Reflections on Thomas McGrath's Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Part One

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My maternal grandfather's brother Benjamin and his wife Yetta, both of them life-long communists, had a radical affect on me as a young poet developing an understanding of class consciousness and justice as it relates to labor. Although they could be slightly blind in the either-or conflict of Stalinist Communism versus Capitalist Democracy, they engendered a solid distrust of the capitalist system of labor, which they could document by their own human struggles as a presser and a seamstress. To make it as far outside of the system as they could, they ended up as small chicken ranchers in Petaluma, California where they eked out a way to live on their own for over thirty years. I had been reading Dylan Thomas, Kenneth Patchen, and Federico Garcia Lorca, but I feel that I first came into contact with political poetry in the basement of the small house where they retired to in Petaluma. I had been staying with my great aunt and uncle while attending classes at College of Marin when-in the middle of a series of questions about what I was going to with my life-I declared awkwardly but emphatically that I had been writing poetry for three years and I intended on becoming a poet. I don't think they cared what I turned out to be as long as I had class consciousness, which I sensed for the two of them was primary to any notion of being mentally sound, that is, if ethics was a component. "Oh-h-h, so, you want to be a poet? So, come, come," she said, and my uncle and I followed her down the back porch to the daylight basement room where they kept the overflow from their library. She picked through Mike Gold and some Howard Fast, and shuffled around a few selected Daily Worker folders then came out with two worn paperbacks: a chapbook of poems by Langston Hughes and a translation of Pablo Neruda's Let the Railsplitter Awake. "Old lady from a village outside of Kiev I don't even remember the name of, you forgot one." I turned to face my uncle who was holding up a copy of New and Selected Poems by Thomas McGrath. When we were back upstairs Yetta said, "Go ahead, read, read, and if you smoke don't open the window, go outside, it stinks, it stinks, your smoking." And I went off into the room I stayed in for several weeks before I found a rundown cottage to rent near the college.

Because of the historical and emotional immediacy, out of those three volumes McGrath's had the strongest effect on me. Poems like "Nightmare," "Many in the Darkness," "The Dialectics of Love," "A Warrant for Pablo Neruda," "The Trouble with the Times," "Return to Marsh Street," "A Coal Fire in Winter," and others combined a metaphorical Wallace Stevens and Dylan Thomas-like elaboration of language with a narrative flow that contained the material of insight usual lyric poetry suppressed.

A few years later I read Thomas McGrath's Letter to an Imaginary Friend Part I. My focus here on the first of the four books is neither a negative criticism of the following three parts nor of his shorter lyric poems. There are books that come to you during excruciating and memorable periods of self-discovery. For me, several of those experiences included Whitman's poetry and prose, Dickinson's poetry and letters, Sesuki's Introduction to Zen Buddhism, Freud's The Pleasure Principle, Rexroth's poetry and essays, Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, The Double, and Notes from the Underground, Gogol's Dead Souls, Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Traven's The Death Ship, Lawrence's Women in Love and Sons and Lovers, Cendrars' Prose of the Tran Siberian, Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, Buber's translations of The Tales of the Hasidim, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, Miller's two Tropic books, John Lame Deer's Seeker of Visions, Black Elk's autobiography, and Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. McGrath's Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Part One was such a book for me. It had a liberating effect on my writing and my understanding of ways to write poetry, and it helped me toward a deeper understanding of experience.

Deriving in part from Whitman's collage technique in his long poem Song of Myself, McGrath's narrative sense of immediacy with historic events coupled with the struggle for self-knowledge diverges from Whitman's mystically Democratic personal and collective representation. No comparison of the two poets is intended. Song of Myself is a lasting work of American and world literature, and so is Letter to an Imaginary Friend. Generally speaking, neither are Whitman and McGrath politically or philosophically opposed to each other, but the problems of working-class exploitation and alienation not to mention the problems of imperialism and empire were not solved by the system Whitman partially placed his hopes in. Living in a time when the Democratically-utopian ideas of Jefferson, Owen, Kropotkin, and Marx were fresh and prevalent among the working people exposed to them, there is reason to accept Whitman's hope-though the decimation of the native American tribes, the entrenched anti-abolitionist mentality, and Western expansion threw into question any notion of a progressive sense of hope. McGrath's sensibility is a political as well as a cultural expansion distinct in style and temperament from Whitman's sensibility. Concurrent with the revolution of Modernism, Cubism, and Simultanism that took place in the arts during the early part of the twentieth century was the organization of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies, IWW, or Wobs), the most radical working-class organization to emerge in the U.S. The IWW believed in a union of all the workers of the world within a system that erased exploitation, which they attempted to achieve-militantly when necessary. William D. Haywood, America's legendary revolutionist, was the chairman of the first conference of the IWW. "Fellow workers," he said, "the aims and objects of this organization shall be to put the working class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution without regard to capitalist masters" (Adamic p.157).

