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Robert Kern's essay on Brautigan and Williams
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Williams, Brautigan, and the Poetics of Primitivism

by Robert Kern

A poetic was hammered out, as American as the Kitty Hawk plane. not really in the debt of the international example, austere a and astringent.
-- Hugh Kenner

From the beginning, the New World has demanded a new literature, and in the twentieth century this demand has often coincided with the general modernist imperative, in Pound's formulation, to "make it new." In this sense, to be truly American is to be modern by very definition; it is to be free of the past, to start fresh in a new uncharted environment, unburdened by history. There may well be, in fact, as Paul de Man has suggested, an essential incompatibility between the idea of the modern and the idea of history, the former being precisely an escape from the latter. This very contradiction emerges in another formulation of Pound's, his definition of literature as "news that STAYS news," a notion in which "literature," conceived as a privileged entity, is situated just beyond the reach of time and its changes.

Such demands for permanent novelty, for, in effect, having one's cake and eating it too, have been especially burdensome to American writers, or at least those among them alert enough to heed the demands and recognize their validity. One strategy for dealing with them, I want to suggest, has been an attempt not to run ahead of history but to go back of it, and in this sense American modernism and post-modernism, in some of their versions, can be construed as forms of aesthetic primitivism — as an ignorance, acquired or real, of the history and rules of art, of culture and civilization, of manners, conventions and established norms, particularly those associated with Europe. There is nothing aggressive about this ignorance, however, and it is necessary to distinguish between it and the deconstruction or negation of the past associated with the rebellious avant-gardism of European modernism. What is at issue here is not the sophisticated and forceful attack on history launched by the dadaists and surrealists but a historical naiveté or innocence that seeks instead to build up its own world in the absence of knowledge of the past, a world that Hugh Kenner accurately designates as "homemade." In this sense, American modernism is more a forgetting of the past than a confrontation with it, a continual unprecedented starting from scratch.

If this is the case, however, then the history of American literature becomes so problematic that its very possibility must be called into question. For how can the history of a literature be written or even known when that "history" turns out to be a project of perennial self denial, a series of clean slates, each of which refuses to acknowledge the existence of the previous one? We are faced here not with a smooth tradition, an easy development from past through present to future, but with a discontinuous stream of disruptions, none of which has a past or a future, though each is doomed to repeat the act of denial by which the whole stream was originally set in motion. The largest figure in this "history," the one whose act of denial most powerfully prompted the acts of denial to come, is undoubtedly Whitman. As R.W.B. Lewis points out in The American Adam:

For Whitman, there was no past ... to progress from; he moved forward because ... there was nothing behind him — or if there were, we had not yet noticed it. There is scarcely a poem of Whitman's before, say, 1867, which does not have the air of being the first poem ever written ... While European romanticism continued to resent the effect of time, Whitman was announcing that time had only just begun.

Yet if Whitman is the greatest pursuer or cultivator of this "ignorance" as an artistic stance, it has also, from the beginning, been regarded with ambivalence, as both lure and threat. (Henry James saw the threat and abandoned America altogether.) It is one thing to strike out aesthetically for the New World, to enter the dark, unknown continent and submit one's consciousness to it, hopeful of an interpenetration between self and environment, a conquest of and by the new land which is one version of our national myth. But it is quite another to shrink back from that continent in terror, to see it as a threatening blankness likely to overwhelm the self rather than make a welcoming, nurturing space for it. Under such circumstances a certain amount of backsliding becomes understandable, a certain amount of clinging to the old, the known, the familiar, and the result is the re-establishment of the old, the known and the familiar in the very heart of the New World, a betrayal of, and reactionary resistance to, its possibilities.

Such, at least, is the account of our history that emerges in William Carlos Williams's? still too little known prose classic, In the American Grain (1925), in which the poet argues that it was just such a terror of the New World that held the Puritans back from a full, vital encounter with the American environment. The book is at once a quirky, revisionist and personal version of American history, an analysis of cultural malaise as well as a prescription of a cure, and a literary manifesto in Williams's campaign as a stay-at-home against the expatriates Pound and Eliot, but it establishes him as the best expositor of the peculiar coincidence between the demands of the modernist movement in art and the chief requirement of Americanization as a genuine and lasting and physical encounter with the New World. It is also, I would argue, an essential text in the poetics of primitivism, and as such a major re-enactment of Whitman's assertion of his freedom from history, even as it immerses itself in history to discover the sources of this freedom. What Williams finds, like Whitman before him, is that to be an American is an opportunity to be fully modern, and to be modern is not to be in the vanguard of history but to be permanently at the beginning of history, to be pre-historic — to be new, that is, in the sense of "first" rather than "latest." To borrow a phrase from Harold Bloom's recent criticism, we seem to be witnessing here the unfolding of a literary history that is the expression of a national anxiety of influence.

