Her voice was like rose-fragrance waltzing in the wind.
She seemed a shadow, stained with shadow colors,
Swimming through waves of sunlight.…
The sole precedent I can find for the broken style of my prologue is
Longinus on the Sublime and that one far-fetched.
When my mother was in Rome on that rare journey forever to be remembered,
she lived in a small pension near the Pincio gardens. The place had
been chosen by my brother as one notably easy of access, being in a
quarter free from confusion of traffic, on a street close to the park
and furthermore the tram to the American Academy passed at the corner.
Yet never did my mother go out but she was in fear of being lost. By
turning to the left when she should have turned right, actually she did
once manage to go so far astray that it was nearly an hour before she
extricated herself from the strangeness of every new vista and found a
landmark.
There has always been a disreputable man of picturesque personality
associated with this lady. Their relations have been marked by the most
rollicking spirit of comradeship. Now it has been William, former sailor
in Admiral Dewey’s fleet at Manila, then Tom O’Rourck who has come to her
to do odd jobs and to be cared for more or less when drunk or ill, their
Penelope. William would fall from the grapearbor much to my mother’s
amusement and delight and to his blustering discomfiture or he would
stagger to the back door nearly unconscious from bad whiskey. There she
would serve him with very hot and very strong coffee, then put him to
scrubbing the kitchen floor into his suddy-pail pouring half a bottle of
ammonia which would make the man gasp and water at the eyes as he worked
and became sober.
She has always been incapable of learning from benefit or disaster. If
a man cheat her she will remember that man with a violence that I have
seldom seen equaled but so far as that could have an influence on her
judgment of the next man or woman, she might be living in Eden. And
indeed she is, an impoverished, ravished Eden but one indestructible as
the imagination itself. Whatever is before her is sufficient to itself
and so to be valued. Her meat though more delicate in fiber is of a kind
with that of Villon and La Grosse Margot:
Vente, gresle, gelle, j’ai mon pain cuit!
Carl Sandburg sings a negro cotton picker’s song of the bol weevil. Verse
after verse tells what they would do to the insect. They propose to place
it in the sand, in hot ashes, in the river, and other unlikely places but
the bol weevil’s refrain is always: “That’ll be ma HOME! That’ll be ma
HOOME!”
My mother is given over to frequent periods of great depression being
as I believe by nature the most light-hearted thing in the world. But
there comes a grotesque turn to her talk, a macabre anecdote concerning
some dream, a passionate statement about death, which elevates her mood
without marring it, sometimes in a most startling way.
Looking out at our parlor window one day I said to her: “We see all the
shows from here, don’t we, all the weddings and funerals?” (They had been
preparing a funeral across the street, the undertaker was just putting
on his overcoat.) She replied: “Funny profession that, burying the dead
people. I should think they wouldn’t have any delusions of life left.”
W.—Oh yes, it’s merely a profession. M.—Hm. And how they study it! They
say sometimes people look terrible and they come and make them look fine.
They push things into their mouths! (Realistic gesture) W.—Mama! M.—Yes,
when they haven’t any teeth.
By some such dark turn at the end she raises her story out of the
commonplace: “Look at that chair, look at it! (The plasterers had just
left) If Mrs. J. or Mrs. D. saw that they would have a fit.” W.—Call
them in, maybe it will kill them. M.—But they’re not near as bad as that
woman, you know, her husband was in the chorus,—has a little daughter
Helen. Mrs. B. yes. She once wanted to take rooms here. I didn’t want
her. They told me: ‘Mrs. Williams, I heard you’re going to have Mrs. B.
_She_ is particular.’ She said so herself. Oh no! Once she burnt all her
face painting under the sink.
Thus seeing the thing itself without forethought or afterthought but with
great intensity of perception my mother loses her bearings or associates
with some disreputable person or translates a dark mood. She is a
creature of great imagination. I might say this is her sole remaining
quality. She is a despoiled, moulted castaway but by this power she still
breaks life between her fingers.
