"Fallen Western Star" Wars (Part I)

Jack Foley

"I'm teaching my students to publish in New York."
--A teacher at New College of California

In the Winter 1999-2000 issue of "The Hungry Mind Review" [now "The Ruminator Review," 1648 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105; (651) 699-2610; back copies are available for $4, subscriptions are $14 for one year/four issues] poet-critic Dana Gioia published an article, "Fallen Western Star," on the San Francisco Bay Area as a literary region. Bart Schneider, editor of "The Hungry Mind Review," explained that he had asked Gioia "to write an essay about the literary life of his region, and he delivered so provocative and thorough a piece that I asked eight other writers from around the country to report on the literary doings in their regions."

Gioia's article grew out of the introduction he had written to my book, "O Powerful Western Star." His title, "Fallen Western Star," is a reference to the line in Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" which gave me my title, and his essay begins with an explicit reference to my book.

I thought Gioia's article was a wonderful piece, but not everyone agreed with me. Howard Junker, editor of "ZYZZYVA," sent a blistering letter to "The Hungry Mind Review." It began,

A lot of things suck in the Bay Area--the Warriors, the 49ers, the theater, the layout of the new Main Library, the collection of the Museum of Modern art, bagels...but the literary scene does not.

Dana Gioia is so estranged, so painfully oblivious, that if he weren't also so pompous and inaccurate, it would be cruel to take him to task.

Jonah Raskin also responded to Gioia's article, though Raskin's tone was considerably milder than Junker's. Raskin's article, "Local Literary Scene is Worth Celebrating," appeared in "The Press Democrat" on Wednesday, December 15, 1999; it begins,

My friend Dana Gioia--who lives on a hilltop in Sonoma County and who churns out distinctly good poetry and trenchant literary criticism--has an odd take these days on the San Francisco Bay Area as a literary region. In the winter 1999-2000 issue of "The Hungry Mind Review," Gioia complains that our part of the country has gone down hill since the glory days of the late 19thcentury when Mark Twain and Frank Norris held sway here.

I suppose he has a point. It's hard to go up hill, culturally speaking, from Mark Twain. Then again, the idea of measuring culture and authors in terms of rising and falling like the barometer or the stock market doesn't sit well with me...Unlike Dana Gioia, I'm not of a mind to lament, but rather to celebrate. What we have here, culturally speaking, seems awfully good indeed.

The most detailed response to Dana Gioia's article was written by Richard Silberg, Associate Editor of "Poetry Flash." It was titled, "On ˜Fallen Western Star': Dana Gioia Stirs it Up in the ˜Hungry Mind Review'" and it was published in the "Flash's" most recent issue, Number 285, May June 2000. My response to Silberg's piece, "The Black Hole of Criticism: Richard Silberg on Dana Gioia's ˜Fallen Western Star,'" is forthcoming in the next "Poetry Flash."

I think that Gioia's article and the issues it gives rise to are of sufficient importance to be disseminated as widely as possible. My next several columns will present, in their entirety, Gioia's piece, Silberg's, and my own.

We'll begin with "Fallen Western Star."

I. "O Powerful Western Star" - Title of Jack Foley's critical Book on Bay Area culture (1999)

In 1899 San Francisco was a major literary center--a city where influential new trends emerged and young writers achieved national reputations. Not only was the Bay Area noted for developing its local talent, true originals like Jack London, Bret Harte, Edwin Markham, Lincoln Steffens, and Frank Norris; it had also long attracted ambitious newcomers from elsewhere like Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. What better place was there in America to serve a literary apprenticeship than this raw but strangely sophisticated boomtown where even a stagecoach robber like Black Bart wrote poetry? Northern California also drew foreign literati, most notably Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, and the region's climate--both meteorological and intellectual--attracted literary invalids like the consumptive Stevenson and the post-breakdown Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

In the days before television and radio, national taste and opinion were not yet created exclusively in broadcast capitals like New York and Los Angeles. Strong city newspapers commanded national attention. A brilliant local journalist like Bierce at the San Francisco Examiner exercised immense influence (just as a little later H. L. Mencken would shape political and cultural opinion from the Baltimore Sun). San Francisco, which was then the center of William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire and home to dozens of other journals, helped set the agenda of American literature.

What emerged was a distinctive local literature that reflected San Francisco's unique geography, history, and population. The literature of this Gold Rush seaport was innovative, irreverent, populist, and yet oddly international--notably different from the writing of other American literary centers of the era like Boston, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. No one would confuse a page of Frank Norris or Jack London with one by William Dean Howells or Edith Wharton. San Francisco represented a bohemian and democratic alternative to the East Coast's genteel and academic traditions. Its best writers not only added to American literature, they transformed it. American Naturalism, for example, was largely the creation of San Francisco and Chicago newspaper-trained novelists. London was America's first significant working-class writer. Japanese-born Yone Noguchi became the first Asian-American author of note. These writers would not have emerged in Boston or Baltimore.

