Mary Oppen, Meaning a Life

The words do not illuminate the poem;
the poem illuminates the words.
—St. John of the Cross, translated by Mary Oppen

Some books we can read over and over again through the years with renewed delight. Our initial encounter with such a book feels like our first experience with a place we love, or like the first sight of shore or sea—that particular, that vast. Our emotions swirl with promise, hope, jubilation in a miraculous moment of recognition that enlarges our world. How lucky we are to have found this book! How impossible it is now to imagine our life without it! I think of this special-collection library that grows as we grow our autobiographical canon—resistant to trends, conditioned by intuition and whim, and open to any language or genre.

Mary Oppen’s Meaning a Life: An Autobiography merged into my autobiographical canon through her husband, George Oppen. I was working for New Directions on a posthumous selection of his poems, edited by Robert Creeley, who asked if I could write a chronology of the poet’s life to run in the book. I was a fledgling editorial assistant and the request came as a bit of a surprise. High on the challenge, I dove into the chronology with zeal and, after wrestling with it for a few weeks, sent a draft off to Creeley for his approval. Without comment, the Black Mountain master gallantly nixed it. It would be better, he decided, to have someone else do it. Still, all was not lost, as my research had led me to Mary’s book, a copy of which was nearly impossible to track down at the time.

Meaning a Life was originally published in June 1978 by Black Sparrow Press—a California-based literary house built from the ground floor of Charles Bukowski and up through the contemporary American avant-garde—together with George Oppen’s last book of poems, Primitive, which came out earlier that spring. George was already suffering the symptoms of what would later be diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease and, as Mary told an interviewer a few years after his death in 1984,

He couldn’t get [Primitive] ready for the publishers. And he finally said, “If you can do this, please do it.” He said, “I can’t do it.” So I had to put them together and get the typescripts presentable, and probably lots of things he’d have done differently.

Her autobiography opens with the dedication, “To George, whose life and mine are intertwined”—an echo of George’s dedication in his Collected Poems of 1975: “For Mary/whose words in this book are entangled/inextricably among my own”—with the entirety of his “Anniversary Poem” as epigraph, one line of the poem questioning, “How shall we say how this happened, these stories, our stories.” What objectively appears to be a rare, celebratory occurrence—the simultaneous publication of a couple’s new books from the same press, both praised later that year in the same review by Michael Heller in the New York Times—with the Oppens feels both ordinary (the common light) and fated (the shining rays of a binary star).

 

Mary Oppen was born in the kitchen of her parents’ frontier home in Kalispell, Montana, on November 28, 1908, and died on May 14, 1990, in Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, California. Meaning a Life was her first book; she turned seventy the year it was published. As she tells the story, she found poetry at the same time she and George found each other. She was eighteen when she met him in a poetry class at Corvallis State Agricultural College (now Oregon State University). On their first date, George picked her up in his roommate’s Model T Ford and they stayed out all night, “in the bright/Incredible light” of the moon, as George describes it in his poem “The Forms of Love.” They “sat and talked, made love, and talked until morning ... talked as I had never talked before, an outpouring,” as Mary describes it in Meaning a Life. She returned to her dorm the next morning and was expelled (George was suspended) for breaking the curfew. She left school, George followed her, and they decided to flee family to make a life of their own, “complete, a mated pair, with the strength of our intelligences, our passions and our sensibilities multiplied by living our lives together,” and with a shared vision of “conversation, ideas, poetry, peers.” They were eighteen! Armed with Conrad Aiken’s anthology Modern American Poets and writing, both soon getting poems published in the same Texas newspaper, for which they each received a check for $25. Then, almost as soon as she had begun, Mary stopped writing. While hitchhiking to New York, they made it as far as Dallas before she got sick, had an abortion, didn’t recover, and returned to George’s father’s home in San Francisco. She talks about writing and not writing in her autobiography:

