Conrad Aiken, 1889-1973
Metcalf’s basic unfettered crankiness (sheer honesty ungarbed by politesse, or, worse, “literary” propriety, what makes a career ooze out like honey, or some primordial black grease) witnessed in letter excerpts (among other things). Out of the Robert Buckeye-edited From Quarry Road: Uncollected Essays and Reviews of Paul Metcalf (2002):
Gil [Sorrentino] is a fine critic (recently read an excellent piece of his own on Blackburn), but I just can’t read his own work. Zukofsky I don’t have the patience for . . . he’s a classic example, to me, of someone who has made a profound commitment to Art or Philosophy or some god-damn thing (something other than Life, i.e., they’ve placed the cart before the horse) . . . it’s really a religious commitment, somewhat more refined than Ginsberg and his Buddhism, but essentially the same thing—and I find it very dull.Metcalf invariably repeats the Aiken line: “Around 1940 or so I spent a summer living and studying (and drinking) with the poet Conrad Aiken.” Or, in a piece printed in the Don Byrd and Jed Rasula-edited Wch Way (1982) wherein Metcalf tells of how, after dropping out of Harvard (result of spending most of three months at “McManus’ Bar & Grill, across the street from the Yard”), joining—and quitting—a “small repertory theatre group outside Philadelphia, the Hedgerow Theatre, run by a dynamic and loony Pennsylvania Dutchman, Jasper Deeter” and “kind of drifting in ignorance”:
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Oppen is fine, remains strong over the years. I used to like Bronk, but he begins to wear thin. Like you say, too much Stevens. As I get older and crankier, I find myself with diminishing tolerance for people who play games with language.
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Have been thinking lately about the bicameral mind, migraine (from the Greek “half-skull”) headache, kinesiology, the loss of vowels in the speech of the deaf, Celtic settlements (pre-Christian) in the Midwest, and the great Mississippi earthquake.
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I love [Benjamin’s] comparison of the assembly line and gambling, the fact that each action, in both, is the duplicate of the one before it—and that both are therefore without tradition, without history, Tradition, oddly, depends on change.
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Like you say, it’s strange, getting me reduced to a formula before I’m even a threat to anybody. Preventive Medicine. And loading me into a cart with Olson, Pound, Williams, and pushing us all off the cliff. I am flattered, truly, to be assassinated in such company.
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I wouldn’t be bothered about a specific concern for history in one’s makeup—presence or lack thereof—and perhaps some of the things I’ve written on the subject are misleading. I think any man who develops a style that seems right for the time and place in which he is writing—and the time and place of which he is writing—demonstrates an implicit sense of history, whether he’s conscious of it or not. The “rightness” is an historical phenomenon, the man and his work entering the organic process of human events.
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“The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones”—great god! Well, I’ve scrounged thru old cartons, mouse-nest manuscripts, battered baggage, etc., and cannot find it. That was the fruit, I recall, of a summer spent studying with Aiken, in the mid-thirties; he taught me how to drink like a gentleman, and little else.
My tolerant parents . . . felt that a little more at least semi-formal education might be a good thing, so I was treated to a summer living and studying with Conrad Aiken, on Cape Cod. Aiken, besides refining my tastes in alcohol, taught me to write a good honest sonnet—but, more importantly, he introduced me to some reading that began to turn my life around: Faulkner, who was just beginning to surface then, and Kafka, for example.It’s unclear what Metcalf is looking for, scrounging in boxes, in the lines about Aiken’s 1931 book The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones. What’s of note, though, is how, while disparaging Aiken’s teaching, Metcalf seemingly cottoned to one of Aiken’s techniques in Osiris Jones, a book that attempts to portray a man’s life through lists of places, signage, speeches, &c. One notes how, in an interview in Sagetrieb (V:3, 1986), Metcalf claims, regarding “influences”: “one of the beauties of this game is that you can pick your ancestors, you can decide who is influential, who is important to you . . .” (Must Metcalf’s “pick” of Olson* preclude the possibility of Aiken?) Look at some of the documentary pieces (and techniques) in The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones:
Inscriptions in Sundry PlacesAnd, out of a piece called “Report Made by a Medical Student to Whom Was Assigned for Inspection the Case of Mr. Jones”:
On a billboard
smoke Sweet Caporals
In a street-car
do not speak to the motorman
On a vending machine
insert one cent then press the rod
push push push push
On a weighing machine
give yourself a weigh
On the schoolhouse
Morton Grammar School Founded 1886
In gilt letters on a swinging black sign
Dr. William F. Jones, M.D.
On a tombstone
memento mori
On a coin
e pluribus unum
On the fence of a vacant lot
commit no nuisance
In a library
silence
At the entrance to a graveyard
dog admitted only on leash
At a zoo
do not feed the animals
On a cotton wharf
no smoking
On a crocheted bookmarker in a Bible
time is short
On a sailor cap
U.S.S. Oregon
At a railway-crossing
stop look and listen
At the end of a road
private way dangerous passing
Beside a pond
no fishing
In a park
keep off the grass
In a train
spitting prohibited $100 fine
On a celluloid button
remember the Maine
On a brick wall
trespassers will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law
Outside a theatre
standing room only
At the foot of a companionway leading to the bridge of a ship
officers only
In a subway
the cough and sneeze
both spread disease
and so does spit
take care of it
. . .
In a saloon
no treating allowed
Laundry-mark on linen
B69
In a window
board and room
On a ship
first class passengers not allowed aft of this sign
In a train
ne pas se pencher au dehors
On an apartment-house door
all deliveries must be made at side entrance
Over a door in a hospital
staff only
FaciesI suspect, for Aiken, the cataloging impulse, encyclopedic and commonplace, is derived out of Joyce, somebody Metcalf rarely mentions. And it may be that Metcalf’s own medical extravagances and revels turn me to Aiken’s document. Metcalf: “Having once chosen to be ‘factual,’ the writer gets into interesting situations. First, there is the old saw: what are facts, what is reality?—reality is whatever any given group of people can agree it is.”
sallow and somewhat haggard; thin and pallid;
intelligent; with no marked cyanosis;
the lips however pale and slightly blueish.
No prominent veins, no jaundice, no oedema.
The eyes are sunken, broad dark rings around them;
conjunctivae, pale; gum, not affected;
no blue line, and no sponginess. Tongue,—moist;
with yellow coat . . . The right ear shows
a small herpetic cluster on the lobule.
Neck
no enlargement; normal pulsation.
Chest
as a whole, symmetrical in outline.
respiratory movements, uniform.
Supra-clavicular (and infra-clavicular) regions
no more depressed than anaemia warrants.
No heart-impulse visible. Apex beat not seen.
Abdomen
the skin, deeply pigmented. The abdomen
somewhat distended; uniform in shape.
Found only one small spot that might be thought
a rose-spot: no abdominal pulsation.
Extremities
forearms and thighs, dotted with small spots—
average about a pinhead size (some larger)—
varying from the color of fresh blood
to almost black. Are not removed by pressure,—
not raised above the surface, sharply outlined:
appear (on close inspection) as minute
haemorrhages beneath the epidermis . . .
The skin, harsh, scaly. Follicles, not prominent.
Muscles, somewhat flaccid. No oedema . . .