* * * * *
Once when I was taking lunch with Walter Arensberg at a small place on
63rd St. I asked him if he could state what the more modern painters were
about, those roughly classed at that time as “cubists”: Gleisze, Man Ray,
Demuth, Du Champs—all of whom were then in the city. He replied by saying
that the only way man differed from every other creature was in his
ability to improvise novelty and, since the pictorial artist was under
discussion, anything in paint that is truly new, truly a fresh creation
is good art. Thus according to Du Champs, who was Arensberg’s champion
at the time, a stained glass window that had fallen out and lay more or
less together on the ground was of far greater interest than the thing
conventionally composed _in situ_.
We returned to Arensberg’s sumptuous studio where he gave further point
to his remarks by showing me what appeared to be the original of Du
Champs’ famous, Nude Descending a Staircase. But this, he went on to say,
is a full-sized photographic print of the first picture with many new
touches by Du Champs himself and so by the technique of its manufacture
as by other means it is a novelty!
Led on by these enthusiasms Arensberg has been an indefatigable worker
for the yearly salon of the Society of Independent Artists, Inc. I
remember the warmth of his description of a pilgrimage to the home
of that old Boston hermit who watched over by a forbidding landlady
(evidently in his pay) paints the cigar-box-cover-like nudes upon whose
fingers he presses actual rings with glass jewels from the five and ten
cent store.
I wish Arensberg had my opportunity for prying into jaded households
where the paintings of Mama’s and Papa’s flowertime still hang on the
walls. I propose that Arensberg be commissioned by the Independent
Artists to scour the country for the abortive paintings of those men and
women who without master or method have evolved perhaps two or three
unusual creations in their early years. I would start the collection with
a painting I have by a little English woman, A. E. Kerr, 1906, that in
its unearthly gaiety of flowers and sobriety of design possesses exactly
that strange freshness a spring day approaches without attaining, an
expansion of April, a thing this poor woman found too costly for her
possession—she could not swallow it as the niggers do diamonds in the
mines. Carefully selected these queer products might be housed to good
effect in some unpretentious exhibition chamber across the city from
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the anteroom could be hung perhaps
photographs of prehistoric rock-paintings and etchings on horn: galloping
bisons and stags, the hind feet of which have been caught by the artist
in such a position that from that time until the invention of the camera
obscura, a matter of 6000 years or more, no one on earth had again
depicted that most delicate and expressive posture of running.
The amusing controversy between Arensberg and Du Champs on one side,
and the rest of the hanging committee on the other as to whether the
porcelain urinal was to be admitted to the Palace Exhibition of 1917 as a
representative piece of American Sculpture should not be allowed to slide
into oblivion.
One day Du Champs decided that his composition for that day would be the
first thing that struck his eye in the first hardware store he should
enter. It turned out to be a pickaxe which he bought and set up in his
studio. This was his composition. Together with Mina Loy and a few others
Du Champs and Arensberg brought out the paper, The Blind Man, to which
Robert Carlton Brown with his vision of suicide by diving from a high
window of the Singer Building contributed a few poems.
In contradistinction to their south, Marianne Moore’s statement to me at
the Chatham parsonage one afternoon—my wife and I were just on the point
of leaving—sets up a north: My work has come to have just one quality of
value in it: I will not touch or have to do with those things which I
detest. In this austerity of mood she finds sufficient freedom for the
play she chooses.
Of all those writing poetry in America at the time she was here Marianne
Moore was the only one Mina Loy feared. By divergent virtues these two
women have achieved freshness of presentation, novelty, freedom, break
with banality.
* * * * *
When Margaret Anderson published my first improvisations Ezra Pound wrote
me one of his hurried letters in which he urged me to give some hint by
which the reader of good will might come at my intention.
Before Ezra’s permanent residence in London, on one of his trips to
America—brought on I think by an attack of jaundice—he was glancing
through some book of my father’s. “It is not necessary,” he said, “to
read everything in a book in order to speak intelligently of it. Don’t
tell everybody I said so,” he added.