The time and the urge to write did not come again to me until I was working on translations of St. John of the Cross in 1971 or 1972. I have quite often translated poems I wanted to read from the original French or Spanish. The St. John translation was so poor in every version I could find that I began to make what I called “transpositions.” From that I began to write again; my readings in the prophets brought me back to a search for my father, who had read Sirach, Ezekiel, the Psalms, the Song of Songs and other parts of the Bible to me. It was as though pent-up emotions were waiting to be released—I wasn’t aware of all I remembered until I tapped at the door and memories came flooding in. Apparently nothing is forgotten, but all is waiting to be called forth; I think I have reached a safe age from which to release these memories which have troubled me over the years. Perhaps they would not have been released for the asking when I was younger.

In an unpublished piece dated December 4, 1975, she shares a little more:

I started to write with the rise of the women’s movement ... without the women’s movement my writing would not have been respected, in the first instance, enough to break through the male writing world.... I have chosen to write at the time culturally prepared for me.... I am happy to be writing, very pleased with the loss of shyness that took almost sixty-seven years to accomplish.

More publicly known is that George, too, stopped writing from 1935 to 1958, a choice initially connected to what he witnessed as the “catastrophe of human lives” in 1930s America. After spending a summer in Mexico, where the Oppens had witnessed a poor country undergoing a dramatic transformation through socialization, “from colonialism and ‘peonage’ into equality of nationhood,” Mary says about their return to New York: “The city had an air of disaster; the unemployed were the refugees who had exhausted their resources and did not know where to turn.” They also “did not find honesty or sincerity in the so-called arts of the left”—with Mary’s exception of Bertolt Brecht and certain Soviet films—and instead joined the Communist Party and Workers Alliance in Brooklyn, organizing and demonstrating and participating in sit-ins in the Philippine, Puerto Rican, Syrian-Lebanese immigrant neighborhood of Borough Hall, mediating between the relief bureau and poor Southerners in Bedford–Stuyvesant, going to party training school in Utica, and there organizing union meetings and talking with industrial workers and farmers. The stories and observations Mary shares about those difficult times give a poignant account of the daily challenges grassroots activists faced in Depression-era America. Though shocked by the announcement of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, they remained active party members through the war. Writing to a friend in 1959, George pointed to another reason for not writing—the birth of their daughter, Linda, in 1940:

Julian: there were only some fifteen years that political loyalties prevented me from writing poetry. After that I had to wait for Linda to grow up.

Words arrived before the life. Meaning a life lived close to the roots, meaning into words, words a measure of the life, in pursuit of meaning, meaning through seeing, listening, thinking, “to find a way of life in which the poetry we felt within us could come out of our lives.” The first two chapters of Mary Oppen’s book—a beautifully discursive and concise prelude—lead up to the moment of their romance. She recalls her childhood in isolated Kalispell, a place where “children and Indians were the only natives,” a homesteading railroad and lumber town in the Rocky Mountains settled by families from the east, Germans and Scandinavians, three Chinese laborers, Protestants, Lutherans, and Catholics. Vivid memories of growing up in the woods with three older brothers; Papa, a postmaster and later a Ford dealer, then an investor in Chinese imports; and Mama, of Norman Catholic ancestry who worked multiple jobs and ran the house: “Rhythms from ancient times still held everywhere in the weekly order of household work.” The seasons pass with the day’s milk delivered by horse and wagon, smudge-pot summers at Flathead Lake, getting a pair of soft deerskin moccasins made at the coulée Indian encampment, preserved eggs checked against a light box in the basement, a lit candle gently placed in a snow-dome, watching the Aurora Borealis with Papa before bedtime, the Chinook wind of spring and the sound of snowmelt.

