in twenty-five
years, all the novelists and short-story writers ended up bitter enemies of
Bolshevism in all forms . . . many of them professional antibolsheviks, a very
lucrative occupation in the States.
There was a moment when French influence was very important in American
writing. From Kharkov to Les Cloches de Basle, all eyes were on Aragon.
Would he be the leader of an assertion of the valid rights of literature against
the anti-intellectualism of the bureaucracy? Nothing happened, and one by one
the writers dropped away. The leading literary quarterly in America, bitterly
reactionary, paranoid in its antibolshevism, was once an organ of the
International Union of Revolutionary Writers and carried, along with myself,
Louis Aragon on its masthead. No one of my generation is ever likely to forget
Aragon’s speech attacking Léger and praising as the pure representative of the
working class — Gromaire!
When the split came, Breton did not carry any of the older
American modernists with him. A whole new crop of American poets sprang up —
specifically disciples of Breton’s brand of Surrealism. The most important of
these poets are Charles Henri Ford, Parker Tyler and Philip Lamantia, all still
writing today. Together they edited one of the most dynamic magazines of
“Surréalisme Outremer” — called View — which was livelier if less
learned than transition. All three are certainly among the finest
non-French Surrealists. Parker Tyler’s Granite Butterfly is an excellent
philosophic revery of the type written by Lowenfels, Zukofsky, myself, and
others — a form which begins in France with Un Coup de dès. This poem of
Mallarmé’s, along with Zone and Le Cimitière marin, — even
Carco’s L’Ombre — have been of immense influence on American poets of my
generation.
In the meantime, as a sort of effort to stave off disorganization, the poet
Louis Zukofsky organized a “movement — with manifesto — called Objectivism.
It owed a good deal to Apollinaire and the Cubists and to the principles, but
not the practice of the German Neue Sachlichkeit. Just at this moment
people in France — notably Léger — were talking about “the return to the
object.” Zukofsky himself was deeply read in French poetry and had translated
André Salmon, in fact, all of Prikaz. His own poetry somewhat resembled
the Salmon of the days of Prikaz but owed even more to William Carlos
Williams and Ezra Pound’s Cantos. He has a peculiarly knotty, Kabbalistic
sort of mind and his long philosophical-personal “epics,” actually reveries,
resemble nothing so much as the permanent crisis of the modern heart filtered
through the baffling convolutions of the Zohar. Incidentally, he was a friend
and translator of the great Yiddish modernist, Yehoash. Zukofsky included me,
along with Williams, Pound, Horace Gregory, Lowenfels, Wheelwright, in fact,
anybody who would say yes and didn’t write sonnets, in his Objectivists — but
after putting out a very stimulating anthology (printed by Darantière) the
movement died for lack of interest on the part of its members. Zukofsky did
discover the one American poet who is, without ever having heard of him, an
almost exact replica of Reverdy — Carl Rakosi, who published one small book and
then fell silent.
The Rakosi book was published by James Laughlin at New Directions. For over
twenty years Laughlin alone imported French writers into America by the
bucketful. He took up where Jolas stopped and has lasted four times as long. He
has published everybody from Julien Gracq to Éluard, from Queneau back to Louise
Labé. At one time he was very awake to what was going on in France. People were
just beginning to talk about Michaux in St. German when Laughlin appeared with a
bilingual Selected Works of Michaux. In 1940 the baby Surrealists
in the American cornbelt cut their eye teeth on the New Directions Annual
Surrealist numher. In recent years he has been more interested in publishing the
work of Asian writers in English and has turned away from the French writers of
post-World War II. He is himself an excellent poet, a kind of intimiste,
who owes much to the example of French poets as diverse as Toulet, Éluard, and
Queneau.
The Second World War produced nothing in American poetry. Like most everybody
else in the world, Americans seemed to be ashamed of themselves — fighting a
war in the middle of the twentieth century; but unlike the more seasoned
British, they were unable to write out this attitude in a mature way. Of course,
there was nothing in America like the French press of the Resistance, which was
by definition stimulating. However, anything that crossed the ocean by chance
from North Africa was eagerly read and by the end of the war American poets who
read French were well aware of the wartime work of poets like Char and Frénaud.
Les Éditions de Minuit and Poésie were easier to buy in America
than in Paris.
Has the French poetry that has come after the Second World War had much
influence? I think not. Modern American poetry now has a long tradition behind
it and it is deeply involved in developments of its own. Poets like Allen
Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, all of whom
have lived for long periods in France, owe much to the classic period of French
modernism, but they are now following roads which diverge widely from the poets
represented in anthologies like Rousselot’s and Bealu’s. Ferlinghetti has
translated Prévert and fancies that he himself writes like Prévert. Actually, if
he resembles anybody, it is much more Queneau.
