Laurie Duggan
Basil King and the Green Man
1
I’m Not There is the title of Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan biopic. It is a biography of sorts that presents its subject as multiple: the one and the many. This title came to mind when I began to think about Basil King’s work and the figures it makes use of. I kept thinking of the passage in Learning to Draw referring to McSorley’s and other places familiar to many of us from the stories we’ve been told about the 1950s New York art world:
Ted Wilentz phoned to tell me Fred McDarrah had been at his house with hundreds of photographs and I wasn’t in
one of them. Ted said you were there at my store, my house, and at the parties . . . When Ted read ‘Mirage’ he said,
why didn’t you tell us. I told him I couldn’t I didn’t know how. Not then. I told Ted every time Fred was about to take
a photograph I ran into the next room or the bathroom. I didn’t want to be seen. Not then. [“Bring it Home”]
2
1
I’m Not There is the title of Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan biopic. It is a biography of sorts that presents its subject as multiple: the one and the many. This title came to mind when I began to think about Basil King’s work and the figures it makes use of. I kept thinking of the passage in Learning to Draw referring to McSorley’s and other places familiar to many of us from the stories we’ve been told about the 1950s New York art world:
Ted Wilentz phoned to tell me Fred McDarrah had been at his house with hundreds of photographs and I wasn’t in
one of them. Ted said you were there at my store, my house, and at the parties . . . When Ted read ‘Mirage’ he said,
why didn’t you tell us. I told him I couldn’t I didn’t know how. Not then. I told Ted every time Fred was about to take
a photograph I ran into the next room or the bathroom. I didn’t want to be seen. Not then. [“Bring it Home”]
2
I took this photograph a few years back inside a church in the village of Minster, not far from where I live. In Britain you will often find, carved on wooden benches or sculpted as reliefs on the walls of churches, the strange non-Christian image of the Green Man. The Green Man is a kind of interloper in churches and other places: he is there and not there. He is a figure often caught in peripheral vision like those persons seen “dauncinge” in TS Eliot’s “East Coker”: “Holding eche other by the hand or the arm / Whiche betokeneth concorde”. This passage derives from The Golden Bough and Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book of the Governour. Eliot is not a poet much favoured by late modernists. To complicate matters “East Coker” is very much an English poem, albeit written by a migrant from St Louis.
The figure of the Green Man might disappear into the wall of a church or hide among branches in a woodland. We look again and there’s no-one there, or else it’s just an innocent passer-by. But we have sensed a presence. Though we may not clearly see the Green Man, perhaps he sees us.
He may be able to slip away sideways like a playing card can slip back into the deck. Or he can assume a stance for a moment like a baseballer facing up to the pitcher. The Green Man functions in church and popular culture as a kind of allegorical figure – there are plenty of Green Man stories and images, yet there’s no single story that the figure is tied to. In this sense he is always available as opposed to the figures of myth that tend to stand for something that is unchanging and unchangeable.
Allegory, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, lends itself to our own stories. It isn’t fixed and we can manipulate it for our own purposes. The Green Man, unlike Oedipus, is a profoundly democratic figure.
It would have been difficult in the late 1940s to avoid the universalizing theories of Jung and his disciple Joseph Campbell, and even The Maximus Poems, especially the later ones, seem in thrall to these accounts of our mythical underpinnings. Such reductionism is deeply conservative, at odds with Charles Olson’s stated purposes: it leaves no room for the citizen of a democratic state to move. Each initiative instead ends up as a re-enactment.
Drawing might be a way out of this world of mirrors, King suggests. “Lawrence says to himself, drawing is always contemporary” (“Across and back”, Learning to Draw). And Thomas Eakins’ nudes are contemporary: “they have nothing to sell and nothing to hide.” To be contemporary, to be “absolutely contemporary” as Frank O’Hara suggested, will remove us from the diminishing returns of re-enactment.
3
The Ted Wilentz anecdote I’ve noted deals with appearance (or non-appearance) and disappearance. Basil’s England also functions like this. It is a place of memory but it is a memory that switches between the substantial and the insubstantial. I think here of the image in Learning to Draw of a Lyons Corner House (a common chain of English tea-rooms) seen again after climbing out of a shelter during the London blitz:
[I was] leaving a Lyons Corner House with my parents in London during the Second World War. We went into the basement
of a church. The minister had all of us sing. When the all-clear sounded and we returned to the street, Lyons Corner House
had been hit . . . Only one staircase remained standing. Its banister and steps didn’t have a scratch on them. (Twin Towers)
What seems fortuitous now takes front stage. What we know, what seemed substantial is no longer present. As Karl Marx said: “All that is solid melts into air.” The world of modern capital that surrounds us isn’t all that different.
