*Zong!* confronts the sea as a historical agent by exploring the materiality of the enslaved who were drowned there. This exploration manifests as sea creatures, bubbles, murmurs, and words that flow across the page as though pulled along by the tide: "sea fa/ns dance se a cre/atu res ride the b/ones" (p. 148). Oceanic objects and sounds populate the pages of *Zong!* in community with bones and broken memories. In this way, the poem depicts the sea "as a material space characterized by movement and continual reformation" rather than merely treating the ocean as a metaphor (Steinberg 2013, p. 156). *Zong!* considers this movement and continual reformation important to the story of slavery through its use of maritime images that evoke the vitality of the ocean through its nutrient cycle: "the process of organisms eating organisms" (Sharpe 2016, p. 40). Scholars including Erin M. Fehskens have read in *Zong!* a sublime encounter with the sea. In its vastness, the ocean is often the trope of the sublime (Lambert et al. 2006, p. 483). It has been read as a "space beyond representation" that evokes the fear of the unknown (ibid.). But *Zong!* registers another kind of encounter with the sea, one that focuses on the sea as a place where active processes fragment matter to produce new shapes and forms. As a physical geography, the sea breaks apart organic matter thrown into it. This organic matter circulates as nutrients to be taken up into new formations, such as the bodies of other creatures.

13 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2015) points out that appeals by some post-humanists and scholars of the new materialisms to move "beyond the human" can reintroduce Eurocentric transcendentalism as attempts to move beyond race, even though "*blackness conditions and constitutes the very nonhuman disruption and*/*or displacement they invite*" (pp. 215–16, emphasis in original). Bringing this insight to an investigation of blackness and matter, Leong adds that "one of the primary figures of the new materialisms—the material body—is defined by and through disavowed social fantasies about black female flesh that are linked to the global legacies of modern slavery" and argues against "against a misrecognition of black female flesh as a resource against the violence of hierarchical differences, rather than the site of their active production" (Leong 2016a, p. 6).

*Zong!* gives attention to the more-than-human world in its treatment of the sea, acknowledging that the sea is "something with a lively and energetic materiality of its own" (ibid., p. 482). The poem's consideration of the "imaginative, aesthetic, and sensuous geographies of the sea" illustrates that "maritime worlds open up new experiential dimensions and new forms of representation" (p. 479). For example, four section titles point to the historical and material geographies of the Caribbean Sea in relation to slavery: bone, salt, wind, and iron. Bone relates to those thrown overboard for whom no bones can be exhumed in order "to return dignity to the dead" (Philip 2008, p. 201).14 It also suggests the ribs of a ship. Salt indicates the chemical makeup of the sea but also perhaps the sweat on the bodies on board as well as the sodium content of human blood, which Christina Sharpe notes may remain in the ocean for 260 million years (Sharpe 2016, p. 41). She imagines that the bodies of the drowned exist in the ocean today, because they would have been eaten by sharks, fish, and organisms and become part of the ocean's nutrient cycle. Identifying (sea) salt as "the 'bone' of water" produced by dehydration, Diana Leong describes the jettisoning of enslaved people, given the salt in their bones, as "a salting or 'boning' of the seas", thus making "salt also the medium for a kind of material memory that ensures that the slaves are not lost *to* the seas" though they have been lost at sea (Leong 2016b, pp. 812–13, emphasis in original). Salt inevitably suggests tears, of course, as well. Wind is necessary to move sailing ships. Finally, iron refers to the manacles used to hold enslaved people, irons "made of the same material as our fingers and hands" (Brathwaite 1994, p. 107). Thus, the iron section title may indicate the human body's iron content, an element which endures in the ocean for just 500 years (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute 2017). Elsewhere, *Zong!* invokes Ogun, Yoruba deity of iron and a figure of the iron revolution in West Africa, reflecting technologies of iron smelting tied to ritual and other cultural practices as well as the ironworking that "made the ships of Atlantic modernity possible" (DeLoughrey 2010, p. 710). A symbol of "terrible ambivalence", Candice Goucher argues, associated with West African culture, enslavement, and resistance, iron is another vehicle for material memory (quoted ibid.).

