Running Head: IT MATTERS MORE THAN ANYTHING PAGE 1IT MATTERS MORE THAN ANYTHING PAGE 16IT MATTERS MORE THAN ANYTHING PAGE 15

It Matters More than Anything:The Poetics of Protest in Kenneth Patchens Life and Anti-War Fiction

Tait M. Johnson

It Matters More than Anything:The Poetics of Protest in Kenneth Patchens Life and Anti-War Fiction

What is there to struggle against? Nobody can put the stars back together again. There isnt much time at all. I cant say it doesnt matter; it matters more than anything - Kenneth Patchen (Miller, 1977, pp. 35-6).

Called by his contemporaries the voice of the conscience which is forgotten, the laureate of the doomed youth of the Third World War, and the living symbol of protest...in our midst (Rexroth, 1977, pp. 22, 24; Miller, 1977, p. 33), the life and writings of 20th Century American poet and novelist Kenneth Patchen can serve as a model for a contemporary poetics of personal engagement and creative protest. Working outside of the critical institutions of American literature due to his uncompromising social stance and experimental writing techniques, Patchen was a key innovator in the American arts: from the 1940s to 70s he helped pioneer new literary forms like the anti-novel, concrete poetry, painting-poetry, and the fusion of poetry with jazz and drama; he collaborated and corresponded with many of the key artists of his day such as E.E. Cummings, John Cage, Charles Mingus, Kenneth Rexroth, and Henry Miller; and he served as a primary influence on the political writings of later generations such as Beat authors Allen Ginsburg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Smith, 2013, pp. 8, 150, 170, 200, 227, 251).Producing over forty books throughout his career, from his early, 1930s proletarian poems to the whimsical paintings of his later yearsand despite decades of poverty, critical disapproval, and debilitating illness in betweenPatchen approached his art through an uncompromising frame of unconditional love, pacifism, and wonder that required him to speak out with a prophetic rage against all forms of violence, oppression, ignorance, and conformity.Patchens strategy of creative protest is best illustrated in his anti-war, anti-novel, The Journal of Albion Moonlight. Self-published in 1941 at the beginning of Americas involvement in World War II, Patchens masterpiece attempted to record the authentic experience of a world on the brink of chaos by breaking out from the confines of conventional narration through its poetic techniques of personal engagement and uncompromising spiritual message of social unity.By studying Patchens liferecorded in Larry Smiths definitive biography Kenneth Patchen: Rebel Poet in America; the political and artistic climate in which he workedas described in the essays and reviews of his contemporaries; and the experimental techniques embedded in The Journal of Albion Moonlight, artists and activists today can rediscover a powerful poet and model for an authentic approach to socially-engaged creative action.Some were Rebels out of choice, Patchen declared; I had none (Miller, 1977, p. 36). Born in 1911 in Niles, Ohio where his father Wayne worked in the nearby steel mills, Kenneth Frederick Patchen was raised on the positive working-class values of diligence, a bold directness and ingenuity, a sense of family sacrifice for each other, a simple practicality and basic humanity (Smith, 2013, pp. 11, 14-15). As a child, Patchen was horrified at the violence of local workmen who shot down birds during their breaks, and which he would compassionately bury; when he was 17, Patchen worked in the steel mills and witnessed first-hand the brutality of the owners against workers and strikers (ibid., pp. 19, 25-6). These incidents helped shape the scope of empathy and outrage that characterizes the personal engagement of Patchens works. While in high school, Patchen began writing poetry under the influence of Romantic poets such as Blake, Shelley, Whitman, and Robinson Jeffers; in 1929, attending Alexander Meiklejohns Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin, he adopted the stream-of-consciousness writing techniques of Woolf and Joyce that would heavily influence the style of The Journal of Albion Moonlight. (Smith, 2013, pp. 30, 39, 47). This identity as a Poetmodeled on the master-artist ideal of William Blakewould remain central to Patchens life (ibid., p. 34). At the same time, college-life granted Patchen an awareness of the political world and of art as an effective response to social evilsit was in school essays that Patchen developed his engaged and confrontational stance as a writer (ibid., pp. 50, 52).Refusing to compromise between his working-class upbringing and the middle-class academic world, Patchen left college after his first year to travel around America, writing and working odd jobs at the start of the Great Depression (Smith, 2013, pp. 41, 58). This first-hand experience of the countrys economic and social disparity may have provided a form and themes for his later work, such as the picaresque journey of peace central to