A Comparative Commentary on Frank O'hara's “In Memory of My Feelings
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ORNATE AND EXPLOSIVE GRIEF A COMPARATIVE COMMENTARY ON FRANK O’HARA’S “IN MEMORY OF MY FEELINGS” AND “TO HELL WITH IT”, INCORPORATING A SUBSTANTIAL GLOSS ON THE SERPENT IN THE POETRY OF PAUL VALÉRY, AND A THEORETICAL EXCURSUS ON ORNATE POETICS. Sam Ladkin Abstract: Frank O’Hara’s “In Memory of My Feelings” and “To Hell with It” are read consecutively to make a comparative point about the lessons of the first poem being taken up in the challenges of the second. Essays on the influence of Paul Goodman’s theory of grief and anger and Byron’s ecstatic elegy provide a theoretical groundwork for a close, comparative reading of the serpent in the poetry of Paul Valéry and O’Hara. An excursus on the ornate and ornamental offers a broader theoretical account for my readings. A commentary on “To Hell with It” is divided into close readings and digressions on the work of Mayakovsky, Shelley, Rimbaud, and the Tutivillus. 189 GLOSSATOR 8 190 LADKIN – ORNATE AND EXPLOSIVE GRIEF CONTENTS 1. Preamble: Frank O’Hara’s Elegies 2. Introduction 3. Commentary: “In Memory of My Feelings” i. In Memoriam “In Memory of My Feelings” ii. The inhibition of grief: Paul Goodman iii. “In Memory of My Feelings” as ecstatic elegy: Byron iv. O’Hara glossing Paul Valéry: the order of the Serpent 4. Ornate Poetics: Memory in “In Memory of My Feelings” 5. Commentary: “To Hell with It” i. Mock Poem: notes towards a gloss on ejaculating “poetry as spite” ii. To hell with subject matter, sentiment, form, and poetry? iii. Vladimir Vladimirovitch Mayakovsky and the Sun’s Motto iv. P.B. Shelley, Poetry and Wind v. “Ma vie dépend de ce livre”: Arthur Rimbaud vi. Tutivillus, the Printer’s Devil and the Hellbox 6. Conclusion: Paul Goodman and Explosive Grief Bibliography 191 GLOSSATOR 8 192 LADKIN – ORNATE AND EXPLOSIVE GRIEF The members of the dead ought to be dead even to the fingernails, and the living ought to be alive in every part. A body is said to be alive when of its own accord it has certain movements. It is called dead when the members may no longer carry out the functions of life, that is, movement and sentiment. Then the painter who wishes to express life in things will make every part in movement. But of all the movements that are charming and graceful, those movements are most graceful and most lively which move upwards toward the air. – Leon Battista Alberti, on grace Great is the force of memory, O Lord, I know not what, to be amazed at, profound, and of infinite multiplicity. And yet it is my mind: it is myself. What, then, am I, my God? What is my nature? Ever-changing, with many different forms, is life, and exuberantly limitless. Observe! in the wide plains of my memory and in its innumerable caverns and hollows filled beyond reckoning with varieties of countless things [innumerabilium rerum generibus]; either through images [per imagines], as of all material things [omnium corporum]; or directly [per praesentiam], as are basic skills and know- how [artrium]; or by means of I know not what notions or notations […], as are emotions [affectionum animi]; for the memory retains them even while the mind does not experience them, although whatever is in the memory must also be in the mind. Through all these I range, and freely move from this to that, digging into them as far as I can, and never finishing. Such is the energy of memory, such the life-energy in human beings living mortally! – Augustine, Confessions 193 GLOSSATOR 8 No discipline is more sentimental than the one that represses sentiments. And who knows, perhaps what is most abject in us comes from the pleasure of being loved, that is, the refusal of the desire to love? – Guy Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses Dehumanizing myself is my own most fundamental tendency – Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers Resolve me of all ambiguities – Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus What follows is a comparative commentary on two poems by Frank O’Hara, reading in depth though by no means solely the relations between their titles and their finales. These poems are “In Memory of My Feelings” and “To Hell with It”. The manuscript of “In Memory of My Feelings” is dated June 27-July 1, 1956, with a manuscript dated June 17, 1955 containing an early version of part of section 4.1 It was first published in Evergreen Review 2.6 (1958) and reprinted, influentially, in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry: 1945-1960.2 The following commentary understands “In Memory” to make strategic use of an elegiac mode to turn away from the accretion of memories and the feelings trapped therein on behalf of the compulsions and freedoms of new life; this commentary chooses to write a comparison with “To Hell With It” because the formal and emotional resolutions of “In Memory” are subsequently challenged by the insufferable feelings of grief for others, feelings that are less disposed to be aestheticized or, in the (bathetically) iconoclastic mode of “In Memory of My Feelings” to be de-aestheticized . 