Burt Kimmelman
The New New England Mind: Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, Henry David
Thoreau, William Bronk, Susan Howe, and the Reimagining of Place
Although different on the surface, Susan Howe’s, William Bronk’s and Henry David Thoreau’s writings all concern themselves with a fundamental connection to place—which is typified by Howe’s long poem Thorow. This connection is visceral, existential, and, while place can be imagined perhaps as sheerly physical, the connection does not foreclose upon a spiritual dimension, even when spirituality might be treated in their writings with skepticism. In this manner, furthermore, they revise the concept embedded in the phrase The New England Mind, which was made popular by Perry Miller in the mid twentieth century and is the title of one of his best known scholarly books. I wonder if Miller—given his own time frame, literary and philosophical tendencies—simply could not have conceived of Thoreau as someone who was essentially untouched by his society, a society rooted in Puritanism, in other words as someone who would more readily subscribe to the idea that spiritual immanence manifested first and foremost through direct experience. This direct experience could give rise to an understanding of the natural world—whereas Thoreau’s contemporaries conceived of a “natural” world mediated by doctrine and language per se. Yet comprehension of Thoreau would have less to do with Miller’s sense of a "religion or devotion of some kind" (The American Transcendantalists 373).
We may locate such revision in the nineteenth-century writers’s work. Howe and Bronk, taken together, reveal a Thoreau—his writings an important influence on them both—who does not quite resemble the picture of him created by a canonical scholar like Miller or F. O. Matthiesen. Hence we are presented with the delicious irony of contemplating Howe, Bronk and Thoreau within a tension in which the elder writer, who of course could never have had any notion of the younger two in a future, becomes a powerful force in the shaping of their respective writings yet also in revising our understanding of earlier New England literature and life. To be sure, through Thoreau’s writing we can see Bronk and Howe creating their respective poetic identities in response to his.
We might also realize how the work of a New England poet like Robert Lowell or Amy Lowell (to use either one as a foil) is a response to Thoreau and the entire New England tradition, but a response in keeping with Miller’s or Matthiesen’s ideas. Howe and Bronk either rejected them at some point or, simply, could never have lived with either scholar’s implied or prescribed historiography. Rather, they reveal a Thoreau who even now may be somewhat new to us. On one count Bronk and Howe only corroborate the view of him as being unconventional in his life and writing. Whether or not we see the two younger poets’ departures from convention as having roots in the older writer is another matter. Even as the work of the two younger figures must appear at first glance to be dramatically different from his (and from one another’s, in some respects), however, it becomes clear that they found in Thoreau what we might call, without irony, a kindred spirit. They may have found that in one another too.
That is, we may be able to speak of friendship, to put this in a very Thoreauvian way, in their respective writings after, about, and through him. They disclose a Thoreau who fits more into their understanding of the world, a world including a New England history that fits into their shared sensibility of friendship, poetry, place, modern New England, and the Lake George region of New York, nearby where Thorow is composed. Yet what we should not overlook is another, parallel influence in their lives—the picture of Thoreau created by Matthiesen and Miller, who played roles in both Bronk’s and Howe’s early maturation, their way of thinking and, I would say in large, in their way of writing. As Ian Frederick Finseth has aptly put it, Miller asserted “that the Transcendentalists still retained in their characters certain vestiges of New England Puritanism, and that in their reaction against the ‘pale negations’ of Unitarianism, they tapped into the grittier pietistic side of Calvinism in which New England culture had been steeped” (par. 8). I don’t wish to claim that either Howe or Bronk do anything like rescue Thoreau from our comprehension of him emerging out of Matthiesen’s study The American Renaissance, or Miller’s The Transcendentalists and The New England Mind. It’s not the case, either, that Bronk and Howe exactly discover or shape a Thoreau for our time. The elder writer can continue to reside within the realm of experience Miller describes as the “New England mind.”
How Thoreau sees the world, himself and his art in it is conceptualized in one way by Miller or Matthiesen, in another by Howe or Bronk. Miller maintains that Thoreau’s “approach to the particular presumed an abstract rationale” (he does go on to say that for Thoreau “any given fact could flower into a truth” [The Transcendetalists 4]). Matthiesen characterizes Thoreau as a writer who “often pushed to a rigorous extreme not merely the supremacy of nature over art and of content over form, but also that of the artist’s life over his work” (The American Renaissance 154). Place is not absent, furthermore, at least as a concept. So, is there only a difference of emphasis when comparing these scholars’ view of Thoreau with that of Howe’s and Bronk’s? Place suffuses Thoreau. For Howe and Bronk—also profoundly taken by place, also profoundly taken by the New England region—religion, belief, divine presence, or spirituality is nondoctrinal. Perhaps this was the case for Thoreau too. What is important is experience. For Howe and Bronk the question of religion or belief or divine power or spirituality or even presence may at times be relevant, but never in any doctrinal way. What is key for them is their being able to experience time and place directly and essentially—which, for Thoreau, is a sine qua non. The category of place becomes a crucial element in the work of all three. How place as such is foregrounded in their work is, moreover, key to understanding not only each writer’s peculiar presence in the writing, but also its relationship to the fact of being a poet, in fundamental terms a writer.
What problematizes their respective thinking about, and writing in response to, place is the act of naming. Of the three writers it is Howe for whom place in and of itself is made central; this occurs in Thorow, a meditation on place, and one that is framed by her attention to the very act of naming. In a headnote to Thorow she complains that the town of Lake George—a run-down, commercialized overlay of majestic natural terrain (on the same latitude and not far from Barre, Vermont)—is a sad “Simulacrum” (41). Quickly enough, the simulacra of names, perhaps even language itself, becomes the problem. She goes “down to unknown regions of indifferentiation" in her walks. “The Adirondacks occupied me,” she reports (44). Beyond this poem she has said of "the whole Lake George area" that "[i]t transformed my own writing.” She lived “in a small cabin in an abandoned for the winter motel, beside the lake alone and out of the center of town etc. under [Thoreau’s] influence in a way” (Email to author [6 March 2012]). This self-locus is common in Bronk. It is contemplated by him, for example, in his 1989 collection Death Is the Place—a book Howe has “kept […] close beside me […]. The poems in that collection amaze me with their philosophical and poetic reach (even religious in the way I think of religion). [….] I cannot get over what he produced then, and I turn to them time and again” (Email to author [6 October 2011]).
Howe’s connection to Bronk is not limited to a shared interest in Thoreau. She may not have been especially thinking of him when she was writing Thorow but they shared an outlook and, while the look of their poems and their diction are different, the fact is that they shared a way of understanding language, poetry as well as, let’s call it, reality. A useful analogue for considering them together is Bronk’s relationship with Charles Olson in a number of respects but not least of all as concerns his book Call Me Ishmael. Howe has said that the book "enthralled me when I first read it" ("Interview with Ed Foster" 17); it was important to her by the time she went to live in Lake George. Bronk’s collection of essays on Thoreau, Melville and Whitman, which he titled The Brother in Elysium, shares Olson’s outlook. And the two books stand in stark contrast to Matthiesen’s and Miller’s respective studies. While her own New England study, My Emily Dickinson, does not involve itself with Melville and was written much later (Bronk began his essays in 1939, his work interrupted by the war), nevertheless the critical approach and style of it warrant grouping it with his and Olson’s New England meditations. Her approach in writing, in response to Thoreau, furthermore, reveals a kinship with Bronk as evinced by his own written engagements with Thoreau's work.
