Enough Rope by Dorothy Parker and Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay
Two American Poetry Collections of the 20s
When a poet’s work is re-released, it is often in large collections that include poems from across their career. However, recently, two famous individual volumes of poetry, both by American writers of the 1920s, have been reissued. In this newsletter, I will consider them alongside one another.
I.
By Dorothy Parker
144 pages. Vintage. $10.00.
Was Dorothy Parker really so different from Baudelaire?
One can easily make a list of similarities: both wrote formalist verse and yet subverted established poetic conventions; both delighted in sharp, ironic twists at the end of their poems; both are indisputably poets of urban life.
But whereas Baudelaire was the prototypical artistic bohemian, Parker portends a very different social type, that of the independent single woman. This was a role for women newly allowed by the big city of the 20th century, and it is one Parker distinguishes chiefly by her casual love affairs which are diverting but provide little in the way of grand passion. Such an existence is not necessarily a superficial one: it is the very matter which allows Parker asserts a personality of her own.
Several of Parker’s poems are quite blistering in their attacks on men and sexist attitudes, but overall she is not, in style or content, a transgressive poet like Baudelaire. One can easily imagine lines like these (from her poem “Inventory”) gracing a column in a woman’s magazine:
Four be the things I’d been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.
Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Parker enjoys subverting what must have been the cloying sentimentality of 1920s newspaper verse. In one poem, she appears to indulge in the hackneyed expressions of heartbreak by writing “All of my days are gray with yearning” but concludes a line later, “Nevertheless, a girl needs fun.”
Interestingly, Parker is in many respects a more pessimistic poet than Baudelaire. Unlike Baudelaire, she rarely expresses intoxication in the sensuous. Her descriptions of being in love are almost inevitably ironic, with a strong suggestion that all courtship is a scam. And at moments she is totally despondent with life. In her best and most famous poem of this collection, “Resume,” she explains why avers from certain methods suicide (“Acids stain you;/And drugs cause cramp”) before finally declaring, “You might as well live.”
Unfortunately, for the most part the poems in this “Book of Light Verse” are a little too light. Many exist solely to lead up to a punchline, and it’s not always a very funny punchline. It’s disappointing that Parker, at least in this volume, was not more ambitious. She clearly is talented at rhythm, and at times she can deploy effectively an unusual vocabulary (fanfaronade, gyve). For all that we can admire of her personality and intelligence, we must also acknowledge that in Enough Rope Dorothy Parker only achieved a fraction of what we could expect of her.
II.
By Claude McKay
112 pages. Modern Library. $15.00.
Claude McKay was like Baudelaire and Parker in that he wrote in traditional forms to describe the new and transgressive experiences of the city, but the similarities pretty much end there. In his 1922 collection Harlem Shadows, McKay is not self-assertive like the other two poets; he has the anguish of an unsettled mind.
McKay’s ambivalence has much to do with his ambition: his poems in Harlem Shadows aim to reach beyond his self and capture the essence of certain places. He wants to be a poet of the world as much as of individual experience. As his collection’s title indicates, one of these places is Harlem - which is full of vice, lust, danger, but is also indisputably, overwhelmingly alive. And in contrast to the newness of this New York neighborhood is Africa, the beginning of everything, but a place that has been dormant for far too long.
In between the Harlem of New York, McKay adds a third place, this one more personal to him: Jamaica, the land where he grew up. Though the island was British colonial subject in McKay’s time, he tends to portray it as an idyll he longs to go back to, a place of warm childhood happiness in contrast to the cold realities of the American city.
Yet strangely, it is when writing of his homeland of Jamaica that McKay produces his very worst verse. His memories of Jamaica are too often put into lines of mechanical meter and tourist brochure-level imagery. Jamaica is a place where “palms wave gently to and fro,/And winds are balmy, blue brooks ever sheen.” Never did I feel McKay captured the feeling of the place that had so obviously touched him.
In fact, it is only when he writes of the alienation of New York that his longing for his homeland comes across. It is not only racism and the cold weather that makes the urban experience so bitter for him; he is also repelled by the way in which atomized individuals can only experience sensuous pleasure in a commercialized, mechanized setting. In “On Broadway,” McKay walks through the city and sees “a hundred shouting signs” where “Desire naked” roams the “playhouse, cabaret and inn,” and yet, McKay declares, “My heart, heart is lonely.” His best-known poem from this collection, “The Harlem Dancer,” is about an enchanting nightclub performer whose “voice was like the sound if blended flutes/Blown by black players upon a picnic day.” But the “wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls” can take her for only a dancer - that is, they see her body but do not register her music. The poem ends with the haunting line “I knew her self was not in that strange place.”
In the last third or so of this collection, McKay turns away from describing places and towards passionate poems about the turmoil and splendor of love. These poems make the gender of the narrator and addressee ambiguous, although several of them clearly allude to an interractial relationship. Here, the care McKay takes with rhyme and meter, which had something of stifling effect in some of his other poems, here becomes a mask, a restraint that prevents his emotions from overflowing.
Indeed, at times McKay approaches the British Romantic poets in his ability to convey passionate inner experience in meditative, detached verse, as in the last stanza of his poem “Torment”:
But when you’re filled and sated with the flesh,
I shall go swiftly to the silver stream,
To cleanse my body for the spirit’s sake,
And sun my limbs, and close my eyes to dream.
Harlem Shadows, as Jericho Brown notes in his introduction, was the last collection of poetry McKay published in his life, though he lived for more than twenty more years after and continued writing individual poems here and there. It seems to me to be a deeply melancholy fact that he chose this collection as the formal end to his poetic career - there is something deeply unfinished, unresolved about it. He had grasped hold of something profound, and I wish he had been able to write more poetry that reflected this discovery.
III.
Neither Harlem Shadows nor Enough Rope are great collections of poetry, nor yet can they be said to be particularly representative of the literary vanguard of their time. Yet as minor poetry they have something to recommend them. For Parker, it is her occasional unbeatable arrangements of sardonic wit. For McKay, it is the chiseled, finely formed way in which he captures the wildness of the 20th century city, and the wild minds who live in it. They both have something nobody else can offer.