When McGrath was a boy working on his father's farm he met Cal who, judging by the decency of his character as portrayed in part one of Letter-it was crucial though incidental that he was a member of the IWW. McGrath was watched-over by Cal as older men or other pre-adult males will recognize a boy with care as though by a rare, but customary, masculine code. It is a code of personality-emulation stressing ethical views. In the world of working-class Humanist consciousness these views, guided by an extreme emphasis on egalitarianism, involve everything from treatment of family members to an understanding of labor, consideration toward women, tolerance to children and elders; cautious goodwill to strangers; what is serious and what is comic, and why. These down-to-earth and robust men-any child is lucky to encounter their teaching. Inherent in such an encounter is a strong component for the origins of the confidence to create personal skill, as well as to individually integrate and continue the same custom of an initiatory practice to serve others. What is learned goes beyond immediate knowledge, extending communal intimacy through the course of time. Also, within the context of knowledge it defines itself through the act of transmission as a possession that is inherently a gift:

My father took me as far as he could go that summer,
Those midnights, mostly, back from his long haul.
But mostly Cal, one of the bundle teamsters,
My sun-blackened Virgil of the spitting circle,
Led me from depth to depth.
                                                                 Toward the light
I was too young to enter.
He must have been thirty. As thin as a post,
As tough as Whang-leather, with a brick-topped mulish face,
A quiet talker. He read The Industrial Worker,
Though I didn't know what the paper was at the time.
The last of the real Wobs--that, too, I didn't know,
Couldn't.

                                     Played harmonica; sat after supper
In the lantern smell and late bat-whickering dusk,
Playing mumbly-peg and talked of wages and hours
At the bunkhouse door. On Sunday cleaned his gun,
A Colt .38 he let me shoot at a hawk-
It jumped in my arm and my whole arm tingled with shock.
A quiet man with the smell of the road on him,
The smell of far places...

What he tried to teach me was how to take my time,
Not to be impatient, not to shy at the fence,
Not to push on the reins, not to baulk nor pull the leather,
Tried to teach me when to laugh and when to be serious,
When to laugh at the serious, be serious in my laughter,
To laugh at myself and be serious with my self.
He wanted me to grow without growing too fast for myself.
A good teacher, a brother. (p. 17-18).

Cal, the organizer of men in need, the warm teacher, signals and becomes symbolic of the I-Thou brotherly relationship, which is understood as a transmitted value of individuals and brothers extended within a Democratic collective. McGrath's view to his interior life and its relation to the collective life is not a fantasy of idealism or revolution or what E.P. Thompson in his perceptive "Homage to Thomas McGrath" refers to as a "reputable nostalgia" (Thompson p. 110). As a young man in a brutal winter of the Depression, without any chance at other work, he hitches up with a crew of loggers, actually woodchoppers cutting lumber into "stove length rounds/ chunks of pure sunlight made warmer by our work" (46). Hard work, long hours in the subzero woods, but the men have an allegiance, a sense of necessity within the small
workers' community of desperate need. McGrath speaks of the tranquility
of the solidarity in the woods:

     Sometimes at evening with the dusk sifting down through the trees
     And the trees like a smudge on the white hills and the hills drifting
     Into the hushed light, into the huge, the looming, holy
     Night;--sometimes, then, in the pause and balance
     Between dark and day, with the noise of our labor stilled,
     And still in ourselves we felt our kinship, our commune
     Against the cold. (p. 46)

Earlier in Section V. McGrath refers to a "night journey," by way of a lift he's taking to Buffalo from where he will set out for school. And it is the beginning of the journey of a young man into "the night," leaving home, the fecundity and virulence, the unpredictability that awaits him on that journey, ominous and flagrant with the troubles that come to a poet approaching the "mine" and "the underground streams" of the imagination and buried emotion. It is also the beginning of the anxiety of departure from earlier rituals that can not-without psychological stagnation-outlast the time of their occasion. Moreover, the rituals of sexuality to which the teenage man is "plenipotentiary...clamped to the sweating pelt," will pass through other affairs and departures, and night journeys between them and no sentimentality over these affairs either, but another kind of night related to the original, which is part of the poet's

     "Nightmare, struggle, despair, and dream."
     Love and Hunger!-that is my whole story.
     An education in the form of a night journey.
     Congo of the heart...
                                                             Dream voyage...

