The Violent Years

1.

During the mad rush of leaving, they had to find homes for 60 animals, a menagerie of horses, snakes, turtles, and various other creatures. Only two made the cut to tag along with them: their blue budgie parakeet, Bird, who went eerily still as they crossed the Sonoran Desert, and their Doberman, Kinch, who panted in the scorching heat.

Traveling with their 10-year-old daughter Linda and their friend Raf in a red Dodge, George and Mary Oppen fled Redondo Beach, California, on June 11, 1950. They were in flight from the FBI. Special agents had visited their house days earlier to ask about the Oppens’ relief work during the Depression, and about a former roommate now suspected of espionage. Nationally, it was a tense time. North and South Korea would clash two weeks later, launching another war. Dissent was unpatriotic; a person’s past could send them to prison. Case in point: The Oppens’ friend Dalton Trumbo, a screenwriter who was blacklisted after he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, spent most of that year in a Kentucky prison for contempt of Congress. Having worked with the Communist Party USA during the Depression, the Oppens knew they were considered enemies of the state. They headed toward Tucson, and to the border beyond. They spent the next decade in Mexico City, under constant surveillance. They called themselves political refugees.

George famously stopped writing during this period. His silence lasted 25 years. He didn’t want his work to become what Mary derided as a shallow version of writing—that which merely encompassed the “day-to-day ideology” of their times rather than a deeper individualism. In 2017, after Donald Trump was inaugurated, I walked through New York City listening to a 10-minute recording of Oppen reading the first half of his long poem “Of Being Numerous.” The poem, and George’s gentle, softly hoarse voice, struck me as the antidote to insincerity, and as the antithesis to the abuse of language rampant in American politics. The poem exists at the other end of a continuum that includes T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land.” Beneath its modernist machinery thrums a haunting melody about shipwreck and Robinson Crusoe, and a response to the essential, if paradoxical, solitude of urban life: “the shuffling of the crowd … is nothing but the many that we are.” As I listened to George’s wounded voice, I wondered what lay behind this poem. What inspired the Oppens, like so many other American leftists of their time, to make that treacherous desert crossing?

Having read Mary’s memoir Meaning a Life: An Autobiography (1978), which mentions the security visits, I petitioned the FBI, the CIA, and the National Archives under the Freedom of Information Act for files related to the Oppens. I wanted to know what the couple did during the period Mary refers to as “the violent years”—years that bridged a long literary silence that encompassed the Depression and the war. While other biographers and scholars have sought (and received versions of) these files, much in them is still misunderstood. And the Oppens themselves often obscured facts. In Meaning a Life, for example, Mary depicts her and George working with the Communist Party USA only during the Depression; she states that their ties to the Hollywood refugees in Mexico were social, not political.

But if the FBI files are to be believed, the Oppens were immersed in a network of activists affiliated with the Communist Party who were engaged in noble but politically difficult campaigns, such as ending the lynching of Black Americans and stopping the US coup in Guatemala. In one FBI file, George, who went on to win the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, describes himself as an enemy of the US government and as one of the leaders of the US communists in Mexico. In the end, the Oppens’ homesickness, and George’s famous dream about his poetry practice “rusting,” finally brought them back to the United States, and effectively ended their Communist Party ties, more than a decade later than has been traditionally understood.

The Oppens’ repudiation of US foreign policy morphed alongside George’s modernist aesthetic. As war raged in Vietnam in the 1960s, he began drafting “Of Being Numerous,” one of the 20th century’s most haunting antiwar poems. But to understand the full story of how the Oppens’ then-radical activism converged with their avant-garde aesthetic, I had to have the FBI files.

 

2.

George and Mary met in a poetry class at Oregon State University in 1926. After hearing Carl Sandburg read “Fog” on campus, they embraced poetry themselves. They stayed out all night, were expelled, and soon got married without their parents’ approval. George used an alias on the marriage certificate—David Verdi—that later appeared in his FBI file.

In 1929, the Oppens embarked from San Francisco to Europe, a month-long voyage at sea. As recounted in Meaning a Life, they spent the night in Le Havre, a port town in northern France, and then proceeded to Paris by horse and cart. They traveled through small villages on Pom-Pon, a docile half-Arabian, half-English gelding who only disobeyed when in pursuit of bananas, which its prior owner imported. Mary studied the hard labor of the village women as she traveled; she records with satisfaction in her memoir that she and George “now lived out of doors.”

Arriving in Paris with Conrad Aiken’s An Anthology of Modern American Poetry (1927) among their few possessions, they reveled in the city’s “wealth of art.” Such abundance of museums and galleries was found nowhere in the United States, a country the Oppens considered disdainful of artists. Near Marseilles, they rented an empty house in a vineyard in the village of Le Beausset. As in the north, they were welcomed there; the local butcher boasted of his support for Tom Mooney, a socialist labor hero from San Francisco who was in prison for a bombing he likely did not commit.

From France, the Oppens launched TO Publishers, in collaboration with the US-based poets Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff. They printed books by Ezra Pound (How to Read) and William Carlos Williams (A Novelette & Other Prose), and also formalized their loose movement, Objectivism, which had been the focus of a special issue of Poetry magazine in February of 1931. An “Objectivist” Anthology (1932), edited by Zukofsky, featured work by Reznikoff, Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Basil Bunting, and others. George later defined Objectivism as “the sense of the poet’s self among things,” or as the objectification of the poem itself. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is a well-known example that builds upon the earlier movement known as Imagism.