 

 

After a short stretch in Seattle, her family moved to Grants Pass, Oregon, when she was twelve, a one-street town settled by prospectors, farmers, and lumberjacks; if you were black, she notes, you weren’t permitted to stay overnight. It was the start of Prohibition, which, as Oppen reflects, “incited lawlessness and added an air of secrecy and license, an air of drunkenness, to sex.” She talks about teenage courtship being “the flushed and struggling girl finding no safe, satisfying or honorable outcome.” It was the dawn of the Nineteenth Amendment. An impoverished, filthy old couple with a derelict farm lived on their block, along with two families of Osage Indians who were oil-rich, dignified, “their beauty almost burned the town.” Oppen read everything “from Maeterlinck to Sax Rohmer” in the town’s “pitiful” library and planned her escape from a place that “held for me the greatest danger I could conceive: to be trapped in a meaningless life with birth and death in a biological repetition, without serious thought or a search for life with more meaning.” At fifteen her father died from cancer and she was suddenly plunged into a loneliness neither wilderness nor sex could alleviate. She worked and saved money for college.

—

Oppen is studious of condensation in her prose, her understated, carefully attentive sentences always testing the truth of her experiences without overreaching. She relates her and George’s chosen life together—the life that fills the rest of her book beginning with “Love & Escape”—in this way:

We were in search of an esthetic within which to live, and we were looking for it in our own American roots, in our own country. We had learned at college that poetry was being written in our own times, and that in order for us to write it was not necessary for us to ground ourselves in the academic; the ground we needed was the roads we were traveling. As we were new, so we had new roots, and we knew little of our own country. Hitchhiking became more than flight from a powerful family—our discoveries themselves became an esthetic and a disclosure.

It is a youthful, romantic vision, as well as a serious statement about the relationship between art and life, bound to their times—an aesthetic of discovery that seeks a life in art and art out of life.

Romance (against romanticism) is what encapsulates Meaning a Life most for me. It is a romance of the mind and heart, not a fairy-tale romance—though at times it almost reads like a fairy tale—but a romance with real ups and downs, immersed in the empirical world, lived through their travels in France by horse and cart, through the rise of fascism in Europe that they saw firsthand, through the Great Depression, the Second World War—when George worked a seventy-hour week as a machinist in an airplane factory in Detroit before being drafted into the army at age thirty-six, then sent to fight in the Rhineland for a year before getting seriously wounded in a foxhole, his fellow infantrymen killed—and on through nearly a decade of political exile in Mexico in the 1950s, due to the real threat of persecution under the Smith Act for their work with the Communist Party. A twentieth-century American romance of consciousness on the open road; a book of travel where the autobiographer is not the usual singular self at the center of the story but the union of two individuals. Unlike, for example, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s devastating memoir Hope Against Hope, written as a testament to her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, while the externals of her own life remain undisclosed or inconspicuous. As Mary writes, “It must be remembered that we were always two; we learned from reading and from what we saw, but conversation never ceases between us.” She echoes this in a journal she kept on their visit to Israel in 1975 at the invitation of the mayor of Jerusalem: “Of course I am I and George is most certainly George, his accomplishments are his and mine are mine, but the composite life we live is us.”

“The composite life” meaning to place with, or together. Of their beginning, setting out on their new life into the unknown, they would quote a line by Sherwood Anderson: “We wanted to know if we were any good out there.” They recalled this line in letters and interviews, as George did in 1973, writing to Dan Gerber, “the cadence produces the statement of ‘out there’ as a thing that exists, the line has more than a novelistic quality.” It also appears in a poem in Primitive, and it comes up in Mary’s book when she’s recalling their four-year stay in France with their dog Zee-wag during their early twenties. Before that, in the “strange limbo” of George’s stepmother’s drawing room in San Francisco, his stepmother who required Mary to wear a girdle and gloves when she visited, she mentions reading Lewis and Clark’s accounts of their Northwest expeditions, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévannes, and Charles M. Doughty’s Arabia Deserta. Again, they fled George’s domineering family for New York, sailing a catboat from Lake St. Clair in Michigan, navigating the rivers to the Erie Canal and through its system of locks, to Albany and down the Hudson River to Seventy-Ninth Street, the whole journey accomplished with only a road map as their guide.

