When Oppen and Pound met in 1969 in the New York offices of their mutual publisher, New Directions, after nearly 30 years, they both “wept openly” (as recounted in Eric hoffman's excellent bio of Oppen, A Narrative). Oppen revisits the moment in his 1972 poem “Of Hours” where he asks: “but why did I weep/Meeting that poet again what was that rage//Before Leger’s art poster/In wartime Paris.” The poem concludes with the single one-word line “Unteachable” – a final indictment of a lost soul.
It's an odd splice in time. Oppen's syntax conjoins the two moments, so far apart in time but not in emotional charge. He was not a man to shirk from reality yet one can't help but feel that his outrage over Leger masks a deeper reaction to the war itself.
But if Pound was unteachable, we might venture to say that Oppen could be somewhat intransigent himself. Case in point: his response to a Fernand Leger poster he saw in Paris. As Mary Oppen recounts in her autobiography, “Meaning a Life,” itdrove George “berserk: there was no way to express my anger at these Parisians who could care about such mediocrity at the time.”
Ironically enough, Leger, who had fought on the Western Front in World War I and spent WWII in America, was, like Oppen, a member of the Communist Party. He was singled out for ire by a congressman from Michigan, George Dondero, who attacked the State Dept’s “Advancing American Art” project of the late 40s, which was designed to convince European elites that modern art could flourish within an anti-Communist left:
“The artists of the “isms” change their designations as often and as readily as the Communist front organizations. Léger and Duchamp are now in the United States to aid in the destruction of our standards and traditions. The former has been a contributor to the Communist cause in America; the latter is now fancied by the neurotics as a surrealist.” (qtd. in Menand https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/17/unpopular-front
In my interview with the Oppen’s daughter, Linda, at Harvard in 2011, (which can be viewed online) she related how, during their extended stay in Mexico in the 50s, her father abruptly ended a friendship with a fellow expat over Fellini’s "La Strada" (1954), which like Leger’s poster, he deemed frivolous. One supposes this was because Oppen as a good card-carrying Communist, viewed it as a betrayal of Neo-Realism. And indeed when Fellini was awarded the best film prize at the Venice Film Festival, a fight broke out between the Marxist supporters of Luchino Visconti, whose "Senso" had been in the running, and those of Fellini.
Those were the days.
In any case, Oppen, a self-declared “man of the 30s,” seems to have suffered from an acute case of brow-anxiety, as Menand might put it: a desire to build a wall between high brow seriousness and what Dwight MacDonald labeled “masscult.” It makes you wonder what Oppen might have made of Ashbery, if in fact he ever read him. “Daffy Duck in Hollywood”?
In the interview, groping after some notion of Oppen as regular chap, I asked Linda if her father had liked baseball or Westerns, which I had fantasized he might have, “Oh, nooo,” she said, shaking her head.
