'Hard, Condensed, and Durable'

“Minor art needs to be hard, condensed, and durable.”

Louise Bogan is probably describing her own poetry, among other things. Her productivity was never Wordsworthian or Tennysonian – that is, bloated with inferior work. In the best writers, the ones we prize as life companions, ruthlessness trumps self-indulgence, though even Shakespeare nods. Bogan’s poetry fits into a slender volume flensed of flab.

 

She is writing on this date, January 24, in 1936, to her old friend Rolfe Humphries (1894-1969), future translator of Garcia Lorca, Virgil and Ovid. Mention of the Spanish poet is significant. Seven months after Bogan’s letter, Garcia Lorca would be murdered by Nationalist forces at the start of the Spanish Civil War. In 1940, Humphries published his translation of The Poet in New York. Humphries was a fellow traveler, reflexively sympathetic to Leftist causes even in the year Stalin’s show trials begin. In 1939, Bogan would reply to a literary questionnaire: “Political convictions: NONE.”  Humphries has apparently asked Bogan about her politics as fighting looms in Spain:

 

“I suppose any political regime that includes dictatorship is something for a writer anywhere to worry about. I don’t think he should give as much worriment to the possible political set-up as he does to his writing. The less capacity for scattered worrying that a writer possesses, the better. Great artists in any field haven’t been great worriers. Minor artists ought to worry about their work, for worry is only valuable  when it goes toward making something hard, condensed , and durable. Minor art needs to be hard, condensed, and durable.”

 

An unfashionable stance: writers ought to mind their own business. They are granted no more and often fewer exalted insights into politics than plumbers or proctologists. To the degree they play dress-up as pundits or rabble-rousers, they neglect the literary qualities of their work, assuming there was any there to begin with. George Orwell writes best when he leaves politics alone – a handful of good essays, usually on literary topics. Bogan gets further worked up in her letter and points out the obvious similarities between Hitler and Stalin:

 

“The Fascists burn the books, and the Communists bar the heterodox, and what difference is there between the two? I must say I would just as soon die on the barricades for Mozart’s music as not: if someone walked in this minute and said, Louise, if you don’t go out and get shot, they’ll take Mozart’s music and throw it down the drain, I’d put my hat right on and go outside and take it. But the thought of spending years moping along with a lot of other writers, defying anti-cultural forces: No. For culture isn’t saved that way. Nothing is saved that way. And a lot of precious life is wasted that way. I’m an individualist, as you can easily see.”

 

[You can find Bogan’s letter in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan (ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005).]