                                                                                   Safari
     To the dark interior.
     Chaffinch, miner's canary, O white mice
     Of Sir Humphrey Davy be with me now!

     Borne on the underground stream,
     I entered the hornacle mine--trivium--quadrivium-
     In the rattling Ford, through the black stopes of a dust storm
     From Sheldon to Buffalo.

                                                          Stopped in that dead of night,
     The midnight noon of nineteen-thirty-five,
     Becalmed in a dark our headlights could not pierce
     And my father gave me advice. Advice and ten dollars
     The money to last for a year, the advice for a lifetime.
     I heard the wind howl in the night of the dust... (p. 31)

Writing from the Greek Island of Skyros, having traveled through Spain, Mexico, across the United States and world war; seeing the situation of the poor, the miserable cities with interchangeable governments, McGrath writes: "Dakota is everywhere./ A condition." One might say it is a condition from Watts to Afghanistan, from the "planting" of dynamite by agents of the Mill owners during the Lawrence strike in 1912 to the planting of weapons in the yard of a church worker in San Salvador during a popular uprising, from the anti-humane police state expansion of the Israeli settlements to the corporate-imperialist war waged over the non-existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "The condition" beckons for a sensibility that is outraged, compassionate, and morally practical. Part of the tragedy of our time is that an obligation to such a sensibility has become unaccountable or indeterminate in the make up of human consciousness. Mark Twain, responding to the Imperialist foreign policy-makers re-sharpening their knives in the United States, France, Germany, Russia, Belgium, and England, wrote:

     I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled,
     besmirched and dishonored from pirate-raids in Kiao-Chow, Manchuria,
     South Africa and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her
     pocket full of boodle and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her
     soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.
     (Twain p. 13)

"Dakota is everywhere./ A condition."

At the core of McGrath's narrative are the self-revelations of a man struggling to develop a personal system of humane and erotic values:" Love and hunger!-that is my whole story/ An education in the form of a night journey" (p. 31). Though the presence of Cal has passed out of his life, the reality of his activism informs McGrath's anger over the crushing, co-opting, and marginalizing of the working-class. Still, the life of the individual man goes on however stilted, hung-up, or oppressed. "Now what is harder to know than the simplest joy?" (McGrath p. 55) the poet asks.

Early scenes of Letter catalogue and recollect love affairs in Dakota, and the lusty now slightly older man refers with direct jargon and humor to a harsh winter,
"whose cold could make your balls ache when there was nothing to warm them/ But my burning and stallion need-that grand old religion/ of which I am the Pope" (p. 44). But now as though instinctually: an end to journeying: an unfolding into settling down occurs in the poem. The sexual recognition, arriving as it often does in advance of erotic commitment, seems to have stunned McGrath as much as it inspired him. It shook him up. There appears to be a side within him that wasn't ready, that needed to wander longer and more thoroughly in that "Safari/ to [his own] dark interior." Exquisitely expressed, he anticipates the loss that will come: "A rose, a flower of warmth in the heart of the abstract cold./I was bound to lose it" (p.56). But it is not clearly explained how the loss finally occurs. Only that even this early vital love is somehow victimized by the poet's interior chaos and the "nightmare" and "struggle" of his journey through the world. It can only be assumed that there is a kind of wearing-out through the blending and conflicting erosions that happen within the complexity of an unworkable or premature marriage. But the relationship to Marian has an initial force and up surging in the way it affects McGrath as a catalyst, a primary actualization of the pair, the couple united, the manifestation in the world of the poet's interior marriage:

