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STONE'S CAPACITY
(Continued
from page 1.)
I would characterize this as
Quintessential Late Sund. (I
speak only slightly facetiously.)
It is simple on the surface, but upon
examination reveals a complex image
structure, with many elements that do
not repeat themselves or yield
amplification and analysis.
There is a Juggler and a Poet, and they
are engaged in a dialog that seems
familiar to them. It is casual,
slangy, almost a dialect. Both
are professionally involved in
"keeping objects up in the
air." The small blue
trumpets may be flowers—larkspur,
for instance—or
figurative horns; paper oranges may be
an allusion to origami, or else those
lantern-like decorations of no
substantial weight. It doesn't
really matter. They are precise
images and completely fitting to the
poem.
The line, "had not the surprises
kept coming," is wonderful, a true
delight. But it is hard to pin
down. It exists, as do other
lines in the poem, completely out of
real-world context. It is
open-ended, a bit like some of an early
Bob Dylan's obscure lines that seem to
mean so much and resist being analyzed,
and may mean next to nothing on a
literal level. They have elements
of the shaggy-dog joke, too. This
illusiveness does them no harm at all.
And then there is that marvelous tag,
"enticing
particularity." What a joy
it must have been to have it arrive on
his doorstep and to set it down on
paper as the poem's climax! It is
prefaced, of course, by the
Chinese-seeming, "small struck
bells." Of them I must say,
those sharp little bells sound in the
infinite baffle of my skull. The
reverberations go on and on.
Sund's command of so many diverse
elements, and sensuous images plucked
(it would seem) widely and almost at
will, are the signs of a mature
poet. He is enjoying his skill
and the ability to manipulate his
tropes, his poetic raw material. And
how rich it is.
The poem follows
"A Note on Publishing Shack
Medicine," in which he
describes a reading tour of Eastern
Washington (often a favorite retreat
of his from the rain and rising
rivers) and the act of having finished
producing all the physical elements of
a book, which he is now ready to
distribute as advance orders: He
writes, "It's
about as organic as it can get:
you write the poems, make the
illustrations, design the book, pick
the paper, and after it's printed you
assemble it, sew it with thread, be
correspondent, tambourine banger,
shipping clerk, office boy, janitor,
treasurer, stamp licker, night
watchman." In short,
you do the whole job by yourself.
By making sure nothing goes wrong, you
ensure that everything goes
RIGHT. It is the perfectionist
speaking.
And notice the "tambourine banger."
Is he not akin to the Juggler, friend
and perhaps foil of the Poet? Or
else he is the Minstrel—a slightly
different character or characterization—
who announces that the show is about to
start?
He is saying, “Read on!”
One must.
3
Sund did not start out producing his
own books. It was a mature
effort, a relatively late
accomplishment, and the process meant a
lot to him. He wanted total
control of his books-—typography,
paper, layout, inking. He went so
far as to make his own fine
paper. He oversaw each and every
physical detail in the making of
a quality book. The thrill of being
published in commercial book form was
long past and seemed a slight,
ephemeral thing. Besides, there
was no money in it and fame seemed
beyond hope, even imagining. He
had no interest in great success,
either, only in living in a style that
would make the word bohemian seem
elegant in comparison. His life
was one of abject poverty. He
applied over years what Henry David
Thoreau only brought off for a short
while.
He truly depended on the
kindness of strangers, and they
generally didn't let him down. He
spent many a night on the couch of some
old or new-found friend and tended to
remain there, caging meals as a
supplicant would, until shoehorned
away.
He paid for his room and board in
poems. Sometimes he handed them
out; they were his currency. He
dedicated poems in books to the people
who had been hospitable to him,
offering food and shelter. He
thought it much more fitting than
offering them crass money.
Besides, he didn't have any. He
was sure they would
understand. Some did,
others did not. He wasn't about
to change his ways. He wasn't
born Scandinavian (Swedish, Finnish)
for nothing. But this trait is
also in the long tradition of the
poet/suppliant. He is the
minstrel who sings for his
supper. And we must listen to his
words.
For in poetry, words are all.
Earlier, back in school days and after,
he had difficulty in getting his poems
accepted by the top literary magazines,
such as Poetry, where literary
politics held large sway. But he
was published in obscure journals—Cascades,
Poetry Northwest, Michigan Quarterly
Review, and Choice. The University
of Washington Press published his poems
in a small edition as Bunch Grass in 1969.