During this same visit my father and he had been reading and discussing
poetry together. Pound has always liked my father. “I of course like your
Old Man and I have drunk his Goldwasser.” They were hot for an argument
that day. My parent had been holding forth in downright sentences upon my
own “idle nonsense” when he turned and became equally vehement concerning
something Ezra had written: what in heaven’s name Ezra meant by “jewels”
in a verse that had come between them. These jewels,—rubies, sapphires,
amethysts and what not, Pound went on to explain with great determination
and care, were the backs of books as they stood on a man’s shelf. “But
why in heaven’s name don’t you say so then?” was my father’s triumphant
and crushing rejoinder.
The letter: … God knows I have to work hard enough to escape,
not _propagande_, but getting centered in _propagande_. And
America? What the h—l do you a blooming foreigner know about
the place. Your _père_ only penetrated the edge, and you’ve
never been west of Upper Darby, or the Maunchunk switchback.
Would H., with the swirl of the prairie wind in her underwear,
or the Virile Sandburg recognize you, an effete easterner as a
REAL American? INCONCEIVABLE!!!!!
My dear boy you have never felt the woop of the PEEraries. You
have never seen the projecting and protuberant Mts. of the
SIerra Nevada. WOT can you know of the country?
You have the naive credulity of a Co. Claire emigrant. But I
(der grosse Ich) have the virus, the bacillus of the land in my
blood, for nearly three bleating centuries.
(Bloody snob. ’eave a brick at ’im!!!).…
I was very glad to see your wholly incoherent unamerican poems
in the L. R.
Of course Sandburg will tell you that you miss the “big
drifts,” and Bodenheim will object to your not being
sufficiently decadent.
You thank your bloomin gawd you’ve got enough Spanish blood to
muddy up your mind, and prevent the current American ideation
from going through it like a blighted collander.
The thing that saves your work is opacity, and don’t forget it.
Opacity is NOT an American quality. Fizz, swish, gabble, and
verbiage, these are _echt Americanisch_.
And alas, alas, poor old Masters. Look at Oct. Poetry.
Let me indulge the American habit of quotation:
* * * * *
“Si le cosmopolitisme littéraire gagnait encore et qu’il
réussit à étaindre ce que les differénce de race ont allumé de
haine de sang parmi les hommes, j’y verrais un gain pour la
civilization et pour l’humanité tout entière”.…
“L’amour excessif d’une patrie a pour immédiat corollair
l’horreur des patries étrangères. Non seulment on craint de
quitter la jupe de sa maman, d’aller voir comment vivent les
autres hommes, de se mêler à leur luttes, de partager leur
travaux, non seulment on reste chez soi, mais on finit par
fermer sa porte.”
“Cette folie gagne certains littérateurs et le même professeur,
en sortant d’expliquer le Cid ou Don Juan, rédige de gracieuses
injures contre Ibsen et l’influence, hélas, trop illusoire, de
son oevre, pourtant toute de lumière et de beauté.” et cetera.
Lie down and compose yourself.
I like to think of the Greeks as setting out for the colonies in Sicily
and the Italian Peninsula. The Greek temperament lent itself to a certain
symmetrical sculptural phase and to a fat poetical balance of line that
produced important work but I like better the Greeks setting their
backs to Athens. The ferment was always richer in Rome, the dispersive
explosion was always nearer, the influence carried further and remained
hot longer. Hellenism, especially the modern sort, is too staid, too
chilly, too little fecundative to impregnate my world.
Hilda Doolittle before she began to write poetry or at least before she
began to show it to anyone would say: “You’re not satisfied with me, are
you Billy? There’s something lacking, isn’t there?” When I was with her
my feet always seemed to be sticking to the ground while she would be
walking on the tips of the grass stems.
Ten years later as assistant editor of the Egoist she refers to my
long poem, March, which thanks to her own and her husband’s friendly
attentions finally appeared there in a purified form:
_14 Aug. 1916_