Originally published November 2007.
As with Jeannette Rankin, Patchen's pacifism with regard to the Second World War represents a refusal to address the particular issues at hand, an adamant desire to stand apart for the sake of a better future world. Marketed as a "proletarian poet" with the release of his first book, Before the Brave [1936], Patchen never shied away from incorporating political messages into his work. In the early years of the Thirties, he travelled the country, working and living where he could, whether it be Manhattan or the deep South, in turn becoming a prototypical hobo-artist of the Great Depression, like Woody Guthrie or Harry Partch. He then lived for most of the new two decades in New York, haunting the fringes of radical literary and political circles.
Larry Smith's Kenneth Patchen: Rebel Poet in America [2002] is indispensable, even as it suffers from severe limitations: the biography genre and reliance upon Kenneth's wife, Miriam, who passed away in 2000 and had served as an eager interviewee. The problem is not the wealth of information she supplied about her and Kenneth's life together, but that with such information the author presumably was pushed further in the direction of a generic biography than perhaps he otherwise would've been. Alas, several matters outside Kenneth's domestic life discussed in depth in the book, from his boyhood in Warren, Ohio of the Nineteen-Teens and Twenties, and the working-class family he came from, to his time in San Francisco of the 1950's pioneering the mixing together of Jazz and poetry, at least touch upon broader issues.
For our topic here, the chapter on "America's Literary Left of the 1930's" does not just provide a welcome break from the narrative, but also explores other aspects of U.S. politics of the time besides pacifism/ Neutralism/ anti-interventionism. Smith argues that understanding "the social and political times out of which [Patchen] arose […] has been blocked for decades by the reactionary vision of 1950's literary historians. In their subsequent abandonment of politically engaged writing in favor of a narrow canon of acceptable American writers, these narrow-minded historians and anthologists have denied our history and art." He continues thus, "The accepted rationale for this closing of critical minds to the writers of the Left has always been the assumption that the writing is full of political rhetoric, is single-minded in theme, and is traditionally limited in form. An examination of the literature itself - though rarely anthologized and difficult to access today - refutes such narrow and false assumptions." Those writers who have been unduly ignored include: James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos, Erskine Caldwell, Kenneth Rexroth, Mike Gold, Normal Macleod, Horace Gregory, Joseph Freeman, Isador Schneider, Waldo Frank, Jack Conray, Agnes Smedley, Tillie Olsen, William Rollins, Grace Lumpkin, H.H. Lewis, Miradel le Seur, Robert Cantwell, and Kenneth Fearing; though three writers "who have come to be assimilated into the larger canon" are Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and Richard Wright. Other writers and activists who figure in Smiths' history are Malcolm Cowley, Max Eastman, John Reed, Floyd Dell, Lincoln Steffens, Theodore Dreiser, Alfred Kazin, Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, John Wheelright, Harold Loeb, and Charles Henri Ford. Several leading literary and general-interest publications of the time seriously considered radical political positions and, more important, a great number of political publications sprang up across the nation. Meanwhile, events like the publication of Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology [1935] and the First American Writers' Congress held the same year in New York brought many of these individuals together. Smith writes, "Patchen was among what were termed 'fellow travelers' […] rather than joining Socialist or Communist parties in the United States, they sought the vantage point of the involved outsider."
To see a unique manifestation of the "fellow traveler" political stance in the literary arts, turn to Patchen's "anti-novels," as he called them, which surely deserve a spot alongside the likes of James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer, and other ambitious works of High/ Late Modernist literary experimentation; and especially look to The Journal of Albion Moonlight [1941], commonly regarded as Patchen's best. Albion Moonlight is not representative, though, of Patchen the writer or--as we see from reading Smith's book--Patchen the man. It lacks the humor and the sentimentality that courses throughout Patchen's work, such as the anti-novel which followed it - Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer [1944] - or his numerous love poems, or his experiments in combining literature and the visual arts ("picture poems"). Yet, in a different sense, it is representative, being his response to the prospect of war - proof, in a way, that his reaction to the extraordinary sociopolitical question he'd face could find its clearest, richest expression via literature.