If you read its dedication, you
will find the names of dozens of
people, many of whom helped sustain him
during those early days, when he was so
poor. He was profuse in his
thanks. If he thought he might
embarrass you by naming you fully, he
used only your first name. It was
a special form of consideration.
I think it was
misplaced. People would have
been happy to be fully acknowledged in
print.
But this was not his way.
Bunch Grass consists of 54
poems, almost all of which were written
in Southeast Washington and Eastern
Washington, while he worked in the
wheat harvest. They are the poems of a
working man, a hand, and many of them
are prose-like sketches.
He looked at the men working
alongside him with compassion.
Their whole lives seemed to open
up to his eyes and motivate his poems.
Their often quaint, obscure
lives mattered and he thought they were
worth preserving in words.
But the first of the nature
poems also appear here.
They are close studies of what
he observed and thought important. Like the Eighteenth
Century British poets, nothing was too
small to escape his gaze—insects, flowers, grasses.
These poems contain flashes of
great beauty.
They need to be brought forward
and looked at again, after the passage
of so much time. For example, Poem
36, which gives the book its
title:
"Let these poems be like bunch grass,
in ground winds,
flash floods, and sunlight,
holding together
while one cricket sheltered here
sings his simple song."
I find his observations acute and the
images memorable in the following poem:
"13
A bee thumps against the dusty window,
falls to the sill,
then climbs back up, buzzing:
falls again;
and does this over and over.
If only he would climb higher!
The top half of the window is open."
The description is simple,
straightforward, only the message
contained is more complex than it first
appears, and links questions of human
limitations with those restricted to
insect life.
They are not so different, he
says.
The tradition is the American
Transcendental writers and poets, most
notably Emerson, along with the
Romantic Poets of Blake and Wordsworth’s
time.
Yet the sensibility is distinct
and original.
Poem 21 describes
a hard day’s work in the grain
elevator.
“When there are no trucks to
weigh,/ I write brief poems/to strike a
balance and keep/the day/ from toppling
over.”
Of course the day can’t topple
over; it is only in the poet’s mind
that this might happen, the hot, sweaty
efforts of the day needing to be
balanced against the calming effect of
writing contemplative poetry.
It is how he keeps his sanity
there.
Poem
25 is short and quite lovely:
"Late afternoon, there's a restlessness
in the air,
Five or six small whirlwinds of dust
rise up in the road,
and move quickly up and down it,
then cross over into the sweet clover,
settling down.
That’s all there is, there is
no more.
It is perfect.
It cannot be improved upon.
(Young poets, take note.)
The world of nature holds a mirror up
to the human world and the refection is
not always flattering.
Poem 33
states this rather well:
"Two white
butterflies are doing a jig,
going higher and higher.
Is it
a rancher and his money?
Myself and what I am looking for?
Or two white butterflies
alone?"
The question is a good one and is
important.
For once there is sufficient
material (perhaps too much?) within the
poem to indicate quite specifically the
two parallel human worlds the poet is
pointing out and contrasting (once
again) to the insect world.
Things in nature suggest to us
happenings in the complex world in
which we live, but only indicate them,
and offer no solutions.
If the rancher is doing a dance
with his money, and if the poet is a
seeker of a kind of understanding that
approximates money, while at the same
time negating and despising it, then
what do the two butterflies signify?
Futility, perhaps?
Meaningless gestures?
Nothing perhaps, but they jig
upwards, “higher and
higher.”
It is a transcendental flight,
but there well may be nothing at the
end of the flight—at the
apex of the column of air.
The butterflies are “alone”
in a beautiful but purposeless
environment.
And so are the rancher and the
poet.
So are we.
The world of nature is at heart
existential.
Reading on, so many of Sund’s poems
seem to echo keenly the kind of
observations and poetic diction found
in William Carlos Williams’s “The
Red Wheelbarrow.”
“So much depends/upon/a red
wheel/barrow/glazed with
rain/water/beside the
white/chickens.”
Sund’s poems are similarly
direct, laconic, sweet, sad.
The lines are short, sometimes
only one word long.
Never many.
Deceptively simple.
Quite beautiful.
Poem 41 is
unusual, different.
The poet is expansive,
ebullient.