4
What if we had to map out where we are in order to be there? In order to understand where we are?
An Australian acquaintance recently put together a book of early police photographs of criminals in Sydney (Peter Doyle, City of Shadows). The photographs date from the turn of the century up until the 1940s and many of them precede the general use of “mug shots.” The injured souls in these photographs look out at us with more defiance than later more measured shots of criminals would allow. They are permitted to escape their frames. Faces like these might advance or recede among others in a crowded bar or pub. They might, for a moment, seem emblematic, like the royal playing cards. What does bringing these fleeting identities into focus or partial focus (or gathering them into a file) mean?
Stories can be like faces. The anecdote presents an “angle,” in journalistic terms. It may be resumed at or from another angle.
The evolving sequence of Learning to Draw is rather like a deck of cards. Each card retains its value though this value might be enhanced by conjunction with another card. There is no end of the poem in sight as yet, though this doesn’t preclude a gathering that would present the work as a satisfying whole. It’s not like the classic high-modernist long poem that tends to trail off or become fragmentary. There is good reason for this: King isn’t out like Ezra Pound to create a paradise on earth, so the freight of Pound’s failure as the Cantos withdraw into silence doesn’t inform Learning to Draw. Nor does the map of loss that ends what we have of Maximus, Book Three: “my wife my car my color and myself.”
5
Pound famously viewed William Carlos Williams as a mongrel. And yet Williams was a true “American product” if not a “pure” one. To quote Basil, “Marsden Hartley said, Williams is perhaps more people at once than anyone I’ve ever known – not vague persons but he’s a small town of serious citizens in himself” (“Across and Back”). The structure of Williams’ Paterson was indeed artificial (the idea of a river flowing from mountain to sea paralleling the life of a man) but it was not a harmful artifice like the notion of a terrestrial paradise (and in any case Williams escaped his own structure with Paterson Book V).
I find it significant that Basil handed over the ordering of Learning to Draw to Daniel Staniforth, the editor of the book. There are good reasons for his doing so. Firstly, the tales that compose Learning to Draw are histories, often ragged ones, of artists and writer learning to look at things.
These often cantankerous individuals are nothing like the exemplars wished upon us by Ezra Pound. They are often people lost in the moment of composition; lost in a space where “calligraphy is for lovers.” It is the tentative nature of drawing that is important. Secondly, the America of this poem is not the kind of purist homeland that needs to be defended at all costs, but a space in which things can happen that mightn’t have happened elsewhere or before. In effect this is a poem that argues for diaspora.
Holbein had left Basel (now in Switzerland) for England when the Reformation prohibited religious painting. Circumstance lay behind King’s own migration, opportunity behind Robert Frank’s. On the “frontier,” invention had to occur. There is something to be said (at last) for the idea of so-called “rootless cosmopolitanism” that needs to be rescued from the rhetoric of the far right.
And yet the Green Man is a strange democratic figure. He is there for no-one’s particular advantage, least of all that of the mob. He is a voice suggesting to us that we consider where we are.
References:
Basil King, Learning to Draw/A History, Cheltenham, Skylight Press, 2011.
Peter Doyle, City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912-1948, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 2005.
The figure of the Green Man might disappear into the wall of a church or hide among branches in a woodland. We look again and there’s no-one there, or else it’s just an innocent passer-by. But we have sensed a presence. Though we may not clearly see the Green Man, perhaps he sees us.
He may be able to slip away sideways like a playing card can slip back into the deck. Or he can assume a stance for a moment like a baseballer facing up to the pitcher. The Green Man functions in church and popular culture as a kind of allegorical figure – there are plenty of Green Man stories and images, yet there’s no single story that the figure is tied to. In this sense he is always available as opposed to the figures of myth that tend to stand for something that is unchanging and unchangeable.
Allegory, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, lends itself to our own stories. It isn’t fixed and we can manipulate it for our own purposes. The Green Man, unlike Oedipus, is a profoundly democratic figure.
It would have been difficult in the late 1940s to avoid the universalizing theories of Jung and his disciple Joseph Campbell, and even The Maximus Poems, especially the later ones, seem in thrall to these accounts of our mythical underpinnings. Such reductionism is deeply conservative, at odds with Charles Olson’s stated purposes: it leaves no room for the citizen of a democratic state to move. Each initiative instead ends up as a re-enactment.
