Page:Minority of One September 1961.pdf/10

James Franklin Lewis

By Mary Graham Lund

Seldom, except in the occasional lyrics of Stephen Crane, has the grotesque appeared in American poetry. Yet the idea of the "lyric as emotion" which stems from Horace and Proclus in the Aristotelian tradition, does admit humor to its province. According to Louis Armand Reid (A Study in Aesthetics, 1931) "strong humor" adds width to the "difficult beauty" of the lyric. Much of the poetry of James Franklin Lewis has been misunderstood by his editors and belittled by his critics because in him the "spirit of lyric" was enhanced by the spontaneous, the gratuitous, the explosive, the curative grotesque.

Humor in Lewis's poetry is never contrived. It is a product of the essential "joy of the spirit" which characterized the "Renaissance man," the "universal man," at home in two worlds, the objective world of science and the subjective realm of the lyric. Lewis did not force wit. His humor was a part of what Germany's great modern poet Gottfried Benn calls the Vorgang, the event of the poem which exists before it is translated into words.

Lewis had never heard of Benn, but his explanation of Vorgang is clear and credible. "Sometimes," he wrote to his editor, Dr. Alan Swallow, "a poem comes to me in musical melody which I cannot transmit by word of page. Quite often I start off well with a line. a melody, or an idea, work fluently for a half hour, get stalled completely, lay it in my box of attempts, stall again, and again - then find my mind full of melody." These diatonic melodies, the poet explains, "have exactly the same curve as the verbal melody that emerges."

As examples of this type of Vorgang Lewis offers two poems in Score for this Watch^[1] (Swallow Press, 1941). In "Midair Metabolism," the opening poem, there is a comparison of a fountain's play with water droplets forever bursting into beauty to return "In the insubstantial way/Of a waterstalk that flows like a poet's pen/To fill an oblivious rock-strewn gorge,/Unstably as the course of men. . .” which has elements of the grotesque. "Excavators," an account of an amateur geological jaunt, is sprinkled with chips of macabre humor, such as, "We found a curving reddish trail/ That might have been another bone/Gone off to decompose alone." It has a merry rhythm that counterpoints the macabre theme ironically. These two poems, he confessed, were constructed upon a melody and "taken out of a white-hot head in a very few minutes."

This was not true of "To a Mocking Bird," an arrangement in all its seventeen stanzas, not so much of the bird's song as of the poet's emotions, as the passionate bird flings its contradictions into space, jovially antagonistic to everything in general. Lewis confessed that he "painfully worked out the meter and content over a number of months," though in the end he "dashed off the whole business in a few intense hours." This is an example of "Pre-Set," a process of selecting the components according to the effects desired in advance of actual composition, a term and process applicable to the kinetic as well as to the plastic arts. In this case, he set up a formal stanza pattern. then structured the poem carefully from the personal and concrete to the universal concrete.

This poem is like Shelley at his Hellenic best; the last stanza even carries a Shelleyan lament at the transcience of fame:

The grotesque in "Mocking Bird" consists mainly in regarding the bird as an orator against "old dotards bent on laws," "air stuffy with old sound," against waste, and bad taste, etc. The grotesque persists in his serious poems. In "Time at Trial" he brings up the subject of gargoyles:

The grotesque is as much a part of a serious poem as the gargoyles of Gothic architecture; they serve the same purpose as those famous waterspouts in washing away filth and debris.

Things speak to Lewis humorously: "the pewter plate has a round low bass"; "squeak-fitted feet" call out for pity as they tiptoe the street; the grass in the rain calls out "a saturate peace"; the poet listens to "a city of sifting poetries. Things do the strangest things: fairies "strop their silky wings on the metaphysical rose"; "some moon has grown/To a great self-love in the local sky"; a serpent "rolls to a marriage-hoop"; man escaping from a lost civilization saves "a wattled cockatrice and a catalogue of Greece."