Bronk and Olson admired one another but Bronk would not praise Olson’s poetry that he claimed not to be able to get a handle on (conversely, Olson did praise Bronk's work). This was the way Bronk spoke about most contemporaries’ work, though—a fact germane to thinking about the Howe-Bronk connection (as we shall see below). Robert Creeley, in introducing Olson's Collected Prose, writes of Olson's Call Me Ishmael as follows.
When I found the book and read it, I was astounded [. . . .] we share [. . .] a sense of person from a place, New England. Like the Pequod's crew, we are fact of a democracy, which does not think of itself a such but so functions. We believe in knowing, gnosis, we take over various worlds as a primary. (xi)
Surely Thoreau would have subscribed to such sentiments. Would Bronk or Howe?
Bronk grew up very near Lake George. He attended Dartmouth. It proved to be an unhappy college experience but for his professor Sidney Cox through whom he met Robert Frost, read Wallace Stevens and became friends with Samuel French Morse, the Stevens biographer and editor. Then Bronk attended Harvard, taking a course with Matthiesen and leaving after a year, now at the graduate level the academic study distasteful. As for Howe, she knew both Matthiesen and Miller in her youth; they were friends of the family, her father their Harvard colleague. I think the iconoclasm of her utterly original poetics bears out the argument that she chose to escape what was a sterile academic world and its approach to literature. Stylistically not only her poetry but also criticism like her My Emily Dickinson places her in diametric opposition to Miller and Matthiesen.
What Peter Nicholls has said about Howe can also be applied to Bronk. She “regards herself,” Nicholls believes, "as first and foremost a poet, but she is also a freelance historian in a long and distinguished line which includes writers such as Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, each of whom shared a keen sense of American history as a carefully policed regime of knowledge." (“Unsettling” 586)
I cannot help but feel that, in the lives of both Howe and Bronk, a sort of filial rebellion took place, which helped to establish a ground for their respective writings and for their, let’s say, intellectual, in some sense spiritual, engagements with a number of New England and rural New York writers. These engagements manifested in the kind of writing that would not normally be countenanced in academe. It was the kind of writing that found its compass in, among others, a vital existential encounter such as the one I am arguing they enjoyed with Thoreau.[i]
Having been granted a residency at the Glens Falls library in 1987, which led to her composing of Thorow, Howe visited Bronk in nearby Hudson Falls where he lived. He treated her in a way not atypical of him. “[H]e wasn’t very friendly—crusty even,” she recalls. “I loved Glens Falls [near Lake George] and the library there and that whole Lake George area. [. . .] I feel badly I didn’t make more of an effort to break through the shell he presented” (Email to author [6 October 2011]). While Bronk could be cool, even cold to people, including other writers, I was surprised to learn of this meeting between them, inasmuch as my own recollection of visiting Bronk at about this time stands in jarring contrast. Yes, he could be diffident and in his later years he was increasingly less interested in people’s poems other than his own (as he would be quick to mention). Not long after Howe’s overture, however, he spoke kindly, even admiringly of her. I was really struck by what he had to say not only because he didn't do that sort of thing, but because her work was seemingly so dissimilar to his, her writing maybe closer to The Maximus Poems. (I queried Ed Foster about this period; his memory of Bronk’s feelings about her corroborate my own [Email to author (16 June 2012)].)
So, what might Howe and Bronk have seen in the other's work, exactly? Especially, how might their respective takes on Thoreau not only help us profitably to consider them now together, but also, how might looking at the two of them together shed light on a New England experience that produces, maybe in nascence in Thoreau, a vision and possibly a poetics that in large might have been shared by an Olson or a Robert Creeley, a Cid Corman, Ted Enslin, maybe a Rosemary or Keith Waldrop—all usually thought of in terms of “The New American Poetry” and all of the New England region—rather than a Robert Lowell, maybe more recently his student Gail Mazur, or Rosanna Warren (the daughter or Robert Penn Warren and the scholar/critic Eleanor Clark)?
Let me answer my questions by first turning back to Howe’s concern for naming in Thorow, which has garnered a lot of critical commentary. Kornelia Freitag has described Howe’s aim in this poem as a striving to “[capture] the locality of Lake George” through reckoning its
history of cultural confrontations which were at once locally specific and part of the broader process of the creation of “the New World.” While the place seems disconnected from any history, Howe finds and explores the link in the language of a wide range of Western cultural texts. Indian place names (Swegachey, Millinocket) are shown to be more than relics of time gone by. They function as symptoms of the racial, economic, social, religious, or psychological repressed. (133)
The names are of especial importance for Howe. “Indian names lead [to the] understory,” she writes (Thorow 52). This deft coinage, "understory," refers to both a linguistic and conceptual substrate, and as a history, Freitag adds, “of the place she inspects but further to the ‘understory of anotherword’, of great cultural texts of Western and American civilization” (Freitag 133; Howe 50).
Howe’s thinking about naming (pretty much as stipulated in that headnote to Thorow) also hints at a fundamental engagement with place and even more basically with what I’d like to call lived time. “I was trying to paint a landscape in that poem,” she has also said. In continuing to explain what she means by this remark she reports, however, that her "vision of the lake [Lake George] was not so much in space as in time. I was very much aware of the commercialization and near ruin at the edge of the water, in the town itself, all around—but I felt outside of time or in an earlier time and that was what I had to get to on paper." ("Interview [with Tom Beckett]" 20-21; in White "The Landscapes" 242)
This task becomes all the more urgent because "[f]or some reason this beautiful body of water has attracted violence and greed ever since the Europeans first saw it. I thought I could feel it when it was pure, enchanted, nameless” (20-21).
Is there something about the New England landscape, about New England place, which gives rise to such thinking? Naming is a critical matter for Thoreau, famously so in “The Ponds” chapter of Walden: “Flints’ Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature,” he writes in outrage, continuing as follows.
What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who [. . .] regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers [....] let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him [. . .] whose presence perchance cursed all the shore; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow, — there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes, — and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. (163)
Bronk could have had this passage or others like it from Thoreau in mind when he wrote his poem “Flowers, the World and My Friend, Thoreau” (which appeared in his early collected poems, in 1982):
It no longer matters what the names of flowers are.
Some I remember; others forget: ones
I never thought I should. Yes, tell me one.
I like to hear that. I may have forgotten again
next week. There's that yellow one whose name
I used to know. It's blossoming, secure
as ever as I walk by looking at it,
not saying its name or needing to.
Henry, it's true as you said it was, that this
is a world where there are flowers. Though it isn't our truth,
it's a truth we embrace with gratitude:
how should we endure our dourness otherwise?