the narrative of The Journal of Albion Moonlight. When traveling through Macon, Georgia, for instance, Patchen was arrested for vagrancy, beaten, and charged with a recent murderan incident that he had nightmares about through the rest of his life (ibid., p. 59), and which may be encoded in the nightmare vision of American violence and transgression that runs through his masterpiece. This use of personal experience to reflect social issues is central to Patchens engaged stance as a writer of protest.In 1932, Patchen published his first politically-charged poetry in Rebel Poet, and after his 1934 marriage to Miriam Oikemusa politically-active woman who shared and supported Patchens social and creative idealsmoved to New York so that he could participate in the burgeoning Leftist literary scene (Smith, 2013, p. 59, 75-6, 96). According to Larry Smith (2013), due to the Depression and the increasing popularity of Communist ideals, writers and artists now had neither public opinion nor financial ruin to fear and so began freely speaking outand yet the wealth of 1930s dissident American literature has been buried by shifting political sympathies as well as by 1950s-era McCarthyist literary historians (pp. 88-9), making it difficult to uncover the creative climate in which Patchen began publishing his political poetry.To illustrate: the popular anthologization of Patchens poem, Joe Hill Listens to the Praying (published in the 1934 issue of the radical literary magazine The New Masses), led to the contract for Patchens first book, Before the Brave, with commercial publisher Random House, who had been looking to publish an American proletarian poet (Smith, 2013, pp. 91-2, 100). According to Amos Wilder (1977), proletarian poets are writers who are... workers out of workers families, which describes Patchens upbringing despite Patchens belief that, the writer should keep himself clear of passing phases whether in social conflicts or the literary scene (pp. 125, 128). And yet, due to the passing phase of popular politics from a working-class to a Socialist ideology, within six months of his books publication in 1936 Random House decided to remainder the majority of the print run, leaving Patchens work ignored or condemned by the radical magazines that years before would have supported him (Smith, 2013, pp.107, 110). This knack or misfortune or the will for doing the right thing at the wrong time or place for his career would haunt Patchen throughout his creative lifebut while angered by the professional cost of his engaged rebellious stance, he refused to join political parties or artistic movements that might compromise his value-oriented vision (Smith, 2013, pp. 8-9, 107, 109). He even denounced the Beats for their overt misogyny and drug use, as well as the Surrealists for their bourgeoisie values (ibid., pp. 227; Rexroth, 1977, p. 27). In a 1945 interview he declared his engaged creative stance: the primary aim of the creative artist... is to protest. Out of protest will come whatever validity there is in art, and that, the hallmark of the artist is to make no compromise for any reasons (Beye and McCleery, 1977, pp. 48-9). Like many writers, Patchen felt betrayed by the failure of 1930s political struggles such as the Spanish Civil War, but where this led his contemporaries to reject the social utility of art in favor of formal aesthetics, Patchen remained a stubbornly direct moralist (Nelson, 2004, p. 475-6). In the introduction to his 1944 An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air, Patchen stated his core moral beliefs: I am opposed to all war. I dont believe human beings should kill each other. I am opposed to all violencefor whatever reason. I believe that wars will only end when men refuse to murder each otherfor whatever reason. I believe that wars will only end when the present murderous forms of society are allowed to dieand all men are at last permitted to live together (Morgan, 1977, p. 165).Labeled a political writer for addressing topical issues of violence and corruption, Patchen tackled current social crises in his writing only due to his primary concern for universal human values and truthsan uncompromising spiritual stance of hope in the face of despair often summed up by the title of his 1966 collection of poetry: Hallelujah Anyway (Smith, 2013, pp. 47-8, 250). According to Smith (2013), Patchen found increased relief from the worlds terrors through the human capacity for wonder, adopting from the Romantics, a faith in love as a redemptive forcea counter to the madness of the world (pp. 178-9). Despite his lifelong outrage at violence and social corruption, Patchens wife described him as openly joyful but reserved in his anger at the war, while fellow poet Harold Norse said that Patchen radiated warmth and compassion (ibid., pp. 172, 188-9).The sense of whimsy and wonder that Patchen applied to his brand of creativity and social protest is remarkable given that the poet spent the majority of his adult life in constant, immobilizing pain. While living in Hollywood in 1937, Patchen helped move