Telling Tales (26 page)

I
N
1940, A new American poet burst on to the scene who was quite unlike any other. For one thing, she was not strictly new: her writing career had begun at the turn of the century when she was only nine years old only to burn out two years later when she took early retirement at the age of eleven. For another, her scope was parochial to say the least: all her poems were about the daily life of the small Iowa town where she lived. And almost without exception the poems are terribly bad. Yes, she charmingly evoked the nostalgia of a forgotten America, but she was certainly no infant prodigy, as is plain from one of her more accomplished works, ‘Winter Music’:

Oh, it is wonderful in Millersville

On many a winter night,

When the ground is covered with snow

And the moon is shining so bright.

You can hear the sleigh-bells jingling

Everywhere around.

I don’t think there could be

A more beautiful sound.

Her one and only collection was called
Oh, Millersville!
, after her hometown, and having been handed to an older relative for safe keeping soon after the author’s retirement, it finally saw the light of day in 1940 when it turned up in the postbag of an up-and-coming Iowa publisher called Carroll Coleman. Coleman was an interesting character himself: obsessed with the beauty of traditional typographics and often choosing to use old-fashioned manual printing presses, he had recently set up Prairie Press, one of the few independent publishing houses in the country devoted to bringing out original work instead of trusty old classics. He was madly in love with his home state, finding it every bit as charming and beautiful as Fern had a generation earlier, and was determined to help protect it from the onslaught of industrialization. Although starting up a publishing company during the Depression years brought him much financial uncertainty, he was completely committed to his regionalist agenda and launched the company in the mid-1930s with the following rabble-rousing statement:

Here on the rolling prairies, on the hills along the rivers, in the endless fields of corn that bend before the summer wind in green waves, in the soft little cities hardening under the growth of industrialism, these writers, artists and printers might record and preserve, for all to see, the form and direction of life here in the Middlewest.

Just five years later the poems of Miss Fern Gravel came his way. As soon as he read ‘Iowa’, the opening poem in the manuscript, he knew this was a girl who would appeal to the ladies in book groups as much as to the thoughtful country folk and academics who bought his prettily designed volumes:

I am writing another kind of poetry,

And some of my poems are beautiful to me.

I hope, someday, people will travel

To see the home of the poetess, Fern Gravel,

Like they go to Longfellow’s home, and Whittier’s,

And then I’ll remember the day I wrote this verse.

Fern would never attain anything like the status of Longfellow, but she did, for a while, get an astonishingly good reception in the press. Responding not only to her youth and optimism but her delight in the simpler, quieter side of America (at a time when the rest of the country was obsessed with war and cars and money), critics decided she was destined for ‘immortality’. The
New York Times
jokingly called her ‘the Sappho of Iowa’,
Time Magazine
spoke of this ‘precocity in pigtails’ and the reviewer for Iowa’s
Des Moines Register
spoke of her work’s ‘warm feeling of validity’.

But validity, at least in the conventional sense, was the last thing
Oh, Millersville!
’s readers were getting. For after six years of excellent sales for Prairie Press, the true author of the poems decided the time had come to reveal himself. As it turned out, he was indeed a proud native of the Tall Corn State, but not only was he not a girl called Fern, he was a rather successful writer of adventure stories and First World War memoirs. In fact, he was none other than James Norman Hall, the well-known author of the
Mutiny on the Bounty
trilogy,
Falcons of France
and regular contributor to the
Atlantic Monthly
, in whose pages he eventually made his confession.

He began with the customary self-flagellation of the guilty hoaxer, saying he was ‘shame-faced’ at having misled people for so long. But he went on to account for himself in most unexpected terms. He had been motivated not, he said, by a love of mischief or a bet with a fellow writer or any of the other usual reasons an author might perpetrate a deception. Instead, little Fern had come to him ‘in a dream’ and started dictating her poems to him. Now, Hall was not, as far as anyone knew, at all mad. But he was a prolific and sensitive writer who had perhaps become trapped in a
Boy’s Own
genre not entirely of his choosing. He was also someone who cared so deeply about the changes overtaking his beloved Iowa and other rural places like it that he could not bear to live in America any longer and was relocating to Tahiti, where the pace of life was slower and more natural. It seems, then, that Fern was in a way quite real to this clever and highly creative man, albeit as a semi-mystical facet of his subconscious.