     A warmth, a sunlight, and an end to journeys-
     That's what it seemed like, was;
     Or the permanent sky, maybe,
                                                                      myself drifting,
                                                                                                               or flame
     Would light me north in the long collapse of Time
     When Vega is pole star.
     So the journey ended, or seemed to, in the sweet strength of
     her flesh.
     That brightness...softness…
                                                          in the fire-flame, in the fixed cone
     Of light, I broke my fast, I woke my want. (p. 56)

But McGrath, whose journey "seemed to" end, foretells of himself heading south "Toward music, toward speech," his beginnings as a poet (p. 61) and "all to the wars and the whores and the wares and the ways of a rotten season" (p. 59). The gap of details for the marital collapse that is to come and which is reflected later in the poet's "dream and despair; the journey around the wound..." (p.87) is shifted to the exterior social nightmare and portents of war oncoming. The terrors of the world the couple are surrounded by are taken to its most basic even instinctual level in the scene of the hunt as the night comes where they first lodged "among madmen" and later by "the nameless river."

     Then came the long night running by the river shallows:
     Pursuit
     Workings of darkness
     The endless hunting [...]

     Rolling out of the dark-everything running, running
     The night running , the darkness alive with
     Running and the terror of the long running.

     The brush cracked like a shot and the great shapes leaped,
     Rode by like cloud, their eyes slashed by long speed,
     In the great frieze of terror.
     The great and the noble deer
     and the poor weak things of the dark
     Running, running, the hills wild with their terror
     The brush smashing and rustling the shadows patterned with splashes-
     Till the whole world seemed running in that long hunt.
     And the tame cattle joined the running, came bellowing out of
                                              the brush
     Their holy terror, their anguished disbelief that they were hunted;
     The horses crashed by, screaming their hurt and hatred,
     And the barnyard geese, and the very birds of the place-
     And at the last a man-was it a man?
     Came out of the willow brake, running without a sound
     While the peeling keen of the hounds grew iron and round on the hills.
     It passed us running, a thing of the purest night,
     Soundless.
                                             The terrible eyes begged no release (66-67).

The irreality of the war arrives with shit-burning latrines and sexlessness lousing the psyche. And here McGrath's surreal-blackened satire and pathos concerning what it is to a be soldier at war begins. The stop on board ship is to Anchorage "a little nugget of dung..." in the passage over "the freezing urine colored sea..." The alienated terrain of war is:

     Everything externalized; everything on the outside;
     Nowhere the loved thing, or known thing.
     In the night of the Army, the true sleepwalker's country,
     All are masked familiars at the deaths of strangers-
     It was the strangeness that moved us. (p. 76)

Among medics metamorphosed into junkies over madness of actual lacerated bodies, scorched flesh, amputations; meat wagons carrying off dead soldiers; suicide "swallowers of razor blades" (p. 84), McGrath, driven to fight fascism for a government that until the necessary and also convenient immersion in the war was an oppressor and enemy of the very people who were now the troops-satirizes the final cynicism of the whole involvement and the cool savagery of military-industrial profiteers:

     ( They have heat-seeking missiles for that kind of jazz,
     Thermotropic anonymous letters that explode at blood heat
     And will blow you ass-ways just because you are warm...)
     Part of the Engineer's great dream: a war without bandages. ( 85)

However, a gripping content to the poet's psychic descent, which is parallel to the intense worldly Inferno of the war, is unfortunately skirted over. The lyrical narrative flow is consistent but the passage leaves the reader with poetic generalities of dark and light, life and death, laughter and grief. There is a sense of fortuitous disposability to the difficulty or unpleasantness of this content, and the poet travels past "the bottom of the interior night and that antipodean great/ beast/ (Whose charity is to devour)" (91 ). Nonetheless, he goes down to the bottom, under the layers that drop from the pit of that hole:

     It was down there,
     Past the milestones of my tombs and the singing bones of my true loves
     I come there:
     Drifting:
     In the high march and dead set of the night, On the most direct road to my death
     Most careless there?I come into the Old Dominion, the true, breathing, holy, Dark.
     There, old bird on the branch of the lost midnight,
     The Dark closed and clothed me, and the pushed, furious beast
     That burned and bit in my side lay down to sleep.

     Hushed at last.
     Then I saw the bones go singing-
     Like stars or fireflies-
     And came to the laughter:
     The Holy Joke of myself in that blizzard of dark and light:
     To Laughter:
     Laughter of light and dark and the Holy Joke of that real world,
     And the great open secret that we all know and forget.
     Samadhi. Satori.