a stalled car that fell on him, severely damaging his spineit took twelve years to receive a proper diagnosis, and although surgery corrected his slipped disk, a botched operation in 1959 reversed the condition so that he spent the remainder of his life in debilitating agony (Smith, 2013, pp. 119, 253). Miraculously, Patchen continued to work, and even tied his personal pain to global suffering, harnessing it as a source of inspiration: in interview he said, injustice and cruelty upset me to the point of becoming really sick, and that nightmares, sickness, and the actual work of writing all have about the same effect on me (Beye and McCleery, 1977, pp. 46-7). Although difficult, that effect was clearly motivational, and did not lessen his insistence on social harmony and spiritual unity. According to poet Paul Veres, although Patchen dealt with more personal pain and struggle than most of us can imagine in a lifetime, his art never turned inward on its pain but remained universal in its call for compassion (Smith, 2013, p. 10).In the spring of 1940, at a low point in his health and career, Patchen planned to write an epic prose work called The Hunted Citya proposed spiritual history of the countrywhen it became clear that the time for this project had passed due to the increasing likelihood of a second World War, and so Patchen folded his notes and experimental techniques into his first extended prose piece, the anti-war, anti-novel, The Journal of Albion Moonlight (Nelson, 2004, p. 466; Smith, 2013, p. 146). According to Miriam, Patchen was getting deeply involved with the struggle of how he could most clearly and briefly but with his own voice make a clarion call of alarm to alert people to the [war] so certain to erupt (Smith, 2013, p. 151).In a letter to friend and publisher James Laughlin of New Directions (who had just published Patchens second book of poems, First Will & Testament) (Smith, 2013, p. 140), Patchen explained his plan to write a journal of the summer of 1940a summer when all the codes and ethics which men have lived by for centuries were subjected to the acid test of general war and universal disillusionmenthe intended to use the narrative genre of the journal over against that of the novel, however, in order to recreate that chaos as a weapon against the false and sterile reality of the story books (Nelson, 2004, p. 483-4), turning instead to his creative strategies of personal engagement and uncompromising universality.According to Raymond Nelson (2004), Patchen responded to the moral disequilibrium between war and received literary treatments of it through a process of fragmentation and defamiliarization within his text: the several narratives of The Journal branch off into diversions, parallel actions...false starts, false endings, and blind alleys (pp. 467, 470). The most consistent plot follows a band of desperadoes led by anti-hero Albion Moonlight across a war-torn America in search of peace and salvation. The character Albion is modeled on the protagonist of William Blakes Jerusalem and The Four Zoas, a symbolic figure of a generalized quester adapted from earlier British fairy-tales and Morality plays to embody the descent and potential redemption of man, and used by Patchen to represent all humankind (Nelson, 2004, p. 468-9; Morgan, 1977, p. 157). In generic terms, The Journal can be read as a quest romance or as a failed quest in the tradition of T.S. Eliots The Waste Land, depicting the fragmented search through a diminished world for a sacred symbol (Nelson, 2004, p. 476).And yet, Albions public quest... is paralleled by his personal quest for a free narrative voicethe prose narration breaks into dramatic, lyrical, oratorical, or visual genres utilizing techniques of concrete and found poetry that allow the novel to produce novels-within-a-novel, tables of chapter headings, pairs of fables told in parallel columns, along with fragments of other journals, scraps of leftover narrative material, poems, sermons, essays, lists, chants, asides, as well as quotations ranging from The Bible and Shakespeare to the poetry of Whitman and Keats (Nelson, 2004, pp. 471-2, 476-7). According to critic Richard P. Morgan (1977), one cannot view [The Journal] as a rebellion against form, but rather as both a parody and a rejection of the very idea of form (p. 153). As Albion Moonlight states Patchens engaged intentions from within the text: there must be as many journals as there are days covered. The true journal can have no plan for the simple reason that no man can plan his days (Patchen, 1961, p. 304-5).Patchens use of the journal formwith its polyvocal representation of lived experiencemay have been influenced by the metaphysical diaries of Robert Duncan and Anas Nin, his closest companions in 1940 along with novelist Henry Miller, who proofread the manuscript of The Journal and debated the issue of war in order to help Patchen clarify his arguments for pacifism (Nelson, 2004, pp. 467, 473; Smith, 2013, p. 151-2). While Miller later wrote a glowing introduction to the book, and the younger poet Duncan