1 Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California, 1995), 538; hereafter abbreviated CP and cited parenthetically with page number. My thanks to Sara Crangle, Robin Purves, Keston Sutherland, Peter Manson and Ryan Dobran for their comments on and edits of this essay during its long gestation. 2 Donald Allen, ed. The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 244-250. 194 LADKIN – ORNATE AND EXPLOSIVE GRIEF The manuscript of “To Hell with It” is, according to Allen’s edition of O’Hara’s Collected Poems, dated July 13, 1957 (MS x96), just over a year after “In Memory”, though it is the alternative manuscript (MS x325) marked “(original restored),” printed in Collected Poems to which I will refer. The restored material includes both the “MOCK POEM”, “LITTLE ELEGY”, the subtitle “ENVOI” which precedes “Wind, you’ll have a terrible time / smothering my clarity”, and brilliant final line (which may or may not properly belong to the envoi), “And mean it.” The poem was first published in Yügen 4 (1959), and was reprinted in The New American Poetry. The line “It thinks I’m mysterious!” is placed in parentheses in Allen’s anthology.3 Reprints include Big Table 1.4 (Spring 1960), and Grist 9 (1966) (in an alternative arrangement to that of the Collected). The indented section “LITTLE ELEGY” is the second of four of the “Four Little Elegies” published under that title in the Collected Poems (248-252 (248)), the first and third of which are explicitly dedicated to James Dean, whose death on 30th September 1955 in a car accident foreshadows that of the less famous screen-actor Gregory Lafayette, one of the two (three if we include Dean) subjects of “To Hell With It” (the second being V.R. “Bunny” Lang). The second “little” elegy is dated October 31, 1955, so preceding the deaths of Lafayette and Lang. Gregory Lafayette and his wife Judy Tyler were killed in a car crash on July 3rd 1957. Both were actors, and were killed after shooting Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock. Lang died aged 32 on July 29, 1956 from what was then called Hodgkin’s disease, and is now called Hodgkin’s lymphoma.4 3 Allen, The New American Poetry, 251-2. 4 Supplementing the poetical elegies for Lang we also have two prose reflections. “V.R. Lang: A Memoir” includes O’Hara’s delighted first impressions of Lang: “She was sitting in a corner sulking and biting her lower lip – long blonde hair, brown eyes, Roman-striped skirt. As if it were a movie, she was glamorous and aloof.” See Frank O’Hara, Standing Still and Walking in New York, ed. Donald Allen (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1975), 86. More devastating is “A Personal Preface”, moments of which will resonate for those who know O’Hara’s poems. For example, the phone call from the beyond may bring to mind “Poem: Instant coffee with slightly sour cream” (CP, 244-5), “Personism: A Manifesto” (CP, 498-9). I also have a black dunce-cap, decorated with silver bells. She gave it to me to wear when I wrote. “It will keep you relaxed,” 195 GLOSSATOR 8 This period of O’Hara’s writing is riddled with elegies (even more so than is typical of O’Hara’s elegy-strewn oeuvre), of which I will note a few to begin, in order to demonstrate in what ways O’Hara is practicing the elegiac mode, and to draw attention to a few features we will meet again in our two key poems. 1. PREAMBLE: FRANK O’HARA’S ELEGIES Several poems are dedicated to James Dean: “For James Dean” (CP, 228), “Thinking of James Dean” (CP, 230-1), as well as the aforementioned “Four Little Elegies”.5 she said, “free from distractions. It will keep away SPOOKS!” When Bunny was your friend, she was not only a dear friend, she was also the guardian of that friendship.[...] It is now five years since she died; it seems a moment, it seems it didn’t happen at all. She is calling us long distance in these poems, telling us how it is with her, how bright things can be, how terrible things are. (Frank O’Hara, Standing Still, 88) O’Hara’s refusal to have worked through grief above is also evident in “The ‘Unfinished’ In memory of Bunny Lang” (CP, 317-19), dated January 27, 1959 (CP 543).