     Then the night and its canting monsters turned holy around me.
     Laughably holy.
     And that lank gentleman, the esthete snake, came by and bit me,
     And the littlest sacred mad dog of a crazy world,
     And I gave him my heel to kiss In my sudden pride:
     In my quick ridiculous love:
     In my wholeness and holiness:
     In solidarity and indifference:
     In the wild indifferent joy which is man's true estate. (p. 92?93)

The resurrection McGrath gains from his descent is as much a part of his vision of a communal society as the creation of the poem is the material testimony of his experience of "indifferent wild joy."

The struggle of the working class to transform society in to what Kropotkin referred to as "all for all" is not simply an intellectual position taken up and upheld however dignified by a poet remote from the struggle involved. McGrath was there as a worker, an organizer, and a writer. And in the late forties and early fifties he witnessed the struggle first hand and was not taken in by the half hearted or phony activists "Turning and turning/ fighting mainly each other" (p. 88). There was a chaos overwhelming the working class in the post-war grief and affluence fogging the high profits of the military and manufacturing industries and the further greed of multinational Imperialist adventure then in Korea: "The last strikes sold out by the labor fakers of business unionism Reuther Meany Social Plutocracy. (p. 118) That is, the "One Big Union" dream and struggle of the IWW has turned into a grotesque union of labor, big-business and government. The larger humane values integrated within those of economic justice are now castrated and marginalized. During the anti-constitutional purges of the late forties and early fifties in the United States when members or one-time members or associates of the communist party were hunted down and jailed, or went into exile, all but the informers who worked deals with the HUAC were blacklisted, and McGrath lost his teaching job at L.A. State College, not to mention several jobs thereafter wherever the blacklist was in effect. McGrath bounced around and bounced back. Near the end of part one of Letter he concludes:

     Now, toward midnight, the rain ends.
     The flowers bow and whisper and hush.
                                                                                 the clouds break
     And the great blazing constellations rush up out of the dark
                                                                               To hang in the flaming North...
     Arcturus, the Bear, the Hunter
     Burning...

     Now, the Furies come, my furious Beast.
     I have heard the laughter,
     And I go forward from catastrophe to disaster
     Indifferent: singing... (p.99)

It is remarkable and curious that McGrath waited until he turned seventy for his work to receive the attention it deserved. Although academic critics have been reluctant to celebrate a long poem with a passionately expressed and unrestrained sense for historical truth, McGrath has had a large following. It is the same constituency that reads Pablo Neruda, Nazim Hikmet, Kenneth Rexroth, Muriel Rhukyser, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Andrei Voznesnsky, Kenneth Patchen, Nicannor Para, Czeslaw Milosz, Adrienne Rich among others. Characterizing in part what shaped the moral sensibility of this particular group of poets, Rexroth concluded his article on Kenneth Patchen stating that

     The Moscow Trials, the Kuo-Min-Tang street executions, the betrayal of Spain, the      Hitler-Stalin Pact, the extermination of whole nations, Hiroshima, Algiers--no      protest has stopped the monster jaws from closing. As the years go on, fewer and      fewer protests are heard. The spokesman, the intellects of the world have      blackmailed themselves and are silent. (97)

From his Dakota that is everywhere to his "electric bird of desire," McGrath speaks to us imaginatively and politically about the real news of the experience of the world and what it's like to live in it with moral responsibility. Whereas poets like Ginsberg, Rukeyser, Rexroth, and Levertov were visible, charismatic, and in Ginsberg's case celebritized poetic voices of our ongoing domestic and international social crises, McGrath's voice was limited to his books and to the classroom. Yet he was a prophetic and liberatory force. "Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty," wrote Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas McGrath's poetry is part of the American library that documents that vigilance without denying either the life of the imagination or the difficult everyday facts of bare human existence.

Works Cited

Adamic, Louis. Dynamite. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1958.

McGrath, Thomas. Letter to an Imaginary Friend. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1970.

Rexroth, Kenneth. Bird in the Bush: Obvious Essays. New York: New Directions Books,
1959.

Thompson, E.P. "Homage to Thomas McGrath." TriQuarterly #70 Fall (1987).

Twain, Mark. A Pen Warmed-up in Hell. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.