The Oppens had mixed feelings about Pound. They visited him in Rapallo, Italy, the small town on the Riviera coastline where he’d lived since 1924. Despite their more than 20-year age difference, Pound and the Oppens admired each other’s poetics and shared an interest in Europe’s avant-garde. But as the Great Depression worsened, Pound continued to defend capitalism, gesturing to the chestnuts he gathered in the hills and declaring them beyond capital. He offered TO Publishers a second book on the ABCs of economics. The Oppens demurred. Their political differences only intensified. When Pound spoke of Benito Mussolini as “the Boss” (il Duce), Mary interpreted this with shock as “the sudden intrusion of a madness.” Meanwhile, wandering in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Mary wrote

we were suddenly surrounded by Black Shirts pouring into the [square] ... so fast that we could not escape. We were pinned against the monument at the center of the Piazza by the press of the crowd, crying “Il Duce—pericolo del morte” ... and we were trapped in this sudden, impressive demonstration. We saw no differences of expression on the faces of the young men, only of blind fanaticism, in ecstasy and worship of Il Duce.

 

3.

The Oppens’ publishing venture soon fell into limbo, due in part to mismanagement on the US side. (Books shipped from France to Zukofsky’s apartment in New York often sat undistributed.) The Oppens returned to the US in 1932. On their drive to New York, they were disturbed by the sight of otherwise dignified men in tattered clothes—“our fathers,” Mary called them—who asked for a nickel to wipe their windshield with a dirty rag.

George’s first book, Discrete Series, was published in 1934. To help sell it, he and Mary visited the few bookstores willing to carry an unknown poet during such dire economic times. “In German neighborhoods in New York City and New Jersey,” Mary wrote,

right-wing organizations were drilling in fascist military style. Father [Charles] Coughlin was using the radio as it had not been used before; every Sunday, especially in working class neighborhoods, the windows were thrown open, radios were turned up full blast, and the voice of ... the Radio Priest blared divisive, vituperative anti-Semitic fascist propaganda.

Nationally, it was a bleak time. President Hoover left office in 1933 with an emptied treasury. Welfare organizations, mostly philanthropic, were out of money. In New York, the Oppens saw “families sleeping on their household goods, piled on the sidewalks.”

In the summer of 1935, the couple heeded the seventh World Congress of the Communist Parties’ appeal to intellectuals to join together to defeat fascism. Theirs was a firm decision: “We decided to work with the communist party, not as artist or writer because we did not find honesty or sincerity in the so-called arts of the left,” as Mary wrote. They told each other, “Let’s work with the unemployed and leave our other interest in the arts for a later time.” Thus began American poetry’s longest and most mythologized case of politically motivated writer’s block. George did not publish another book until 1962, nearly 30 years after Discrete Series. Mary did not publish her memoir until 1978. Activism was foremost on their minds.

The couple wanted to help the unemployed, and found that “the Communist and the Socialist Parties were the only [entities] … organizing the unemployed to do something  themselves about their predicament,” Mary wrote. The Oppens met Doretta Tarmon, of the Communist Party’s Workers Alliance of America, who “came to New York where the Movement was her breath, her sustenance, her life.” As Mary recalled,

[Doretta] had intense black eyes behind thick lenses which flashed as she tossed her head in impassioned speech. She ... wore a leather jacket and a hat with a long red feather; having come recently from Paris, I was bare-legged and bare-headed, wearing a Paris dress. Doretta cautioned me, “You don’t want to be sectarian, comrade.”

In the Italian neighborhoods where Doretta invited the Oppens to their first street rally, it wasn’t only the Radio Priest with whom they competed. After an alleged near-death experience in 1928, a writer named William Dudley Pelley transformed himself from a spiritualist to a rabidly anti-Semitic, Hitler-boosting, anti-communist who worked through a fascist college he founded in North Carolina, a printing press, several newsletters and newspapers, and a recruiting organization called the Silver Legion of America. Doretta dodged milk bottles thrown by these and other fascists. But, as the Oppens noted, the Italians to whom Doretta appealed nevertheless quietly sought her out, as they wanted “the Relief” from rent penalties and eviction, and money for food.

George later trained to bring these relief efforts to the Borough Hall section of Brooklyn, where the Alliance blocked evictions and fostered worker solidarity. Stretching from Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues “to the waterfront and from Brooklyn Bridge to the Manhattan Bridge, with all the slums that crowded under the El,” the neighborhood was largely Filipino, Puerto Rican, and Syrian-Lebanese. Whole neighborhoods in Brooklyn, the whole borough, seemed to be out of work. If the tenant was denied “the Relief” and the threat of eviction culminated with the arrival of “the city marshal, who with several assistants put the furniture in the street and put a lock on the door,” it triggered the all-seeing, all-hearing “Petra Roja, who called a crowd together by leaning out her tenement window and beating on her dishpan.” The Alliance members and neighbors crowded the apartment and did everything possible to block the marshal. When all else failed, the neighbors sat on the furniture in the streets to prevent the Sanitation Department from hauling it all away.

