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Tributes
American Writers on American Writers
Conjunctions, Vol. 29
Edited by
Bradford Morrow
Martine Bellen
Lee Smith
CONJUNCTIONS
Bi-Annual Volumes of New Writing
Edited by
Bradford Morrow
Contributing Editors
Walter Abish
Chinua Achebe
John Ashbery
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Guy Davenport
Elizabeth Frank
William H. Gass
John Guare
Robert Kelly
Ann Lauterbach
Patrick McGrath
Mona Simpson
Nathaniel Tarn
Quincy Troupe
John Edgar Wideman
published by Bard College
Contents
EDITORS’ NOTE
Ntozake Shange, Sterling Brown: A Southern Man
John Sayles, Chicago Guy: Nelson Algren
Maureen Howard, My Willa
Bradford Morrow, The Emerson Madrigal
Cole Swensen, For M. Moore
Robert Creeley, Old Poets, Old Poems: Edwin Arlington Robinson
Jim Lewis, Melville and the Art of Saying No
Amiri Baraka, Black Reconstruction: Du Bois & the U.S. Struggle for Democracy & Socialism
Eli Gottlieb, Panels for Nathanael
Joanna Scott, How to Tell a Lie, by Edgar Allan Poe
Peter Straub, 45 Calibrations of Raymond Chandler
Paul Metcalf, Ezra Pound: A Seereeyus Precursor
Ellen McLaughlin, On Lillian Hellman
Anne Waldman, Language, Voice, Beat, Energy in the Poetry: Jack Kerouac
Lynne Tillman, Edith Wharton: A Mole in the House of the Modern
Elaine Equi, Frank O’Hara: Nothing Personal
Kevin Young, Langston Hughes: “If You Can’t Read, Run Anyhow!”
Ben Marcus, Chemical Seuss
Carole Maso, A Novel of Thank You (for Gertrude Stein)
Lisa Shea, Divining Stein
Mona Simpson, Henry James
Will Alexander, Bob Kaufman: The Footnotes Exploded
Rick Moody, John Cheever and Indirection
Nathaniel Mackey, Phrenological Whitman
Sven Birkerts, Elizabeth Bishop’s Prose: Atmospheres of Identity
Ana Castillo, Anaïs Nin, All the Rest Is Origami
Siri Hustvedt, Gatsby’s Glasses
Quincy Troupe, The Visible Man: Ralph Ellison
Dale Peck, Shirley Jackson: “My Mother’s Grave Is Yellow”
C. D. Wright, Frank Stanford, Of the Mulberry Family: An Arkansas Epilogue
Phillip Lopate, The Strange Case of Dr. Eiseley
Steve Erickson, Henry Miller: Exhibitionist of the Soul
Mac Wellman, Bierce
Lawrence Osborne, Frederick Prokosch
Diane Williams, To Dickinson
Robert Kelly, Robert Duncan & The Right Time
Victor Hernández Cruz, Encounters with an Americano Poet: William Carlos Williams
Catherine Bowman, Sylvia’s Honey
Lydia Davis, Broaching Difficult Dahlberg
Norma Cole, For Lorine Niedecker
David Means, Now Let Us Praise James Agee
Jonathan Williams, Kenneth Patchen: “Hiya, Ken Babe, What’s the Bad Word for Today?”
Joyce Carol Oates, The Visionary Art of Henry David Thoreau
Donald Revell, Joyful Noise: The Gospel Sound of Henry D. Thoreau
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND PERMISSIONS
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
EDITORS’ NOTE
IF ONLY WE COULD have paid homage to them all, our forebears and predecessors, all those writers who have gone before us. Mark Twain would surely have been included, and Frederick Douglass. Anne Bradstreet, of course. A few essays had been proposed on Nora Zeale Hurston, Wallace Stevens, Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, even Isaac Bashevis Singer and others, but circumstances prevented them from coming into being. Who else is absent and why? Certainly one obvious impediment was limitations of “SPACE,” to paraphrase invertedly the opening of Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, his homage to Melville that largely inspired this issue. And yet, what a brilliant congregation of writers is celebrated by forty-five fellow authors in the pages you hold in your hands.
