Louis Zukofsky's "Little / for careenagers"
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If a work of art doesn’t make you want to become a Communist and help the revolutionary proletariat realize its historic mission, was it really Modernist?
That question may only make sense in an Adornian framework, where you can have an encounter with a modernist work of art, with its hardcore formalism, that is so devastating in its attack on the wholeness and harmony so central to western culture, that the practical result is the dissolution of our own sense of individuality as cultivated by bourgeois social conditions, breaking the conformist spell of the “culture industry,” and all the rest of it.
Not likely, and even less so in our time.
But it does bring to mind the case of Louis Zukofsky, one of the most influential poets within the Objectivist tendency of the 1930s. The pro-working class content of his verse, some say, would have been more impactful were he not also formally perpetuating the most challenging and inaccessible aspects of literary modernism.
My first encounter with Zukofsky—and perhaps a standard one—was in a 1935 poem called “Mantis.” The first stanza of this sestina studies the insect at a microscopic level while throwing in philosophical epithets like “thoughts’ torsion,” before the locale is established at the end of the stanza.
Mantis! praying mantis! since your wings’ leaves / And your terrified eyes, pins, bright, black and poor / Beg-“look, take it up” (thoughts’ torsion) ! “save it! ” / I who can’t bear to look, cannot touch, -You- / You can-but no one sees you steadying lost / In the cars’ drafts on the lit subway stone.
By the end of this epic piece of Objectivist poetry, the cycle of seemingly simple end-words (leaves, poor, it, lost, stone) have built a metaphor of the mantis, lone green organism amongst the stone of an urban metro, as the resilience and grit of the city’s lower strata, enduring within a society that commands their labor at will, and who will one day construct the new society.
Fly, mantis, on the poor, arise like leaves / The armies of the poor, strength: stone on stone / And build the new world in your eyes, Save it!
Zukofsky’s work enjoyed much respect from Ezra Pound and James Laughlin and the surrounding New Directions circle. Neither men were fellow travelers of Marxism, obviously. What they valued in Zukofsky’s work was more likely (see postscript) the theatricality that arises from the literalist approach in Objectivist writing. All this verbiage about construction materials and everything that simply and independently exists, to the exclusion of the older illusions of figure and formal wholeness in art, results in a focus on a highly charged staging and self-presentation (theatricality in the Michael Fried sense) as the work’s main source of impact—so that it’s not strictly about the things in themselves but how the audience metabolizes them.
So much for Objectivism, and Marxism for that matter, for the text I wanted to focus on is actually a short novel that took Zukofsky 19 years to compose throughout the 50s and 60s, long after the political commitments of earlier decades.
Little / for careenagers is bound up with the collection It Was in his Collected Fiction published by Dalkey Archive. It’s something of a family autobiography, for Zukofsky’s son Paul ended up being a child prodigy at the violin, playing Carnegie Hall in the late fifties as a teen. It appears that Zukofsky was fictionalizing his family life as he lived it. It is also a roman à clef, with real personalities, from family members and music instructors to great 20th century composers having their names swapped out for Zuk’s invented monikers.
Louis is here as Dala Baballo von Chulnt, a poet fascinated with Welsh literature and an easy-going family man. His wife is Madame Verchadet von Chulnt. And the child is Little Baron Snorck. They are European aristocrats now carving out a deflated but cheery petty-bourgeois existence in the States. The entire narrative is decisively lighthearted. A negative review on Goodreads says, “Never have I seen such intricate prose used to tell such an uninteresting story,” which nails the uniqueness of this text. There is no melodrama, no crisis, just comic incidents with colorful characters in idyllic domestic settings.
Little’s speech is chock full of malapropisms: like “you’rephonie” for euphony, “e-midget-ly,” “anti-semiotic,” and “The Illicy” as a fusion of Homer’s two epics. Along with the spontaneously ludic world of the child is the mental world of the father, whose drafts of poetry often hook the short chapters together. Every few utterances has a ringing alliteration to it, giving the sense of characters grappling with a foreign language, but also exploiting it and stretching it to make textures that native speakers wouldn’t dream of. Early in the novel, the von Chulnts are summering in a New England cottage community, and the church wants Little to give a recital. The child resists the proposition, sensing pearls before swine:
“Verchadet, all they’ll do is jabber when I play, and the acootsticks are bad enough without an electric organ drowning me out. And what do you know about electricity to inaugurate it. You did, you did want to remove the stuck plug with a nail file, when I shrieked, Watch out, STOP, NO!”
Baballo had his mouth slightly open to speak. But Verchadet, knowing storms pass, merely signed with her left index finger on her lips say nothing, turned off the lights of the living room, and the lights of Little’s bedroom followed suit in a lightning flash.