called Patchen a saint atoning... for the murders committed by the human race (Nin, 1969, p. 91), Millers lover Nin resented Patchens influence, verbally attacking both him and Miriam as well as penning a scathing review of The Journal in her Diaries (Smith, 2013, p. 153). Nins criticism offers a fascinating glimpse at the power of this work to engage even those who disagreed with its style and content: [Patchen] describes the nightmare of war. The nightmare of the fragmented self. All the voices of the subconscious speaking simultaneously... he is a man who reads newspapers and has nightmares... It is a nightmare of violence. Every act of love or desire is an act of murder... Is this the American nightmare: violence, castration, fragmentation (Nin, 1969, pp. 63-5).James Laughlin was also so disturbed by the nightmarish form of the book that he asked Patchen to make the text more linear and conventional (Nelson, 2004, pp. 482-3). The Journal has been criticized for its failure to achieve aesthetic or narrative resolution in its formal attempt at representing chaos (Nelson, 2004, p. 471), but as poet William Carlos Williams (1977) said in an early review, the haphazard writing was both a defect and necessary for the text (p. 9). Patchens strategy of literary protest, however, may not have been as haphazard as it appears: he composed and refined the components of the book separately before weaving them together to create continuities and juxtapositions in the text (Nelson, 2004, p. 477), thus allowing the narrative voice to directly address its audience. Morgan (1977) suggests that the surface incoherence is a conscious abandonment of literary form in favor of direct personal discourse paralleling a rejection of society, which forces the reader to move from spectator to participant (pp. 154-5). Nelson (2004) argues that Patchen replaced passive tactics of telling with engaged tactics of doing, treating the book as a subjective historiography that did not explain events but imparted their lived experience (pp. 468, 477)the same personal approach to experience that Patchen utilized in his non-partisan political poetry. You will be told that what I write is confused, without order, the character Albion states within The Journal, and I tell you that my book is not concerned with the problems of art, but with the problems of this world, with the problems of life itself (Patchen, 1961, p. 200). Albion also warns the reader that, I write this book as an action, that, some of you will hate my book, for I insist on touching you, and that, you have read many books. This book is reading you (ibid., pp. 24, 202, 261).Because of Patchens (1961) belief that, the writing of the future will be just this kind of writingone man trying to tell another man of the events in his own heart (p. 200), he refused to compromise his artistic vision of personal engagement, leading New Directions to reject publication of The Journal (Smith, 2013, p. 158). Despite Henry Millers personal solicitation to publishers to read Patchens manuscript, major media sources like The New York Times refused the book advertising space and even warned off potential publishers, declaring that the books anti-war stance was anti-American during a time of war (Smith, 2013, pp. 159-60, 163). It may be deeply ironic to read The Journal as anti-American given that the books most consistent message, and the goal of Albions journey, is to inform those who had lost hope in the world that: we live, we love you. Our religion was life (Patchen, 1961, p. 17). As Albion repeatedly declares, I said that you were not to kill anyone, and I meant it, and, there is only one answer: end War (ibid., pp. 48, 90)sentiments that are only unpatriotic if to be American is to glorify death. Much of the critical discomfort with Patchens uncompromising pacifism may extend from the fact that, rather than shift his identity from being a Depression-era writer to a soldier-poet writing in service of a wartime boom, Patchen refused to disown his radical pacifism in the name of national unity, as so many did (Morgan, 1977, p. 153). For example, one of the few directly activist (non-artistic) actions performed by the Patchens throughout this war and those that followed was to help insure the rights of conscientious objectors (Smith, 2013, p. 175). Nelson (1977) claims that, where most literature of protest describes social concerns from an objective or outside standpoint, Patchens focus on the personal effects of historical and social failure allowed for a more effective protest than is generally available in literature (pp. 245-6). The symbolic murders that occur in the novel, and the use of graphic violence that so troubled Anas Nin, are cast as a war against the war and murder that are in the heart of anyone who has ever lived (Patchen, 1961, p. 32). By de-glorifying acts of violence through their stark representation, Patchen attempted to bring war into sharp relief as an immediate personal experience (Morgan, 1977, p.166), and to return protest to its original and irrevocable source: the emotional