'I Find a Demanding Medium Liberating'

R.L. Barth is Turner Cassity’s literary executor. Several months ago Bob loaned me the typescript of the 106-page autobiographical essay Cassity wrote in 1988 for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Last year I began reading Cassity’s poetry intensively, acquiring all of his major books and many of his small-press chapbooks, and Bob supplied me with two typescripts of poems (Hitler’s Weather, Poems for Isobel) left unpublished at the time of Cassity’s death in 2009.

My interest in Cassity is not scholarly. I’m no scholar. Rather, I feel a rare affinity with Cassity’s voice, in prose and verse. He is allergic to cliché and verbal flab, as every good writer ought to be but seldom is. He is reliably funny, often with a campy flavor. In general I dislike campiness. It panders while the best humor is unexpected and harsh, but most times Cassity carries it off. (About his visit to Germany: “I cannot convey to you how many cathedrals I did not look at.”) He writes a poet’s prose – not “poetic” but balanced, with every word doing its part to bolster sentences that carry the thought. This becomes important when your nature, like Cassity’s, is indelibly contrary. Like any honest writer he is politically incorrect. (In Hitler’s Weather he includes a poem called “The Pleasures of Slave Owning,” which begins: “Raw imposition of the will; / Enjoyment of another’s ill.”) He has no use for fashionable manners and morals. The old ways are best. Consider this passage from the memoir:

“I must tell you right away that I have never been able to make the trip I most want to make. I want to do, in one trip, all of the Mexican border towns: the 1,800-mile sewer. One would begin in Matamoros, continue to Nuevo Laredo, Piedras Negras, Acuña, Ojinaga, Agua Prieta, Nogales, Mexicali, and Tijuana. It is the measure of the cowardice or the good sense of all my longtime traveling companions that none has been willing to make this attempt. Now, the trip is unthinkable, and not only because of advancing age. One could not make all of the trip on the Mexican side. One would have to keep recrossing the border to find a highway, and after a certain number of crossings you know what Customs and Immigration officials would begin to think.”

Sooner or later, Cassity comes back to language and writing:

“If my life as presented seems to you a discontinuity of airport security checks and chain motels you are wrong. It has more continuity than most. Let us say it has been a chromatic scale. I still see occasionally friends with whom I went to elementary school, fifty-five years ago, and I see with some frequency friends with whom I went to junior high school, forty-five years ago. . . .It is more than possible, though, that I am in the last generation of those who will know what it is to have lifelong friends. The mobility of the society is against it, and the drive to presentism. Presentism is if anything a worse affliction on writing than on historiography. Anyone who has taught composition knows that the students’ idea of a short story is something about people who have known one another three days at a beach, nor is their youth an extenuation. Mann completed Buddenbrooks at the age of twenty-five.”

Especially in his poetry, Cassity’s style is unmistakable. In a blindfold test, you could identify the author of one of his couplet’s without hesitation. In the memoir he quotes from an interview given by his favorite (or at least most often cited) author, Ivy Compton-Burnett:

“I think that my writing does not seem to me as ‘stylised’ as it apparently is, though I do not attempt to make my characters use the words of actual life. I cannot tell you why I write as I do, as I do not know. I have even tried not to do it, but find myself falling back into my own way. I think people’s style, like the way they speak and move, comes from themselves and cannot be explained. I am not saying that they necessarily admire it, though naturally they turn on it a lenient eye.”

Thanks in part to Cassity, I have read nineteen of Compton-Burnett’s twenty novels, and she has become one of my favorites. Near the end of his memoir  he articulates a writer’s apologia that might stand as the English novelist’s and the Mississippi/South Africa/Georgia poet’s:

“In forty years I have seen no evidence that they [“aspiring poets”] have the willingness or the ability to create characters to have relationships. It is not altogether their fault. They have no models. The English lyric is too relentlessly first person and too relentlessly centered on the internal. . . . The possibility that poetry might deal with settings and characters as well as drama or fiction is alien. . .. I find a demanding medium liberating rather than otherwise. The more secure the technique the wider range of subjects I am prepared to deal with. Few poems I read, however, have a subject.”