And we feel an eager desire to make it ours,
making the flowers ours by naming them.
But they stay their own and it doesn't become our truth.
We live with it; we live with othernesses
as strangers live together in crowds. Truths
of strangeness jostle me; I jostle them
walking past them as I do past clumps of flowers.
Flowers, I know you, not knowing your name.
(LS 217)
Howe’s “otherstory” and Bronk’s alternate truth (“it doesn't become our truth “) and “othernesses,” and perhaps a “dourness” shared with Thoreau—how tantalizing to think of Howe reading “The Ponds,” maybe having it in mind when she composes these lines in Thorow:
The origin of property
that leads here Depth
Indian names lead here
Bars of a social system
Starting for Lost Pond
psychology of the lost
First precarious Eden[.]
(52)
Do “Indian names” seek to possess?
Likewise, Bronk notes in a Thoreau essay titled “Friendship” that “The difficulties of expression led Thoreau to leave his friendships, as here in reference to language, almost unexpressed” (74). And yet Thoreau realized that poetry was the best hope for capturing the experience of place. Here in Thorow we perhaps see Howe in conversation with this belief:
Eating nothing but hominy
Scribbling the ineffable
See only the tracks of rabbit
A mouse-nest of grass
(47)
Note the semiotics in this passage. Further on she writes:
Only step
As surveyor of the Wood
Only Step
(48)
And shortly thereafter she speaks of the
Expectation of Epiphany
Not to look off from it
but to look at it
Original of the Otherside
understory of anotherword
(50)
Is she referring to herself when she writes of a “Child of the Adirondacks / taking notes like a spy”? Is she acting as the good “Scout” (43) she has identified at the start of her poem, who now has put down in the Lake George country, who now observes a “Most mysterious river // on the confined brink” (53)? These and other lines in Thorow evoke a trope crucial to Thoreau, one that might portray his spirituality as being integral in his sense of essential connection with nature, in his direct engagement of the palpable world. The trope is implicit in his accusation against the farmer Flint who wants to drain his pond and sell “the mud at its bottom” (above).
Thoreau also says the pond “was made deep and pure for a symbol” (233). Here we find him intent upon establishing a deeply embedded, controlling figure that will extend throughout his writing: “While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless,” Thoreau writes. In fact, however, “[t]here is a solid bottom everywhere” (267). That is to say, as Ira Chernus explains, “beneath the finite appearances of life there is an infinite, ultimate reality that is the foundation of everything.” For Thoreau, in other words, "[u]ltimate reality is not something set apart from the world; it is the essence of the world and all that is in it" (Chernus n.p.).
Within the world conditioned in this way Thoreau is capable of penning his famous passage, surely known to Howe and Bronk, beginning with the phrase “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” Thoreau pushes the metaphor along to great effect: “I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains" (83). What he means to be understood is that, as Chernus puts it, "the ‘solid bottom’ of reality is actually a dynamic process of spiritual powers, which are, in Thoreau’s words, ‘identified with the substance of things’, and from which ‘they cannot be separated’” (Chernus n.p.; Thoreau 112).
Bronk could have had such a philosophical construct in mind when he wrote in Death Is the Place that
It isn’t what we say of reality
is metaphor but reality itself
which is. Reality as God or as
cosmos or as, more often, both at once
—whatever—reality is metaphor
not more not less and, being that,
is real as can be and not quite real:
(36)
He ends the poem with this tease: "always brilliantly true and less than whole." In Thorow Howe writes:
So many true things
which are not truth itself
We are too finite
(49)
Further on, she ties in her theme of naming, of simulacra:
The expanse of unconcealment
so different from all maps
Spiritual typography of elegy
Nature in us as a Nature
the actual one the ideal Self
(55)
Names, maps—all inscriptions—cannot comprehend the natural world Thoreau felt was imbued with the eternal yet which in human perception existed in time—or, as Elisabeth Joyce has said, in Howe "[t]he map becomes […] an emblem of cultural identity that renders the incoherence and irrationality of the wild into the tamed logic of civilization" (35; cf. 38). In an essay Bronk titles “The Occupation of Space—Palenque” (written prior to Thorow) he concurs: “The names of places are names we have given them.” Furthermore, in considering the act of naming, he understands how the
more precisely we try to locate ourselves, the more we are sent back to the realization that, except as we have imposed a shape on
environment by occupying it, it is still as described in Genesis in the first creation, without form and void and with darkness covering the face
of the deep.” (Vectors and Smoothable Curves 22)
“The Occupation of Space” was written as part of the large collection of his essays The Brother in Elysium. The collection began with a series of prose meditations on Thoreau, Melville and Whitman. Having to be finished after the war, the writing straddled the publication of Matthiesen’s American Renaissance and coincided with Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, the two works so very different in kind. Bronk got most of the Thoreau essays in place for the future book before entering the service, which would comprise a section he titled Silence and Henry Thoreau. The first of these, “Friendship,” argues as follows.
To nourish and care for the spirit,—this was what friendship was as Thoreau saw it. […] in its simplest, most basic form, as the force which motivated all the rest of the complex, friendship was an exalting and powerful love. It was a kind of love that went forth with no particular object in view and was wholly self-generated. It neither arose from, nor was directed toward, anything else in the world. This love without reference is the basis of friendship in Thoreau. [….] He was almost driven to believe that a sympathy; with man and a sympathy with nature could not consist of one another, —that those qualities that bring you near to one estrange you from the other. And yet he knew that this was not so, and indeed that nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all. [. . .].
Bronk then quotes Thoreau as saying that “’man is all in all, Nature nothing, but as she draws him out and reflects him’” (69-70; Thoreau Journals 166).
Toward the end of Thorow, perhaps as Howe’s way of beginning a conclusion to the poem, we find this:
You are of me & I of you, I cannot tell
Where you leave off and I begin
selving
forfending
Immeadeat Settlem
but wandering
(58)
And yet, as Bronk points out several pages further on in “Friendship” (and as I quoted earlier), “[t]he difficulties of expression led Thoreau to leave his friendships, as here in reference to language, almost unexpressed” (74)—and, indeed, in Howe’s lines there is not merely an open-endedness of reference but a sense of the ineffable. Note, now, how Bronk continues: “Thoreau, who was absorbed in being rather than in expression, was hesitant of names, of words, of forms of any sort. He was aware of their ambivalent power which is the power of the metaphor, suggestive of truth, suggestive of being, but such that the truth is not literally in it” (74-75). Howe writes of “The source of Snow / the nearness of Poetry” (50). Is poetry for her, as well as for Bronk and Thoreau, an attempt to elude the hegemonic act of naming?
Somehow through writing but also in spite of it, ironically perhaps, Bronk comes to assert in another of his essays that “to the observer, the life lived is a kind of fiction. Actuality is a work of the imagination only” (“The Actual and the Real in Thoreau” 27). But what of the seer herself? Compare his comment with Howe's “the source of snow” lines, and then compare it with these poems from Death Is the Place:
Vicarious
Except from our
mortality
how should
infinite
eternal know
how beautiful
the brief world
is to us?
