helped with this, that or the other, and you swapped labor back and forth all the time and
that community was never defined. It wasn’t a geographical thing; it was a sort of commune
of people who got along well together, and right in the same actual neighborhood there
might be two or three of these…. This sense of solidarity … is one of the richest
experiences that people can have. It’s the only true shield against alienation and
deracination and it was much more developed in the past than it is now.
In McGrath’s poetry this "community of swapped labor" and the populist
sentiment rising from it, cannot be overestimated. This was the political milieu, or
simply the spirit of place, that he inherited. Parts One and Two of Letter to an
Imaginary Friend, in which McGrath evokes his roots, are devoted to moments of compact
drama recalling the populist legacy as it spun itself out and into his soul. The Great
Depression was the definitive learning experience for McGrath’s own generation, the
testing ground for political belief of any kind and, as it seemed to him from his own
encounters, the historical proof of populism’s capacity to endure as a force. Drifters of
every sort filled the land, men from different backgrounds, some of them schooled, others
not, all of them angry and talking politics nonstop. Companionship with laborers like
these provided the forum for McGrath’s education–working, for example, with a logging
team:
All that winter in the black cold, the buzz-saw screamed and whistled,
And the rhyming hills complained. In the noontime stillness,
Thawing our frozen beans at the raw face of a fire,
We heard the frost-bound tree-boles booming like cannon,
A wooden thunder, snapping the chains of the frost.
Those were the last years of the Agrarian City
City of swapped labor
Communitas
Circle of warmth and work
Frontier’s end and last wood-chopping bee
The last collectivity stamping its feet in the cold. [. . .]
The weedy sons of midnight enterprise:
Stump-jumpers and hog-callers from the downwind counties
The noonday mopus and the coffee guzzling Swedes
Prairie mules
Moonfaced Irish from up-country farms
Sand-hill cranes
And lonesome deadbeats from a buck brush parish.
So, worked together.
Diction shoves and bristles within a theme of solidarity, affording McGrath’s
figuration of harmony-in-conflict another lively
example. The object of praise is again a community united through work–a further glimpse
of "the round-dance"–and again,the world it comes from is gone. Some hundred
lines later McGrath’s mood turns elegiac as he remembers the collective rapport of a time
when people of all sorts came together in common need to help out; and then how they lost
and disappeared. I quote the following passage at length to discover the tonal shifts, the
conjunction of blessing and cursing, the reach of language and then the historical
complexity of events being rendered:
The talk flickered like fires.
The gist of it was, it was a bad world and we were the boys to change it.
And it was a bad world; and we might have.
In that round song, Marx lifted his ruddy
Flag; and Bakunin danced (And the Technocrats
Were hatching their ergs . . .)
A mile east, in the dark,
The hunger marchers slept in the court house lobby
After its capture: where Webster and Boudreaux
Bricklayer, watchmaker, Communists, hoped they were building
The new society, inside the shell of the old–
Where the cops came in in the dark and we fought down the stairs.
That was the talk of the states those years, that winter.
Conversations of east and west, palaver
Borne coast-to-coast on the midnight freights where Cal was riding
The icy red-balls.
Music under the dogged-down
Dead lights of the beached caboose
Wild talk, and easy enough now to laugh.
That’s not the point and never was the point.
What was real was the generosity, expectant hope,
The open and true desire to create the good.
Passages of this kind epitomize McGrath’s poetic enterprise. No mere catalog, this is a
kind of lyrical documentation at which McGrath excels, and through which he preserves his
firsthand sense of the nation at odds with itself. He bears witness to "the generous
wish," and curses the McCarthy plague ("the hunting" conducted by HUAC)
that put an end to "talk of the states those years":
Now, in another autumn, in our new dispensation
Of an ancient, man-chilling dark, the frost drops over
My garden’s starry wreckage.
Over my hope.
Over
The generous dead of my years.
Now, in the chill streets
I hear the hunting, the long thunder of money.