Mary worked in a Black neighborhood around Nostrand Avenue. The chapter office was built up by Black women, many of whom were denied relief for having migrated recently from the South, a residency requirement being just one test that blocked aid otherwise available to whites. (Though Mary preserved the names of other women activists in her memoir, she failed to name any of the Black women with whom she worked.) The Alliance’s success in organizing around the principle that government can easily solve these issues with progressive policies led to intensified attempts by police and business interests to “break” the Alliance. They sent in thugs to intimidate and assault the leadership, police arrested them, and trials involving the organization’s leaders were strung along for years. (George and Mary endured such a trial in the late 1930s.) It became too difficult in the city, Mary wrote; with such a large group of the unemployed, she rarely saw results. The Oppens were transferred upstate, where they worked to unite small dairy farmers against exploitative conglomerates.

As war loomed, George sought skills that could be useful in the antifascist effort. The couple returned to New York City, where George trained as a machinist to make aircraft for Grumman. With the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, George changed jobs for a higher machinist rating, knowing this transfer exposed him to the draft. “De facto” enlistment, one interviewer called it. “We agreed that the war must be fought … that the lives of all Jews were endangered by fascism … and not to fight in the war was to ask of others what we would not do for ourselves,” Mary wrote. When George left for Europe, however, she insisted, “You must come back alive, do not throw yourself away in any moment’s heroism. I want you to return.”

 

4.

In the Vosges Mountains on Germany’s border with France, in a forest just south of where the Battle of the Bulge later occurred, George’s unit was bogged down on the front lines. For six weeks there were no replacements. They had relieved a regiment of Black soldiers that bore heavy casualties. George froze through that bitter winter, unable to change clothes or bathe for more than a month. “We came down through the Vosges mountains into a town leveled by artillery fire,” he wrote to Mary, “and which had only a cellar remaining; into it my company crowded—not a good position to be in.” George’s French reassured the villagers, who provided soup and milk to Allied soldiers. Victory Day was close when German fire pelted George’s unit as they moved south near Urach, between Ulm and Stuttgart. He and the other convoy drivers jumped from their vehicles, desperate for cover. George dived into a hole left by the fresh blast of an 8mm shell. Another soldier also took cover there, then a third fell onto them. One man was killed immediately when a shell exploded. “The shrapnel from the explosion passed through the other soldier and into Oppen,” writes Eric Hoffman in his biography Oppen: A Narrative (2018):

Oppen considered taking him to safety, but very soon realized that, given the shelling, to do so would amount to suicide, and that, given the nature of the other soldier’s wounds, he was probably not going to survive anyway. Instead, Oppen pulled the mortally wounded soldier’s body over his own, and used him as a human shield. It became apparent to the other soldier that Oppen was not going to help him, and he began to protest.

Confused and immobile, George—just two days from his 37th birthday—gradually awakened to the horror of his situation. He lay in the hole for 10 hours, awaiting nightfall. To pass the time until it was safe to leave, he recited poems by his friend Reznikoff and Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee from Me.”

George convalesced in a hospital in Nancy, France, where Mary sent a letter commanding him, “You are to come home alive, no matter what the scars.” George spent much of that year in the hospital, long enough to learn that his division liberated the Landsberg concentration camp. “Following his recovery,” Hoffman writes,

he went to collect his belongings, his flak jacket among them. The attendant who gave him back his jacket was convinced that the serial number must be incorrect, that it was simply impossible for someone to survive such a barrage of shrapnel.

George returned home to New York City in 1946, decorated with numerous medals and deaf in one ear. Guilt over his act of self-preservation troubled him. It lingered for years. Soon after his homecoming, his trauma—which would be considered PTSD today—required that he be left alone in dark rooms with no noise nearby. This lasted throughout Linda’s childhood, she recalled later, with George irritable and depressed, his wartime firearm always at hand, never willing to sit with his back to the door or window.

In late 1946, the Oppens moved to Southern California. Shortly after, they began to notice the dark cars parked outside their house.

 

5.

The FBI’s repeated visits to the Oppens’ Redondo Beach home turned an otherwise placid neighborhood suspicious, even hostile. “Do you visit those people often?” agents asked the Oppens’ neighbors. “Whose car is that in [their] driveway?” The persecution-by-investigation—which made the Oppens local outcasts—was widespread, visited upon “every friend, every neighbor, every person who had signed a petition, every trade unionist, every supporter of [former Vice President] Henry Wallace,” according to Mary.

On one visit, recounted in Mary’s memoir, she and George “decided to give no answers to [the FBI’s] questions, although their insinuation was: give information, tell all, expose your neighbors, friends, comrades—that is the only way to be safe. One young man did the questioning, the other took out his notebook. When I walked around in back of the one who was writing, he looked up and asked, ‘Are you going to watch to see what I write?’” “I am going to do just that,” Mary responded.

According to the FBI files, the topic of discussion that day was Whittaker Chambers, the former Communist Party member turned conservative anti-communist. Testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in1948, Chambers named members of the so-called Ware Group of communist organizers, including Alger Hiss. As a result, Hiss was convicted of perjury around claims that he engaged in espionage while in the State Department. He served more than three years in prison but maintained his innocence until his death. All that was proven was that Hiss, like the Oppens, had been a member of the Communist Party before and during the war, not an especially dramatic revelation given that the Soviet Union was fighting as an Allied Power.