Thus Poe, for Williams, is the first authentic American poet because his literary activity is a re-enactment in literary space of what another hero, Daniel Boone, had achieved in American physical space, the "clearing of the ground." Boone's life was important, Williams writes, because it involved, in his relationship with the New World, "a descent to the ground of his desire" and "the ecstasy of complete possession of the new country," issuing finally in "a new wedding." The sensuality of this language is fully intended. It is the intimate and "thoroughly given" quality of his life in the wilderness that is the source of Boone's identity as a new man in a new place. He did not steal "from the immense profusion" but gave himself to it, and in doing so solved the problem of the New World, which was a problem, in Williams's terms, of

how to replace from the wild land that which, at home, they had scarcely known the Old World meant to them; through difficulty and even brutal hardship to find a ground to take the place of England. They could not do it. They clung, one way or another, to the old, striving the while to pull off pieces to themselves from the fat of the new bounty.

Williams denigrates the Puritans for remaining Europeans on American ground, even as they exploited that ground. Implicitly he also denigrates American literature before (and, in many cases after) Poe for the same reason — because it remained true to European conventions and refused to become itself, refused to open itself to local conditions and achieve its own identity in its own physical place. Just as Boone sought "to be himself in a new world," not to be an Indian but to be "Indian-like," and possess the land, if at all, "as the Indian possessed it," so Poe

conceived the possibility, the sullen, volcanic inevitability of the place. He was willing to go down and wrestle with its conditions, using every tool France, England, Greece could give him, — but to use them to original purpose ... His greatness is in that he turned his back and faced inland, to originality, with the identical gesture of a Boone.

And this gesture, Williams explains, is "a movement, first and last, to clear the GROUND," Poe's realization of "the necessity for a fresh beginning" in literature.

A primitivist poem, then, is a poem built or made on cleared ground (is that ground), without the benefit of historical traditions or conventions as guides. It is, necessarily, a newly invented or re-invented poem whose shape and utterance are determined not by established procedures sanctioned by the authority of the literary past but by the materials that one has in the place that one is. If it is not too sweeping a generalization, most American poems, I would argue, are primitivist in this sense in some degree, and there seems to be a primitivist element in our poetics from the very beginning, an element that becomes increasingly prominent in the modern and post-modern periods when the characteristic American demand for originality is given additional impetus by the modernist insistence on novelty. It is, one would think, an unlikely artistic procedure — in fact hardly a procedure at all, since what primitivism usually implies, in the paintings of Grandma Moses?, for example, or in the anonymous folk-art of the nineteenth century, is the virtual absence of method or theory (though not of craft), a utilization of whatever is available to satisfy the creative impulse and get the job done. But analogies between painting and writing here are probably not very sound, and given the nature of language, which has a history of its own and which must be learned and then employed with a certain amount of sophistication and skill before it can even begin to serve any "literary" purposes, the very idea of a primitivist writing becomes further complicated and problematic, at least insofar as it can be or desires to be classified as "literature." In fact the primitivist poem, when it first appears, often does not look like literature and is not meant to. The extent to which it can avoid such categorization, its ability to remain pre-literary, might be one measure of its success and is certainly a criterion of definition. But after a while the absence of convention becomes itself a convention, a way of recognizing and knowing work that was previously difficult of access. Indeed this is precisely the process that all modernisms seek to undo.

Perhaps the classic example of a primitivist poem in the modern tradition is Williams's own "Red Wheelbarrow":

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

This can best be understood in terms of Williams's early poetic development. He began as an overly lush and yet desiccated imitator of Keats, moved to a kind of democratization of imagism — an effort to bring the techniques of imagism to bear on a subject-matter rooted in his own local environment in Rutherford, N.J., as opposed to the precious, otherworldly "classicism" of Pound and H.D. — and arrived finally, in the early nineteen twenties, at the sheer, impersonal attention to objects displayed here. The poem is completely unadorned and unliterary; its speaker is unidentifiable, as a poet or anyone else; its utterance is occasioned solely by the "event" it describes — someone's perception of "the absolute condition of present things" (to quote Charles Olson quoting Melville). It is this latter aspect that is perhaps most important, for in concentrating so steadily on the absolute presence of things in external reality (to the exclusion of just about everything else a poem might contain), the poem is released from the temporal and spatial limits that a more subjective or self-conscious discourse would impose. It is both particular and unlimited, the achievement of a novelty that will not stale.

What it leads to, at one extreme, is this:

A piece of green pepper
fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
so what?

This is "Haiku Ambulance" by Richard Brautigan, a poet better known for his prose books Trout Fishing in America and A Confederate General from Big Sur than for his poetry, but I want to conclude this essay by looking closely at some of Brautigan's work in both poetry and prose, for it provides a post-modernist instance of primitivist poetics in as pure a form as one could wish and also helps to clarify some of the differences between modernism and post-modernism in general.