A queer parade goes past: Informers, shit-eaters, fetishists,
Punkin-faced cretins, and the little deformed traders
In lunar nutmegs and submarine bibles.
And the parlor anarchist comes by, to hang in my ear
His tiny diseased pearls like the guano of meat-eating birds.
But then was a different country, though the children of light,
gone out
To the dark people in the villages, did not come back . . .
But what was real, in all that unreal talk
Of ergs and of middle peasants (perhaps someone born
Between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, the unmapped country)
Was the generous wish.
To talk of the People
Is to be a fool. But they were the sign of the People,
Those talkers.
The parts of Letter I’ve been quoting give the poem its authority. They mark
episodes of personal importance to McGrath’s political development. They are also–the
impassioned talk of the Depression years, the welders on nightshift during the
war–representative moments in the life of the nation. McGrath has deliberately stationed
himself to document the populist spirit in action from the thirties on through the forties
and fifties, and then beyond into our own time. He is on the lookout for evidence of
political promise, and a witness to communal possibilities. His care is for people working
and living together–the productive spirit of Communitas. Without question, this is
McGrath’s grand theme, based on his poetry’s recollection of his own experience as a boy,
as a young man and then active poet. His art is motivated by a visionary care for the
future, but also by "grief for a lost world: that round song and commune / When work
was a handclasp."
When McGrath began publishing in the early forties, his work was shaped by the strain
and agitation of the thirties. For political visionaries it had been a painful but
exciting time to come of age. On the disheartening evidence of events, the future was
bound to be a glory. After the lament, the exaltation. This doubling–first the bad news,
then the good–is the form of the American jeremiad, a type of political-visionary stance
that thrives on unfulfillment. It owes much to our founding fathers and little to Marx,
but yields an enlarged notion of consensus when recast in Marxist terms. For McGrath, in
any case, the jeremiad is a natural vehicle; it allows him to rail and reconfirm, to
deplore the failures and backsliding of his tribe without abandoning hope.
In the poems of the forties, McGrath announces and proclaims. His language is abstract
and mythic, a style distinct from the kind of line and language in Letter.
Repeatedly, in these early poems, the poet calls to his tribe and predicts redemptive
apocalypse. In "Blues for Warren," a poem of 197 lines with the inscription
"killed spring 1942, north sea," the dead man is praised as one "who
descended into hell for our sakes; awakener / Of the hanging man, the Man of the Third
Millenium." A political prophecy is informed by traditional archetypes, while Marx
and the Church are made to join in common cause. Here the hero, a "Scapegoat and
Savior;’ is united–in spirit and in body–with the dispossessed multitudes his death will
help redeem:
Those summers he rode the freights between Boston and Frisco
With the cargoes of derelicts, garlands of misery,
The human surplus, the interest on dishonor,
And the raw recruits of a new century.
Much of McGrath’s work in his early style–collected in The Movie at the End of the
World–declares belief, addresses action and actors in the political arena, blesses
and blames. Many of these poems are informed by a sense of humor that is tough and playful
at once, a manner that reaches a comic highpoint and takes on a new, easy-going confidence
with a little volume of poems printed by International Publishers in 1949. Entitled Longshot
O’Leary’s Garland of Practical Poesie, the book is dedicated to the friends of
McGrath’s waterfront days in New York. Most of these poems express the spirit enacted by
the title. The centerpiece is a ballad of nineteen stanzas, "He’s a Real Gone Guy: A
Short Requiem for Percival Angleman," celebrating the death of a local gangster. Like
Brecht, from whom he learned a great deal, McGrath often praises renegades and losers,
figures that rebuke the prevailing order as part of capital’s bad conscience. "Short
Requiem" is an exercise, so to say, in jocular realism, a satire that goes to the
tune of "The Streets of Laredo." The violence of the west comes east and this is
stanza one:
As I walked out in the streets of Chicago,
As I stopped in a bar in Manhattan one day,
I saw a poor weedhead dressed up like a sharpie,
Dressed up like a sharpie all muggled and fey.