knowledge that man is in pain (Nelson, 1977, p. 246).The true power of Patchens writing, though, is that where The Journal begins with the suitably horrific image of an angel that has had its throat slit (Patchen, 1961, p. 1), the narrative attempts to move away from its representations of the chaos and pain of organized Society... towards nature and the wonder of the natural soul, through a spiritual engagement with the Romantic concept of a unifying bond connecting all things (Morgan, 1977, pp. 161, 172). This strategy would enable the book, in Patchens estimation, to heal its historical moment (Nelson, 2004, p.468), or, as Williams (1977) put it, to seek a cure... for the bedeviled spirit of his day (p. 4). Patchen regarded himself as essentially a religious thinker, who raided Christian didactic conventions in order to create his visual moral vocabulary and what Nelson (2004) calls a tone of sacramental estrangementdefamiliarizing quotidian referents of violence toward a mysterious other world echoing the scriptural and mythic (pp. 469-70, 474, 477). As Albion states: I propose to make the future and the present and the past happen all at once. I shall allow you not a moment to draw breath (Patchen, 1961, p. 146); this effect is achieved through the repetition and unity of time, space, and dramatic action in the text (Morgan, 1977, p. 174). The narrative moves through a logic in which the characters continually shift archetypal roles, or are shown to be extensions of the narrators own psyche (Nelson, 1977, p. 238; Morgan, 1977, pp. 155-6); episodes in the fictional plot repeat and contradict; while historical news items from the warsuch as the plight of the Polish Jews, the Gallup polls, the winter war in Finland, the military war games in the US, the fascist government in France, the London blackout, mass starvations, the candidacy of Herbert Hoover for president, and the summers brutal heat waveare reported directly but a-chronologically, allowing the narratives personal representation of events to be experienced simultaneously and make the summer of 1940 a single enormous moment of collective experience and memory (Nelson, 2004, p. 481). This summer a miraculous event took place, Albion claims: for the first time in the history of our race all men became aware of the same world... My journal is its record... It was too late to write a book; it was my duty to write all books (Patchen, 1961, p. 305).Driven by the need to express his holistic vision of universal peace on its own engaged and outraged terms, Patchen self-published The Journal of Albion Moonlight in 1941; the limited first edition sold so well that Padell published a trade edition in 1944 and New Directions issued the paperback in 1961 (Nelson, 2004, p. 485; Smith, 2013, pp. 164, 181). According to Morgan (1977), The Journal was read by and effected numerous writers: William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Jean Wahl, Ren Duamal, T.S. Eliot, and Jack Kerouac (p. 152), and it continues to carry a cult following today. As Williams (1977) stated in his review: [The Journal of Albion Moonlight] is the sort of book that must be attempted from time to time, a book to violate all the taboos... There are passages in this book where the mind threatens to open and a vivid reality of the spirit to burst forth and bloom in terrifying destructivenessthe destroying of all that we think we know in our time (pp. 7-8).Or as Miller (1977) declared: Patchen uses the language of revolt. There is no other language left to use (p. 36). Although The Journal of Albion Moonlight did not stop the Second World War in an immediate, historical sense, the personal engagement and experimental techniques through which Patchen wrote make his uncompromising message of peace a universal one, able to wake up future generations to the realities of violence and oppression that haunt every age.Kenneth Patcehn died in 1972 of heart failure; since his death, Miriam dedicated herself to bringing his work to a wider audience, reading his poetry and fictions internationally as well as in front of Amnesty Internationals 1978 Celebration of Human Rights; while publisher New Directions remains committed to keeping Patchens books in print (Smith, 2013, pp. 283, 287, 290-1). Despite a lifetime of critical dismissal, personal pain, and political black-listing, the current positive attitude among scholars is that Patchens works were too good, too universal in their message to be appreciated while he was alive (Smith, 2013, p. 289), and due to the power of their rebellion and whimsy may last to inspire the passionate approach of future artists and social activists. Fellow poet and close friend Kenneth Rexroth (1977) once said that Patchen speaks from the moral viewpoint of the new century, the century of assured hope (p. 22), a hope that is expressed in Patchens final poem, from his 1972 Wonderings: Everyman is me,/ I am his brother./ No man is my enemy./ I am Everyman/ and he is in and of me./ This is my faith,/ my strength,/ my deepest hope,/ and my only belief (Smith, 2013, p. 284).

