Truths from the Grave
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Truths from the Grave By Stanley Edgar Hyman Back in the days when poets had three names, in 1916, Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology appeared, and scandalized the...
...But he confronted the spiritual poverty of his America—which is still our America—without blinking, whereas Sinclair Lewis in Main Street ultimately turned away, and Thornton Wilder in Our Town never looked at America at all, merely sat down to copy Spoon River Anthology in a sculpture of fudge...
...Sex is the curse of life," says Margaret Fuller Slack, who might have been a great novelist if she had not had eight children...
...Their composite picture of the Illinois town of Spoon River is thoroughly repulsive...
...He is not a great writer, nor even a good one...
...Knowing that childbirth would kill his wife, Henry Barker impregnated her out of hatred...
...I doubt that after almost half a century, in either incarnation, it will scandalize anyone...
...Masters' figures of speech are ponderous: labored similes ("She drained me like a fevered moon'That saps the spinning world") or interminable metaphors (Dippold the optician sees the afterlife as an eye examination, Joseph Dixon the tuner will be retuned by the great Tuner...
...Wickedness is summed up by "I was drinking wine with a black-eyed cocotte" in Paris, or "I killed the son/Of the merchant prince, in Madam Lou's...
...As poetry, Spoon River Anthology is wonderfully old-fashioned now and was wonderfully old-fashioned when it appeared...
...But McGuire's epitaph on the next page explodes that inspirational account...
...To balance these there are considerable successes...
...Old Henry Bennett died of overexertion in the bed of his young wife...
...the clergymen speak or keep silent as their masters command...
...He took that tradition to be that of the Greek Anthology, and his poems are full of references to Hades, Furies, Fates and other Grecian properties, but his true tradition is Browning, Whitman and the native ironies of Yankee gravestones...
...You have woven a shroud...
...her eyes must suppurate under the bandages...
...In the much-anthologized "Petit, the Poet," Masters mocks the ticking of Petit's little iambics "While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines...
...Frank Drummer tried to memorize the Encyclopaedia Britannica...
...There are several Homeric similes in the book, but I am afraid that despite his self-identification, Masters ticks irregularly more than he roars...
...Williams doesn't think Spoon River would have been any worse had its people "been given their freedom/To live and enjoy, change mates if they wished...
...English Thornton" appeals to the descendants of the veterans of the Revolution and the Indian wars to rise up and battle the descendants of the profiteers and the thieves, to recover their inheritance...
...Oscar Hummel, drunk, was beaten to death by a fanatic prohibitionist...
...The style is fittingly archaic...
...Then bites your hand and springs away...
...The cemetery is strewn with the wreckage of dreams and hopes...
...One obvious explanation is succès de scandale—it was the sex-shocker, the Peyton Place, of its day...
...Charles Bliss pleads from her experience that divorce is far better for the children than a bad marriage...
...There is even a touch of sodomy...
...The terms in which this is put are mostly inadequate...
...says the shade of the poetess Minerva Jones, raped by a bully and dead of an illegal abortion...
...and sometimes it approximates rhyme ("Go out on Broadway and be run over,/They'll ship you back to Spoon River...
...Love of women," Ezra Bartlctt argues, may lead one to the divine...
...Masters overdoes everything...
...Only a handful of the dead are happy: a dedicated old maid schoolteacher, a blind mother of sighted children, a fiddler who had no worldly ambition, a loving old couple, a dancer whose final placid years were spent living in sin in Spoon River, a reader of Proudhon who murdered his rich aunt and got away with it, a man whose wife loves him and mourns him, several people who were inspired by knowing Lincoln, and a few others...
...From the epitaph of Daisy Fraser, the town whore, we learn that only she is honest in her whoredom: the newspaper editor takes bribes to suppress the instability of the bank...
...Another hero is "Foe of the church with its charnel dankness...
...Many of the poems end with exclamation points, and one ends with a little thicket of them: The loom stops short...
...We encounter fine single lines ("Toothless, discarded, rural Don Juan") and fine similes ("While he wept like a freezing steer...
...And there you stand bleeding and smelling to heaven...
...Yet it retains an odd sort of power despite its quaintness, like grandmother's pearl-handled revolver...
...Mrs...
...And hate of it lays you in it...
...The reason I believe God crucified His Own Son," Wendell P. Bloyd explains, "is, because it sounds just like Him...
...The amount of hidden crime would shame Singapore, and its quantity is equalled only by its nastiness...
...The dead really seem to be trying to tell us something about the quality of American life, something ugly yet essential to our knowledge...
...The touch is very unsure, and Spoon River Anthology is full of failures, many of them in endings...
