"Mending the break in time"
Al Filreis
Class of 1942 Professor of English
Faculty Director, the Kelly Writers House
introduction to "Finding the Words: Responses to crisis from the Marianne
Moore papers & Philadelphia poets" - at the Kelly Writers House, November
7, 2001, a program co-sponsored by the Rosenbach Museum and Library
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The wartime letter exchanged between and among modern poets was a place
"where the fragments met," as Marianne Moore put it in "Nevertheless" -
forming a temporary whole that was nevertheless no illusion of enduring
wholeness. In 1944 Moore's book Nevertheless was published, mutedly
proclaiming that the old perfectly shaped lyric fruits were marred although
delicious as ever--but, again, marred so that the hard process of fruition
now bore in the final sweetness. "Nevertheless / you've seen a strawberry
that's had a struggle." Frost kills rubber-plant leaves but can't destroy
down to the roots. A prickly-pear leaf clings to barbed wire, but roots
shoot down for a later greener day. "Victory won't come / to me unless I go
to it." In his charming November 7, 1944 letter to Moore, William Carlos
Williams wrote to her about--exactly as we've categorized it tonight--"the
uses of art" in a time of worldwide crisis. While in November '44 it was
"hard to focus the mind on praise," Williams said he especially loved the
title poem of Moore's new book, which she had sent him: "Nevertheless." I
cannot think of a better gloss on Moore's wartime poetics than what
Williams wrote here about what "we get from writing": "All artists are
secretive and fly from a style which has been found out." This is why H.D.
in her moving 1940 letter is "so keyed-up and happy in our fortress"-that
fortress being London hunkered against the Luftwaffe which at the time many
believed augured the destruction by air of England. In her poem "May 1943"
H.D. wrote that the carpenter "has his chisel" while "I have my pencil":
"he mends the broken window-frame of the orangery, / I mend a break in
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Marianne Moore with Langston Hughes, 1952
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time." And it is precisely why Winnifred Ellerman, a.k.a. "Bryher," could
speak of the "irreality and great beauty" of a wartorn night sky, not to
say that beauty made sense but precisely that it didn't, any more. It is
why she, too, received Moore's homefront letters, as physical things, "with
such joy," personal impressions on paper, the crabbed inimitable
handwriting, seen immediately upon the postman's delivery, that announced
the arrival of what Bryher calls Moore's "strength." Williams's
typewritten letter ends with the briefest handwritten postscript: "Paul Sr.
is at sea--a destroyer." We can sense here, in this letter--but also
everywhere in Williams' writing at this time--how worried about his son he
was. Paul eventually made it all the way to Tokyo, part of the time on an
aircraft
carrier--in the vicinity of the most terrifyingly difficult fighting of the
war. What could the father do? Well, he was putting together the first
drafts of Paterson I, another hard-bitten place where the modern
fragments
would meet. But with Paul in the Pacific, he did what homefront
grandfathers do. He took the disconsolate Paul Jr. on an outing-the perfect
Williams outing, down to the dirty but stately Hackensack River, to a
"marvelous old-car dump," with "hundreds of junked cars." Paul was beside
himself with joy as the grandfather poet "paraded him up one alley and down
another, old cars on all sides." He, too, so keyed-up and happy in his
fortress. "The weak overcomes [the world's] menace," Moore wrote in
"Nevertheless," "the strong over- / comes itself. What is there / like
fortitude! What sap / went through that little thread to make the cherry
red!"
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Document URL:
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modified: Wednesday, 14-Nov-2001 10:32:33 EST