Mundane
What we do gets so natural
feels so good to us
we forget what we are
and any interruption,
lessening,
even the final breaking off
seems terrible
and wrong.
Bronk’s epistemological stance may not be exclusively New England in kind. It was shared, however, by Emily Dickinson. And My Emily Dickinson, Howe’s study of this forerunner, like Bronk's prose on Thoreau, is an extended meditation of great poetic as well as critical and scholarly stature. Howe writes that Dickinson "looked right into the nature of things / words, straight through,—to the fearful apprehension that there was no Truth, only mystery beyond mystery” (138). The tangible world is a manifestation of an intangible—except, perhaps, that the intangible might become tangible through poetry, and that this same immanence makes not only communion between person and place possible but also communion between person and person.
Not unlike friendship, this way of making art is one that—as commented upon by all three writers—must be grounded in and dependent upon a person’s essential experience of the natural world. Such an apprehension comes out of a duality: on the one hand, the notion of a metaphor, on the other the ultimate reality of metaphor. In Thorow Howe addresses this phenomenon, as does Bronk in a number of poems. Thoreau, her poem's namesake, has provided the ground for their work. The question of metaphor, the question actually of knowing, leads inevitably to a questioning of the efficacy of art, indeed the efficacy of writing.
Thoreau's “Thursday” chapter in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is another of Howe’s “favorite pieces of his writing”; she “knew it well” by the time she arrived to stay in Lake George (Email to author [16 June 2012]). Recently she highlighted the importance to her of a comment by Thoreau in it about artistic creation (repeating what she said in a May 1987 letter to John Taggart): “’The talent of composition is very dangerous,—the striking out the heart of life at a blow, as the Indian takes off a scalp. I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it’” (Email to author [16 June 2012]; Thoreau 329).[ii] Consider this passage in the context of these lines of Howe’s: “From the Fort but the snow / falling very deep / remained a fortnight / Two to view the Fort & get a scalp / domain of transcendental subjectivity [etc.]" (43). Does art kill only so there can be resurrection? By way of explaining Thoreau’s definition of composition here, I offer this as the key passage from the “Thursday” chapter:
Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.
The expressions of the poet cannot be analyzed; his sentence is one word, whose syllables are words. There are indeed no words quite worthy to be set
to his music.
(328)
In discussing Bronk's early poem “The Arts and Death: A Fugue for Sidney Cox,” Henry Weinfield maintains that
in Bronk's vision, human beings are compelled to a kind of Sisyphean attempt to get closer and closer to a truth that must always elude them. This is perhaps more true of the artist even than the philosopher: not because there is anything inherently deficient in art, and not, as Socrates supposed in The Republic, because art is two steps removed from reality, but, on the contrary, because it is the artist who is most driven by desire to penetrate the whole. (162).
Bronk’s final poem in life had no title, was simply this:
Art isn’t made; it’s in the world almost
unseen but found existent there. We paint,
we score the sound in music, we write it down.
(Bursts of Light 300)
Yet, as Bronk writes in Death Is the Place, “the little we know or do doesn’t make the form / and nature of things” (“Worksong” 44).
What is left for me to say—in contemplating Howe, Bronk and Thoreau together—has to do with the nature of the Northeastern winter and how it may have played a part in forging a kinship among them, and maybe implicitly what it has to do with the creative act for each of them. Bronk is the poet of winter. His “crustiness,” as Howe has called it (above), comes from it. I wonder if the Thoreauvian way of seeing things could have emerged apart from it, winter's stark reckoning demanding a severe, perhaps an absolute, clarity. Howe said recently, about her stay in Lake George and the birth of Thorow, that “the landscape and the frozen lake and the pines in snow wrote it. The entire lake was so frozen you could walk out to the center. I remember the terror and lure of walking out on ice.” She also said then, in speaking about Bronk and her attempt to reach him (her doing so indicating how Thorow got written): “I think we [i.e., she and Bronk] have some kind of religious belief in common. If one can call it that in this secular age. A belief in the sacramental nature of poetry and of winter light” (Email to author [16 June 2012]).
Thinking of this remark I reproduce here, simply, Howe’s favorite poem from Death Is the Place (Email to author [16 June 2012]), entitled “Emptying Out”:
How it is like the first day now
—the bareness between the evening and the morning which were the first day.
Winter now and light
comes late and it is celebrant
and just the light is enough, the idea of light,
the waking naked to it. Then evening coming on
and the memory of light in the eased dark
and nakedness again, the lying down.
(DITP 19).
I wonder if a sense of desolation is what sponsors their writing often enough and particularly Thorow—the world with its beautifully illusory states stripped away so that a truth beyond naming is available and the writing of it, the accession of immanent metaphor, a memorializing of that moment of existential insight. I believe Howe realizes she has taken this experience from Thoreau. As for Bronk and Lake George, she writes that the region “and its history [….] did give one a very particular feeling about time and the power of local history. Winter. He [Bronk] gets it so perfectly right […]” (Email to author [16 June 2012]).
WORKS CITED
Bronk, William. "The Actual and the Real in Thoreau," Thoreau Quarterly: A Journal of Literary and Philosophical Studies, 14 (Spring 1982): 26-27.
_____.The Brother in Elysium: Ideas of Friendship and Society in the United States. New Rochelle, New York: The Elizabeth Press, 1980.
_____. Bursts of Light: The Collected Later Poems. Jersey City: Talisman House, 2012.
_____. Death Is the Place. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989.
_____. Life Supports: New and Collected Poems, New Edition. 1981. Jersey City: Talisman House Publishers, 1997.
_____.Vectors and Smoothable Curves: Collected Essays, New Edition. 1983. Jersey City: Talisman House Publishers, 1997.
Chernus, Ira. American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, Books, 2004.
Cf. http://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus/NonviolenceBook/Thoreau.htm. Accessed 4 January 2015.
Creeley, Robert. "Introduction." Charles Olson: Collected Prose. Eds. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. xi-xvi.
Finseth, Ian Frederick. "Liquid Fire Within Me": Language, Self and Society in Transcendentalism and Early Evangelicalism, 1820-1860. M.A. Thesis,
1995. http://thoreau.eserver.org/amertran.html. Accessed 5 January 2015.
Freitag, Kornelia. "Susan Howe's Thorow(s): The Politics of Place and Time in Postmodern Poetry." A World of Local Voices: Poetry in English Today.
Eds. Klaus Martens, Paul Morris, and Arlette Warken. Wurzburg: King & Neumann, 2003. 124-35.
Howe, Susan. "Interview with Ed Foster." Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 4 (Spring 1990): 14–38.
_____. “Interview [with Tom Beckett].” The Difficulties 3.2 (1989): 17-27. _____. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1985.
_____. Thorow. Singularities. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1990.
Joyce, Elisabeth. "The Small Space of a Pause": Susan Howe's Poetry and the Spaces Between. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2010. Matthiesen, F. O.