...The town's pervasive hypocrisy is worse than its crimes...
...The pattern's out...
...By 1916 Pound had published eight volumes of poems and translations, and Eliot had published most of the poems in Prufrock and Other Observations, but Masters was writing in an older tradition...
...Sometimes it becomes almost metrical, falling into lines mostly anapaestic ("I know that he told that I snared his soul/With a snare which bled him to death") or mostly iambic (" ?, son who died in a cause unjust!/In the strife of freedom slain...
...But thou grievest," Masters writes, or "Thou wert wise...
...After Lincoln, Masters' heroes idolize Altgeld, Bryan and Henry George...
...The form is free verse...
...Two of the poems seem to me, in their different fashions, completely successful...
...A bitter wind . . . stunted my petals," cries Serepta Mason...
...Matching this Populist politics is the religious iconoclasm of the village atheist...
...The enormous popularity of Spoon River Anthology on its appearance warrants some discussion...
...and one after another all the hypocrites and whited sepulchres confess...
...One is "Roscoe Purkapile," a slight comic poem about the ironies of marriage...
...Harmon Whitney has been wounded by his wife's "cold white bosom, treasonous, pure and hard...
...In a typical poem, he is not content with blind Justice...
...The mock epic and play with which the book concludes are worse than the worst of the lyrics...
...You're alone in the room...
...One poem ends with a true whimper...
...The other is Masters' most famous poem, "Anne Rutledge," where his Lincoln worship somehow found its proper voice, the eloquence of understatement, and something that really does rival the spare beauty of the poems in the Greek Anthology was achieved...
...Hamilton Greene is really his father's child by the German maid, as her epitaph confesses, although his own epitaph blindly boasts his "valiant and honorable blood...
...Last month a dramatization of the book had its world premiere in Los Angeles...
...In a dream," he says triumphantly, "I appeared to one of the twelve jurymen/And told him the whole secret story...
...A good poem in which a tethered cow is a metaphor for the limited freedom of the will is ruined when the metaphoric cow pulls up its stake and gores the homespun philosopher to death...
...McGuire really escaped hanging, he explains, because his lawyer made a crooked deal with the judge...
...Yee Bow was killed by a sneak punch from the minister's son...
...WRITERS & WRITING Truths from the Grave By Stanley Edgar Hyman Back in the days when poets had three names, in 1916, Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology appeared, and scandalized the nation...
...The most important factor in the appeal of the book, I believe, is that, as in Winesburg, Ohio, some larger vision of life shines through all the pettiness...
...In his epitaph, the Town Marshall exults that Jack McGuire was not hanged for killing him, since he had first attacked McGuire...
...Edmund Pollard pleads boldly for hedonism and joy...
...The total effect of bitterness and frustration that Spoon River Anthology gives is greater than the sum of its poems...
...The world of the poems is more remote from us than Mycenae...
...A nickel then bought a supply of bacon, or was a proper tip for a waiter...
...These are truths from the grave, thus grave truths...
...Unhappiness is endemic in Spoon River...
...Its pervasive fable is the easy fable of Populism: that the pioneers built the land by their labor and endurance but that it was all stolen from them by "the bank and the courthouse ring...
...Spoon River Anthology consists of almost 250 epitaphs, all but two or three of them spoken by the deceased...
...Nellie Clark, at eight, was raped by a 15-year-old boy, and the disgrace pursued her ever after and wrecked her life...
...It has now been reissued in a fine edition with handsome woodcuts by John Ross and Clare Romano Ross (Macmillan, 297 pp., $7.50...
...We have not advanced that much further in half a century...
...Deacon Taylor is a prohibitionist and secret drinker who confesses that the true cause of his death was cirrhosis of the liver...
...It is almost inarticulate, and much of it is silly, yet some suggestion of the good life, a richer and fuller life than Americans knew in 1916, is there...
...Julia Miller married an old man to legitimize her unborn child, then took a fatal dose of morphine anyway...
...the judge is on the payroll of the railroad...
...Masters never understood the reasons for his success in Spoon River Anthology, and he never attained it again...
...I thirsted so for love!/I hungered so for life...
...Another feature that would have attracted readers in 1916 is the book's sour socialism...
...There is an eloquent impression of a rattlesnake ("A circle of filth, the color of ashes,/ Or oak leaves bleached under layers of leaves") and a vivid mean description of a woman: She was some kind of a crying thing One takes in one's arms, and all at once It slimes your face with its running nose, And voids its essence all over you...
...The only feeling Benjamin Pantier inspired in his wife was sexual disgust...
...Refusing medical aid...
Vol. 46 • June 1963 • No. 12