Hiss and Chambers were on the minds of the agents who visited the Oppens on May 13, 1949. After calling ahead, Special Agents Arthur Wittenburg and Harold F. Dodge interviewed the Oppens “relative to their association with David Vernon Zimmerman.” The agents believed Zimmerman lived with the Oppens in the 1940s in Long Island, when George was remaking himself as a machinist to build war planes. “Zimmerman was a photographer for Whittaker Chambers,” the agent noted, who worked “in a Soviet espionage apparatus operated on the East Coast in the 1930s.” When asked about Zimmerman, the agents wrote,

Oppen stated that he knew that Zimmerman had never engaged in any espionage activity, but … that so far as Communist activity is concerned, he would not answer the question, because … the United States Government has no authority to ask questions concerning political beliefs. When asked additional questions, Oppen refused to answer ... and did not even state whether the Oppens were acquainted with Zimmerman.

As one agent realized, George was caught in a contradiction.

When it was pointed out that Mr. Oppen had already stated that he knew that Zimmerman was not engaged in espionage activities, from which statement it could reasonably be assumed that he [knew] Zimmerman, Oppen replied that he would withdraw this answer ... and that he and his wife would answer no further questions. Throughout the interview ... Mr. and Mrs. Oppen maintained an antagonistic attitude.

Another memo elaborated on George’s “antagonistic attitude,” paraphrasing him as saying

if the FBI has authority to ask questions concerning political beliefs of Communists, then tomorrow they will have authority to investigate a person because he is a Republican or Democrat. Oppen then went into a tirade concerning reports that telephone lines of private citizens are being tapped and civil rights are being infringed upon. Mary Oppen expressed the same views as did her husband.

FBI recaps of the visit, alternately dated both May 13 and June 24, reveal that Mary was already on the FBI’s Security Index, a list of leftists collected for use in possible mass arrests and political imprisonment. How threatening was this? Less than a decade earlier the government arrested Americans of Japanese and German descent, and held them in internment camps for the duration of World War II. Some of the German internees, were, like George, Jewish (unlikely to be conspiring with Hitler’s regime). The FBI had rounded them up using its B and C Teams in Latin America.

Tensions flared after China’s communist victory in 1949 and during the leadup to the Korean War in June of 1950. The Hiss case was mentioned during Congress’s push to pass the McCarran Internal Security Act in 1950, which nearly failed but which was ultimately ratified in September of 1950. In practice, this law made some leftist politics of the past—such as working with United Front groups to stop evictions—retroactively illegal. President Truman vetoed the bill, calling it “a mockery of the Bill of Rights,” but Congress overrode him. In this way, progressive activism during the Depression was recast as subversion and espionage. This was why the Oppens, and their neighbors in the film industry, fled south. George was terrified of arrest.

 

6.

 

 

In Mexico City, Mary wrote, “we got in touch with a family whose name had been given to us by our movie writer friend.” Once settled in a large house in the San Angel neighborhood, where Diego Rivera kept a studio, she wrote that the Oppens were “prepared to receive political refugees, sure that many … would be coming. A Hollywood family arrived and moved in with us in our convent apartment, and I began looking for a larger place.” Jean Rouverol, an actress friend of the Oppens, described the couple as “true Bohemians.”

Their apartment, off a stairway next to the San Angel post office, was a rambling series of rooms … strung together one flight up from a small back courtyard where one of the neighbors kept chickens… Their front door, off the landing, opened into George’s woodworking shop, a confusion of worktables and a lathe and tools and bits of raw lumber and … several half-finished portrait carvings of his friends in bas-relief.

Mary’s own workspace “tended to be in whichever room could currently accommodate her easel and painting supplies and elderly sewing machine and photography equipment.” Rouverol describes being “entranced” by the Oppens during a dinner she and her husband attended: “George’s lean Old World face, with his dark eyes and his shaggy mustache and his thin forehead and aquiline nose,” looked almost “hawk-like,” while Mary was “his antithesis … with clear blue eyes, blond hair done up in a careless bun … I had the fleeting feeling that when I grew up I wanted to look just like her.”

Soon, the all-seeing eye of US surveillance followed the Oppens across the border, with “two men hanging around our house day after day,” as Mary recalled. One of the agents who eventually questioned them “had the same dossier, with all the same background that the FBI men had had back in California and all the same errors, but these were Mexican men, supplied with dossiers that the CIA and FBI had compiled.” George, whose PTSD confined him in bed for days, was annoyed by the visits. So was Mary.

The Oppens complained to their lawyer, Carmen Otero Gama. The sister-in-law of leftist labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Otero Gama was “a key contact in the Mexican government for left-wing radicals,” wrote the Oppens’ surveillant. She chased down files and found that the men monitoring the Oppens were attached to the presidential security detail. Otero Gama confronted the men after the Oppens identified them on the steps of a government building. She scolded them for “ugly” behavior, insisting that from now on they come to her with any questions. Remarkably, the Oppens never saw the men again. But the surveillance didn’t end, even if George and Mary no longer noticed; it moved deeper into their circle.

