The Long Audience
A guest post by Anthony Grooms
Typically, my column focuses on a technique, but this month I am in a contemplative mood, and want to ponder a bit about literary legacy.
Allen Polite was a poet and painter. Likely you know of him only if you have delved deeply into African American poetry of the 1960s. Born in New Jersey in 1932 into a family that is said to have had Gullah roots, he and his second wife, dancer, activist and novelist Carlene Hatcher (1932 –2009) embraced Greenwich Village’s bohemian lifestyle of the 1950s. A description of the cool couple’s pad is found in Amiri Baraka’s memoir, The Autobiography of Leroi Jones, in which the young Baraka, having taken Polite as a mentor, admired their meals of black bread and beer.
In the early ‘60s Polite’s career as a poet was taking off. He had been recognized by the “hearth poet” of black America, Langston Hughes, who included him in the New Negro Poets U.S.A. anthology.
His published poems, typically short, fit well with the work of other New York School poets like Leroi Jones and Frank O’Hara, characterized by wit, painterly imagery, colloquialisms and occasional turns toward the abstract and the surreal.
In 1967, Polite made what his fourth wife Helene Polite described as an impromptu decision to move to Sweden. Working for the United Nations in New York, he was traveling to Africa and had a layover in Stockholm to visit his friend, painter Harvey Cropper. During the stay he met Helene, aborted the journey to Africa, and lived for the next twenty-six years in Stockholm.
He continued to write poems but published very little. In part, his change of language culture caused a loss of audience. Though he eventually spoke Swedish, he did not write in it and for most of his career, English was not the lingua Franca of Europe as it is today. Other Americans living abroad have had vigorous literary careers in English, or for that matter, in the language of their new homes. To that point, Carlene Hatcher published her roman a clef, The Flagellates, which chronicles the fractious Hatcher-Polite marriage, in French.
Perhaps poetry writing became less of a passion, as Polite turned more toward painting. Perhaps, too, his writing fell out of style as Black poets turned more to political topics. Also, he adopted an abstract and difficult style, as evidenced by a long work called “The Dead Seeds” which was left in draft at his death of cancer in 1993. For whatever reason, Polite published little after he took up residence in Stockholm.
Several years after his death, Helene took her husband’s ashes to Africa and sprinkled them in the grasses of the Serengeti, thus completing his interrupted journey, she reasoned.
I became aware of Polite’s poetry on a visit to Stockholm in 2006 when I was introduced to his son journalist Ovivio and to Helene. For some years, Helene had been working to bring attention to Allen’s work. She had sponsored the publication of two volumes—Poems and Looka Here Now—and was looking for ways to bring more critical attention to the work. She had befriended critic Anne Charters, who included Polite’s work in her anthology The Portable Sixties Reader. Helene and I decided that making Polite’s papers available to American scholars would be helpful in boosting his legacy. We worked for about a year to pique the interest of U.S. based archives, and finally, with Charter’s help, the papers were placed at the Dodd Center archives at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.
Papers entombed in an archive, however, do not revive a literary legacy.
They must be read and written about in order to promote an author’s legacy. Having Polite’s papers archived was only marginally better than having them in boxes in Helene’s apartment, if they weren’t to find scholars. The Dodd Center library held a reception to introduce the papers. But note that the Dodd Center is known for its holdings of political writings. It is not the first place a literary scholar would look for the works of a dead poet. (I had tried very hard to get Emory University’s library, which specializes in poetry and African Americana, to take the papers, and though the university had agreed to, the effort came to naught.)
So, my work was not finished. I am a bit dogged when I commit to a project. A writer has to be! So, I went on the conference circuit, presenting about Polite wherever and whenever I could. Panels on lesser-known writers are often placed in the worst time slots, and so I faced many a scanty audience.
A break came, however, when Maryemma Graham invited me to speak at the University of Kansas’s History of Black Writing Project, which she directs. It was a weeks-long National Endowment for the Humanities seminar held for a select group of poets and poetry scholars. I presented on Polite and other Swedish-based black American poets—yes, there’s more than one! The centerpiece of the presentation was a remote video call with Helene. Though not a literary scholar, she was, without doubt, a better prompter of her husband’s work than any scholar. Her passion and insight moved many of the seminar participants and at least one of them made the journey to Storrs to examine the papers.
Over the years, distracted by other projects and teaching, I presented less about Polite. My early effort seems to have been just enough, however, for now and again, I am contacted by scholars who want to know more about Polite. Most recently a Swedish-born scholar who teaches in Germany. Polite’s work is still far from well-known, but it seems that at least the seeds have been planted and scholarly interest is growing.
Working with this project emphasized several points to me about literary legacy. First, legacy is not important to all writers. Polite did little to plan his legacy. Some of us are content with living in the moment and are willing to let the future take care of itself. The fact is that most of today’s published writers, even those who are national prize winners, will be mostly forgotten fifty years after we’re dead.