Sund is rarely like this and,
when he is, it is often when he is
newly released from the confines of the
city, which he hates more and more, but
accepts as a discordant part of his
life, not yet to be broken away from. He is effect a prisoner,
one only slightly different in kind
from the ones he observes in Walla
Walla State Prison, near where he is
working in the wheat harvest.
He asks:
"What day is it now?
Like a star on a moonlit river, my life
graced by an element simple as water,
I move with love and care
where old meanings grow full,
and others lose their hold."
“I
release myself,”
he adds.
The jailor turns his back and
walks away.
He jingles some keys—a very
specific and auditory image that nails
the poem to the earth.
It is as though the poet and the
jailer have “made
an agreement.”
The poet walks away, free
now, announcing “I’ve
wanted to do this all my life!”
It may be that he is announcing
his liberation from the ordinary world
of money,
jobs, and respectability.
If so, it was a lifetime
decision.
The “prison” was a place of
misery, he declares in Poem 43.
We do not doubt him.
When his mentor, the poet Theodore
Roethke, died, Sund (as well as I)
learned of it over the radio—that
ancient instrument of communication now
replaced by TV’s multi-Windowed CNN.
Angry, Sund starts to throw some
stones down a road.
(Poem 27)
Stone follows stone, each
kicking up a puff of dust.
The last
stone could have gone farther,
he notes.
If he were to walk down the
road, looking for that particular stone
(a stone among stones), he wouldn’t
be able to find it.
“Where
it lies, it lies with stone’s
capacity, and with that much
eloquence.”
Very nice.
Thank you, Robert.
This kind of thing is what
poetry does best.
The Williams’ influence continues,
but has become a unique form of
personal expression.
This is well shown in Poem
34.
I’ll quote only the beginning
image, then summarize the rest:
"Five
magpies
stand in a circle at the edge of the
road,
like old jobless men leaning on a pier,
looking down into the glazed water,
each one about to
reveal the secrets of his past."
(Continued
on page 3.)
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A TRIBUTE TO ROBERT SUND,
by Arthur Greeno
(Continued from Page 1.)
In
1963, while working in the wheat
harvest near Walla Walla, he
learned from the radio that his mentor,
Roethke, had died.
Bunch Grass, his first published
collection of poems, was penned into
notebooks that same summer.
Among the University of
Washington Press’s most widely
anthologized works ever published is
the following poem from
Bunch Grass:
In
a landscape that desperately
needs
color
why do the flowers
stay
so close to the ground?
You meet them with surprise hidden
in the pale grasses.
From
1964-1967, he was poetry program
director for Lorenzo Milam’s KRAB-FM
in Seattle.
There he conducted live on-air interviews with
poets Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell and Lawrence
Ferlinghetti. In 1968, he published
Bly, Kinnell, and Pablo Neruda, among
others, in the first and only issue of The Sullivan Slough
Review, an
ambitious magazine that is now a
collector’s item.
The
seventies found Robert living the life
of an artist. He was often broke, but
always true to his calling.
He sold single calligraphed
poems and an occasional work of art in
Seattle, shot passionate games of pool
in her taverns, filled notebooks with
poems, and discovered the work of Karl
Gustav Jung.
Jung’s archetypal imagery
fascinated him and he began a long series
of gouache Mandala images on paper that
were shown in several Seattle
galleries, including Richard White,
Second Storey, Polly Friedlander, and
the Seattle Art Museum.
During
that same time, he discovered the
autoharp, which became his lifelong
instrument.
Most of his poetry readings
included at least a few songs with
autoharp accompaniment.
On
a trip to Shi-Shi beach with artist
Charles Krafft in the early seventies,
a vision came to Robert of a pyramidal
shaped cabin behind the huge log
drifts at the mouth of Petroleum Creek.
Over the next few years, he and
many friends fashioned two-inch thick
drift boards of teak, cedar, and fir
into a beautiful shelter with a
beach-stone fireplace.
Many survivors of that era
fondly remember the glorious isolated
beach, the vegetarian cuisine, and the
high times.
Later, in gratitude for those
days and in memory of the place, he was active
in the movement to incorporate Shi-Shi
into Olympic National Park.
After that goal was
accomplished, the shelter was dismantled.
But,
his passion for wilderness had been
ignited, and he turned to his earlier
discovery of abandoned gill-netter
shacks in Fishtown, on the North Fork
at the mouth of the Skagit River.