Drawing might be a way out of this world of mirrors, King suggests. “Lawrence says to himself, drawing is always contemporary” (“Across and back”, Learning to Draw). And Thomas Eakins’ nudes are contemporary: “they have nothing to sell and nothing to hide.” To be contemporary, to be “absolutely contemporary” as Frank O’Hara suggested, will remove us from the diminishing returns of re-enactment.
3
The Ted Wilentz anecdote I’ve noted deals with appearance (or non-appearance) and disappearance. Basil’s England also functions like this. It is a place of memory but it is a memory that switches between the substantial and the insubstantial. I think here of the image in Learning to Draw of a Lyons Corner House (a common chain of English tea-rooms) seen again after climbing out of a shelter during the London blitz:
[I was] leaving a Lyons Corner House with my parents in London during the Second World War. We went into the basement
of a church. The minister had all of us sing. When the all-clear sounded and we returned to the street, Lyons Corner House
had been hit . . . Only one staircase remained standing. Its banister and steps didn’t have a scratch on them. (Twin Towers)
What seems fortuitous now takes front stage. What we know, what seemed substantial is no longer present. As Karl Marx said: “All that is solid melts into air.” The world of modern capital that surrounds us isn’t all that different.
4
What if we had to map out where we are in order to be there? In order to understand where we are?
An Australian acquaintance recently put together a book of early police photographs of criminals in Sydney (Peter Doyle, City of Shadows). The photographs date from the turn of the century up until the 1940s and many of them precede the general use of “mug shots.” The injured souls in these photographs look out at us with more defiance than later more measured shots of criminals would allow. They are permitted to escape their frames. Faces like these might advance or recede among others in a crowded bar or pub. They might, for a moment, seem emblematic, like the royal playing cards. What does bringing these fleeting identities into focus or partial focus (or gathering them into a file) mean?
Stories can be like faces. The anecdote presents an “angle,” in journalistic terms. It may be resumed at or from another angle.
The evolving sequence of Learning to Draw is rather like a deck of cards. Each card retains its value though this value might be enhanced by conjunction with another card. There is no end of the poem in sight as yet, though this doesn’t preclude a gathering that would present the work as a satisfying whole. It’s not like the classic high-modernist long poem that tends to trail off or become fragmentary. There is good reason for this: King isn’t out like Ezra Pound to create a paradise on earth, so the freight of Pound’s failure as the Cantos withdraw into silence doesn’t inform Learning to Draw. Nor does the map of loss that ends what we have of Maximus, Book Three: “my wife my car my color and myself.”
5
Pound famously viewed William Carlos Williams as a mongrel. And yet Williams was a true “American product” if not a “pure” one. To quote Basil, “Marsden Hartley said, Williams is perhaps more people at once than anyone I’ve ever known – not vague persons but he’s a small town of serious citizens in himself” (“Across and Back”). The structure of Williams’ Paterson was indeed artificial (the idea of a river flowing from mountain to sea paralleling the life of a man) but it was not a harmful artifice like the notion of a terrestrial paradise (and in any case Williams escaped his own structure with Paterson Book V).
I find it significant that Basil handed over the ordering of Learning to Draw to Daniel Staniforth, the editor of the book. There are good reasons for his doing so. Firstly, the tales that compose Learning to Draw are histories, often ragged ones, of artists and writer learning to look at things.
These often cantankerous individuals are nothing like the exemplars wished upon us by Ezra Pound. They are often people lost in the moment of composition; lost in a space where “calligraphy is for lovers.” It is the tentative nature of drawing that is important. Secondly, the America of this poem is not the kind of purist homeland that needs to be defended at all costs, but a space in which things can happen that mightn’t have happened elsewhere or before. In effect this is a poem that argues for diaspora.
Holbein had left Basel (now in Switzerland) for England when the Reformation prohibited religious painting. Circumstance lay behind King’s own migration, opportunity behind Robert Frank’s. On the “frontier,” invention had to occur. There is something to be said (at last) for the idea of so-called “rootless cosmopolitanism” that needs to be rescued from the rhetoric of the far right.
And yet the Green Man is a strange democratic figure. He is there for no-one’s particular advantage, least of all that of the mob. He is a voice suggesting to us that we consider where we are.
References:
Basil King, Learning to Draw/A History, Cheltenham, Skylight Press, 2011.
Peter Doyle, City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912-1948, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 2005.