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The poem looks like a parody and would probably work best in an oral presentation, in which its punch line could achieve greatest impact. But it is hard to tell whether the joke is on the method of impersonal attention to objects that Brautigan duplicates from several sources (Pound, Williams, actual Japanese haiku), or on the speaker, Brautigan himself, who ends by not knowing what to do with the particulars of his perception once he has noted them down. What is crucial, though, is the last line, not merely because it undermines the kind of attention that Williams takes such pains to build up (in "The Red Wheelbarrow" itself as well as in the development that leads to it), but because it redirects attention away from external objects and back to the speaker, who invites us to participate in his puzzlement, an attitude that calls the status of his entire utterance into question. The poem seems a good example of what Harold Rosenberg refers to, in the context of the contemporary visual arts, as an "anxious object." But the anxiety, the uncertainty, are finally Brautigan's, and in dramatizing such attitudes he calls attention to the movement away from the impersonality of traditional modernism in more contemporary poetic modes and styles. From Williams's point of view, the poem might well be considered regressive in the sense that it questions the value for poetry of the familiar and the ordinary and thus revives and re-enacts the distrust that hampered Williams's own efforts to democratize imagism, to make poetry out of the daily events and objects of his immediate physical locality — a distrust that he was shocked into overcoming by the publication in 1922 of The Waste Land (see James E. Breslin, William Carlos Williams: An American Artist, New York, 1970, pp. 51-61, for a full and valuable discussion of this point). But Brautigan has other ends in mind, and one of them is clearly not Eliot's "escape from personality" or Williams's merging of the self with the objects in its environment; it is, rather, exploitation of personality, creation of a voice that calls attention to itself, inevitably, as naive, innocent, primitive.

As a poet and maker of fiction, Brautigan seems to come as close to a painter like Grandma Moses as it is possible for a writer to do; though sometimes his allegorical intentions and utopian or pastoral politics suggest a greater affinity with the early nineteenth-century Quaker and primitivist painter of a long series of variations on the theme of the Peaceable Kingdom, Edward Hicks. Insofar as his prose books can be considered novels, they are a re-invention of the novel, a project carried out in seeming ignorance of the history of literature and representing a kind of childhood of fiction, personal to the point of self-indulgence, open-ended, radically picaresque. This is probably most true of Trout Fishing in America, which often gives the impression of being invented or created ex nihilo, in a kind of isolation from the entire world, past and present, of literary method and discourse. But on another level Brautigan's ahistorical naiveté is deliberate, a calculated assertion of freedom from convention or the willful and sometimes arbitrary satisfaction of a whim. "Expressing a human need," he says near the end of Trout Fishing, "I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise." And he then proceeds to fulfill the wish by giving us, in "The Mayonnaise Chapter," the following text (which makes up the entire chapter):

Feb 3-1952

Dearest Florence and Harv.

I just heard from Edith about
the passing of Mr. Good. Our heart
goes out to you in deepest sympathy
Gods will be done. He has lived a
good long life and he has gone to
a better place. You were expecting
it and it was nice you could see
him yesterday even if he did not
know you. You have our prayers
and love and we will see you soon.

God bless you both.
Love Mother and Nancy.

P.S.
Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonaise.

Thus Brautigan ends his book by introducing into its imaginative confines an artifact (whether invented or authentic makes no difference) that could never be mistaken for "literature" but that is a fully serviceable if highly oblique metaphor for his vision of pathos and continuity in American life. Brautigan's willingness to use such texts, the fact that he grants them entry into "literature," is indicative of his primitivist impulse not only to clear the ground but to widen it as well, to make it hospitable to utterances and verbal shapes and even inarticulate desires whose literary value and viability are essentially unrecognized. To this extent he goes even further than Williams in the democratization of literature, in the offer of recognition and "a say," so to speak, not only to the ordinary and the familiar but to motives and impulses that just barely make their way into written form.

An even clearer example of this generosity toward the inarticulate is the short story "1/3, 1/3, 1/3?" (in the collection The Revenge of the Lawn), which also demonstrates the degree to which Brautigan's primitivism is an adopted stance as well as a genuine expression of his sensibility. Here the primitive invention of literature is both theme and method as the narrator describes the collaboration between himself and two others to produce a novel when he was seventeen. "I was to get 1/3 for doing the typing, and she was to get 1/3 for doing the editing, and he was to get 1/3 for writing the novel" — "she" being "one of those eternally fragile women in their late thirties and once very pretty and the object of much attention in the roadhouses and beer parlors, who are now on Welfare and their entire lives rotate around that one day a month when they get their Welfare checks," while "he," the novelist, a fourth-grade dropout and ex-logger in his late forties, "looked as if life had given him an endless stream of two-timing girlfriends, five-day drunks and cars with bad transmissions." Only a few pages long, the story includes some pathetically precise quotations, complete with crossed-out words and almost unreadable errors in spelling and grammar, from the novelist's work in-progress: "a story about a young logger falling in love with a waitress ... in 1925 in a cafe in North Bend, Oregon," written in a child's notebook "in a large grammar school sprawl: an unhappy marriage between printing and longhand." At the end the narrator recalls sitting with his two partners in the logger/novelist's trailer and reading over their "book":

Howdi ther Rins said Maybell blushed like a flower flouar while we were all sitting there in that rainy trailer, pounding at the gates of American literature.