The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 1941.
Miller, Perry. Ed. The American Transcendentalists, Their Prose and Poetry. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957.
_____. The New England Mind. 2 Vol. 1953. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2014.
_____. Ed. and Intr. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology. 1950. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978.
Montgomery, Will. “Appropriating Primal Indeterminacy: Language, Landscape and Postmodern Poetics in Susan Howe's Thorow.” Textual Practice 20.4
(2006): 739–57
Nicholls, Peter. "Unsettling the Wilderness: I and American History.” Contemporary Literature 37 (1996): 586–601.
Olson, Charles. Call Me Ishmael. 1947. New York: Grove P, 1958.
_____. Charles Olson: Collected Prose. Eds. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997
_____. The Maximus Poems. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.
Thoreau, Henry David. Journals. The Heart of Thoreau's Journals. 1927. Ed. Odell Shepard. New York: Dover / Houghton Mifflin, 1967. _____.
Thoreau’s Walden. Ed., Intr. Annot. Raymond McDonald Alden. No loc.: Ulan Press / JPS Norton, 2012.
_____. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Eds. Carl F. Hovde, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1980.
White, Jenny L. “The Landscapes of Susan Howe's ‘Thorow’.” Contemporary Literature, 47.2 (July 2006): 236-260. Weinfield, Henry. The Music of
Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2009.
[i] In passing it should be mentioned that Howe and Bronk have written eloquently about Melville, especially Billy Budd.
[ii] Cf. Montgomery “Appropriating” 739 and n. 1 on p. 752 that cites this quote used by Howe in a letter to Taggart of 29 May 1987.
The New New England Mind: Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, Henry David
Thoreau, William Bronk, Susan Howe, and the Reimagining of Place
Although different on the surface, Susan Howe’s, William Bronk’s and Henry David Thoreau’s writings all concern themselves with a fundamental connection to place—which is typified by Howe’s long poem Thorow. This connection is visceral, existential, and, while place can be imagined perhaps as sheerly physical, the connection does not foreclose upon a spiritual dimension, even when spirituality might be treated in their writings with skepticism. In this manner, furthermore, they revise the concept embedded in the phrase The New England Mind, which was made popular by Perry Miller in the mid twentieth century and is the title of one of his best known scholarly books. I wonder if Miller—given his own time frame, literary and philosophical tendencies—simply could not have conceived of Thoreau as someone who was essentially untouched by his society, a society rooted in Puritanism, in other words as someone who would more readily subscribe to the idea that spiritual immanence manifested first and foremost through direct experience. This direct experience could give rise to an understanding of the natural world—whereas Thoreau’s contemporaries conceived of a “natural” world mediated by doctrine and language per se. Yet comprehension of Thoreau would have less to do with Miller’s sense of a "religion or devotion of some kind" (The American Transcendantalists 373).
We may locate such revision in the nineteenth-century writers’s work. Howe and Bronk, taken together, reveal a Thoreau—his writings an important influence on them both—who does not quite resemble the picture of him created by a canonical scholar like Miller or F. O. Matthiesen. Hence we are presented with the delicious irony of contemplating Howe, Bronk and Thoreau within a tension in which the elder writer, who of course could never have had any notion of the younger two in a future, becomes a powerful force in the shaping of their respective writings yet also in revising our understanding of earlier New England literature and life. To be sure, through Thoreau’s writing we can see Bronk and Howe creating their respective poetic identities in response to his.
We might also realize how the work of a New England poet like Robert Lowell or Amy Lowell (to use either one as a foil) is a response to Thoreau and the entire New England tradition, but a response in keeping with Miller’s or Matthiesen’s ideas. Howe and Bronk either rejected them at some point or, simply, could never have lived with either scholar’s implied or prescribed historiography. Rather, they reveal a Thoreau who even now may be somewhat new to us. On one count Bronk and Howe only corroborate the view of him as being unconventional in his life and writing. Whether or not we see the two younger poets’ departures from convention as having roots in the older writer is another matter. Even as the work of the two younger figures must appear at first glance to be dramatically different from his (and from one another’s, in some respects), however, it becomes clear that they found in Thoreau what we might call, without irony, a kindred spirit. They may have found that in one another too.
That is, we may be able to speak of friendship, to put this in a very Thoreauvian way, in their respective writings after, about, and through him. They disclose a Thoreau who fits more into their understanding of the world, a world including a New England history that fits into their shared sensibility of friendship, poetry, place, modern New England, and the Lake George region of New York, nearby where Thorow is composed. Yet what we should not overlook is another, parallel influence in their lives—the picture of Thoreau created by Matthiesen and Miller, who played roles in both Bronk’s and Howe’s early maturation, their way of thinking and, I would say in large, in their way of writing. As Ian Frederick Finseth has aptly put it, Miller asserted “that the Transcendentalists still retained in their characters certain vestiges of New England Puritanism, and that in their reaction against the ‘pale negations’ of Unitarianism, they tapped into the grittier pietistic side of Calvinism in which New England culture had been steeped” (par. 8). I don’t wish to claim that either Howe or Bronk do anything like rescue Thoreau from our comprehension of him emerging out of Matthiesen’s study The American Renaissance, or Miller’s The Transcendentalists and The New England Mind. It’s not the case, either, that Bronk and Howe exactly discover or shape a Thoreau for our time. The elder writer can continue to reside within the realm of experience Miller describes as the “New England mind.”
How Thoreau sees the world, himself and his art in it is conceptualized in one way by Miller or Matthiesen, in another by Howe or Bronk. Miller maintains that Thoreau’s “approach to the particular presumed an abstract rationale” (he does go on to say that for Thoreau “any given fact could flower into a truth” [The Transcendetalists 4]). Matthiesen characterizes Thoreau as a writer who “often pushed to a rigorous extreme not merely the supremacy of nature over art and of content over form, but also that of the artist’s life over his work” (The American Renaissance 154). Place is not absent, furthermore, at least as a concept. So, is there only a difference of emphasis when comparing these scholars’ view of Thoreau with that of Howe’s and Bronk’s? Place suffuses Thoreau. For Howe and Bronk—also profoundly taken by place, also profoundly taken by the New England region—religion, belief, divine presence, or spirituality is nondoctrinal. Perhaps this was the case for Thoreau too. What is important is experience. For Howe and Bronk the question of religion or belief or divine power or spirituality or even presence may at times be relevant, but never in any doctrinal way. What is key for them is their being able to experience time and place directly and essentially—which, for Thoreau, is a sine qua non. The category of place becomes a crucial element in the work of all three. How place as such is foregrounded in their work is, moreover, key to understanding not only each writer’s peculiar presence in the writing, but also its relationship to the fact of being a poet, in fundamental terms a writer.
