TO TEST THE JOY : SELECTED POETRY AND PROSE

By Genevieve Taggard (Edited by Anne Hammond)

Recovered Books, Boiler House Press. 357 pages. £16.99. ISBN 978-1-915812-02-5

Reviewed by Jim Burns

I doubt that Genevieve Taggard’s name will arouse a wide response among readers in Britain. A few academics in American Studies Departments may know of her, and it could be that some others interested in women writers will have encountered examples of her work in a publication like Writing Red : An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940, edited by Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz (The Feminist Press, New York, 1987). She’s mentioned in books about the 1930s and the involvement of writers with the Communist Party. Examples might be Daniel Aaron’s Writers on the Left : Episodes in American Literary Communism (Columbia University Press, New York, 1992) and Alan Wald’s Exiles From a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2002).

The books I’ve referred to  tend to indicate that Taggard is a writer mostly associated with the 1930s. That’s certainly true from the point of view of a general history of her activities, but she’s far more interesting than just being seen as someone who allied herself with communism. Her work, both poetry and prose, covered a wider area, though it would be wrong to suggest that it ever lacked a deep social conscience as a guiding light to its creativity.

Taggard was born in 1894 in Waitsburg, Washington. Her parents were both teachers, and members of the Church of the Disciples of Christ.  In 1896 they moved to Hawaii and taught at the public school in Kalihi. Taggard “grew up in the company of children of many races......From her religious and politically liberal parents, she learned early about social inequality and the injustices suffered by the indigenous population under the colonial occupation of American business interests”. Some of Taggart’s later writings refer to her experiences in Hawaii, as in the memoir, “A Haole Scrapbook”, and the poem, “The Tourist” with its lines, “He saw the hula flower in her hair/Drop to her bosom where it rose and fell”. It’s a poem with, in Anne Hammond’s words, “unresolved implications of seduction and thwarted desire, in a foreigner’s fantasy of hula”. The poem was published in the Liberator, a radical magazine edited by Max Eastman, then a leading figure on the New York intellectual scene and a “fervent evangelist of revolutionary socialism”.

It’s of relevance to note that Taggard’s story, “Engaged”,  also appeared in the Liberator, and can be seen as an early example of her social concerns. Its theme of a young girl worried about being pregnant and visiting a back-street abortionist, would have tied in with the kind of problems in the air at a time of battles over birth control and such matters. Taggard’s story is effective without being didactic.

Poetry was Taggard’s main interest, and in 1921 she joined with a number of other writers, including Louise Bogan, Elinor Wylie, and Maxwell Anderson, to found The Measure. Described by Frederick J.Hoffmann in The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1946) as “one of a few important American poetry magazines”,  it had a different editor for each issue and continued publication on a monthly basis until 1926.  It may also demonstrate Taggard’s commitment to poetry to point to her editorship of May Days : An Anthology of Verse from Masses-Liberator (Boni & Liveright, New York, 1925), as well as indicating where her social and political sympathies were focused. The Masses had been suppressed by the government during the First World War due to its outspoken opposition to American involvement in the conflict.

May Days  is a fascinating collection.  As Taggard says in her introduction, “The air was clear and inviting and the hour was the hour of seven on a spring morning........Boredom, ennui were not the fashion. There was so much to be said, done, thought, seen, tried out”.  Many of the poems may now seem naive and not even “good” by contemporary critical standards, but “interesting” is a much better means of judging them.There are known names, such as Claude McKay, Floyd Dell, E.E. Cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edmund Wilson, but what of Charles Ashleigh, Ralph Chaplin, and Arturo Giovannitti?

All three had links to the I.W.W.,  the. Industrial Workers of the World. Ashleigh was English and deported from America after being imprisoned. His novel, Rambling Kid (Faber, London,  1930) is about his adventures in America. Chaplin was also imprisoned and I have a small book, Bars and Shadows : The Prison Poems of Ralph Chaplin (Allen & Unwin, London, 1922). The poems are traditional in structure and sometimes sentimental in tone, but often quietly moving. Giovannitti, noted for his involvement in the 1912 strike in Lawrence, wrote poems that were loose and  long-lined and much in the Whitmanesque manner. His “The Walker” is a classic prison poem. A collection of his work, Poems, was published by El Corno Emplumado in Mexico in 1966.

Taggard’s first husband, Robert L. Wolfe, unfortunately suffered from mental problems, and was eventually committed to an asylum. When she remarried in 1935 it was to Kenneth Durant, “an undeviating Stalinist with an authoritarian personality”, though he was also “a cultured and highly educated man who could share Taggard’s poetic life”. She “had been raised in the full confidence of Christianity in the Church of the Disciples of Christ” but “by her thirties needed an alternative faith.....And, under the pressure of the Depression in the 1930s, Taggard went over, as did so many of her fellow liberal poets, to Marx”. I think it’s useful to note that the six Taggard poems chosen by Louis Untermeyer for the 1932 edition of his Modern American Poetry (Jonathan Cape, London, 1932) do not display any overt political sympathies. Bur one of them, “Enamel Girl”, with its short, clipped lines (“Fearful of Beauty, I always went/Timidly indifferent”...”Dainty, hesitant, taking in/Just what was tiniest and thin”) does seem to me to evidence her interest in Emily Dickinson. And she did, in fact, write a well-received book about Dickinson – The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson (Alfred Knopf, New York, 1930) -  that Hammond says “practically single-handedly saved the poet from obscurity”.  