Just like Carroll Coleman, Hall longed so much to make people see the evils of industrialization that he believed in ends justifying means. He explained how he had been musing on his idyllic childhood days back in Colfax (‘All my roots are still in the prairie country of the Middle West’) when this little, very local girl started to invade his thoughts, not only when he was asleep but when he was at his desk, too: ‘She dictated so fast that I got writer’s cramp . . . She told me things about people in our hometown that I had completely forgotten, or thought I had.’

Clearly, Hall’s imaginary dictator is intricately bound up with his literary identity and methods, and although it seems strange for a writer who is not a raging post-modernist to play with ideas of real and unreal in this way, his entire life story betrays a talent for using imaginary sources to create good works.

In the 1910s, Hall was studying for a master’s degree at Harvard while working as a social worker in some of Boston’s more impoverished communities. Each experience fed into the other, and he seemed well on the way to getting his first stories published when, in 1914, the First World War broke out. It just so happened that Hall was on holiday in England in July that year and, seizing the opportunity for adventure, he pretended he was a Canadian and signed up with the Royal Fusiliers. He fought bravely at the Battle of Loos but when his true nationality was discovered he was sent back home to America, where he found he had more than enough to put into his first published book, the gripping war memoir
Kitchener’s Mob
(1916). As soon as he could, he joined the US Army and when they entered the theatre of war he returned to France, achieving the rank of Air Captain and being awarded a Croix de Guerre for his good work. Towards the end of the war he was captured by the Germans and incarcerated, during which time he bonded with another American writer-pilot, Charles Nordhoff. The two men kept their spirits up by planning the books they might write together, and after their release in 1919 they launched a collaborative career that would make them both, for a while, household names. Their three books
Mutiny on the Bounty, Men At Sea
and
Pitcairn’s Island
are still enthusiastically read by fans of adventure fiction today.

Hall would go on to write a dozen more books on his own, many of them inspired by his life in the South Seas, where he settled in a humble wooden house with his half-Polynesian wife Lala and became increasingly preoccupied with the lost innocence of pre-war America. It was into this middle-aged homesickness for a world that no longer existed that Fern Gravel appeared. She had the power to take him right to the heart of the kind of simple family home he had loved and felt safe in while at the same documenting the irrevocable social changes affecting Midwestern society in the new century. In these terms, a poem like ‘Visiting Cards’ starts to seem less like doggerel and more like a cunning and very modern piece of artistry:

My mother has had some calling-cards printed.

The reason is Mrs Smouse.

She thinks she ought to leave one

When she goes to their house.

Mrs Smouse was the only one

Who had calling cards before;

But now that my mother has them

I expect there’ll be more.

My mother has put a little table

In our vestibule.

You leave your card there, in a cut-glass dish;

That is the rule.

Will Hall/Gravel one day be lauded as a radical, ventriloquistic sage of his times? A strange hybrid of Garrison Keillor and Daisy Ashford with a message for the America of tomorrow? If so, critics and literary historians will have to work hard to pluck him out of the near total obscurity into which he has sunk. But you never know, perhaps in a hundred years’ time the tattered manuscript of
Oh, Millersville!
will turn up on the desk of some unsuspecting young publisher and Fern Gravel will live again.

I
N THE EARLY
1990s, the work of a unique poet began to appear in American literary magazines. He was Araki Yasusada and, although he had died in 1972, his son had found his notebooks in 1991 and had them translated into English. The central theme of his work, and the cataclysmic centre of his tragic life, was the bombing of his hometown, Hiroshima, on 6 August 1945. Although his son was out of town that day, Yasusada had watched his beloved wife and youngest daughter die horrific deaths, only to lose his older girl to radiation poisoning a few years later. He himself fought a long battle with the carcinogenic effects of the bomb until his death in the 1970s.