What problematizes their respective thinking about, and writing in response to, place is the act of naming. Of the three writers it is Howe for whom place in and of itself is made central; this occurs in Thorow, a meditation on place, and one that is framed by her attention to the very act of naming. In a headnote to Thorow she complains that the town of Lake George—a run-down, commercialized overlay of majestic natural terrain (on the same latitude and not far from Barre, Vermont)—is a sad “Simulacrum” (41). Quickly enough, the simulacra of names, perhaps even language itself, becomes the problem. She goes “down to unknown regions of indifferentiation" in her walks. “The Adirondacks occupied me,” she reports (44). Beyond this poem she has said of "the whole Lake George area" that "[i]t transformed my own writing.” She lived “in a small cabin in an abandoned for the winter motel, beside the lake alone and out of the center of town etc. under [Thoreau’s] influence in a way” (Email to author [6 March 2012]). This self-locus is common in Bronk. It is contemplated by him, for example, in his 1989 collection Death Is the Place—a book Howe has “kept […] close beside me […]. The poems in that collection amaze me with their philosophical and poetic reach (even religious in the way I think of religion). [….] I cannot get over what he produced then, and I turn to them time and again” (Email to author [6 October 2011]).
Howe’s connection to Bronk is not limited to a shared interest in Thoreau. She may not have been especially thinking of him when she was writing Thorow but they shared an outlook and, while the look of their poems and their diction are different, the fact is that they shared a way of understanding language, poetry as well as, let’s call it, reality. A useful analogue for considering them together is Bronk’s relationship with Charles Olson in a number of respects but not least of all as concerns his book Call Me Ishmael. Howe has said that the book "enthralled me when I first read it" ("Interview with Ed Foster" 17); it was important to her by the time she went to live in Lake George. Bronk’s collection of essays on Thoreau, Melville and Whitman, which he titled The Brother in Elysium, shares Olson’s outlook. And the two books stand in stark contrast to Matthiesen’s and Miller’s respective studies. While her own New England study, My Emily Dickinson, does not involve itself with Melville and was written much later (Bronk began his essays in 1939, his work interrupted by the war), nevertheless the critical approach and style of it warrant grouping it with his and Olson’s New England meditations. Her approach in writing, in response to Thoreau, furthermore, reveals a kinship with Bronk as evinced by his own written engagements with Thoreau's work.
Bronk and Olson admired one another but Bronk would not praise Olson’s poetry that he claimed not to be able to get a handle on (conversely, Olson did praise Bronk's work). This was the way Bronk spoke about most contemporaries’ work, though—a fact germane to thinking about the Howe-Bronk connection (as we shall see below). Robert Creeley, in introducing Olson's Collected Prose, writes of Olson's Call Me Ishmael as follows.
When I found the book and read it, I was astounded [. . . .] we share [. . .] a sense of person from a place, New England. Like the Pequod's crew, we are fact of a democracy, which does not think of itself a such but so functions. We believe in knowing, gnosis, we take over various worlds as a primary. (xi)
Surely Thoreau would have subscribed to such sentiments. Would Bronk or Howe?
Bronk grew up very near Lake George. He attended Dartmouth. It proved to be an unhappy college experience but for his professor Sidney Cox through whom he met Robert Frost, read Wallace Stevens and became friends with Samuel French Morse, the Stevens biographer and editor. Then Bronk attended Harvard, taking a course with Matthiesen and leaving after a year, now at the graduate level the academic study distasteful. As for Howe, she knew both Matthiesen and Miller in her youth; they were friends of the family, her father their Harvard colleague. I think the iconoclasm of her utterly original poetics bears out the argument that she chose to escape what was a sterile academic world and its approach to literature. Stylistically not only her poetry but also criticism like her My Emily Dickinson places her in diametric opposition to Miller and Matthiesen.
What Peter Nicholls has said about Howe can also be applied to Bronk. She “regards herself,” Nicholls believes, "as first and foremost a poet, but she is also a freelance historian in a long and distinguished line which includes writers such as Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, each of whom shared a keen sense of American history as a carefully policed regime of knowledge." (“Unsettling” 586)
I cannot help but feel that, in the lives of both Howe and Bronk, a sort of filial rebellion took place, which helped to establish a ground for their respective writings and for their, let’s say, intellectual, in some sense spiritual, engagements with a number of New England and rural New York writers. These engagements manifested in the kind of writing that would not normally be countenanced in academe. It was the kind of writing that found its compass in, among others, a vital existential encounter such as the one I am arguing they enjoyed with Thoreau.[i]
Having been granted a residency at the Glens Falls library in 1987, which led to her composing of Thorow, Howe visited Bronk in nearby Hudson Falls where he lived. He treated her in a way not atypical of him. “[H]e wasn’t very friendly—crusty even,” she recalls. “I loved Glens Falls [near Lake George] and the library there and that whole Lake George area. [. . .] I feel badly I didn’t make more of an effort to break through the shell he presented” (Email to author [6 October 2011]). While Bronk could be cool, even cold to people, including other writers, I was surprised to learn of this meeting between them, inasmuch as my own recollection of visiting Bronk at about this time stands in jarring contrast. Yes, he could be diffident and in his later years he was increasingly less interested in people’s poems other than his own (as he would be quick to mention). Not long after Howe’s overture, however, he spoke kindly, even admiringly of her. I was really struck by what he had to say not only because he didn't do that sort of thing, but because her work was seemingly so dissimilar to his, her writing maybe closer to The Maximus Poems. (I queried Ed Foster about this period; his memory of Bronk’s feelings about her corroborate my own [Email to author (16 June 2012)].)
So, what might Howe and Bronk have seen in the other's work, exactly? Especially, how might their respective takes on Thoreau not only help us profitably to consider them now together, but also, how might looking at the two of them together shed light on a New England experience that produces, maybe in nascence in Thoreau, a vision and possibly a poetics that in large might have been shared by an Olson or a Robert Creeley, a Cid Corman, Ted Enslin, maybe a Rosemary or Keith Waldrop—all usually thought of in terms of “The New American Poetry” and all of the New England region—rather than a Robert Lowell, maybe more recently his student Gail Mazur, or Rosanna Warren (the daughter or Robert Penn Warren and the scholar/critic Eleanor Clark)?
Let me answer my questions by first turning back to Howe’s concern for naming in Thorow, which has garnered a lot of critical commentary. Kornelia Freitag has described Howe’s aim in this poem as a striving to “[capture] the locality of Lake George” through reckoning its
history of cultural confrontations which were at once locally specific and part of the broader process of the creation of “the New World.” While the place seems disconnected from any history, Howe finds and explores the link in the language of a wide range of Western cultural texts. Indian place names (Swegachey, Millinocket) are shown to be more than relics of time gone by. They function as symptoms of the racial, economic, social, religious, or psychological repressed. (133)
The names are of especial importance for Howe. “Indian names lead [to the] understory,” she writes (Thorow 52). This deft coinage, "understory," refers to both a linguistic and conceptual substrate, and as a history, Freitag adds, “of the place she inspects but further to the ‘understory of anotherword’, of great cultural texts of Western and American civilization” (Freitag 133; Howe 50).