The elegance of this passage is very satisfying to this reader. The simple clause “knowing storms pass” gives us a glimpse of Verchadet’s world, where tantrums are smoothly handled with equanimity (one might say coldness), as well as the silent italicized utterance that accompanies her “hush” gesture to her husband without a standard preposition, establishes a lot about how this family operates, how father mother and son “struggle” together, with much of it going in the father’s direction from mother and son. And of course the gag about the cottage’s faulty wiring and the adults’ maladroitness with electricity is followed up in the last sentence with that alliteration I mentioned, in this case a pattern of l-sounds and f-sounds.
The following is a knockout passage from the church recital sequence, as Baballo gets a first look at socialite Dea Falin, with commentary from James Madison (named by Little, presumably due to her powdered wig).
He saw a frail lady uppermost in mauve gauze, head wobbling at first, cheeks rouged into two small suns that with the frenzied decisiveness of a pinwheel on its stick whirred quickly past three oblivious parishioners to the seat beside him. Polite he stood up, she was nearly as tall as he. She spoke sympathetically to be overheard as at a performance, “I hope you don’t mind.” He could only shake his head from side to side, meaning he didn’t as they sat down together. And at that moment like the prelate in a painting of her time called “Temptation” his listless smile might have incurred the wayward thought of a resilience which persists in the calves of an aging danseuse who once wished she were thinner. She spoke freely to him, introducing herself as Dea Falin: “They all look dead!” His smile did not change. She must have seen or been drawn to James Madison, coming down the aisle. She hovered on her seat—butterfly over a flower. Contrition held the priest of “Temptation” who now turned his head to his left. Were these tears or fears in Miss Madison’s eyes behind the thick lenses? The reflections multiplied into a monster moth humming at a window lighted in the night.
As for real people in New York City and the world of music, there is a reference to David Mannes of The New School’s Mannes School of Music. The virtuoso pianist Artur Rubenstein appears with the annagramized and backwardized name Rutar Neitsnebur. One of Little’s teachers is the real violinist Roman Totenberg, semantically transformed into Mr Athens Olympus. Dala teaches English at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, as Zukofsky actually did. We’re treated to some snippets of correspondence with “R. Z. Draykup,” aka Ezra Pound. There are many more, including Phaethon Weaver and I. Gloss Dazzling (Anton Webern and Igor Stravinsky, respectively).
But I’ll cap it off with a tiny scene where Little approaches his teacher Betur with a score “of dots, dashes and carets that bypassed note, line and intensity to the discretion of the performer.” Betur remarks on this new music that it would be difficult to play in the Middle Eastern climate of his birthplace, where “summer flies change composer’s score.” The piece would be something by John Cage.
The playfulness and light tenor of Little reflects how there’s more to it than the codenames. It’s as if Zukofsky injected a warmth and amiability into his fictional world that was absent in the real world of the text’s production—the world where the Zukofskies’ aloof prickliness was just as apparent as their brilliance.
A reminiscence of Zukofsky by James Laughlin, from The Way It Wasn’t:
I was impressed by Louis Zukofsky, who stayed for two weeks [at Rapallo]. What an intense mind! But he was not at all impressed with me. We had little conversation. I simply listened to him talking to Pound. I think he thought I was a parasite…
Nevertheless, Zuk gave me for ND 1936 the magnificent “Mantis” sequence, which opens with an intricate sestina. It was a trial-horse for his long poem “A.” (One finds lines from Mantis picked up later.) Then for ND 1938 he gave me the whole of the eighth section of “A,” all fifty-six pages of it. By then the great poem was really rolling in all its power and splendor of language, Zuk asked me to describe it in the notes as “an epic of class struggle.” …He was an ardent Communist, though I think he dropped away from the Party after the Moscow trials. It should be noted that “fascist” Pound, who was already an admirer of Il Duce, paid no attention to Zukofsky’s politics. He liked his minds and his poetry… Zuk was eager to have New Directions become the regular publisher of his books, I wish we had, but a small publisher can’t do everything. And I realized that he might be difficult and demanding. So there was a cooling off of what had never been exactly warm.
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From the little I have glossed on Paul Zukofsky, it seems that his own violinism had a modernist bent to it. In the novel, Little never uses vibrato. And Paul Zukofsky indeed was purging his sound production of kitsch. From his NYT obit: “He despised the conventional idea of what was a beautiful violin sound. …He was more or less a contemporary of people like Zukerman and Perlman, and he scorned the beauty of their sound.” The result: a timbre that was “astringent, but very pure.”
Hear for yourself in this 1990 recording of Morton Feldman’s For John Cage.
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This letter has been filed under the “Red writers” series. Zuk and Wright were the two Americans; we will soon go across the pond to European authors.
Finally, a huge and sincere thank you to everyone who has subscribed to Silent Friends, free or paid, and have told others about this project. It really will keep it going!
Up next: a salty sea story—but not because of the seawater…