Charles Kraft had already moved there,
and soon there was a shriving community
of artists, including
Calligrapher-Bookman Steve Herold,
Poet-Artist Paul Hansen, and
Sculptor-Architect Bo Miller.
Robert opted for a remote shack
just downstream on Ship Creek (which he
called Disappearing Lake, due to the
tidal action at the mouth of the
river).
There he crafted another
aesthetically pleasing shack filled
with the simple beauties of stone,
wood, pottery, and paper art.
It became the center for his
work for the next eleven years.
As always, notebooks filled up
with poetry, and from those efforts
came two beautiful chapbooks in
collaboration with printer Rusty North
of Sagittarius Press, Port Townsend—Why I am Singing for the Dancer, 1979,
and How the Dancer is Carried Into the
Hall of Light, 1982.
In
1982, he hosted Kenneth Rexroth at a
poetry reading in La Conner, and
published another chapbook with one
long poem for Rexroth, entitled "This
Flower" (The Great Blue Heron Society,
La Conner, 1982).
Perhaps prophetically, he
attached an addendum to this exquisite
work entitled “One More For Good
Measure.”
Maybe
exalted gestures will be
retrieved
in our time.
Maybe
our grandchildren will go
through
our
trunks and boxes
and be amazed.
The
most profound statement of his years at
Disappearing Lake was Shack Medicine
(Tangram
Press, 1990, and Poet’s House Press,
1992).
In “A Note on the Setting”
from this book, he said, “Out on the
river you know you are in the midst of
a great creation. You see the old work, and
the new work side by side; the ancient
migration routes of all the birds, and
the slow building of silt and soil in
the estuary; a small grassy island, for
instance, that wasn’t there last year
and that, in a few seasons, will grow
new willow for the blackbirds and the
beavers.”
Here,
too, he discovered the old Chinese and
Japanese “hermit poets,” and
produced new versions of finely honed
poetry from other translations.
Robert calligraphed many such poems on “wind
letters” over the next two decades, a
practice he followed until the end of
his life.
In
1984, his book, Ish River (North Point
Press, San Francisco, 1983), won the
Washington State Governor’s Award for
the best new book of poetry.
Here are poems written longingly
about his family, grieving, and
sometimes bitter, reflections of life
in the towns and cities of Washington
State, and tender reminiscences of love
celebrated and lost.
After
a short hiatus and a private showing of
new paintings in California, at the
home of friends in Point Reyes and at
Woodacre, he was diagnosed with
diabetes.
Soon after, another chapbook was
published.
As Though the Word Blue Had Been
Dropped Into the Water (Sagittarius
Press, Port Townsend, 1986), consists of eight “healing poems,” including
“Like a Boat Drifting.”
Like
a boat drifting,
sleep
flows forward
on
the deep water of dreams.
Drafts
and drifts. . .
until,
finally
the
bottom falls out of knowledge.
In
the fragrant mist of dawn
the
rower wakes,
picks
up the oars, sets them,
and
begins to row.
All
night
he
labored in his dream
to
be born
like
a song in the mouth of God.
Back
in LaConner, after hospitalization, he
found shelter with many friends:
Jim and Janet Smith, Barbara
Cram, Alan Olsen, and Charlotte
Underwood.
There he was active in
a group of artists, musicians, and
poets who formed the LaConner Arts
Foundation (LAF), which worked with the
town to restore Maple Hall as a
community center.
He calligraphed flyers for art
show openings and painted posters for
the film society’s movies.
In
perhaps the most memorable mayoral
election in LaConner’s history, he declared himself a candidate in
1984, and “stirred the political
soup.”
He did not win, but the effort
brought an eloquent voice into the
arena, and the politicians to the edges
of their seats.
Some
of his most joyful days were
spent working with Washington’s young
people as “Poet in the Schools” at
Skagit Valley College (1969), Seattle
Public Schools (1973), and the LaConner
Elementary School (1976-77). He also worked with
Christine Wardenburg in their
“Patterns in Nature” summer camp
series at Burlington Little School
(1987–1989).
The program won an award of
excellence from the Washington Alliance
of Art Educators in October of 1988.
The
Nelson family of LaConner gifted him a
small corner lot adjacent to their
lumberyard, which he later traded for
land on LaConner’s hill. After selling that, he
moved to Anacortes and lived on the
monthly proceeds from the land sale and
from his Social Security
income.