 

 

While in New York she mentions reading Proust (“sinking deep into his memories and awakening to intuitive knowledge of my own”), Henry James, and Virginia Woolf (“her writing meant to me the flash of insight while a leaf falls, the knowledge of complex relations that comes in a moment of understanding”). At a party they met the poet Louis Zukofsky, who introduced them to the poet Charles Reznikoff, both poets becoming two of their closest contemporaries, particularly Reznikoff with whom they took long walks around the city and would visit often, and whose verse, Mary wrote after his death in 1976, “remained with me since I was twenty years old.” Zukofsky would edit a special issue of Poetry in 1931 that was focused on a group of poets, the “Objectivists,” whose work he thought sought the “objectively perfect” in “the direction of historical and contemporary particulars.” He pointed to Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, Reznikoff, and Robert McAlmon as practitioners, and included exemplary poems by George Oppen, Basil Bunting, Reznikoff, Williams, and Martha Champion, among others, as well as Emanuel Carnevali’s translations of Arthur Rimbaud. Furthering his statement about the meaning of objectivist, Zukofsky refers to “the lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus,” that the aim of the poem was to achieve “the totality of perfect rest” as formed by sincerity, “the accuracy of detail in writing,” for “in sincerity shapes appear concomitants of word combinations, precursors of (if there is continuance) completed sound or structure, melody or form.” In an interview Zukofsky described it simply as “thinking with the things as they exist.” Reznikoff related the term to a quote by the eleventh-century Chinese writer Wei T’ai that the translator A.C. Graham had used as an epigraph to his Poems of the Late T’ang:

Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words; this is how poetry enters deeply into us.

Or, as Mary quotes, George who attributes this to Zukofsky:

The necessity for forming a poem properly, for achieving form. That’s what “objectivist” really means. There’s been a tremendous misunderstanding about that. People assume it means the psychologically objective in attitude. It actually means the objectification of the poem, the making an object of the poem ... the attempt to construct meaning, to construct a method of thought from the imagist intensity of vision. If no one were going to challenge me, I would say, “a test of truth.” If I had to back it up I’d say anyway, “a test of sincerity”—that there is a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction.

All of this bears significantly on Oppen’s autobiography—her intellectual interests, her approach to prose, how she distills her memories and experiences, proceeding chronologically as a whole while moving back and forth in time within. In some respect her writing makes me think of the nineteenth-century Maine-lover Sarah Orne Jewett—her deep interest in local folks, her plainspoken narratives, her generous spirit, her lack of artifice. While the method, in her own graceful way, feels objectivist inclined, which doesn’t imply that it lacks warmth and humor, as that would be untrue.

For Oppen, “Happiness comes in the conversations and the learning that I have to master, even in the barest knowledge of how to get from here to there.” She steers clear of the sensational; measures the actual with the particulars of her memories; probes for insight and clarity without complaint or passing judgment. The short chapter “1938–1941: Transition” must have been one of the most difficult for Oppen to write. She says,

Birth ... I think I am afraid to try to write of it. In childbirth I was isolated; I never talked about it even to George. He was surprised to learn that giving birth was a peak emotional experience and so entirely my own that I never tried to express it. Exposure of the experience has been attempted, and although I concur with the attempt, I do not think it has yet been told in a form in which it is whole. I would wish it to remain whole, and I have preserved the wholeness of my own experience of birth by not telling it; it is too precious to me.

She proceeds to write around birth by confronting death. She speaks about her many stillbirths—holding one dead fetus in a hospital pan—about an infant who died in the cradle at six weeks, the guilt, isolation, and loss she felt because of those deaths, and how she became obsessed with desire for a child. The chapter was published in the journal Feminist Studies the same month her book came out, with different opening and closing paragraphs bracketing a similar middle section, and titled “Breath of Life.” It is a more private, more personal piece, written on the day Bird died, the small, lifeless body of their pet blue budgie recalling the smallness of their baby boy’s death years before. “Transition,” like the rest of her autobiography, deftly threads together inner and outer moments, moving seamlessly between public and private matters so that, for instance, Chamberlain’s signing of the Munich Agreement, celebrated when they are in Utica with the ringing of church bells, occurs while she’s struggling with the desperate desire to have a child. Novelists have been doing this for ages, often as a strategic way of using historical events to give the personal greater significance, but it doesn’t come across like this in Meaning a Life. In an unpublished review of the book, Anita Barrows writes about the Oppens’ “sense of life engaging both inner and outer worlds, where neither is overwhelmed by or absorbed in the other.” Through Mary’s words, the reality of their inner life converges with external events as one continually-changing occurrence.