Surely it is valuable to think of who else is here in spirit. You can compile your own list, maybe starting with Kenneth Rexroth, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, Countee Cullen, H.D., Donald Barthelme, Arna Bontemps, Washington Irving, Katherine Anne Porter, Vachel Lindsay, Tennessee Williams, Amy Lowell, Margaret Fuller, Kate Chopin, Jean Toomer, John Steinbeck, Stanley Elkin, Booker T. Washington, Raymond Carver, Claude McKay, Laura Riding, Frederick Jackson Turner, Ellen Glasgow, Robert Frost, Louisa May Alcott, e.e. cummings, Horatio Alger, Thomas Merton, William Inge, Sarah Orne Jewett, Truman Capote, May Swenson, John Dos Passos, Mary Moody Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Muriel Rukeyser, Thornton Wilder, Chester Himes, Edgar Lee Masters, Frank Norris, Jean Stafford, William Wells Brown, Flannery O’Connor, Paul Monette, Edna St. Vincent Millay, James Jones, Robinson Jeffers, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, Charles W. Chesnutt, Louis Zukofsky, Sherwood Anderson, Lorraine Hansberry, Jack London, Paul Blackburn, Carl Sandburg, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sidney Lanier, John Berryman, Eugene O’Neill, Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, Paul Goodman, Patricia Highsmith, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Wolfe, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Lowell, Haniel Long, James Schuyler, Dorothy Parker, Ted Berrigan, Peter De Vries, Wallace Stegner, Helene Jackson, Delmore Schwartz, Henry Adams, John Crowe Ransom, Marcus Garvey, H. P. Lovecraft, Fitz-James O’Brien, George Oppen, F. O. Matthiessen, Dorothy West, John Cage, Randall Jarrell, Alice Childress, James Merrill, Joel Oppenheimer, Jack Spicer, Charles Henri Ford, Walker Percy, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne … the catalogue might fill pages as it continues to build toward mere incompletion!
Most of the writers honored in Tributes are best known as novelists, poets, story writers or playwrights, which is great and appropriate. But in a literature as manifold and hybrid as that of these United States, it would have been equally representative to have included historians (like Francis Parkman) and justices (like Oliver Wendell Holmes), translators (like Mary Barnard) and newspapermen (like Ring Lardner), screenwriters (like Orson Welles) and political leaders (like Malcom X), lyricists (like Ira Gershwin) and inventors (like Buckminster Fuller), philosophers (like William James)—and even an occasional president who could weave ideas with words in exceptional ways (like John Adams, or Abraham Lincoln).
This is all to say that the intention was never to provide a comprehensive accounting of American literature. Tributes should be seen as an invitation to begin to have a look at where we have been, as a various and often dissociated fellowship of American authors, in order to see where we might be headed—together and apart—in the future.
The choice of authors honored was happily left up to the contributors. So there are two pieces on Gertrude Stein and nothing on Hemingway. Prokosch is here but not Stephen Crane, nor Hart Crane, nor the creator of Ichabod Crane. There is a tribute to Dr. Seuss but the author of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is neglected. A number of contemporary writers were invited to pay homage to an American writer, one who made something possible
for them, whether that was the act of writing itself, or writing a certain book, or in a particular manner, or living in a way that was consonant with the work of writing. This is an anthology of personal enthusiasms—enthusiasm as Emerson defined it: exuberant and magnanimous—a colloquium Whitman might have seen as a progress of vistas.
