Vachel Lindsay goes to the movies - the face of the whole earth changes

From A Doll’s “Arabian Nights”

(A Rhymed Scenario for Mae Marsh, when she acts in the new many-colored films)

I dreamed the play was real.
I walked into the screen.

Vachel Lindsay is anticipating Buster Keaton.  Lindsay wrote a number of poems about actors, including at least one more about Mae Marsh, one of D. W. Griffith’s favorite actresses.  I do not think the acting poems are among Lindsay’s best, but I am interested in their existence. 

I am the one poet who has a right to claim for his muses Blanche Sweet, Mary Pickford, and Mae Marsh.  I am the one poet who wrote them songs when they were Biograph heroines, before their names were put on the screen, or the name of their director…  There are two things to be said for those poems.  First, they were heartfelt.  Second, any one could improve on them.  (p. 4, Modern Library edition)

He loved movies; he theorized about movies.

The result, more important than the poems, was The Art of the Moving Picture (1915, revised 1922), “dated and cranky,” “hyperbolic and self-appointedly supreme” (says Stanley Kauffmann, p. viii) – Lindsay wants people to politely converse during the movie – he titles a chapter “The Substitute for the Saloon” and means it – yet insightful and thorough.

His vocabulary requires some transposition.  Crowd Splendor, Patriotic Splendor and Fairy Splendor. Sculpture-in-Motion, Painting-in-Motion and Architecture-in-Motion.  He is categorizing spectacle and imagery, looking for the uniquely cinematic aspects of film art.  Lindsay is almost an auteurist, praising the aspects of films that are not simply copied from the theater – strong images, intimate but non-verbal acting, crowd scenes, dream sequences.  Chases and special effects (“the wizard element”).

I have said that it is a quality, not a defect, of the photoplays that while the actors tend to become types and hieroglyphics and dolls, on the other hand, dolls and hieroglyphics and mechanisms tend to become human.  (94)

And this in a world almost without auteurs.  Georges Méliès is never mentioned; Charlie Chaplin only mentioned uncomprehendingly.  The one great artist for Lindsay is D. W. Griffith – “he is the star of the piece, except on one page where he is the villain” (124).

The feature-length film is only four or five years old when Lindsay is writing.  Part of the strangeness of the book, I admit, is imagining my way back into the world Lindsay inhabits, where Hollywood has not been built but is one of his correct predictions (Ch. XVI, “California and America”), where every aspect of movies is no new, and changing so fast, and where Lindsay can title his last chapter “The Acceptable Year of the Lord,” and can preach the Gospel of Beauty, prophesying “dreams deeper than the sea and higher than the clouds of heaven”:

It has come then, this new weapon of men, and the face of the whole earth changes…  by faith and a study of the signs we proclaim that it will go on and on in immemorial wonder.  (187)

Vachel Lindsay in Springfield and Biloxi - America's glories flaming high

They journeyed home, made young indeed,
    But opening the book of song
    Each poem looked so deep and long
They could not bear to start to read.  (from “The Visit to Mab,” Collected Poems, 221)

If the great quality of Vachel Lindsay is his imaginative power, his Collected Poems can be almost too powerful – too eccentric, too much of Lindsay at his most peculiar.  But also at his best, and his strangest is often his best.

He is a visionary poet, but a mild one.  He makes great claims for – see left – his high school in Springfield, Illinois, for example.  The UFOs that dominates the illustration is an incense censer, swung by angels over Springfield, with the high school glimpsed in the background.  Other illustrations depict buildings related to Abraham Lincoln and the state government.  No one else has ever attached so much mystical significance to Springfield, IL. 

No man may escape his bouncing infancy.  I do not expect to get ten feet from my childhood till I die.  (“Adventures While Singing These Songs,” 23)

Ah, now, metaphorically, now we’re getting somewhere.

Collected Poems ends with a section titled “Songs Based  on Cartoons, Bill-Boards, and American Hieroglyphics, and Motion-Pictures” that contains some of his dullest poems and also some of his best.  These are latish poems, form the early 1920s mostly.  A long Cleopatra fantasy, “A Song Based on Egyptian Hieroglyphics,” is almost unreadable.  “Billboards and Galleons (Inscribed to Stephen Graham” is full of terrific lines and passages.  Biloxi, Mississippi, “City of hearties, of birthday parties,” is invested with significance for some biographical reason, as are highway billboards:

They went like cliffs up to the sky,
America’s glories flaming high,
Festooned cartoons, an amazing mixture,
Shabby, shoddy, perverse and twistical,
Shamefully boastful,
Shyly mystical.  (p. 427)

Lindsay is not a gifted rhymer, that I’ll concede.  But he sure gets off some good lines.

Exaggerated Sunday papers,
Comic sheets like scrambled eggs,
And Andy Gump’s first-reader capers,
All on those billboards to the sky.