Howe’s thinking about naming (pretty much as stipulated in that headnote to Thorow) also hints at a fundamental engagement with place and even more basically with what I’d like to call lived time. “I was trying to paint a landscape in that poem,” she has also said. In continuing to explain what she means by this remark she reports, however, that her "vision of the lake [Lake George] was not so much in space as in time. I was very much aware of the commercialization and near ruin at the edge of the water, in the town itself, all around—but I felt outside of time or in an earlier time and that was what I had to get to on paper." ("Interview [with Tom Beckett]" 20-21; in White "The Landscapes" 242)
This task becomes all the more urgent because "[f]or some reason this beautiful body of water has attracted violence and greed ever since the Europeans first saw it. I thought I could feel it when it was pure, enchanted, nameless” (20-21).
Is there something about the New England landscape, about New England place, which gives rise to such thinking? Naming is a critical matter for Thoreau, famously so in “The Ponds” chapter of Walden: “Flints’ Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature,” he writes in outrage, continuing as follows.
What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who [. . .] regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers [....] let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him [. . .] whose presence perchance cursed all the shore; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow, — there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes, — and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. (163)
Bronk could have had this passage or others like it from Thoreau in mind when he wrote his poem “Flowers, the World and My Friend, Thoreau” (which appeared in his early collected poems, in 1982):
It no longer matters what the names of flowers are.
Some I remember; others forget: ones
I never thought I should. Yes, tell me one.
I like to hear that. I may have forgotten again
next week. There's that yellow one whose name
I used to know. It's blossoming, secure
as ever as I walk by looking at it,
not saying its name or needing to.
Henry, it's true as you said it was, that this
is a world where there are flowers. Though it isn't our truth,
it's a truth we embrace with gratitude:
how should we endure our dourness otherwise?
And we feel an eager desire to make it ours,
making the flowers ours by naming them.
But they stay their own and it doesn't become our truth.
We live with it; we live with othernesses
as strangers live together in crowds. Truths
of strangeness jostle me; I jostle them
walking past them as I do past clumps of flowers.
Flowers, I know you, not knowing your name.
(LS 217)
Howe’s “otherstory” and Bronk’s alternate truth (“it doesn't become our truth “) and “othernesses,” and perhaps a “dourness” shared with Thoreau—how tantalizing to think of Howe reading “The Ponds,” maybe having it in mind when she composes these lines in Thorow:
The origin of property
that leads here Depth
Indian names lead here
Bars of a social system
Starting for Lost Pond
psychology of the lost
First precarious Eden[.]
(52)
Do “Indian names” seek to possess?
Likewise, Bronk notes in a Thoreau essay titled “Friendship” that “The difficulties of expression led Thoreau to leave his friendships, as here in reference to language, almost unexpressed” (74). And yet Thoreau realized that poetry was the best hope for capturing the experience of place. Here in Thorow we perhaps see Howe in conversation with this belief:
Eating nothing but hominy
Scribbling the ineffable
See only the tracks of rabbit
A mouse-nest of grass
(47)
Note the semiotics in this passage. Further on she writes:
Only step
As surveyor of the Wood
Only Step
(48)
And shortly thereafter she speaks of the
Expectation of Epiphany
Not to look off from it
but to look at it
Original of the Otherside
understory of anotherword
(50)
Is she referring to herself when she writes of a “Child of the Adirondacks / taking notes like a spy”? Is she acting as the good “Scout” (43) she has identified at the start of her poem, who now has put down in the Lake George country, who now observes a “Most mysterious river // on the confined brink” (53)? These and other lines in Thorow evoke a trope crucial to Thoreau, one that might portray his spirituality as being integral in his sense of essential connection with nature, in his direct engagement of the palpable world. The trope is implicit in his accusation against the farmer Flint who wants to drain his pond and sell “the mud at its bottom” (above).
Thoreau also says the pond “was made deep and pure for a symbol” (233). Here we find him intent upon establishing a deeply embedded, controlling figure that will extend throughout his writing: “While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless,” Thoreau writes. In fact, however, “[t]here is a solid bottom everywhere” (267). That is to say, as Ira Chernus explains, “beneath the finite appearances of life there is an infinite, ultimate reality that is the foundation of everything.” For Thoreau, in other words, "[u]ltimate reality is not something set apart from the world; it is the essence of the world and all that is in it" (Chernus n.p.).
Within the world conditioned in this way Thoreau is capable of penning his famous passage, surely known to Howe and Bronk, beginning with the phrase “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” Thoreau pushes the metaphor along to great effect: “I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains" (83). What he means to be understood is that, as Chernus puts it, "the ‘solid bottom’ of reality is actually a dynamic process of spiritual powers, which are, in Thoreau’s words, ‘identified with the substance of things’, and from which ‘they cannot be separated’” (Chernus n.p.; Thoreau 112).
Bronk could have had such a philosophical construct in mind when he wrote in Death Is the Place that
It isn’t what we say of reality
is metaphor but reality itself
which is. Reality as God or as
cosmos or as, more often, both at once
—whatever—reality is metaphor
not more not less and, being that,
is real as can be and not quite real:
(36)
He ends the poem with this tease: "always brilliantly true and less than whole." In Thorow Howe writes:
So many true things
which are not truth itself
We are too finite
(49)
Further on, she ties in her theme of naming, of simulacra:
The expanse of unconcealment
so different from all maps
Spiritual typography of elegy
Nature in us as a Nature
the actual one the ideal Self
(55)
Names, maps—all inscriptions—cannot comprehend the natural world Thoreau felt was imbued with the eternal yet which in human perception existed in time—or, as Elisabeth Joyce has said, in Howe "[t]he map becomes […] an emblem of cultural identity that renders the incoherence and irrationality of the wild into the tamed logic of civilization" (35; cf. 38). In an essay Bronk titles “The Occupation of Space—Palenque” (written prior to Thorow) he concurs: “The names of places are names we have given them.” Furthermore, in considering the act of naming, he understands how the
more precisely we try to locate ourselves, the more we are sent back to the realization that, except as we have imposed a shape on
environment by occupying it, it is still as described in Genesis in the first creation, without form and void and with darkness covering the face
of the deep.” (Vectors and Smoothable Curves 22)
“The Occupation of Space” was written as part of the large collection of his essays The Brother in Elysium. The collection began with a series of prose meditations on Thoreau, Melville and Whitman. Having to be finished after the war, the writing straddled the publication of Matthiesen’s American Renaissance and coincided with Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, the two works so very different in kind. Bronk got most of the Thoreau essays in place for the future book before entering the service, which would comprise a section he titled Silence and Henry Thoreau. The first of these, “Friendship,” argues as follows.
To nourish and care for the spirit,—this was what friendship was as Thoreau saw it. […] in its simplest, most basic form, as the force which motivated all the rest of the complex, friendship was an exalting and powerful love. It was a kind of love that went forth with no particular object in view and was wholly self-generated. It neither arose from, nor was directed toward, anything else in the world. This love without reference is the basis of friendship in Thoreau. [….] He was almost driven to believe that a sympathy; with man and a sympathy with nature could not consist of one another, —that those qualities that bring you near to one estrange you from the other. And yet he knew that this was not so, and indeed that nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all. [. . .].
