Making It New: 1900–1945 453of city life (“Do the Dead Know What Time It Is?”) and fierce jeremiads directed
“to falsity, the smug contempt” of “drugstore-culture” in America (“O Fiery River”).
Sometimes the social comment has a slightly automatic quality to it: the targets are
too easy, the conclusions too pat. For instance, a poem with the eye-catching title
“The Eve of St. Agony or, The Middleclass Was Sitting on its Fat” ends with the glib
cry, “Hey! Fatty, don’t look now but that’s a Revolution breathing down your neck.”
More characteristic are poems like “Street Corner College” and “The Fox,” or
Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer. Memoirs is a biting satire. Styled “an amusement” by
its author and told by a Candide-like innocent called Alfred Budd of Bivalve,
New Jersey, it holds up a grotesque distorting mirror to American society. In
“Street Corner College” Patchen adopts an entirely different voice to speak for the
adolescent boys found on the corner of any city street. The poem is a mixture of
the abrupt, abrasive language of urban life (“Watching the girls gone by; / Betting on
slow horses; drinking cheap gin”) and a strange, surreal idiom (“solitude is a dirty
knife at our throats”). Out of all this comes a powerful feeling of sympathy for such
people: the contrast between their jazzy, streetwise exterior and their jumpy inner
selves, their vitality dimmed by the perception that they are “Sleepwalkers in a
terrible land.” They are the dispossessed, the poet intimates, on the bottom rung of
a society they cannot begin to comprehend, destined when war comes to die for a
culture that has given them nothing – not even the courage to be themselves. “The
Fox” uses a more lyrical mode to arrive at equally stark conclusions. It opens with an
evocative description of a snowscape, “white falling in white air,” into which the
figure of a wounded, bleeding fox is introduced. Slowly, incrementally, the poem
then builds to the final lines. “Because she [the fox] can’t afford to die / Killing the
young in her belly,” the poet says, “I don’t know what to say of a soldier’s dying /
Because there are no proportions to death.” In this bleak landscape of red and
white, hunters and hunted, victimizers and victims, no one death is worse or better
than another, nothing is morally quantifiable. No comparison need apply; all there
is, is the simple, recurring fact of exploitation.
Although Patchen produced notable prose works, his energies, like those of
Rexroth and Fearing, were mostly devoted to poetry. There were, however, many
radicals who turned to fictional or nonfictional prose to examine the contemporary
crisis and to express their convictions. And among the most notable of these
were Randolph Bourne (1886–1918), Michael Gold (1893–1967), and Albert Maltz
(1908–1985). Bourne established his reputation as an essayist in The New Republic
and other magazines. His work reveals an interest in education (The Gary Schools
(1916), Education and Living (1917)), and a firm commitment to the development
of a socially responsible fiction (The History of a Literary Radical (1920)). As America
entered World War I, he also became an increasingly eloquent but also increasingly
isolated advocate for pacifism and nonintervention (Untimely Papers (1919)).
A theoretical piece entitled “The State” (1919) was left unfinished, leaving many to
speculate about his possible political influence had he lived longer to complete it
and other similar pieces. However, his essay on an ethnically diverse American
culture, “Trans-National America” (1916), shows both his perception and hisGGray_c04.indd 453ray_c 04 .indd 453 8 8/1/2011 7:54:00 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 00 AM