Lewis's view of a distorted universe is highly serious: he battles against ambivalence (which seems to be a holy symbol in much modern literature) considering it the poet's task to integrate it, since all things are really polar. In one of his most serious efforts titled "The Annual Poem," there are several grotesque images. In this poem Lewis celebrates the tree-god of Christianity, the trinity of branches. As the keystone of the Christian philosophy is sacrifice, the tree drops its "fair mass of shredded yellow downward/Into dusky gossip-" Man makes foolish use of the sacrifice, so that the tree god is forced to "abdicate his own creation," to become the wild blasphemer of later centuries, the agnostic trinity of science. The tree becomes weary of the slow advance of reason, weary of the "wind's interrupting thuds," of the "deferred poison" in its veins, pessimistic of the new growth from the spicy decay below "Kept leaves like Christmas bushelry of old letters stank . . ." But these dead leaves- "...trophies from the dry tripartite peace," the poet warns, must be treated as though their minds were still alive- "Fallen as they are now in their mockery/Of democracy, all fallen dead instruments/In transit to experiment again/(In faint ammonia under memory-meadows) . . ." The scientist must again begin his search for truth, but "The wrecked log/Lays its long trash across the path, To trip up Jack running around with a light-bulb/Through the hollows..."

Lewis saw life with a cartoonist's eye. Evidence of this is found repeatedly in an early poem Lem Harris in Illinois, an account of a rather frustrating year at a small denominational college, particularly in his descriptions of characters. "One smiled a sweet expanse of resignation," another wore a "face impressed by truth and money-lenders." The president was a "man of great theologies and reasons/That shifted with the seasons," and while he talked, "the faculty sat there dead/And watched the indentations in his head." One of the faculty was a lonely fellow, "hounded by suspicion/ With much saliva and a fake contrition." One of the feminine members of the staff "loved her words to being through rounded lips/ Slowly mothered to enunciation." And one of the faculty wives was "over-childed, over-mastered, underfed."

The Disneyish cartoonist's trick of using animals to point a moral, Lewis carried to an hilarious extreme in a long unpublished poem titled Goat's Milk and Mirrors. In excerpts published in Targets 5 ("Hot Spots" and "Strange Epitaph") the protagonist sees 1) "four-winged birds" sitting on a wire, 2) "a headless hen/Leaping in ecstasy . . ." and 3) a stoat which ". . . committed nuisance/On the letters of a solemn epitaph,/Yellowly bathing that fiction/In the salty stream of reality..." This book with the intriguing title may well prove the most exciting of all of Lewis's work. I have seen only Part I, Esthetics (40 pages) and Part III, Socialics (35 pages). Mrs. Lewis wrote me (Jan. 4, 1961) that in the box of unfinished manuscripts she has recently dis covered a copy of Esthetics labeled Part II, and Part I (not typed) titled Philosophics. Part I contains about 36 pages, and there is a prose introduction of 26 pages. The epigraph of the book is a quotation from Schleimacher:

"Therefore my progress is slow, and I shall have to live long before I have embraced all things equally, but whatever I do embrace will bear my impress."

Lewis did not live long. He died at the age of 42, in his laboratory, with an unfinished poem on his desk, over four thousand pages of unpublished work in "The Box," and a book ready for the printer. The book is The Apocalypse of Harmony, the title poem of which was recently given a cash award by THE CAROLINA QUARTERLY. The poem appears, for the first time in English, in their summer issue. It was published in Spanish translation in RUECA, a magazine published in Mexico City. Lewis was a great admirer of modern Spanish poetry, and acquainted with the work of the Mexican poets Huerta and Paz, a fact which he reveals in an article in INTERIM the fall of 1944.

Lewis was becoming interested in philosophy, and might have bogged down in a morass of Hegelian dialectic had it not been for his flair for the grotesque, the mischievous spirit that made him place gargoyles on all his temples. It seems probable that he had put away Goat's Milk to work on a series of philosophic poems titled The Stepholds of the Mind, published posthumously in The University of Kansas City Review (Winter, 1946). But he couldn't shut out the leprechaun. He says, regretfully, of science, "I've spent a half a life in this love- pact,/Darting about my coat-tails,/Striving to be accurate and wise." But he was wiser, perhaps, in Goat's Milk. The leprechaun's voice may prove louder than Hegel's.

Mary Graham Lund is a poetess and a literary critic. She is presently engaged in sorting and marketing the unpublished manuscripts of James Franklin Lewis.

1. ↑ Copies of Score for this Watch are available from the poet's widow, Mrs. James Franklin Lewis, 4420 McCulloch St., Duluth 4, Minn., at $1.00.