Taggard was an academic from 1929 onwards, teaching first at Mount Holyoke, then Bennington, and finally in 1934 at Sarah Lawrence, where she stayed until her death in 1948. It would appear that she had been suffering from hypertension, and that in the post-war period of rising anti-communism she was being “red-baited” by a colleague at Sarah Lawrence. This colleague was a fellow-poet, Horace Gregory, who in his time had been something of a radical poet himself. There is an anthology, Social Writing of the 1930s : Poetry (Burt Franklin, New York, 1978) in which both Taggard and Gregory are prominently featured. His poems are hard-nosed, even cynical, and something in the mould of Kenneth Fearing’s with their blunt, conversational bleakness. They offer little hope, and certainly nowhere suggest that communism has anything to offer. In that sense they are, perhaps, social but not overtly political poems.

Alan Wald, in his Exiles From a Future Time, says this of Gregory in relation to his contemporaries of the Thirties: “Only Gregory who, in the early Depression, published subtle and well-crafted volumes of revolutionary verse such as Chelsea Rooming House (1930), No Retreat (1933), and Chorus for Survival (1935), lived into the era of the new radicalism, dying in poverty and near-obscurity in 1982”. And he adds, “Ironically, as a poet of the Left, Gregory had already given up the ghost four decades earlier, even before reports began to circulate of his red-baiting attacks on his pro-communist colleague at Sarah Lawrence College, poet Genevieve Taggard, a harassment that many on the Left believed hastened her death due to complications of hypertension at the onset of the Cold War”. Taggard died in 1948,  and so seems to have escaped the attentions of HUAC. As a prominent academic, a contributor to left-wing publications, and the wife of Kenneth Durant,  a well-known communist sympathiser, she would have been a prime subject for investigation. And would have most likely lost her job.

Wald thinks that Taggard was influenced by Kenneth Durant to the extent that she firmly believed in the guilt of the accused during the Moscow Show Trials of the 1930s, though, like him, she may not have been an actual member of the Communist Party. He describes her as “a free-spirited bohemian radical, later as a resolute and constant Communist fellow-traveller.” Many years ago I was lucky enough to come across a copy of her Calling Western Union (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1936), probably her most effective collection in terms of its political content. As she said, “The poems translate the strong anti-fascist convictions of our times into living realities, with emphasis on the struggles of labor, the sufferings of the city and country poor, and the part of the humane middle-class person in the intelligent movement against reaction”.   With titles like “To an American Worker Dying of Starvation”, “Mill Town”,  “Up State – Depression Summer”,  and “Feeding the Children” (“We must feed the children. Have you joined the Union?/We must feed the children. March today./We must feed the children. How shall we feed the children?/We must feed the children. Vote the strike!”) it’s obvious what many of the poems are about.  And Taggart is direct in “Not for Philosophy Does This Rose Give a Damn” (a title taken from E.E. Cummings) when the final line says simply, “Better read Marx”. It’s perhaps understandable that none of the poems I’ve mentioned are among those in To Test the Joy. I mention this not in a spirit of criticism. I can see that they might be thought of as too much of their time, and consequently lacking in lasting qualities. I find them interesting, but that may be because of my curiosity about the people and politics of the  period concerned.

There is much more than poetry in To Test the Joy, and it’s thanks to an astute editorial selection that a rounded picture of Taggard has been achieved.  She wrote a few short stories, and some reviews and essays that are still worth reading. “Romanticism and Communism”, published in New Masses in 1934, proved to be controversial in its questioning of the whole Romantic tradition with its emphasis on individuality. It evoked a strong response from the editors of the magazine in which they referred to her loose definition of Romanticism, and “the final literary stages of bourgeois Romanticism, such as Dadaism, Stream of consciousness, the Revolution of the Word, Objectivism, Futurism, and so on, together with their outstanding practitioners”, which again intrigues me from a historical point of view. The communist theoreticians believed that “Even if in a sense these writers are commiting and have committed literary suicide, in that very suicide they destroy within capitalist society some of the impediments to a new social order”. They additionally said they could “imagine, for example, a ‘revolutionary romanticism’ -  a poem, story or play projecting a vision of a socialist society, an outgrowth of the dialectical forces perceived in the present breakdown of capitalism”.

There are other essays. “Children of the Hollow Men”, with its obvious reference to Eliot, talks of “anarchist, nihilist or near-Fascist schools” of writers, and says that the “tone of their work is defeatist”. It was published in The Christian Register/Unitarian 125:11 in 1946, when Taggard could still feel optimistic about the promise of communism. 

There is a poem by Taggard that I’d like to mention before closing. It isn’t in To Test the Joy and I came across it in the anthology, The Poetry of Freedom, edited by William Rose Benet and Norman Cousins (The Modern Library, New York, 1945). Taggard’s poem, “To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade”, shows how the Spanish Civil War had an emotional impact on many American writers. It is a particularly powerful poem, or so it seems to me, and states that while “the men on the make/Were busy bickering and selling/Betraying, conniving, transacting, splitting hairs/Bribing, blackmailing”, the young men who went to Spain “Knew and acted/understood and died/Or if they did not die came home to peace/That is not peace”.

Genevieve Taggard is a writer worth reviving, and To Test the Joy is a welcome collection held together with some informative linking essays by Anne Hammond and a useful introduction by Terese Svoboda.