According to FBI files, the Oppens’ political activism continued in Mexico, though Mary downplays this in her memoir. They attended parties with the blacklisted filmmaker Trumbo, who wrote Oscar-winning screenplays (Roman Holiday, The Brave One) under pseudonyms during his Mexican exile. The surveillance files, which may be erroneous, record extraordinary details logged by informants who penetrated the Oppens’ social life, suggesting the couple’s activism with the Communist Party continued for perhaps five years or more, into the mid-1950s. While the first surveillants may have been reassigned after the confrontation with the Oppens’ lawyer, files show that those agents became moot after the Hollywood group was penetrated with paid and unpaid undercover informants. Special Agent George Munro arranged to have his informant attend a December 1952 party at the home of Waldeen (von) Falkenstein Brooke de Zatz, a pioneering choreographer who was Mary and George’s dance instructor. At this going-away party for the Polish communist Gitta Sten, an informant created a detailed list of attendees, with the makes, models, and license plate numbers of their cars, and he zeroed in on the rumored appearance of an unnamed but very important alleged communist who might stay with the Oppens. (The memos don’t disclose who the communist was.)

In addition to Trumbo, the screenwriter Albert Maltz, another member of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, was also present. At one point, the informant noted that an unknown couple from Guatemala was there, too, and the “Unknown Male told George Oppen that he had a message from ‘your friend Rupert’ … Oppen, the unknown male and Albert Maltz immediately thereafter conferred in private. Both Oppen and Maltz were observed taking notes during the ensuing private conversation.”

In a memo to J. Edgar Hoover, the informant concludes that the party “consisted of the largest gathering of known American Communists ever assembled in one place in Mexico City.” At the end of the 12-page memo, the agent recommends that George, given his absence from the United States, be labeled in the “Unavailable Section of the Security Index.”

By 1954, the FBI’s Los Angeles field office had written to the State Department and to the Legal Attaché in Mexico requesting information either agency may have about the Oppens. When George told one secret informant that he personally knew artists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the statement was added to his file. Rivera was one of the art world’s most famous communists, and Siqueiros had been involved in the attempted murder of Leon Trotsky in 1940. Mary was overheard arguing that even if Rivera had once been a Trotskyite, she still found him charming and admirable.

Another informant overheard a rumor that Oppen “considered himself to be the ‘titular head of the Communist Party, USA in Mexico.’” The Oppens agreed to attend a fundraiser for the “official newspaper organ of the Mexican Communist Party” but were unable to go due to heavy rains. “Having failed to attend the party,” the memo records, “Oppen sent his personal check … in the amount of 150 pesos, which was added to the collection.” This and other FBI memos reveal that the FBI was either directly opening the Oppens’ mail, or one of their informants worked for the Mexican postal service and was doing so there.

Other fundraising initiatives included George’s campaign to get the Civil Rights Congress’s pamphlet “[We Charge] Genocide” translated into Spanish. This report for the United Nations, printed as a booklet in 1951, charged the United States with atrocities against Black Americans. The Civil Rights Congress hoped to make lynching and other acts of murderous racism illegal and subject to prosecution. While the FBI treated the Civil Rights Congress as a communist front, the scholar Gerald Horne has analyzed how the CRC’s procedural understanding of rights, its legal defense of alleged communists, and its focus on attacking racism years before Brown v. Board of Education made it far more (and something less) than a communist front. It was a forerunner of, and even a template for, the better known Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and early ’60s. It was effectively disbanded after laws such as the McCarran and Smith Acts forced it to register as subversive.

According to FBI files, George wanted to coordinate the communist groups in Mexico. When questioned at the border while crossing into Guatemala to renew his tourist visa, he allegedly described himself as “an enemy of the North American Government” who could not enter the United States. Other “subversive” activities involved a letter to President Eisenhower suggesting clemency for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the American couple convicted of spying for the Soviet Union; informants confirmed that George had been an important Party leader in Southern California and would remain so wherever he went. Mary was quoted as saying that she and a friend had been members of the same communist “cell” in New York and that “the two of them had frequently lunched with Communist Party National Committeewoman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.”

In a section of the FBI files labeled “Statements by Subjects,” Mary told an unnamed informant in March of 1953 that it was “unfortunate that Stalin could not have outlived Eisenhower.” She also predicted that, having lost most of its allies, the United States would be “rudely surprised if there were another war, ‘when they lost it.’” In June of 1954, during the US coup in Guatemala, she told friends how to contribute to the Guatemala Relief Committee and “commented that in addition to receiving contributions [her contacts] were preparing a list of persons who would be willing to go to Guatemala to assist in the ‘Red Cause.’”

Even in the mid-1950s, the Oppens’ criticism of the Soviet Union and of the Communist Party USA was recorded in their file by an agency whose very methodology was paranoia. George was overheard criticizing anti-Semitic statements and attitudes made by Albert Maltz, whom George criticized “for his low characterizations of Jewish people in his books.” George also expressed disappointment with leftists who blindly accepted Soviet and Marxist art as the paragon of culture. “After all,” an informant quoted him saying, “there are good points in the cultural system in the United States.” He also criticized the Soviet Union directly: for example, after Khrushchev’s unfair treatment of Lavrentiy Beria, the former secret police chief and deputy premier who was executed in 1953. George did not consider Beria “a capitalist traitor and spy,” his surveillant wrote, as the Soviet regime did.