He
found a tiny cottage in the middle of
the Flounder Bay Boatyard, and kind
landlords in Bob and Erica Pickett.
Here, over the remaining years
of his life, he created another
charming retreat.
The gardens held a surprise in
every corner—an interesting rock and
shell grouping here, a perfectly placed,
carefully selected stone there, with
lovely board fences, a beautiful gate,
and pampered flowers and plants
everywhere.
Here, he wrote the Garden Poems,
which will be republished in the near
future as broadsides by the “Poet’s
House Press.”
Robert
found a musical soul mate and mentor in
guitarist Brad Killian, and their
guitar-autoharp duets were delightful to
hear.
He teamed up with Calligrapher Ota Mae Cunningham to
establish The Ink River Studio in Old
Town Anacortes.
They laid plans for workshops
and classes, and were about to
embark on them when he fell ill in the
spring of 2001.
Although
he was private about it, he was a
very religious man.
He put great faith in the
teachings of the Buddha, although he
recognized the universal truth at the
core of all religions.
He revered his teacher, Deschung
Rinpoche (deceased), cofounder of the
Sakya Monastery in Seattle.
In a letter to the monastery
just shortly before his death, he
wrote, “In the early 1970s in Seattle
Deschung Rinpoche gave me my Tibetan
name.
Ever after, I have tried to
honor his being, his generous spirit,
and his kindness to me.”
Robert’s
last will and testament created a
trust, with an eleven member board of
friends, to care for his work, publish
it, and someday build his dream
“Poet’s House,” a place for
visiting artists to live and create
poetry, calligraphy, and pottery.
He passed away at 12:40 AM on
September 29, 2001, in Anacortes, while his beloved Ish
Rivers teemed with spawning salmon,
their spent bodies littering the banks
of small creeks where they had not been
seen in years.
Family and a grand circle of
friends throughout the nation survive
him.
His thoughts for them were put
succinctly in an unpublished poem from
the Shi-Shi years:
Friends make us fuller.
When friends
leave, their light stays behind.
It is like the
blue sea
that supports the white breakers
that come and go.
No matter how far I go
I long to returned and be with friends.
It is never
the same fire I left, but
beneath it are the ashes
of all our meetings that have gone
before.
Emails
to the Editor (what, already?)
Editor:
I'm enjoying reading your Sund piece
again. But I disagree with you on
the last four lines of the magpie poem.
They ground the image, give it context,
and
introduce an echoing image of
"scattered wheat and gravel,"
which, for me anyway, is both visual
and deeply resonant. I'm enjoying
the piece even more on it's third
reading.
Tim
McNulty
Editor:
Hey, thanks, but there are lots
better things to read out
there than this. See
our next issue, for instance, due
out in March. Maybe you'd
like to submit a poem?
Abstraction
(not by Robert Sund)
Kingfisher Archives
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RECENTLY READ AND
RECOMMENDED
(Continued
from Page 1.)
A
Dance is comprised of twelve
novels divided into four movements of
three novels each. They have
been reprinted by the University of
Chicago Press and are available in
quality paperback editions (you know,
the kind whose flexible covers begin
to curl backwards, as though
they had been a scroll in a
previous lifetime, the
second you take them out of the
shipping box). They sell for about $20
each.
My recommendation is to
begin with the first novel in
Movement One, A Question
of Upbringing, and read each
novel
sequentially. This way you can
quit, or resume reading later,
without going through a terrible
sense of dislocation and loss.
But I have a hunch that, once begun,
you'll finish the long series. I did.
Though
the stories took place more than
fifty years ago, there is a fine
contemporary feeling about the people
in them, who weave in and out of each
other's lives over decades. As
I grow older, I find that many such
people weave in and out of mine, and
I've gotten to know them about as
well as Nick Jenkins his friends and
many leading characters. We retain a vital
interest in people we have not much
more than glimpsed in our collective
past. Why this is so, I have no
idea, but it rings true. Lives
begun with much promise peter out,
while other less promising seem
to blossom, but overall there is a
sense of sadness and
incompleteness. Powell has been
accused of a pervasive melancholy in
his writing. It is a fair
criticism, but then much in life
turns out this way. Perhaps the
unintentional surprises is what keeps
us going.