That “comic sheets” metaphor is one of my favorites.  Lindsay has another good poem titled “A Rhyme about an Electrical Advertising Sign”:

I look on the specious electrical light
Blatant, mechanical, crawling and white,
Wickedly red or malignantly green
Like the beads of a young Senegambian queen.
Showing, while millions of souls hurry on,
The virtues of collars, from sunset till dawn,
By dart or by tumble of whirl within whirl,
Starting new fads for the shame-weary girl,
By maggoty motions in sickening line
Proclaiming a hat or a soup or a wine…  (339)

And ending with a vision of the advertising signs making “a new Zodiac” and Broadway “mak[ing] one with that marvellous stair / That is climbed by the rainbow-clad spirits of prayer.”

On the one hand, Lindsay is the tramp poet obsessed with Johnny Appleseed; on the other, he is the Walt Whitman of advertising, singing the sign electric.  Very American.  Almost logically, then, one of the first writers to really understand motion pictures, which will be my last post on Lindsay.

Vachel Lindsay pours the owls upon us - Hail, all hail the popcorn stand

Come, let us be bold with our songs.  (Collected Poems, p. 24)

Vachel Lindsay was a performance artist, author of poems meant to be sung or chanted or danced.  They sound weird enough in performance but if anything are weirder alone on the page.  And they are bold.

Jaguar, cockatoot,
Loons, owls,
Hoot, Hoot…
Hail, all hail the popcorn stand…  (from “The Kallyope Yell”, p. 118)

Sometimes “bold” means so odd no one else would think to put such a line in a poem.  This one is “(To be given in the peculiar whispered manner of the University of Kansas ‘Jay-Hawk Yell’)” which is admittedly darn peculiar.  Perhaps it can be found on Youtube.  Lindsay wants “to teach the tune of the Jay Hawk Yell to the world.”

The literati of Great Britain do not seem to have realized it, but yell-writing is as steady an occupation of bright youths here, as the writing of sonnets was in England in the Elizabethan age.  I take it that “sonnet” is Sanskrit for “yell,” and “yell” will some day be Sanskrit for “sonnet.”  (p. 6)

More typical, and once a famous poem, is “The Congo,” a nine page chant written in protest of the treatment by the Belgians of the inhabitants of the Congo, which includes marginal instructions such as “Shrilly and with a heavily accented metre,” “With a great deliberation and ghostliness,” and “Like the wind in the chimney.”  The latter accompanies these lines:

Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

Doug Skinner pointed me to some recordings of Lindsay. The wind in the chimney sounded different to him than it does to me. The exoticizing language makes the poem unperformable now – “A negro fairyland swung into view” – but it is easy to imagine how a performance could jolt an audience just learning about King Leopold’s crimes.

The performance poems were at their best when boldest, I thought, in imagery and language, when I wanted to whisper the poem aloud.  The scene here is that Jesus has just left the courthouse (?) and is miraculously healing the lame and blind; General William Booth, leader of the Salvation Army, is leading his troops to Jesus:

from General William Booth Enters into Heaven

  [Bass drum louder.]
Drabs and vixens in a flash made whole!
Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl!
Sages and sibyls now, and athletes clean,
Rulers of empires, and of forests green!

General Booth is playing the drum.  That’s the first line of the poem – “Booth led boldly with his big bass drum.”

Maybe it is too easy to pick out the strange lines – there are also plenty of dull ones – but they are so pleasurable.  Here is a children’s poem, one of dozens of Lindsay moon poems, Grandpa Mouse mythologizing the owls:

What Grandpa Mouse Said

The moon’s a holy owl-queen.
She keeps them in a jar
Under her arm till evening,
Then sallies forth to war.

She pours the owls upon us.
They hoot with horrid noise
And eat the naughty mousie-girls
And wicked mousie-boys.

So climb the moonvine every night
And to the owl-queen pray:
Leave good green cheese by moonlit trees
For her to take away.

And never squeak, my children
Nor gnaw the smoke-house door:
The owl-queen then will love us
And send her birds no more.  (in General William Booth Enters into Heaven, and Other Poems)

The line that kills me, that seems uniquely Lindsay’s, is “She pours the owls upon us.”  I kept reading Lindsay for these bold verbal leaps.

He bought his rhymes with bread - Vachel Lindsay preaches the Gospel of Beauty

Vachel Lindsay, poet, artist, tramp, temperance activist, visionary, genuine American eccentric.

They loved his wizard stories,
They bought his rhymes with bread.

That’s from “Upon Returning to the Country Road,” found in General William Booth Enters into Heaven, and Other Poems (1913), and Lindsay means it:

Now that is the header of Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread (1912), a sixteen page pamphlet crammed with poems that Lindsay printed up and took with him on one of his many tramps around America, preaching the Gospel of Beauty, this time from Illinois to New Mexico, I believe.  Please click to enlarge.

from The Santa-Fe Trail. (A Humoresque)

I am a tramp by the long trail’s border,
Given to squalor, rags and disorder.
I nap and amble and yawn and look,
Write fool-thoughts in my grubby book,
Recite to the children, explore at my ease,
Work when I work, beg when I please,
Give crank-drawings, that make folks stare
To the half-grown boys in the sunset glare,
And get me a place to sleep in the hay
At the end of a live-and-let-live day.  (in The Congo and Other Poems, p. 14)

I have read five books by Lindsay besides Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread:

General William Booth Enters into Heaven, and Other Poems (1913)
The Congo and Other Poems (1914)
The Art of the Moving Picture (1915/1922)
The Chinese Nightingale, and Other Poems (1917)
Collected Poems (1923)

The first three books with titles ending “and Other Poems” are short volumes of poems that look a lot like everyone else’s short volumes of poems.  Lindsay was taken up by Harriet Monroe and Poetry magazine as some kind of primitive, what we – some of us – now call an “outsider” artist, whose work “could be by a mental patient, or a hillbilly, or a chimpanzee” as the art dealer on The Simpsons says.  But those three books look professional, ready to submit for an arts grant or creative writing visiting professorship.