The poem portrays a man who was a worker getting nowhere and who turned, therefore, to
the profits of crime. Here is the core of the dialogue between the poet and the crook:
"Oh I once was a worker and had to keep scuffling;
I fought for my scoff with the wolf at the door.
But I made the connection and got in the racket,
Stopped being a business man’s charity whore.
"You’ll never get yours if you work for a living,
But you may make a million for somebody else.
You buy him his women, his trips to Miami,
And all he expects is the loan of yourself."
"I’m with you," I said, "but here’s what you’ve forgotten;
A working stiffs helpless to fight on his own,
But united with others he’s stronger than numbers.
We can win when we learn that we can’t win alone."
In the uproar and aftermath of the Depression, a poem like this would find its grateful
audience. But by the time it appeared in 1949, labor was damping down and in the schools
the New Criticism was setting narrower, more cautious standards of literary judgment.
McGrath, with his Brechtian huff, was out in the cold, although any reader nursed on Eliot
might still appreciate the poem’s hollow-man ending:
He turned and went out to the darkness inside him
To the Hollywood world where believers die rich,
Where free enterprise and the ties of his childhood
Were preparing his kingdom in some midnight ditch.
I have cited this poem because I like it, but also because in ways not expected it
surpasses its Marxist scene (the world as classes in conflict) with a vision of community
(the workers of the world united) that in the last stanza translates a political
predicament into spiritual terms. I take it that McGrath, in Longshot O’Leary, was
after a style at once streetwise and jubilant. He begins to count on slang and local
patois more directly to invigorate his diction. A distinctly "Irish" note
(nearly always at play in the later poetry) is struck in namings, allusions and parody.
Humor becomes a leavening element, and the comedy of wordplay keeps the spirit agile in
hard situations. And now McGrath can imagine his audience, lost though it might be. His
model derives from the men and women he worked with in New York before the war,
tough-minded socialists devoted day by day to the cause, a working commune worth tribal
regard. To call this tribe back into action, to witness its past and praise its future,
becomes McGrath’s poetic task.
In 1954 McGrath took a job at Los Angeles State College, a teaching position that did
not last long. The spirit of McCarthy was closing down "the generous wish," and
McGrath, after declaring to a HUAC committee that he would "prefer to take [his]
stand with Marvell, Blake, Shelley and Garcia Lorca," found himself jobless and
without recourse. Being blacklisted was an honor of sorts, but money and prospects were in
short supply. So was hope for a better world. It was then that McGrath began his
thirty-years’ work on Letter. It was then, too, that the earlier, more formal style
gave way to the lyrical expansiveness, rooted in his Dakota heritage, that marks McGrath’s
best poetry. As a friendly critic puts it, "we can at least make an honest guess that
McGrath’s direct experience of repression in the early fifties threw him back into touch
with his earlier experiences." Counting his losses, it must have seemed that praise
and blame were not enough, that the defense of his art would require enlargement of
resources as a witness–some way, that is, of speaking for the nation as well as for
himself, a song of self valid for all. What he discovered is that each of us lives twice:
not only that we are first in the world and then make of it what we can through the word,
but also that each of us bears a representative (political) as well as an individual
(private) life. The representative parts occur when self and history intersect, and to
make these distinctions is to suggest one way that politics and poetry converge. By the
time he came to write Letter, McGrath saw that "In the beginning was the
world!" and that he would have to locate himself exactly at the crossroads where self
and world meet:
All of us live twice at the same time–once uniquely and once representatively. I am
interested in those moments when my unique personal life intersects with something bigger,
when my small brief moment has a part in "fabricating the legend."
Excerpted from a longer essay in Thomas McGrath: Life and The Poem. Ed. Reginald
Gibbons and Terrence Des Pres. A Special Issue of TriQuarterly magazine. 1987,
Northwestern University Press. Copyright ? 1987 by Triquarterly.