On one hand, Albion Moonlight is basic in its form and in the circumstances of its writing. Quite literally, it is a journal kept by the author/ narrator during the summer of 1940, in the wake of the shocking quick German conquest of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Yet, as the common designation of Patchen as a Surrealist suggests, the book also takes the reader to places far beyond the prosaic daily life of the author (who, indeed, because of back problems was often bed-ridden) - both in terms of formal experimentation, which later culminated with both the anti-novel Sleepers Awake [1946] and the "picture-poems," and in the settings and scenarios of the narrative itself, possessing as they do a truly dream-like quality that makes most Surrealist art pale in comparison.
One of the first overt references to the war comes when the character Jetter, in conversation with Albion, says:
"I wish to God I could grab up a rifle and run along beside other men with rifles - to feel their terror, to share it with them, to have someone to share mine - but something won't let me - maybe I can't hate enough, maybe I'm too strong to take that way out - the only escape from war is to become a soldier, to lose all touch with your own identity, to become part of one huge, quivering mass of fear and horror - but to face it alone, to have principles, to believe - that's what I'm trying to say, to believe, to have even one belief left - no! it can't be done, no one could stand up under that."
At one point, the author seemingly breaks through the barrier of fiction, to address the reader directly. The following two excerpts summarize the secular and spiritual dimensions, respectively, of radical politics:
"I hate the poor. Once again: I hate the poor. Oh yes, the kingdom of heaven - through the eye of the needle; but I have no use for their heaven, I could invent fifty better ones in a single day. I was born of the poor. I never had enough to eat. I never had decent clothes. I couldn't stomach it. I said: I won't be poor. I go hungry often enough now, but I am not 'of the poor.' I am richer than the richest banker. Because: I hate the poor out of my love for them. Until all men unite in hating the poor, there can be no new society. Stalin loves the poor - without them he could not exist. The revolutions of the future must be directed not against the rich but against the poor. To be poor means to be blind, demoralized, debased. The poor have been the slop-pails of capitalism, repositories for all the filth and brutality of a filthy, brutal world. Do not liberate the poor: destroy them - and with them all the jackal-Stalins that feast on their hideous, shrunken bodies. How the Church and the false revolutionaries draw together: love the poor - for they are humble. I say hate the poor for the humility which keeps their faces pressed into the mud."
"I said that I was God. I said that a beautiful fool had drawn a picture of God in a cave - in the cave known as Chartres. But that is a false God, I said - that is a God of murder and darkness. I told them that they were God. God… now what is God? You are God. I destroy that other God. I put all of us in his place. I am a revolutionist. I want this fraud to end. I am calling you to arms. I want no false Gods before me. I am the one Hitler cannot silence. I am Hitler's defeat and death. God is talking to you. God orders that Hitler die, that his bones be scattered in the field, that his eyes be pecked out by birds. And you are Hitler. You have allowed a murderous God before me. You have slunk through the darkness with the skull of a monster in your hands. I tell you now: I will have no more talk of Christ and Joseph and Mary. They are images in a vicious tale which gluts on the animal blood of our race. Perhaps we shall have to learn to speak again in a new way. Our images are fat with the grease of old caves where madmen sit thinking out new horrors - our art, religion, society… where is the sunlight! where is the power and the glory! not on the cross with that mewling milk-sop who knew only to turn the other cheek - to whom, You Idiot! Thought you were pretty sly… of course, of course, turn the other cheek! That's your Christianity - that's all of it - Father, why hast Thou forsaken me! We have forsaken you because you were a weakling who ran out on your own people. We'll have no more such Christs. I am a revolutionist. I believe in my own people. I tell them to strike before even their first cheek can be shattered. Down, Christ! back into the cave… gnaw the bones of your martyrs - the dirty sonsofbitches, putting shit all over themselves in your name - I'll have no more of that! I demand that the body of no one be degraded. It's into the sun with us! We'll learn to talk joyously; we'll smash all those hideous, befouled images… God, huh? That's all done and over with: kapoot.