And it’s with Whitman, of course, along with Emerson, where many meditations about American literature have typically found their source. Still, what is American literature? Emerson believed it must be autochthonous and original, must look to itself for inspiration and resource, and following his criteria it’s easy to see why he often doubted its existence. Is American literature no more than the collected products of writers who by accident of birth, or socioeconomic design, or immigration, are by nationality American, citizens for better or worse of the United States? And how long do you have to have been here to count as American? Several generations on a cotton plantation or the time it takes to arrange a greencard marriage? Was Russian-born Nabokov really American, though he became a citizen; was Henry James, who became at the end of his life a British subject, ever really American? British-born Paul West, who writes so eloquently on Faulkner, has been an American for over half his life, and is living proof that the art itself transcends national and bureaucratic boundaries. In every way it is ultimately temperament that dictates the answers.
Finally, if American writers are supposed to have an original relationship with the universe, like others have had, then how is the relationship original? Is American literature an idea only, then, an idea about one’s relationship to the universe? If so, is it available to anyone, Americans and non-Americans alike? (Maybe that’s why nineteenth-century Latin American writers recognized Whitman not only as a prophet of personal acquisitiveness and political expansionism, but also as a great poet long before their northern colleagues did.) Is there an American literature, or are there American literatures, each marked by individual idioms, manners, subjects? Or is it fruitless to speak of racial, ethnic, class-based, sexual and geographical distinctions when each writer by necessity must wage her or his own eccentric articulation against and within a culture that tends to devalue the individual voice in favor of consensus? Do such questions begin to erode fundamental purposes of the very activity of asking?
If we can’t answer, at least we know where these questions come from, and we honor both the questions and those who would try to answer. If we don’t know, maybe never can know, precisely what American literature is, we are quite aware we’re not the first to not know. This shouldn’t in any way suppress our desire to pay homage to a handful of the great ones who wrote, many of them against all odds, in this country we’ve inherited. The tributes in this issue are offered in that spirit of magnanimity.
—Martine Bellen, Lee Smith, Bradford Morrow
September 1997
New York City
Sterling Brown. Photograph by Thomas Victor. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Sterling Brown:
A Southern Man
Ntozake Shange
ON SUNDAY AFTERNOONS IN St. Louis, particularly when forsythia, honeysuckle and dogwood blossoms were ebulliently infusing the air with scents so different from those of hatred, hunger, heartbreak and forlorn ennui, my mother would inevitably jump into “Strong Men”:
They dragged you from homeland,
They chained you in coffles,
They sold you to give a few gentlemen ease.
They broke you in like oxen,
They scourged you,
They branded you,
They made your women breeders,
They swelled your numbers with bastards …
They taught you the religion they disgraced.
You sang:
Keep a-inchin’ along
Lak a po’ inch worm …
You sang:
Bye and bye
I’m gonna lay down dis heaby load …
You sang:
Walk togedder, chillen
Dontcha git weary. …
The strong men keep a-comin’ on
The strong men git stronger.
They point with pride to the roads you built for them,
They ride in comfort over the rails you laid for them.
They put hammers in your hands
And said—Drive so much before sundown.
You sang:
Ain’t no hammah
In dis lan’,
Strikes lak mine, bebby,
Strikes lak mine.
They cooped you in their kitchens,
They penned you in their factories,
They gave you the jobs that they were too good for,
They tried to guarantee happiness to themselves
By shunting dirt and misery to you.
You sang:
Me an ’muh baby gonna shine, shine
Me an ’muh baby gonna shine.
The strong men keep a-comin’ on
The strong men git stronger …
They bought off some of your leaders
You stumbled, as blind men will …
They coaxed you, unwontedly soft-voiced. …
You followed a way.
Then laughed as usual.
— from “Strong Men”
No number of bars of Dvořák from my violin, my brother’s Frederick Douglass or my sister’s Dunbar or the baby’s forced phonetic reconstruction of Baker’s “La Vie en Rose” compared in stamina or passion with my mother, Ellie’s, passionate encounters with Sterling Brown, graced unobtrusively with my father on bongo drums.