 

 

Choosing to write again during the period of second-wave feminism, Oppen benefited from a fertile field of twentieth-century women autobiographers like Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells, Emma Goldman, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mary Hunter Austin, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Day, Mary McCarthy, Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Margaret Mead, Maxine Hong Kingston, Angela Davis, and the naturalist Sally Carrighar, whose Home to the Wilderness: A Personal Journey Oppen quotes in a journal entry: “One’s mind has to be emptied, then it fills in an unaccustomed and very rich way.” Their work opened up the autobiographical form to a multiplicity of subjectivities that inhabit and engage the world in formerly unwritten spheres of thought and experience. Their lives made way for their words; their lives and their words “culturally prepared” the times in which Oppen returned to writing. “In defying the traditional injunction to silence for women,” Margo Culley notes in her edited collection American Women’s Autobiography, “the autobiographical act itself contests woman.”

—

Before they had left New York, the Oppens decided to start a press with Zukofsky called To Publishers, using some of the inheritance money George received from his mother’s family when he turned twenty-one, and while in France printed three paperback titles: Zukofsky’s An “Objectivists” Anthology, Williams’s A Novelette and Other Prose, and, in one volume, Pound’s How to Read and The Spirit of Romance. Zero copies sold and the press folded. They visited Pound in Rapallo, when Basil and Marian Bunting lived nearby with their two children. Pound introduced them to Constantin Brancusi, Auguste Rodin, and Ossip Zadkine in Paris; Mary, who had turned to drawing and painting when she stopped writing, studied with other artists at Hilaire Hiler’s studio. This would have been a few decades after the École des Beaux-Arts first admitted female students.

When Oppen turned from writing to the fine arts in her early twenties, it wasn’t a passing phase but became a devoted practice of making pictures until the end of her life. She did have some gallery success early on, and, later in life, was even included in the 19th National Exhibition of Prints at the Library of Congress in 1963. The public side of the enterprise, however, didn’t sit well with her. This is the entirety of an unpublished piece she titled “Fame”

I know ambitious women, so I know that not only men are ambitious for worldly fame, but women do with less, at least in these times. Other things than fame satisfy me: the fame of the world let into my life threatens me, I don’t really want it. I am uncomfortable with it, I don’t want to meet that world eye to eye nor do I want to maintain a public stance. I would have to learn, master, become that. I prefer the grace of my life, lived within an ambiance that is familiar—and familiar means, of course, intimate, a life lived within security and love. It is a romantic vision, and that is what my life is; it is not only the vision, but it is what I’ve made, I would defend it, do it again. The public fame for me would have been hell. One person’s heaven may be another person’s hell. I’d choose my own way again, and it is heaven.

Fame as a threat, as hell in opposition to its lack being heaven, inverts the usual order of our contemporary aspirations. It feels like a particularly radical inversion for our times, a choice proscribed for self-preservation as an act of self-forgetting, true to her sense of individuality and freedom.

I visited Mary Oppen’s archive twice, first in December 2011 and then in August 2018, to see if there might be more autobiographical material she had written in the last decade of her life. Some of this work appears in an appended section to the new edition of Meaning a Life, to be published by New Directions in April. I’ve included the following three fragments from her papers as they each speak to a different aspect of her autobiography. The first reproduces the text of a scrap of newspaper clipped inside a red folder that contained a draft of the book; the second reproduces a typed page titled “To See”; the third reproduces the last section of a typed, three-page piece in a folder titled “At Home in the World”:

Physicians teach that dashed expectations set in motion four recognizable stages in the process of grief: denial, anger, a search for knowledge, and resolution. If the process is not honestly confronted, then the involved individual or group—or even nation—is often suspended too long at the stages of denial and anger.