References

Beye, H. and McCleery, W. (1977). The most mysterious people in the village. In Morgan, R. (Ed.). Kenneth Patchen: A collection of essays. New York, NY: AMS Press.

Miller, H. (1977). Patchen: Man of anger and light. In Morgan, R. (Ed.). Kenneth Patchen: A collection of essays. New York, NY: AMS Press.

Morgan, R. (1977). The journal of Albion Moonlight: Its form and meaning. In Morgan, R. (Ed.). Kenneth Patchen: A collection of essays. New York, NY: AMS Press.

Nelson, R. (1977). The moral prose of Kenneth Patchen. In Morgan, R. (Ed.). Kenneth Patchen: A collection of essays. New York, NY: AMS Press.

Nelson, R. (2004). Patchens evil book. American Literary History, 16 (3), pp. 466-486. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3568060.

Nin, A. (1969). The diary of Anas Nin: 1939-1944. New York, NY: Harcourt.

Patchen, K. (1961). The journal of Albion Moonlight. Norfolk, CT: New Directions.

Rexroth, K. (1977). Kenneth Patchen: Naturalist of the public nightmare. In Morgan, R. (Ed.). Kenneth Patchen: A collection of essays. New York, NY: AMS Press.

Smith, L. (2013). Kenneth Patchen: Rebel poet in America. Huron, OH: Bottom Dog Press.

Wilder, A. (1977). Revolutionary and proletarian poetry: Kenneth Patchen. In Morgan, R. (Ed.). Kenneth Patchen: A collection of essays. New York, NY: AMS Press.

Williams, W. C. (1977) A counsel of madness: A review of the journal of Albion Moonlight. In Morgan, R. (Ed.). Kenneth Patchen: A collection of essays. New York, NY: AMS Press.