Why am I returning to the experiences of a prepubescent Negro child on the banks of the Mississippi, luckily way upriver from Mississippi? This is, as I imagine Jefferson Davis or Thomas Jefferson would say, a matter of honor and authenticity, bloodlines and legitimacy.
While Dvořák (with his New World Symphony), Douglass, Dunbar and Baker remain icons in American culture, falling off the lips of the tenuous day, quasars of the Mothership, Sterling Brown is unique: an honorable craftsman whose handling of the voices and feelings, perceptions of our people could only be questioned by the spirits, the ancestors and the collective unconscious of what Henry Dumas called African pageantry.
I found me a cranny of perpetual dusk.
There for the grateful sense was pungent musk
Of rotting leaves, and moss, mingled with scents
Of heavy clusters freighting foxgrape vines.
The sun was barred except at close of day
When he could weakly etch in changing lines
A filigree upon the silver trunks
Of maple and of poplar. There were oaks
Their black bark fungus-spotted, and there lay
An old wormeaten segment of gray fence
Tumbling in consonant long forgot decay.
Motionless the place save when a little wind
Rippled the leaves, and soundless too it was
Save for a stream nearly inaudible,
That made a short stay in closewoven grass
Then in elusive whispers bade farewell.
—from “Arc of Sons”
Dvořák reaped his soul from ours, Douglass turned his back in disgust on us, Dunbar resented our language, which created the very foundations of his genius. He even persuaded his wife, Alice Dunbar Nelson, to be ashamed that his sonnets were not the “Talk of the Town.” And La Bakaire made up almost as many versions of herself as Brown has characters, women like Clareel, even Frankie.
FRANKIE AND JOHNNY
Oh Frankie and Johnny were lovers
Oh Lordy how they did love!
—Old Ballad
Frankie was a halfwit, Johnny was a nigger,
Frankie liked to pain poor creatures as a little ’un,
Kept a crazy love of torment when she got bigger,
Johnny had to slave it and never had much fun.
Fra
nkie liked to pull wings off of living butterflies,
Frankie liked to cut long angleworms in half,
Frankie liked to whip curs and listen to their drawn out cries,
Frankie liked to shy stones at the brindle calf.
Frankie took her pappy’s lunch week-days to the sawmill,
Her pappy, red-faced cracker, with a cracker’s thirst,
Beat her skinny body and reviled the hateful imbecile,
She screamed at every blow he struck, but tittered when he curst.
Frankie had to cut through Johnny’s field of sugar corn
Used to wave at Johnny, who didn’t ’pay no min—
Had had to work like fifty from the day that he was born,
And wan’t no cracker hussy gonna put his work behind—
But everyday Frankie swung along the cornfield lane,
And one day Johnny helped her partly through the wood,
Once he had dropped his plow lines, he dropped them many times again—
Though his mother didn’t know it, else she’d have whipped him good.
Frankie and Johnny were lovers; oh Lordy how they did love!
But one day Frankie’s pappy by a big log laid him low,
To find out what his crazy Frankie had been speaking of;
He found that what his gal had muttered was exactly so.
Frankie, she was spindly limbed with corn silk on her crazy head,
Johnny was a nigger, who never had much fun—
They swung up Johnny on a tree, and filled his swinging hide with lead,
And Frankie yowled hilariously when the thing was done.
There are literary architectural reconstructions of Shakespeare’s England, Dante’s hell and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. While Dickens’s London and de Maupassant’s terrifying yet elegant Paris can be identified, even visited. But to know the worlds of Sterling Brown, I only have to walk a few miles in the South Side of Chicago, the lonely roads outside Allendale, South Carolina, and the byzantine worlds of black ten-year-olds in Red Hook, and Sterling Brown manifests the essence, not maquettes of a people.
THE NEW CONGO
(With no apologies to Vachel Lindsay)
Suave big jigs in a conference room,