A NOTE FOR TWO
WRITERS
After
our conversations earlier this week, I recall that once the exchange of letters
helped to sustain friendships. The
absence of hand-written letters doesn't
make a friendship less genuine. It
simply leaves a friendship bereft of ritual, the art of penmanship, imagination with a feeling. The latter was
most important when letters were in vogue.
By
accident, I found several instances of creative sparkle in some letters Hart
Crane wrote in the 1920s to people I assume were his friends or close
acquaintances. In a letter to Harriet
Monroe, justifying phrases in his poem
"At Melville's Tomb," Crane made
well-designed comments on the reader and metaphor: "The reader's
sensibility simply responds by identifying this inflection of experience [
Crane referred to inflection of
language] with some event in his own history or perceptions -- or
rejects it altogether. The logic of
metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly
traced or explained outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology." Crane had the common sense that many young
and not-so-young makers of popular
culture often lack; he knew the
operations of writing and reading are not democratic or universal but
constrained by time , culture, and humbling knowledge of tradition.
How can one write, and expect to gain approval, if one is dismissive of a tradition of
extending and/or challenging? When I
consider that some third-class work earns top dollar, I realize the question is
lame.
We older writers can only suggest to those who come to us
for advice that standards, values, and discipline do matter. Many of them have obese egos. They over-rate their skills and talents. Many of them are not brave enough to risk
getting a rejection slip. So be it. If they do well in the world with work that repeats what they don't know has
already been done and that appeals to
the sensibilities of people who don't give a damn about inflection of language,
so be it. I don't want to block their
success. Why do they bother to ask for
our approval?
Finding Crane's poem "Black Tambourine" in the
same paperback with his selected letters was also a fortunate accident. He did not ask Jean Toomer's approval to
borrow images and metaphors from Cane
in the first stanza:
The interests of a
black man in a cellar
Mark tardy judgment
on the world's closed door.
Gnats toss in the
shadow of a bottle,
And a roach spans
a crevice in the floor.
Likewise, I'll not seek the approval of Hart Crane's
ghost when I write about the evil of a white man on a screen, about a carpenter known as Z-Mann Zimmerman.
Perhaps we are asked for approval
because we know what a letter can mean and have the skills to steal as
effectively as William Shakespeare.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. May 19, 2016