Even in Greenwich Village, in the years of U.S. involvement in the Second World War, Kenneth and his wife Miriam were often alone; Smith writes, the couple "were relentless in their condemnation of those intellectuals and artists who supported the war, and so caused many a moral discomfort." Though we might dismiss Patchen's importance to the larger issue of political writing of the Thirties precisely because so many of his leftist peers differed with him on the issue of intervention, we hesitate. Two things overall should be kept in mind: the Socialist party - which despite its decline was nonetheless a respected long-standing voice in U.S. politics, its members having valiantly fought against involvement in the First World War - was similarly opposed to Roosevelt's foreign policy, its leader Norman Thomas even taking the stage for America First meetings; second, the Communist party had only taken an interventionist stance in 1941, with the German invasion of the U.S.S.R. The slavish devotion the U.S. Communists to their Russian leaders, combined with their renewed vitality during the war - given that they were now on the same side as the government that ultimately aimed to oppress them - only showed the weakness of, and further debilitated, the left in the U.S.
Meanwhile, Patchen certainly did find himself with even less friends, politically speaking, than he had before 1941, when the harshest rebukes he'd bared were accusations of being a Trotskysite, and thus rejection from the Communist party. Smith writes,
"Kenneth Patchen's name became synonymous with war resistance and alternative presses, another neglected story in the literature of dissent. Much as the leftist literary magazines had evolved out of the social unrest of the 1930's, during the 1940's on both coasts a loose network of publications evolved espousing pacifist and anarchist and libertarian values. Patchen's work was the first thing they sought to publish."
Smith makes note of the Experimental Review [1940-1942], edited by Robert Duncan, Sanders Russell, and Virginia Admiral; Retort, edited by Holley Cantine, Jr., and based in Bearsville, New York; Now, an anarchist publication based in both London and Canada, edited by George Woodcock. From Berkeley came an array of publications: Circle, edited by George Leite and Bern Porter; Berkeley: A Journal of Modern Culture, edited by James Schevill; Contour: A Resistance Magazine [1947-1949], edited by Christopher and Norma Maclaine; and Illuminati and Ark [1947], both published by members of the Berkeley Poetry Renaissance such as Robert Stock, Philip Lamantia, and again Sanders Russell. And, most of all, from the Conscientious Objector's Camp in Waldport, Oregon, Bill Strafford, Kermit Sheets, and Kemper Normland edited Illiterati. A small publishing company also emerged from the camp: Untide Press. William Shank and William Everson served as editors, and in early 1946 put out Patchen's An Astonished Eye Looks out of the Air, which included many of the pacifist-themed poems Patchen had contributed to these varied publications.
But Smith spends more time on Patchen's defense of Ezra Pound than he does on this book. Rightly so, it turns out. In a letter sent to the aforementioned Circle, Patchen dismissed the very notion of Pound being tried for treason (and facing the possibility of execution, though he ended up being sent to an asylum). The letter, as excerpted by Smith, deserves to be quoted at length as it allowed Patchen to state his sociopolitical views in a blunt fashion, to such an extent that he apparently was somewhat embarrassed:
"Ezra Pound chose one authority and most of you chose another. The authority he chose turned Europe into a hell of concentration camps and human misery; the authority chosen by most of you has left Europe and the whole world in a hell of concentration camps and human misery.
"Not to mince words, Pound chose one head of that grisly, bloodsmeared serpent called war, and most of you chose another: both were evil, both preyed on the warm, living bodies of human beings - both were Fascist - as people with the remotest knowledge of all the teachings of Christ and of every other great soul who ever lived, you should know what I am talking about. […]
"I condemn Pound for having chosen an evil authority; here he is guilty - and so are most of the rest of you. Let us not confused issues. I am writing in defense of poetry, and in defense of that high view of human beings which is poetry's; I am defending the poet Pound against that other Pound who defiled and rejected the things of the spirit - even as most of you have defiled and rejected them.