Back in the old days, when people went to libraries to find books, I would occasionally thumb through an encyclopedia called Twentieth Century American Authors. Though we were only eight-tenths of the way through the century, the volume was easily four inches thick, made of bible-thin pages. Each couple of pages was dedicated to an author’s biography and bibliography. By this time, I was a graduate student and somewhat well-versed in American literary history, but it was only every 50 or so pages that I recognized an author—though many of the others had published dozens of books.
I am not sure what this says about our literary culture. I suspect though that it simply underscores that most of what is published does not sustain the interest of audiences beyond a few years. They are stories and poems of the moment, many of them with topics, language and sensibilities that soon become dated.
We know this is not true for all works. Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, JRR Tolkien are more popular now than they were in their day. Certainly, it is good writing and interesting and relevant storytelling that makes this so, but there are likely other mechanisms at play. These mechanisms serve to keep the literary work in the public eye.
Movies have helped to invigorate interest in literary works—certainly for the three afore-mentioned, but also for Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave. Successful movie versions of books increase book sales. An award-winning movie boost sales even more. For example, in 2014, Northup’s Amazon sales placement, already high because of the movie’s release, jumped from 326 to 19 overnight after the movie won three academy awards, including best picture. Before the movie, the book was known only to a few specialized scholars.
An examination of the relationship between movies and book sales—especially of literary books—is a good project for an enterprising graduate student. But suffice it to say, book sales increase when the movie of that book is released, even if the book has been out of the public eye for decades. Sill most movie watchers will not buy books, being satisfied or not, having seen the story on screen. And no movie can replace the experience of reading a book—many of them, in fact, adapt the book in such a way that it has little to do with the written story. Case in point, look up the film version of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
Nor will a movie, alone, sustain public interest in a book. For example, the 1910 novel A Circuit Rider’s Wife by Georgia author Corra May Harris was made into the 1951 film, I’d Climb the Highest Mountain, starring Academy Award-winner Susan Hayward. The film was a modest success, grossing a little over 2 million dollars domestically, placing it at number 15 for films in 1951. Yet, how many of you have heard of Corra May Harris, much less read her book? It is, interestingly, still in print after 118 years and ranks 1,732,944 on the Amazon sales list.
Even with all of the problems of adaptation, few of us would turn down a chance to have our stories made for the screen. And, frankly, very few of us will get that opportunity.
A more reliable instrument for preserving legacy is the academy. This is what I was attempting with the Polite recovery project. The legacies of many, if not most, writers of previous centuries are preserved by scholars who write about them and introduce them to students. Typically, academics preserve literary texts, but with studies in popular culture, popular texts, too, are taught and preserved.
Majorie Perloff is dead. She died last month at age 92. Her obituary in The New York Times reads, “Professor Perloff gained notice with her 1977 book Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters the first full-length assessment of a writer who until then had been largely ignored by scholars but who, in part thanks to her, has since come to be regarded as one of the most significant American poets of the past century.”
It is too bad that O’Hara didn’t live to enjoy his significance. Now, he is referenced in pop music and his poems recited on TV shows like “Mad Men.” He died in 1966 at age 40, having been run over by a dune buggy. Though there was some effort to bolster his reputation before Perloff’s book, the years after the book have seen many posthumous collections and several biographies, including Brad Gooch’s City Poet. It also helps that O’Hara left behind a cache of photographs, many of them showing him casual and cool, a cigarette between his fingers. A couple of nude paintings and film clips of him reciting his poems also add to the ephemera. Importantly, not only his literary work is preserved and critiqued, but the biographies and images have created a mystique around his personality.
A similar pattern has played out for many of the canonical American writers. Emily Dickinson’s reputation was propelled by Thomas Johnson’s critical work, and William Faulkner’s career was boosted by Malcolm Cauley. Walt Whitman, held out to be our national poet, was a vigorous self-promoter. He cultivated an enthusiastic group of supporters before his death in 1892. Eventually, known as the “Whitmanites,” the literary society lead by James William Wallace held annual “Whitman Days” to celebrate Whitman’s birthday (May 31) and to promote his vision.
Whether a widow, a critic or a literary society, a writer’s legacy needs a tireless advocate, someone who can keep the writer’s work in front of audiences long after he/she/they are no longer cable of doing so. Few of us will have the fortune of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway or Toni Morrison whose legacies were secured long before their deaths. But they too had their advocates.
Those of us interested in posterity should then be interested in cultivating advocates by building relationships within the critical apparatuses. It helps, also, if we leave cool pictures and videos to enrich our biographies. It is true that we write for the moment—for our contemporaries—but most of us want our writing to be sustainable—to be meaningful across time. Afterall, audience completes the creative act. As my mentor Richard Bausch noted in a Facebook post this March 2024:
“It’s the long audience, finally, that matters—the one we’ll never see. So you work toward making the best that you can do, giving it everything, cultivating your ability to take great pains to get it right, just on the hope that it’ll still be somewhere even one other soul from whatever-where or time, will see it, and feel the connection, and be moved, and not feel so alone.”
It’s time to plant tomatoes and Anthony Grooms has dirt under his nails! He is also posting stories and poems at AnthonyGrooms.Substack.Com. For more information, go to AnthonyGrooms.com.