Collected Poems, on the other hand, with its crank-drawings of the mystical hotspots of Springfield, Illinois, its “Map of the Universe,” and its two separate introductions, now that book has a strong outsider flavor.  Even if much of it parts of it are tedious or only semi-comprehensible – no, I mean because etc. – it is now the place to get to know Vachel Lindsay.

My Grandfather Frazee had spoken rather contemptuously of poets in my self-important infant presence.  He said they were clever men, and we liked to memorize long passages from their works, and it was eminently desirable that we should do so.  But almost all of them had a screw loose somewhere.  He said this in the midst of his much-read books, which began with Shakespeare and Addison, and ended with all of Mark Twain.  And then incidentally, there were all the established authorities on short-horn cattle.  (Collected Poems, p. 15, bold mine)

Now that is a library.

I have been able to enjoy these books, all but one, through the magic of online scans of the original editions.  The exception is a the sore middle fingerof the above list, The Art of the Moving Picture, which I bought when it was re-published in 2000 with introductions by Martin Scorsese and more importantly the great film critic Stanley Kauffmann.  Chapters have titles like “The Prophet-Wizard” and “The Substitute for the Saloon,” yet this in fact the first American book-length treatise on film aesthetics, a book of great, sometimes almost prophetic, insight into the new art form, with some of Lindsay’s more idiosyncratic preoccupations sprinkled in.

All right, now I’ve got something to work with.

The Best Books of 1913 - Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare / On, on upward thro' the golden air!

This was a strange year for anniversaries.  It is usually the births and deaths of writers that are commemorated, but this year I noticed a lot of attention to books – two books, I mean, Pride and Prejudice and Swann’s Way (for that matter, the Gettysburg Address fits the pattern).  Perhaps this tells us something about what these books have become, how their meaning has expanded beyond their texts.  Austen and Proust both have industries around them.

Proust, or Swann’s Way, or at least the “Combray” section of Swann’s Way, deserves the honor of Best Book of 1913, I think, so I have no complaint about the attention it receives.  It is one of the great novels of the century.  Yet there is something arbitrary to its celebrity.  At least one more of the century’s greats was published in the same year, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, a novel that is innovative like Proust’s book but has a tense thriller plot, including terrorists and a ticking time bomb.  Yet it is a cult novel in English.  I have no idea why.  It is not like English readers have been averse to Russian novels.

If you polled readers or critics fifty years ago, asking them which novel would get the most attention at its centennial, Swann’s Way or D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, I wonder if Lawrence would not top the poll.  How he has fallen.  Or how Proust has risen.  Some of both.  Sons and Lovers is doing all right for itself.

Perhaps a French reader can let me know if Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes has gotten much centennial celebration in France, where it is as well-known as, I don’t know, its titular cousin The Great Gatsby.  In English, another cult book.

I am never sure if I should do a Best of 191X post.  For the 19th century, I have read more of the books I am mentioning, so I know what the books are, not just how they are known.  In 1913, I see Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, which I have not read (nor have I read the Lawrence novel).  I just started the Cather, out of a sense of shame.

1913 was a deeply interesting year for poetry.  It produced a crop of first or second books by major poets, a number of which may well not be major books themselves – see above, haven’t read them – but remind me how quickly poetry was changing.  Maybe not as quickly as painting, but close.  D. H. Lawrence, again, Georg Trakl, Osip Mandelstam, Robert Frost’s A Boy’s Will, Guilliame Apollinaire’s Alcool, William Carlos Williams.

Subscribers to the hot new magazine Poetry would read Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” alongside (more or less) Ezra Pound’s  “In a Station of the Metro”:

The apparition     of these faces     in the crowd   :
Petals     on a wet, black     bough    .

(for those who do not know it, that’s the entire poem) and Vachel Lindsay’s rather different “General William Booth Enters into Heaven”:

Hallelujah! It was queer to see
Bull-necked convicts with that land make free.
Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare
On, on upward thro' the golden air!
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

You’re supposed to sing this, accompanied by bass drum and banjos.  Pound and Lindsay support Kilmer’s argument, since neither poem is as lovely as a tree, although they have other virtues.  There is another line from the Lindsay poem that I was tempted to use as my title: “But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir.”  That was the poetry of 1913.  And the music.  And the painting.  And some of the novels, too.

Giorgio de Chirico’s The Transformed Dream, picked almost at random from a superb year of paintings, can be seen free of charge at the Saint Louis Art Museum.  How interesting, André Breton owned it for a long time.