Denial characterized the nation’s attitude toward the Vietnam veteran from the 1960s until the dedication last November of the Vietnam [...]

—

To see, not to travel everywhere, but to see and talk, and think, and understand. George and I have spent our lives at it. It will never be understood, we try, but we change, and life changes, it’s a new eye we see with every time we look, and a new aspect of the universe presents itself to our changed eye. But this is our search: to understand as much as we are able of the universe we are part of.

—

Michael Hamburger wrote to me, “it is a mistake to carry one’s account too far in time, to the point where memory ceases to act as filter.”

I shall have to live to be eighty to write of all the years and their times that I have lived—I plan to live long, and I find that a perspective of time makes it possible to choose from the wealth of memory, that storehouse of what I have thought, what I have seen, and heard. Memory returns this to me, purified by time, made safe for me and those close to me, safe from my sometimes capricious thoughts and judgments. Time and still more time. I was writing when I met George and only began again a few years ago. The long span of years was not silence—it was my life.

When I began to write again, a few years ago, I asked George, “Do you remember any of my early poems? I have forgotten them.” George recited two poems to me. The only ones I have from those early times.

 

 

Oppen’s papers are archived in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego. Besides drafts of poems, stories, and essays with typed corrections on pasted paper strips, vignettes of people she knew, journals pasted with scraps of real estate listings, notebooks filled with diary entries, poems, dreams, pasted recipes, and quotations (Camus, Teilhard de Chardin, Rilke, Chekhov, Thomas Traherne, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard), there are nearly two hundred pieces of finished artworks, along with numerous sketchbooks and photograph albums. The images are constructed from a variety of materials and mixed media, and are of the things Oppen saw around her: cityscapes and seascapes, trees and poppies, canyons and cordilleras, portraits of women and dancing girls, abstract figures, a still life of vases, a conch shell, clothesline, torso, kitchen, bulrushes, ports, and flowers. Watercolor, oil, gouache, acrylic, charcoal, crayon, pencil, or ink are rendered on paper, cardboard, wood, particle board, or tissue on paper. A tree is stitched onto burlap, a swan stenciled on cut paper; there are etchings of horses, owls, a frog, and a Greek goat, a tree through a window, as well as collages, mostly of flowers, and most strikingly an almost two-by-two-foot portrait of George. There is a collage-like portrait of a boy looking down at his yellow tie, raised gently with his fingertips as if sewing; he might have just used it to wipe his red upper lip, the subtly shifting colors of his face a landscape of moods and reflections.

Mary Oppen talks very little about painting in her autobiography, save for a humorous anecdote about an art class in Paris, a brief aside on Hiler, and then later, as political refugees in Mexico, she says that they both took classes at “an art school,” without mentioning it was actually the renowned La Esmeralda National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking, where José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and many other prominent artists taught at some point or another. Instead, Oppen’s lifelong engagement with painting is more immanently evident in Meaning a Life in the writing itself, through her vivid observations, her imagistic compression, her distillation of memories in a nonlinear linearity, and through the very structure of her book, which Barrows fittingly describes in her review as “a series of portraits.” Barrows writes:

So the meaning of a life: not necessarily the obvious, not “narrative” in a strict sense, but rather a series of portraits where outstanding 
details tend to capsulate the whole. More than a style of writing, I think, this is a way of seeing: a kind of integrity evident as much in the facts of Mary Oppen’s life as in the work, refusing to exaggerate, dramatize, defend, but allowing experience to stand for itself.

Meaning an honest record of experience, of not wanting to forget, that enriches our life. Meaning constructed from moments of conviction, extracted from memories, the meaning of life meaning a life.