Letter to an Imaginary Friend
Thomas McGrath
publisher: Sheep Meadow Press, 1997
isbn: 1-55659-078-4
price: $20
Thomas McGrath was a 36-year old Rhodes Scholar, World War II veteran, accomplished poet, and teacher at Los Angeles State College when he was blacklisted in 1953 for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. During the next several years, McGrath worked at menial jobs while writing the first part of Letter to an Imaginary Friend, an epic-scale autobiographical poem that would take 30 years to complete.
While Letter could be considered Proustian in its heroic effort to recover, through long, self-perpetuating sentences, a past from the distance of middle age, McGrath's hard-earned political insights provide the work with a wrought philosophical frame. This separates it from the belle-lettrism that has marred many American middle-century long poems with their facile displays of learning, banal narcissism and trivial details culled from daily life.
McGrath wasn't unaware of his distance from mainstream literary culture:
Outlaws
system beaters
we held to the hard road
(While Establishment Poets, like bats, in caves with color T.V.
Slept upside down in clusters: a ripe-fruited scrambling of assholes).
But it's a hard system to beat: working under the hat
On the half-pay offered to outlaws by the fellow-travelers of money:
And time runs fast on a poor man's watch.
[154]
Written several years before the publication of Ginsberg's Beat milestone Howl, Letter already recorded, with prophetic tones but through un-Puritanical eyes:
The junky medics, night walking, their ears full of barbs
And the loony preachers, their ears ringing with gunshots
From the suicide farms, laying the Word out cold
In a thousand-mile thick of fog.
[113]
The poem is imbued, however, with an ethical earnestness -- not to mention a pure love of family, wives, and friends -- that has been long absent from the postmodern equation, providing the missing link between the right-wing dogma and politics of a poem like Pound's Cantos and the aforementioned, decidedly leftist (and certainly anarchic) Howl.
McGrath's capacity for evoking images, whether describing vegetables or labor strikes, is often amazing, compacting the wealth of an entire poem in a few lines. He describes, sadistically but lovingly, the appearance of a young girl:
There was Peets with his gin, his nine-foot wife, and his son
Who was big enough to be twins -- and stupid enough for a dozen,
And the daughter, big as all three, with a backside for a face,
With a mouth of guttapercha, with a cast, with a fine
High shining lunacy crossing her horsy eyes --
"Fuck or fight!" I can hear her yelling it now [...]
[81]
An atheist since thirteen, he hyperbolically confesses to the Christian flavor of his ethics in Book III, writing: "Yes, I do know sin, / For haven't I felt the whole universe recoil at my touch?" [325], echoing at the same time the the metaphysics of Eliot's diffident alter-ego J. Alfred Prufrock. But then McGrath proceeds to parody the entire confessional act with a litany of sins fueled as much by Joycean wordplay as by a sincere belief that he (or someone else) has cheated his fellow man:
A silence from beyond the border wher the Latin begins: And then:
"You left out something."
"What's that, Father?"
"Anfractuosity."
"What's
That, Father?"
"Three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys!"
Hell hath no fury like a sinner scorned.
I try again:
"Zoomorphism."
He's cautious. "Yes?"
"Father, have I failed
My grandfather's Animal Catechism, each inch and fur of the way!"
"And have ye now, my little parolee and logoklept?"
"Yea; though daily I do my self-quiz in my grandfather's terms and tones [...]"
[81]
Letter is one of the most readable long poems in the Pound tradition of personal epics (including The Dream Songs and Maximus), and yet is complex enough to promise disclosure of many secrets upon rereading. This edition is a literary event that will help secure McGrath a place in the twentieth-century canon though perhaps, like Melville's long poem Clarel, it will be relatively uncelebrated.
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