Bronk then quotes Thoreau as saying that “’man is all in all, Nature nothing, but as she draws him out and reflects him’” (69-70; Thoreau Journals 166).
Toward the end of Thorow, perhaps as Howe’s way of beginning a conclusion to the poem, we find this:
You are of me & I of you, I cannot tell
Where you leave off and I begin
selving
forfending
Immeadeat Settlem
but wandering
(58)
And yet, as Bronk points out several pages further on in “Friendship” (and as I quoted earlier), “[t]he difficulties of expression led Thoreau to leave his friendships, as here in reference to language, almost unexpressed” (74)—and, indeed, in Howe’s lines there is not merely an open-endedness of reference but a sense of the ineffable. Note, now, how Bronk continues: “Thoreau, who was absorbed in being rather than in expression, was hesitant of names, of words, of forms of any sort. He was aware of their ambivalent power which is the power of the metaphor, suggestive of truth, suggestive of being, but such that the truth is not literally in it” (74-75). Howe writes of “The source of Snow / the nearness of Poetry” (50). Is poetry for her, as well as for Bronk and Thoreau, an attempt to elude the hegemonic act of naming?
Somehow through writing but also in spite of it, ironically perhaps, Bronk comes to assert in another of his essays that “to the observer, the life lived is a kind of fiction. Actuality is a work of the imagination only” (“The Actual and the Real in Thoreau” 27). But what of the seer herself? Compare his comment with Howe's “the source of snow” lines, and then compare it with these poems from Death Is the Place:
Vicarious
Except from our
mortality
how should
infinite
eternal know
how beautiful
the brief world
is to us?
Mundane
What we do gets so natural
feels so good to us
we forget what we are
and any interruption,
lessening,
even the final breaking off
seems terrible
and wrong.
Bronk’s epistemological stance may not be exclusively New England in kind. It was shared, however, by Emily Dickinson. And My Emily Dickinson, Howe’s study of this forerunner, like Bronk's prose on Thoreau, is an extended meditation of great poetic as well as critical and scholarly stature. Howe writes that Dickinson "looked right into the nature of things / words, straight through,—to the fearful apprehension that there was no Truth, only mystery beyond mystery” (138). The tangible world is a manifestation of an intangible—except, perhaps, that the intangible might become tangible through poetry, and that this same immanence makes not only communion between person and place possible but also communion between person and person.
Not unlike friendship, this way of making art is one that—as commented upon by all three writers—must be grounded in and dependent upon a person’s essential experience of the natural world. Such an apprehension comes out of a duality: on the one hand, the notion of a metaphor, on the other the ultimate reality of metaphor. In Thorow Howe addresses this phenomenon, as does Bronk in a number of poems. Thoreau, her poem's namesake, has provided the ground for their work. The question of metaphor, the question actually of knowing, leads inevitably to a questioning of the efficacy of art, indeed the efficacy of writing.
Thoreau's “Thursday” chapter in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is another of Howe’s “favorite pieces of his writing”; she “knew it well” by the time she arrived to stay in Lake George (Email to author [16 June 2012]). Recently she highlighted the importance to her of a comment by Thoreau in it about artistic creation (repeating what she said in a May 1987 letter to John Taggart): “’The talent of composition is very dangerous,—the striking out the heart of life at a blow, as the Indian takes off a scalp. I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it’” (Email to author [16 June 2012]; Thoreau 329).[ii] Consider this passage in the context of these lines of Howe’s: “From the Fort but the snow / falling very deep / remained a fortnight / Two to view the Fort & get a scalp / domain of transcendental subjectivity [etc.]" (43). Does art kill only so there can be resurrection? By way of explaining Thoreau’s definition of composition here, I offer this as the key passage from the “Thursday” chapter:
Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.
The expressions of the poet cannot be analyzed; his sentence is one word, whose syllables are words. There are indeed no words quite worthy to be set
to his music.
(328)
In discussing Bronk's early poem “The Arts and Death: A Fugue for Sidney Cox,” Henry Weinfield maintains that
in Bronk's vision, human beings are compelled to a kind of Sisyphean attempt to get closer and closer to a truth that must always elude them. This is perhaps more true of the artist even than the philosopher: not because there is anything inherently deficient in art, and not, as Socrates supposed in The Republic, because art is two steps removed from reality, but, on the contrary, because it is the artist who is most driven by desire to penetrate the whole. (162).
Bronk’s final poem in life had no title, was simply this:
Art isn’t made; it’s in the world almost
unseen but found existent there. We paint,
we score the sound in music, we write it down.
(Bursts of Light 300)
Yet, as Bronk writes in Death Is the Place, “the little we know or do doesn’t make the form / and nature of things” (“Worksong” 44).
What is left for me to say—in contemplating Howe, Bronk and Thoreau together—has to do with the nature of the Northeastern winter and how it may have played a part in forging a kinship among them, and maybe implicitly what it has to do with the creative act for each of them. Bronk is the poet of winter. His “crustiness,” as Howe has called it (above), comes from it. I wonder if the Thoreauvian way of seeing things could have emerged apart from it, winter's stark reckoning demanding a severe, perhaps an absolute, clarity. Howe said recently, about her stay in Lake George and the birth of Thorow, that “the landscape and the frozen lake and the pines in snow wrote it. The entire lake was so frozen you could walk out to the center. I remember the terror and lure of walking out on ice.” She also said then, in speaking about Bronk and her attempt to reach him (her doing so indicating how Thorow got written): “I think we [i.e., she and Bronk] have some kind of religious belief in common. If one can call it that in this secular age. A belief in the sacramental nature of poetry and of winter light” (Email to author [16 June 2012]).
Thinking of this remark I reproduce here, simply, Howe’s favorite poem from Death Is the Place (Email to author [16 June 2012]), entitled “Emptying Out”:
How it is like the first day now
—the bareness between the evening and the morning which were the first day.
Winter now and light
comes late and it is celebrant
and just the light is enough, the idea of light,
the waking naked to it. Then evening coming on
and the memory of light in the eased dark
and nakedness again, the lying down.
(DITP 19).
I wonder if a sense of desolation is what sponsors their writing often enough and particularly Thorow—the world with its beautifully illusory states stripped away so that a truth beyond naming is available and the writing of it, the accession of immanent metaphor, a memorializing of that moment of existential insight. I believe Howe realizes she has taken this experience from Thoreau. As for Bronk and Lake George, she writes that the region “and its history [….] did give one a very particular feeling about time and the power of local history. Winter. He [Bronk] gets it so perfectly right […]” (Email to author [16 June 2012]).
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[i] In passing it should be mentioned that Howe and Bronk have written eloquently about Melville, especially Billy Budd.
[ii] Cf. Montgomery “Appropriating” 739 and n. 1 on p. 752 that cites this quote used by Howe in a letter to Taggart of 29 May 1987.