Other entries show the Oppens asking US officials how they might get their names cleared of subversion and obtain a passport to return home. That goal informed their entire time in Mexico, according to Mary, and it eventually led to the Oppens distancing themselves from friends there. While George and Mary drifted away from the so-called American Communist Group in Mexico, the FBI files indicate years of committed leftism interspersed with ambivalence. The Oppens are even reported to have been kicked out of the Party for desertion, upon crossing the Mexican border without notifying the Los Angeles chapter of the Communist Party.

Even as they begged officials to help clear their record so they could come home, they insisted that their political views—leftist, communist, or otherwise—were none of the government’s business. The informants heard the Oppens criticize the USSR and watched them take notes among people from communist-controlled countries, but they also witnessed the Oppens thinking freely, denouncing US policy where it was fascist and Soviet policies where they were violent or abusive, and praising US culture where it seemed attractive. The Oppens were coming to their own judgments even as spies encircled them. Every conversation was layered with paranoia and suspicion.

 

7.

 

 

By 1958, the Oppens were estranged from their friends in Mexico. Linda was nearing college age. The family still didn’t have passports and couldn’t return to the United States. “We needed to be freely in our own country, to have time to assimilate the violent years before turning them into thought and poetry,” Mary wrote. She was particularly anxious, and found it difficult to cope with George’s depression. She began therapy with a progressive, feminist psychiatrist who asked about her dreams, one of which featured a small man eating peanuts from a paper bag while Mary stood before an abyss she couldn’t bear to look into. Noting her anxiety, the psychiatrist said, “But no one is preventing you; you are free to move forward, to become whatever it is you decide to become.” Even so, Mary felt stuck in “the frustration of only being a wife and mother.”

The following year, Linda was accepted to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, not far from where George was born. She left in September. The State Department had been denying Americans passports since the early 1950s, when the Oppens fled for Mexico. When the family sent their passports for renewal, the documents were destroyed, George was labeled a “premature antifascist”—opposing Hitler too soon for the government’s taste—and no new passports were sent. A parallel case of passport denial, that of artist Rockwell Kent, made its way to the Supreme Court in 1958 and was decided in favor of political dissidents. With the Oppens’ passports restored after the Kent ruling, Linda went to New York for school. Though the Kent ruling meant George and Mary could visit her, Mary’s anxiety persisted; the psychiatrist asked to meet George and Linda, in order to interpret their dreams.

Before his session, George dreamed that his father died. He and his sister were “going through his father’s papers. ... In a file marked ‘miscellaneous’ was a paper entitled ‘How to Prevent Rust in Copper.’” George thought, “My old man was a little frivolous perhaps, but he certainly knows copper doesn’t rust.” Mary woke to George shaking in bed with laughter. But she didn’t find it funny. When he laughed off the dream in front of the psychiatrist, the doctor told him, “You were dreaming that you don’t want to rust.”

“On the way home,” Mary wrote, “George stopped and bought a pad of paper and some pencils and started to write The Materials.” The question that produced the most anxiety was how to write about his life, including his political struggles, without falling into the trap Mary described in her memoir as art without sincerity. “It is possible to say anything in abstract prose,” George wrote in the early 1960s, “but a great many things one believes … or thinks he believes will not substantiate themselves in the concrete materials of the poem.”

“Blood from the Stone,” possibly the first poem George wrote after his 25-year hiatus, follows an image of Mary carrying bundles (“Everything I am / is us”). He draws street scenes from the days of Doretta Tarmon and the Workers Alliance:

The Thirties. And
A spectre
 

In every street,
In all explicable crowds, what they did then
Is still their lives.
 
As thirty in a group—
To Home Relief—the unemployed—
Within the city’s intricacies
Are these lives. Belief?
What do we believe
To live with? Answer.
Not invent—just answer—all
That verse attempts.
That we can somehow add each to each other?
 
—Still our lives.

 

George juxtaposed poetry and activism, but he worried about being obvious:

And war.
More than we felt or saw.
There is a simple ego in a lyric,
A strange one in war.
To a body anything can happen,
Like a brick. Too obvious to say.
But all horror came from it.

He recounted trooping through French villages in boots and a helmet, struggling to see around every impediment to spot danger, then feeling sudden joy at the scent of wood smoke, the hope of life continuing. He recorded his current age in 1958 (he was 50), adding, “Among them we were lucky—strangest word / … because we find the others / Deserted like ourselves and therefore brothers. Yet // So we lived / And chose to live. // These were our times.”

The stylistic innovations and metaphysical concerns that later made up “Of Being Numerous” are evident in The Materials: bricks and ordinary objects signal the constructions of time and history; the vicissitudes of the body are evident; the experience of city life among crowds is vividly rendered, as is a cherishing of family. Both books limn the horror of war (and the search to reconcile oneself to the solitude that this horror generates). There is also the notion of being stranded (here “deserted,” elsewhere “shipwrecked”) and the solidarity emanating from seeing that all are so stranded (“therefore brothers”).

George published The Materials in 1962. It featured “Blood from the Stone” and other poems set in New York, Central America, and Mexico; Petra Roja appears in these poems, as do the Silver Shirts. By the early ’60s, with their passports restored, the Oppens returned to the United States and settled near Brooklyn Heights. They returned with their car and a 25-foot boat George built. A package filled with his papers, including new poems, got lost. Nonetheless, George’s third book, This in Which, appeared in 1965. The book’s centerpiece is “A Language of New York,” a prototype for George’s later 40-section “Of Being Numerous.”