Dear
Bunny, Dear Volodya, The
Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971,
Revised and Expanded Edition,
University of California Press, 1993. Probably
the two greatest literary mind of the
Twentieth-Century were Vladimir
Nabokov and Edmund Wilson; both were
functioning at their peak at mid-century
and living fairly near each other in
Upstate New York. Wilson was about
five years the elder. It was inevitable
that they become friends,
coconspirators, and arch
rivals. Both enjoyed the
competition immensely. Both
were linguists. Of course
Wilson's Russian couldn't hold up to
Nabokov's, and N. drove the point
home many times with tiny
quibbles. Each was the master
of English, spoke and read very good
French, and was fair at German.
Both wrote fiction, literary
criticism, and poetry. They did
translations, as well. They
appreciated each other as equals and
rivals. Nobody else came
close. Thus, the published
correspondence between the two men is
a literary event of high order. Wilson
was instrumental in getting Nabokov
published in the United States, both
with The New Yorker, where Wilson was
resident literary critic and book
reviewer, and with publishers such as
New Directions and Doubleday.
It seemed second nature to the older
man to help others who were producing
quality work and bringing it to the
attention of the New York literati.
But the men had a social life as
well. Whenever they could, they tried to
get together for a weekend.
They were too busy for it to happen
often. Butterflies ("Flutterbys")
were Nabokov's obsession since
childhood, and he involved Wilson as
much as he could in his taxonomical
efforts; like a good sport, Wilson
tried to show empathy that probably
wasn't much. When,
at last, Nabokov became wealthy,
following the difficulty he had in publishing
Lolita, and its subsequent
bestsellerdom, he moved to the Palace
Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, and
remained there until he sickened and
died. The correspondence faltered as
the men grew older. Both became
ill in old age, but their minds
remained vital. Contact between
them in those last years was sporadic
and waning, limited to an occasional
exchange of letters. It
is fascinating reading, but fascinating,
I suppose, mainly if you have read extensively
in the work of the two
men. It might be possible
for the book to serve an introduction to the
works of each writer, and encourage
that person to read more. It could
open the door to twin worlds of
incredible richness and reward. Other
books by Nabokov recently published,
or republished in quality paperback
editions, include: Nabokov's
Butterflies, Unpublished and
Uncollected Writings, Beacon Press,
2000. You
don't have to like butterflies to
enjoy this book, but it helps. A lot
of the contents is in diary form and
follow s Nabokov to altitudes
over10,000
feet in both the American West and in
Europe in search of rare specimens,
which he then collects, names, and
donates to museums specializing in
Leps (as its fanatics call them),
such as the Harvard Museum of Comparative
Zoology, where he once worked as a
technician while he wrote fiction. The
book contains much previously
unpublished material, some of it
translated from the Russian by the
writer's son, Dimitri. There is
a nice introduction to the book by the Pacific
Northwest's top Lep, Robert Michael
Pyle, "Between Climb and
Cloud." Ada,
or Ardor, A Family Chronicle (novel),
Vintage Reprint, 1969.
Clue:
if the first three chapters, or thirty
pages, seem impossible, skim them and
keep forging ahead. The book
soon becomes (nearly) intelligible,
though still containing a great deal
of Nabokov's intentional obscurity
and willful obfuscations. Again
it is a story of juvenile sexuality
and intrigue (see Lolita, if
you haven't already), but
this time it involves the lifetime
romance of Ada and Van, who
seem at first to be cousins but may
be in point of fact brother and
sister. It is an erotic
subject that few writers can handle
with taste and discretion.
Nabokov comes close. Or does he?
Dawn
Powell
Dawn
Powell, a Biography, by
Tim Page, Henry Holt, 1998. The
Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931--1965, Steerforth
Press, 1995. Dawn
Powell At Her Best, Steerforth
Press, 1994.
(Includes
Dance Night and Turn, Magic
Wheel.) And
who is Dawn Powell, you may
ask? (No relation to Anthony
above.) It is a fair question, I
suppose. Her name was first
mentioned to me by a flyfishing
friend who makes movies, or at least
sees to their production
design. Dick Sylbert is largely
an autodidact, and I always listen to
autodidacts, perhaps in self-defense,
because I live in fear (not really)
of missing something important,
something that does not lie in the
commonly-acknowledged
mainstream. Somebody like Dawn
Powell. Dick
and I were talking about
writers once. He spends a lot of
time in airports, and the only
intelligent thing to do while you are
waiting for your flight, or on it, is
to read. There are those who
read nearly continuously. They
read fast, usually, and remember
keenly what their eyes have fed them,
now or in the past. I was
holding forth at length about Edmund
Wilson and maybe Scott Fitzgerald,
when Dick hit me with Dawn
Powell. About all I could say
was, Who is she? It is a good
name to stop somebody in his tracks,
even his verbal tracks, and slow him
up some in his inane pronouncements,
as mine were. "Wilson
thought a lot of her," Dick
said. That was enough to set me
off in search of her books.