His writings – called, collectively,
Doubled Flowering
– replayed the world-changing events of that day again and again, reframing the experience with a variety of seemingly typical Japanese images, such as flowers, lakes and clouds, and in styles like the haiku which immediately speak – to Western readers – of all things Eastern. But Yasusada’s imagination and intellectual life were far from parochial – trilingual in English and French, he had studied Western literature at Hiroshima University and developed an interest in the works of Roland Barthes and the developing avant-garde poetry movement. Traces of these influences can be seen in works like ‘Dream and Charcoal’, which opens with that typical cipher of poetic modernism, the word ‘And’:

And then she said: I have gone toward the light and become beautiful.

And then she said: I have taken a couple of wings and attached them to the various backparts of my body.

And then she said: all the guests are coming back to where they were and then talking.

To which she said: without the grasp-handle, how would you recognise my nakedness?

To which she replied: without nothing is when all things die.

It was to respected modernist journals like
Conjunctions
, arts magazines like
Grand Street
and even the Japanese quarterly
Abiko
that the poems were initially sent, appearing on the editors’ desks in packages postmarked London, Tokyo, Chicago or California. Covering letters said that several translators had worked on bringing Yasusada’s oeuvre to English readers, and the editor of
American Poetry Review
even got a portrait of the author with which to illustrate his work.

Over the next few years, Yasusada began to be seen as the only true poetic voice to have survived the devastation of Hiroshima. This was ‘witness poetry’ at its most raw and personal, and thanks to the biographical details with which his anonymous editors had seen fit to annotate his poems, lines like ‘You are a little girl with blistered face, pumping your legs at a great speed beside the burning form of your Mother’ from ‘Suitor Renga’ took on a horrible poignancy. Critics the world over praised these remarkable evocations of the horrors of war, and as more of his notebooks began to leak out of Japan, everything from his thoughts about Zen Buddhism and rough drafts of letters were pored over by an increasingly devoted band of readers.

It became obvious that there was enough interest and more than enough material to justify a book-length edition of Yasusada’s work, and Suzanna Tamminen, the poetry editor of Wesleyan Press, the Connecticut University’s famously
au courant
publishing arm, put herself forward for the job. She set about collecting all the known poems and notebooks, which would amount to more than a hundred pages, and also sought more information about the author himself. But the book would never come to light, and Tamminen would speak of ‘a personal feeling of being humiliated’; because long before the presses started rolling, rumours about the Yasusada poems’ true authorship became too loud to ignore.

Key figures in the avant-garde poetry world had been hearing stories for some time about the real origins of the work, and the finger of suspicion pointed most directly at a language teacher at a very minor university in Illinois who had written very knowledgably about Yasusada and even composed some similar poems himself. An article in the
Boston Review
by the respected critic Marjorie Perlof made the accusation directly. This man was Kent Johnson and, despite officially being a Spanish teacher, he was known to have a strong interest in oriental literature, to be a keen contributor to debates on subjects like witness poetry, to be something of a joker and in fact to have told various poetry editors that he knew who the real Yasusada was.

Johnson initially responded to the claims that he was the real Yasusada by asking, wide-eyed, how on earth ‘a community college Spanish teacher with little poetic talent could have produced work that caused fairly unbridled admiration amongst such a range of well-placed arbiters in the world of poetry’. Pressed further, he claimed that the real poet was in fact his old flat-mate Tosa Motokiyu, a secretive poetic genius (also pseudonymous and also now dead) who wished, for complex creative reasons, to be known only as the work’s translator and not its author, and for Johnson to help deliver it to the world. Pressed even further, and shown the startling similarities between the Yasusada poems and his own ‘From the Daybook of Oshimora Okiyaki’ – a series of verses written many years before in the voice of a Hiroshima survivor – he was forced into an even tighter corner. The reason he gave this time was that Motokiyu had been so impressed with Johnson’s Hiroshima poems that he had asked permission to include them in his ‘hyper-authored’ Yasusada collection. At this point, a resounding ‘Hmm’ could be heard emanating from editorial offices and lecture theatres across the American poetry scene.