The poem captures New Yorkers in their routines: “They are shoppers, / Choosers, judges; … And here the brutal / is without issue, a dead end.” So estranged is his initial gaze from New York life, though, George veered into a meditation on baseball: “baseball’s their game / because baseball is not a game / but an argument and difference of opinion / makes the horse races.” He broached the war: “I cannot even now / Altogether disengage myself / From those men // With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents, / In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies / Of blasted roads in a ruined country.”

George wrote to several friends about his struggle to finish reworking “A Language of New York.” New snippets of the poem emerged from these letters. In fact, friends recall him driven to write five hours a day in the 1960s and '70s, presumably to make up for 25 years of silence. (Remarkably, he always planned to return to poetry; one colleague teased George that it took him 25 years to write his second book.) To further immerse himself into the objects of New York, and to protect his writing time, George rented a room under the Brooklyn Bridge, and soon the sight of it entered the poem he wrestled to finish.

The great stone
Above the river
In the pylon of the bridge
 
‘1875’
 
Frozen in the moonlight
In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness
 
Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing,
Which loves itself

But while George toiled to construct his most ambitious poem, he was doubly stuck. First, foraging through metaphysical and philosophical texts by Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Kant, and Yves Bonnefoy, he had to find an image for solitude—the void, he called it in a letter to Linda. The solitude he experienced in war returned frequently in his bouts of depression. On the other side was an impulse that (in a different writer’s hands) would feel like protest writing. George’s fear of dying alone in France, away from his family, made him want to risk his pristine, apolitical modernism and test its accommodation of a political and moral message against killing. But as a realist, he refused to go far beyond what he observed directly. By constantly reworking language that contained his observations, and his experiences, he found that poetry could accommodate his anxiety over this tension. And to solve the first problem, he had to contrast his vision of solitude with scenes of crowds:

The shuffling of a crowd is nothing—well, nothing but the many that we are, but nothing.

As an image for solitude, George thought of Robinson Crusoe. The idea may have come from Mexico. One of his Hollywood friends, Rouverol’s husband, Hugo Butler, wrote a film adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Directed by the celebrated Spanish-Mexican director Luis Buñuel, and filmed on location and sets in Mexico, the film was released in 1954. Biographers indicate a possible connection between Buñuel’s Crusoe film and the use of Crusoe imagery in “Of Being Numerous.” Of course, the image would have cropped up naturally from George and Mary’s love of sailing through the fog, using little besides maps and a compass, to find small islands and harbors off the coast of Maine.

We are pressed, pressed on each other,
We will be told at once
Of anything that happens
 
And the discovery of fact bursts
In a paroxysm of emotion
Now as always.   Crusoe
 
We say was
‘Rescued’.
So we have chosen.
 
*
Obsessed, bewildered
 
By the shipwreck
Of the singular
 
We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous.

While George expanded “A Language of New York,” first from his room under the bridge, then later from San Francisco, and finally from Deer Island, Maine, he also read, heard, and thought about US involvement in Vietnam. “I’m finding it difficult to write poetry,” he complained to his niece in 1965. “An eerie feeling writing poetry with the war going on. I don’t know if I can.” He complained not just of his own conflicting emotions, but of public distrust in leadership. “A lot of resistance, a lot of doubt, too much as things stand to induce people to throw away a few million lives of young men.” (Six million Southeast Asians were killed in the conflict, roughly the same number of Jews killed in Hitler’s camps.) Reflecting on the power of the antiwar protests, he wrote, “People have never been so close to a refusal, the American Legion ‘patriotism’ has never been so near to the disreputable.” He shifted to the use of napalm, writing in a meandering stream:

Meanwhile burning gasoline; it is “eerie” also to talk about “politics.” We sit in this little room—it’s really like a light-house. … I know it has roots in our whole history and in the talk on the streets as far back as I can remember. … Impossible not to wonder if a disgruntled CIA high command asked a vice president how he’d like to be president. … It is a thing like that, a kind of mad clown, nothing that was even respectable intended this, there’s obviously insane talk about dominoes and [saving] face. … I don’t think it can be continued, I think it will be stopped. But I don’t even KNOW how many people have been burned alive, how many half-burned children.

The same anti-communist impulses that chased the Oppens from Redondo Beach now spilled countless gallons of napalm on Vietnamese children; the logic of anti-communism, like the logic of lynching Black Americans, went beyond the platitudes of political debate. To consider it was disorienting, and George’s dreams began to play tricks on him. Hunting for philosophical quotations for “Of Being Numerous,” George dreamed he plagiarized Heidegger in an early poem, but upon waking he realized he made it up himself: the last word in the line he feared he plagiarized was “incalculable.” However, he could not find the word in Heidegger. It was his own image.

In February of 1966, the Oppens attended a large rally of veterans against the war in Washington, DC. But they demurred from marching, worried they wouldn’t have the energy to last the whole route. Viewing the march, and reading about the war, George finally found words to link his own experience of war with the creeping evil of US presence in Vietnam. To express his disgust, he invoked an image of suicide: 

It is the air of atrocity,
An event as ordinary
As a President.
 
A plume of smoke, visible at a distance
In which people burn.
 