Kenneth Patchen is one of the Old Masters of the universe of discourse which
is that of American poetry after the Second World War. Once again — see how
often we come to these American writers, truly indigenous, who are so easily
comprehensible to the French! The simplest definition of Patchen’s style is that
he writes as Aragon might have written if Lunacharski had been chairman of the
Kharkov Conference. Aragon at the great turn said, “We do not need to concoct
synthetic nightmares, the nightmares of the daily press can always surpass us in
horror.” Well, Patchen really captures that horror, in the way no
social-realist ever could. He writes of a world in which every man has become
Antonin Artaud, where René Crevel and Mayakofski shoot each other at every
street corner, and where every body of water six feet deep contains its own
corpse of Hart Crane and every barroom floor a bloated Dylan Thomas lost in a
coma from which there can be no return.
Ever since the wave of worldwide reaction which is a reflection of the by now
admittedly incurable economic crisis and the economy of permanent war, American
poetry has been in the hands of a coalition of the pillowcase-headdress school
which originated at Vanderbilt so long ago, and the ex-Stalinist paranoiacs of a
small circle of cocktail drinkers in New York. These people control the
scholarships and fellowships that bring American intellectuals to Europe and
French intellectuals to teach in Iowa State University’s School of Creative
Writing. They also publish lavish quarterlies subsidized by American
millionaires. They also control that milksoaked biscuit Encounter, which
is not really what it seems — edited by John Foster Dulles — but is a
publication of the international beni oui-oui. So they have given the
impression abroad that this is what American poetry is today, a sort of hayseed
imitation of Valéry at his most pompous, a bumpkin version of Patrice de la Tour
du Pin at his most vapid. The truth is that, like the Proletcult Boys before
them (many of them were Proletcult Boys!), they are not poets at all, but
politicians, professors and manipulators of prizes, fellowships and
scholarships. They are the present American Academy, even more ridiculous than
the one which the Bull on the Roof recently entered as the last Dadaist joke of
his extreme old age. No one of importance in American poetry takes them
seriously, except their poor students, to whom, if they show any originality,
they can always give a failing grade in “Creative Poetry 2679132 A.”
The great trouble with transatlantic communication is that it is like
short-wave radio — it gets distorted by the overpowering signals of the
official stations. French people seldom really realize, having never seen the
country, that America is a commercial civilization with a mass culture and an
official literature which in no way reflects the actual life of the country. But
its noncommercial culture is by no means underground; it is just not exported by
the American State Department or Hollywood or the big slick magazines and the
academic quarterlies. Except by accident, important American intellectuals never
show up in Europe on Fulbright Fellowships. The entire official and academic,
but not the privately sponsored, fellowship system is a kind of U.S. State
Department Gold Curtain, through which only mice can pass.
Finally, although some of the people in the collection presented by Europe
are important poets and good friends of mine, they show no perceptible French
influence. Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, John Ciardi, Richard Eberhart, all
speak French, are well-read in the language and have lived in France; perhaps
for this very reason they have been little touched by French poetry. I myself
have translated a great deal of French poetry and probably read more of it than
I do American poetry, but since my early twenties I do not think I have been
much influenced by it. French poetry influenced American in the days when it was
changing rapidly, and when it, more than the poetry of any other language, was
the first to catch the funeral music of the end of our civilization. Its
influence was so powerful because it was so different from American.
Today America has not just been dragged into the orbit of Western
Civilization. It, more than any other country except Japan, reflects the inner
moral collapse of that civilization. Between Cartier and Champlain thousands of
Indians in Northwestern Canada died from the diseases imported by a handful of
men in a couple of small boats. The gulf that opened before Pascal, the black
bile of Baudelaire, the sacrificium intellectis of Rimbaud, the
cacodaemon in the bowels of Artaud, these are commonplaces in America today, as
common as measles among the Iroquois. And just as common on both sides of the
Atlantic are those highly exportable commodities, the castrated pimps of
circumstance in the night of man. The world ill has long since smitten Bolivia
and Afghanistan. French poetry and American poetry in the age of Strontium 90
are much alike.
KENNETH REXROTH
1958
This essay was written in 1958 as an introduction to an anthology of American
poets in French translation published by the Parisian journal Europe
(February 1959). The English version was reprinted in Assays (New
Directions, 1961) and in World Outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth
Rexroth (New Directions, 1987). Copyright 1961. Reproduced by permission of
New Directions Publishing Corp.
[Rexroth’s translations of French poems]
[Other Rexroth Essays]
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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