When she died in 1965, all of her
fifteen novels, numerous short
stories, and play were out of
print. A mid-Westerner, she
moved to NYC as soon as she finished
her studies in a small liberal arts
college, and never thought seriously
of living anywhere else. She married
a man who was unkind to her, a
traveling salesman with a large
drinking problem, had a son who was
severely retarded and needed
institutional care, all of his
life. She provided for the
child and was more or
less faithful to her awful husband (whom she
loved) until he preceded her in
death. She needed to make a
living and did so through her
writing. She pushed on and on. Agents
and publishers (even the esteemed
Maxwell Perkins of Scribners) treated
her badly. One by one her
novels came on the market, with high
expectations primarily from her, not
her editors or publishers, and one by
one they went out of print without
giving her any money and only faint
recognition. Toward the end
she lost hope in success and there is a kind
of terrible desperation in her
diaries as she
strives to finish her books, see them
through proofing, and then come on to
the market with absolutely no
hope of selling in any numbers. Still she hung in
there, sick and broke, for she was a
pro, and there was nothing she knew how to
do but write, or could do so
well. Wilson
knew she was good, and he tried to
help, but such efforts are sometimes worse
than no help, and backfire. Women writers were
considered second-class citizens, incapable of producing
first-rate work. Powell at her
best, in the two novels in the
reader, is very good, but does not
strike those powerful archetypal
patterns that lead to greatness.
Irving Howe once told me, when I was
a graduate student of his, and his
own books on Sherwood Anderson and
William Faulkner had just come out,
and I had said something snotty,
"Keep room in your mind for the
novelists who are not in
the first order." We
were talking about Nathaniel
Hawthorne over a Green River, in a
booth at Howard's Restaurant in
Seattle The book was The
Blithedale Romance, which I was
reading for his class. I've never
forgotten his words. Howe, part
of the New York literati of that
time, no doubt knew Powell and her
value. But the market is the
market. Now,
thanks to Biographer Tim Page and his
perseverance, they
are all in print again. It is a
wonderful opportunity for a reader in
search of something old that is new.
At
the Movies
Apocalypse Now
Redux If
any art form captures and epitomizes
what sustains and drives the American
consciousness, it is The Movies,
along with
those flashy imitations of the
art form, the Television Drama, best
exemplified by PBS's Masterpiece
Theatre, of which many wan imitators
abound. What is it that
we have in common, all of us
stratified Americans, if it isn't
settling back into our arm chairs in
the early evening hours and plugging
into a DVD or VHS reproduction of a
movie, be it a big-studio
production, foreign import,
Indie, or perhaps one made expressly
for TV? It unites us, movie-watching
does, and binds us together, all
different Americans. Yet I wonder?
Do we actually see the same
movie, even when we watch at the same
time? I doubt it. I
am a buff. Apocalypse Now
is at the very top of my list of
favorites. Only a small handful
of others come close. I have
probably watched it, usually on video
tape, half a dozen times. I
can't quite recite Martin Sheen's
sparse lines as they come once more
to his lips, but I can come
close. And I recall the sketchy
history of the film--it was made in
the Philippines, not Viet Nam and
Cambodia, and Sheen (a young man
then) had a heart attack during the
filming. Everybody involved in
making the movie emerged on the far
side a different person. Well,
it is a life-altering movie, and
those who make them don't really
expect to escape unscathed. Some
who served in Viet Nam says thickly,
"It is Nam, man." Now
we have Apocalypse Now
Redux.
Francis Coppola was forced to cut the
original version to fit marketing
expectations of the day, 1979.
It must have broke his heart.
Still, that version was deemed
absolutely first-rate
worldwide. Today director's
cuts are in vogue, as movie
distributors seek to entice buyers of
VHS and DVD versions with the
inducement of newly added footage.
How fortunate we are. (Continued
on page 3.) |