[…]
 
Now in the helicopters the casual will
Is atrocious
 
Insanity in high places,
If it is true we must do these things
We must cut our throats
 
The fly in the bottle
 
Insane, the insane fly
 
Which, over the city
Is the bright light of shipwreck
 

 

8.

Of Being Numerous was published on March 31, 1968, days before Martin Luther King denounced the American war on Vietnam in a speech describing the United States as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” (Like George, King was influenced by the suffering of children, and was particularly moved by a photo essay in Ramparts that documented the effects of napalm on Vietnamese children.) George’s previous collections received mixed reviews. But several critics recognized the modernist power that marks Of Being Numerous. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, the poet Louis Simpson perceived in the book “all that has been excluded by a very discriminating mind in order to arrive at significant life. The mind, moving toward clarity, sheds those matters that are, as Gatsby said, ‘just personal.’ As it begins to know itself, the mind moves, and thought is felt as movement, along the line. We experience the life of the mind in its physical reality, the movement of Verse.”

As a member of the Pulitzer Prize jury, Simpson lobbied the other jurors to honor Of Being Numerous with the award that year. It was the only collection that the three white male jurors could agree upon. Simpson added in his juror’s citation that the poetry had “some startling things in it; it’s true, and intelligent, and experimental.”

George’s response was less than elated. Calling the award “a questionable compliment,” he had mixed feelings when the choice was announced in May of 1969. Vaguely sensing that even a little fame could convert his private process into a public performance, he canceled the tour of poetry readings arranged by his publisher and friends, and over the next few years tried to step out from the shadow of the book’s success.

In letters, he discussed the difficulty of getting past the long poem at the book’s heart, asking poet and friend Harvey Shapiro, “You think Numerous is as far as I’ll get?” On the other hand, he admitted to needing the prize, but needing it because it was “gauche” to be a 61-year-old, “self-confident unknown” at parties.

In a letter to his son-in-law, Alex Mourelatos, George added that the poem’s success was causing him to imitate himself. Defending the poem’s material as realism to his sister June Oppen, he credited its winning the Pulitzer to “Celebrating a victory (possibly temporary) over surrealists and symbolists I had thought were dead.”

Yet of the poem’s antiwar section in particular—which begins with the aforementioned “It is the air of atrocity”—George admitted that it “might be felt to be over-clever,” or even

appear somewhat as an outburst, an outburst of horror … [or that] the flat drop to the line / “Is atrocious” / might carry the sense of arbitrariness … the need to make a stance somewhere  

In the Vietnam War era, however, George insisted it was mere reportage, though it “Reports not a proof but a vision,” staying “close to that realistic point” that “the atrocious is the atrocious.” This range from observation to a vision of horror pointed to the value of poetry, which offered glimpses, George wrote, into “the size of reality.”

9.

A decade later, in 1978, Mary Oppen published Meaning a Life. The book is direct, amusing, comprehensive, and wry, filled with her and George’s love of animals, their bond to each other, and their discipline of practicing life as an art. But it downplays their political activism in Mexico, and therefore somewhat obscures the obsession that at least George felt for merging his poetry with activism. The book’s dedication, “To George, whose life and mine are intertwined,” echoes the dedication of George’s 1975 Collected Poems: “For Mary, whose words in this book are tangled inextricably among my own.”

The echo stretches further. The same publisher, Black Sparrow Press, printed both the autobiography and George’s final book of poems, Primitive. When George's Alzheimer’s worsened, he asked Mary to finish preparing Primitive. The two books were reviewed together in the New York Times.

While “Of Being Numerous” struggles to convey his innermost thoughts on trauma, solitude, and war, it also points to Mary, using his old image of the brick. “There can be a brick,” he wrote

In a brick wall
The eye picks
 
So quiet of a Sunday
Here is the brick, it was waiting
Here when you were born
 
Mary-Anne.

As writers harassed and surveilled by the FBI, the Oppens weren’t unique. One US Nobel laureate, Ernest Hemingway, was allegedly even hounded to his suicide by the agency. Like the CIA, the FBI also created a mechanism to censor books from the left that challenged their image or ideology. (J. Edgar Hoover recruited publishing insiders to send him controversial manuscripts for his political appraisal).

But the section on atrocities in Of Being Numerous, with its image of the fly in the bottle, is a powerful response to the harassment the Oppens underwent. Especially given that George’s mother committed suicide when he was small—and that his will to live was tested during World War II—his suggestion that Americans in the Vietnam era “must slit our throats” is unlike anything that came before it in American poetry. In the same letter to George’s son-in-law cited above, his musings make clear he thought hard about that line.

As Mourelatos himself had provided the “fly in the bottle” image, George wrote to thank him. He described the image as depicting “the vision of the insane, poisonous Johnsonian flies” who were then engaged in the mass killings in Vietnam. Of those Democratic Party-affiliated tendencies George likened to flies, agents working for the administration kept tabs on the Oppens, via the FBI’s security updates, through most of President Johnson’s first term and until the spring of 1966, whether George and Mary knew of this continued domestic surveillance or not.

Those poisonous flies, George wrote, “are not us. Not the four of us.” Somehow writing the poem momentarily put George and his family outside of those atrocities. “Whatever our differences,” he wrote, “we are not those insane flies. I have no way to say how grateful I am, or how fortunate I feel.”