"I am writing in defense of the right of all men to live decently and at peace on this earth. I am defending the majesty that is in all men of every color and nationality against nearly every artist and writer in our 'civilized' world - these shameful turncoats and betrayers who spoke out for death, not for life - against any and all who were the spokesmen for the murder of human beings. […]
"For myself, I do not believe that any man has the right to deprive another man of his freedom; I do not believe that any man has the right to take the life of any other man; and I certainly do not believe that any man who has deprived anyone of life or freedom is fit to sit in judgment over his fellows. What a monstrous farce! These trials of those accused of "war-guilt" - and tried by whom? By the most utterly cynical gang of war-makers the world has ever known. […]
"You see, people wouldn't hate and kill one another if they weren't put up to it. And that's the only hope any of you have. This madness - this madness of thinking you can put down evil and murder by becoming the instruments of evil and murder yourselfs [sic]: look about you! is there less evil now: is there less fear? is there less hatred? What war your victory? Where is the triumph? […]
"Only a few men in any age write great poetry; Ezra Pound is one of these. Let the Hitlers among you take his books off the shelves. Let the Hitlers among you spit on his book. The poems, which never heard of that other Pound, will be honored. Pound the poet I honor; the Pound who accepted the ethics and values which most of you find wise and just, has lost - whatever "his peers" may decid to do to him, he has lost the touch of the angel on his arm.
"Poetry - and a love for poetry - is bigger than the judgment of any military court; it is bigger than any decision which crime-hardened men can make; I think it is even bigger than the cold-blooded assassins who gave atomic power into the hands of your particular authority - these madmen in careful dinnercoats who have opened the gates on the darkness, who have dealt a deathblow to the imagination."
Smith also notes in passing later in the book that Patchen signed a petition in support of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose fascist views were more noxious than Pound's, and who too faced treason charges, in France.
A final excerpt from Albion Moonlight succinctly captures both the limitations of Patchen's understanding of history and of society at the time; and yet provides a fine defense of his view on the proper place of an artist during wartime:
"It does not matter what happens in your head or mine; thousands of heads as good and as bad as ours are being opened like eggs before the Goddamn guns. But I am not afraid. Their inventions are child's play when compared to the way I have decided to destroy. You see, and this is not meant to startle you, I am at my work of murder now. A soldier kills after the fashion of soldiers; a writer must kill with what he says. They have ordered that we all become murderers. Very well, I answer, be witness to my kind of destruction. How simple to kill a man's body! I choose to kill his soul… the fact that I wish to put a purer soul in its place does not alter the fact of murder. The State has given the command to destroy; I want to be a good citizen. Indeed, much of what I write is addressed to the dead; why should anyone be interested in the living now? As many of us as possible will be killed. We are an insult to our culture, alive.
"Any man with a gun aimed at another man is Hitler. […] Hitler will be gone tomorrow - a withered leaf falling into a millrace - but the hatred of Hitler will live to breed others like him. I do not hate Hitler. I hate what brought him into being - and the thing that keeps him where he is. I am interested in humanity. Hitler serves the enemies of his people more than the people themselves. He is the hate! 'We have no quarrel with the Germans,' said the late Woodrow Wilson.
"I believe that the German working class will know what to do with Hitler when the proper time comes; and I believe that the English, French, Italian, and American Hitlers will be dealt with in the proper way too. What a stupid animal you are […] - hating Hitler! Hitler hates, and in hating him you become a Hitler. How the governments tremble when they think that all men will one day see under their masks - and find the same thing."
Given that, even in the U.S., the working class did not know "what to do" with Franklin Roosevelt (our Hitler, as Patchen suggests) we doubt the Germans would have known either. Nonetheless, the essential truth he conveys here exemplifies the kind of wisdom that was sorely lacking from interventionist liberals, and later the "Cold War liberals." No, do not ask these good-intentioned war-mongers to consider the meaning of one of their nation's greatest writers taking such a stance, especially since it hardly fits stereotypes of the selfish elitist artist condescendingly forswearing workaday concerns -instead, social and political concerns let the artist know what he must "kill with what he says." And also do not ask these men who find freedom in war (all the while assuring us that the war is designed to achieve a later freedom--they lie) to ponder the effects of raising children only to hate and kill, of teaching them that the only reason they must do so is because of some foreign devil; and the utterly stupidity that results from such ways of thought. They will demur--go quiet, turn their gaze elsewhere-as if a social impropriety beyond the pale has just occurred, and the rage builds…