It is tempting, though probably misleading, to regard Brautigan's work as a revolutionary act of sabotage directed against the institution that American literature becomes in this final image. He wants, after all, not to destroy the institution but to throw open its gates and allow for a greater intermingling between what goes on inside them and the rest of the verbal world. In the larger field of his fiction, at any rate, the distinction between his own sophisticated writing and the primitivism of his sources and subject-matter remains clear despite the intermingling. But in his poetry we come into contact with a voice and a strategy that can usually be categorized as belonging pretty definitely to the primitivist side of the distinction, Its minimalist tendencies, along with the gentle, almost unconscious wit and innocence of its speakers, suggest that in his poetry Brautigan is viewing the world from inside a primitivist perspective as opposed to the juxtaposition and manipulation of several perspectives that take place in his fiction. Nor do his poems carry the same sorts of social and political implications to be found in his stories and novels. For the most part turned in upon themselves, they are almost narcissistic in their self-involvement and self-regard. A poem like "Xerox Candybar" --

Ah,
you're just a copy
of all the candy bars
I've ever eaten.

-- may look like a judgment against technological society, though its tone argues against such an interpretation. Like the speakers in some of Blake's Songs of Innocence, Brautigan's speakers often exhibit little consciousness of alternatives to their circumstances, and it seems more accurate to view this poem as a statement of disappointment within a context of acceptance of the prevailing social conditions. For this reason too, it is not, strictly speaking, a dadaism or a surrealism that Brautigan practices. "Xerox Candybar" lacks the aggressiveness of those modes, and he seems to be writing, instead, within a context that has already been transformed along surrealist lines, a context to which he simply bears witness while leaving all awareness of other possibilities to the reader.

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More than anything else, it is probably the flatness and the apparent artlessness of his poetry that are boring and even offensive to some of Brautigan's readers. But it is precisely these elements that constitute what is meant by a primitivist poetics (though Brautigan, admittedly, takes them to a blatant extreme). His disregard for the conventionally "poetic" is grounded in the assumption that anything more than a direct, immediate and simple response to things would be dishonest, while on another level it implies that he does not know how to write in highflown, literary language, which he distrusts anyway as a distraction, an intrusion between him and unmediated experience. But the most fundamental assumption behind this resistance to the "poetic" in Brautigan is that "poetry" does not reside in language or even in the text of the poem; it is, instead, a latent possibility in reality and can "happen" at any moment. In this sense his poems are opposed to the romanticism of the confessional mode, in which it is assumed that the poet is a special person whose perception is privileged and whose work gives voice to experience that is unique and intensely charged. For a poet like Brautigan (and one thinks also, to varying extents, of Robert Creeley?, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen), poetry is whatever happens to him, a continuing, everpresent possibility, and he is, almost helplessly, its servant, rather than the other way around. In one poem he records how he has to get out of bed and put his glasses on in order to write it down, so that a good deal of his poetry amounts to a commentary on itself. Accordingly, Brautigan's poems are often reproductions of the circumstances which brought them into being. Here, for example, is "Albion Breakfast":

^Last night (here) a long pretty girl
asked me to write a poem about Albion,
so she could put it in a black folder
that has albion printed nicely
in white on the cover.

I said yes. She's at the store now
getting something for breakfast.
I'll surprise her with this poem
when she gets back.

And here is an even purer example, "April 7, 1969":

I feel so bad today
that I want to write a poem.
I don't care: any poem, this
poem.^
Poetry of this sort works like a self-fulfilling prophecy and involves a kind of magic. It delights and surprises because it is so outrageously self-conscious. Before our eyes a desire to write transforms itself into something written. A desire to produce a poem, by virtue of a sheer act of self recognition, becomes a poem. There can be no better dramatization of the notion that poetry is an act of recognition as well as one of craft, and in Brautigan the craft is pared down to the recognition itself. The result may be disturbingly quiescent in the sense that, given the attitudes behind such work, the writer is left helpless before experience, neither exercising control over it nor attempting to interpret it. It may be artless in fact and even trivial, but the undeniable insistence in such writing is that poetry is ultimately located in experience itself, an insistence that demotes the text to an occasion of recognition. And what is recognized is that the true ground of poetry lies beyond all texts, in the world outside the institution of literature.


Chicago Review?
Summer 1975



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