One anecdote will suffice to demonstrate both the power and personality of fin de sicle San Franciscan literary culture. On January 15, 1899 Edwin Markham, a forty-seven-year-old Oakland high school teacher, published "The Man with the Hoe" in the San Francisco Examiner. Based on the celebrated Jean-Francois Millet painting, which had recently been exhibited in San Francisco, this forty-nine-line blank verse poem dramatized the perpetual burden of the oppressed worker and condemned the treatment of labor. Newspapers were the Internet of the nineteenth century--a decentralized information system--and "The Man with the Hoe" was reprinted from paper to paper first across the United States and then abroad. Translated into more than forty languages, it was eventually republished in 10,000 newspapers and magazines. In the early twentieth century there was no more famous American poem than Markham's. The poet became an international celebrity, and the poem served as a literary call to arms for the labor movement--all of which began with the San Francisco Examiner.

The popular sentiment was not misplaced. One hundred years later "The Man with the Hoe" remains an extraordinary poem--vivid, forceful, compressed, and deeply moving. Although the poem still has many readers, it rarely appears in current anthologies, so it may help to quote a few lines to convey its particular quality. After an ironic epigraph from Genesis "God made man in His own image . . . " Markham begins with Millet's pathetic image of a wretched laborer bent over a hoe:

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.

Slowly and passionately the poet builds to his final stanza--an apocalyptic vision of the future when the worker's anger, resentment, and desire are unleashed. No American poet--and especially no poet of the Gilded Age--provided a truer prophecy of the bitter social turmoil of the early twentieth century:

O masters, lord and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?

Although no one ever cites it as such, Markham's "The Man with the Hoe" was and remains the quintessential Bay Area poem--a representative work for the best that would follow over the next century. It offers a populist and progressive but unillusioned view of existence. It dramatizes the lone individual against the system without idealizing the protagonist into an unrealistically noble figure. The poem's perspective dares to take the long view of human history and does not shy away from suggesting universals. The style is both visionary and naturalistic. The concerns are moral and political. The manner of the poem is quite contemporary for the late Victorian era, and yet its modernity is deeply rooted in the past. The poetic and ideological allegiances are thoroughly cosmopolitan, as much international as American. Finally, the poem is conceived for oral delivery--it is accessible, dramatic, and auditory. These same qualities can be found, mutatis mutandis, in later Northern Californian poets including such otherwise diverse figures as Robinson Jeffers, Kenneth Rexroth, Yvor Winters, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, William Everson, Gary Snyder, Josephine Miles, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Thom Gunn. And these qualities link the poets to the populist outsider politics native to the Bay Area from Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair through Eric Hoffer and Jerry Brown.

Although extremely different in their aesthetics, these poets share crucial assumptions that might best be called Populist Modernism. They explored new styles and subjects without ever deliberately limiting their work to a coterie audience of literati. Compare a poem by Jeffers or Ginsberg to one by Wallace Stevens or Hart Crane, and the stubbornly public nature of Northern California poetry becomes obvious. Even a New Critical modernist and academic formalist like Winters, an early champion of Crane and Stevens, developed a poetic style that was accessible, realistic, and auditory. (The cerebral Winters once spent a year preparing and publishing the defense of a local man unjustly convicted and condemned to death for murder. The Case of David Lamson in 1934 resulted in overturning the conviction--hardly the sort of scholarly project any other New Critic would have undertaken.) Poetry was not conceived as a self-enclosed text for private meditation but as a direct address to an audience. There is an essential line of development that stretches from "The Man with the Hoe" to "Howl," though it may be one difficult for an Easterner to see.

Early San Francisco fiction was tough-minded, political, and naturalistic. No wonder the city later inspired Dashiell Hammett. Its fiction viewed the world mostly from the bottom up and vividly registered new social trends--from the labor movement and feminism to sexual freedom and environmentalism--before they became mainstream. Artistic and social concerns mixed easily. The Bay Area not only liberated Charlotte Perkins Gilman to write "The Yellow Wallpaper," but also allowed her to organize the California Woman's Congress. The radical populism of London and Norris found enduring expression in later northern California writers like John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, Tillie Olsen, Oscar Lewis, Wallace Stegner, Janet Lewis, Amy Tan, and Maxine Hong Kingston just as it attracted and influenced a special sort of literary immigrant like Henry Miller, Kay Boyle, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Even its visionaries like Philip K. Dick and Richard Brautigan were anti-authoritarian and democratic. California is surely the only state that nearly elected a Naturalist novelist governor--muckraker Upton Sinclair narrowly missed winning in 1934. Who can blame an aesthete like Gertrude Stein from escaping this gritty, populist, and fervently political milieu for the l'art pour l'art freedom of Paris?

Populist modernism and Naturalist fiction were two of the major ways in which San Francisco once helped shape American letters. For nearly a century, the city represented the unexplored and invigorating possibilities of a new democratic culture. It was, to borrow a phrase from poet-critic Jack Foley, the "powerful western star" of American literature.

(Continued next week)

Jack Foley