#### **2. Decontamination**

*Zong!*'s exploration of the sea as an agent of transformation proceeds through a poetics of decontamination, with formal procedures derived from the liveliness of the sea itself. For Philip, decontamination is necessary for dealing with the logic inherited with English and other imperial languages. Decontamination—a formal procedure—disrupts imperial language by breaking it apart, dispersing it, and putting it into new configurations. Like Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, and others, Philip seeks a linguistic and historical revolution to purify or decontaminate language so that it can be used anew to "reduce the gap between the experience and the expression of that experience" (Philip 2017). 15 In a recent interview, she argues that imperial languages, such as English, Spanish, Dutch, and French, must be put through "a decontaminating process" in order to render them capable of expressing what she wants to express:

I begin from a position of complete distrust of language and do not believe that english (sic)—or any European language, for that matter—can truly speak our truths without the language in question being put through some sort of transformative process. A *decontaminating process* is probably more accurate, since a language as deeply implicated in imperialism as english has been cannot but be contaminated by such a history and experience. The only way I can then work with it is to fracture it, fragment it, dislocate it. And for me this is where

14 A fifth section title, Ẹbọra, meaning "underwater spirits" in Yoruba, signals a spiritual geography of the Caribbean (Philip 2008, p. 184).

15 For more on David Dabydeen and Lorna Goodison's desire for the "cleansing and redemption" of language, refer to Jenkins's *The Language of Caribbean Poetry: Boundaries of Expression* (Jenkins 2004, p. 173). See, also, Grace Nichols's poetry collection *I Is a Long Memoried Woman* (Nichols 1987).

form becomes so very important, because part of the transformative and *decontaminating process* is also to find the appropriate form for what I'm saying. (ibid., emphasis added)

For Philip, "language represents a wound", and *Zong!* submerges the wound in the form of a legal document, in a poetics that, I argue, means to decontaminate both language and history by actively decomposing it into constituent parts—words, letters, and sounds—and recomposing it into ruptured memories through which the past continues to haunt the present (ibid.). Philip breaks up the text as the sea breaks up matter, disperses it and reforms it into new things, including not only words (which produce new meanings), but also sounds and imagined memories that draw attention to the specificity of women's experiences of slavery.16 Once decontaminated, the language can then express Caribbean experiences and fugitive memories. Philip's urge to "fracture", "fragment", and "dislocate" language in order to decontaminate it results in the decomposition of the legal decision into sounds, letters, and words spread across the page, suggesting a form of rupture that, for Philip, characterizes the Caribbean and the abyss of loss associated with slavery: "The Caribbean is synonymous with rupture and break and hiatus and held breath. And death. And rebirth" (ibid.). While some might argue that decomposition is a passive process that occurs on its own, in actuality it involves multiple active processes by organisms in the sea that constitute new forms.

Thus, a poetics of decontamination can be understood as consisting of two parts that correspond to the materiality of the sea: decomposition and recomposition. Decomposition breaks apart the language of *Gregson v. Gilbert*, using it as a word store, and scatters it across the page, suggesting both physical decomposition and dispersal in water. Conjuring fluidity disrupts the gendered conflation between women and land, making room for fluid histories.17 In the first section of the book, the words and phrases in the legal text are broken up but remain decipherable. For example, "*Zong!* #1" fragments the words "water" and "good" into letters, phonemes, and syllables (see Figure 1):

The formal and thematic importance of the sea in decomposition becomes visible with this first poem, which emphasizes the significance of water and the sea to the collection as a whole and introduces the formal project of the poem with its decomposition of the words "water" and "good", which mimics the material processes of the sea. The ship was surrounded by water, yet the central concern for those on board (and the justification for the murders) was lack of drinking water.18 Via decomposition, the speaker's words degenerate into regressive infant-like speech with "waa" and

16 Laurie Lambert shows that Philip "produces new and unexpected meanings" through fragmenting and reordering the *Gregson v. Gilbert* legal decision (Lambert 2016, p. 122).

17 While the sea undoes notions of gender, gendered notions of the sea have always been unstable (Helmreich 2017; DeLoughrey 2009). The female body has been conflated with land, rootedness, stability, and stasis; however, gendered conflations of men with mobility invoke "feminized flows, fluidity, and circulation", conjuring the female borderless body and in-betweenness (much as the sea is viewed as an in-between space) (DeLoughrey 2009, p. 5; Neumann and Rupp 2016).

18 The disintegrating language points to the difficulty of speaking from an experience of profound trauma compounded by the refusal to speak as a result of that experience. The initial "w w w" evokes the stuttering attempt to begin telling what

"goo". The fracturing of the word "water" into individual letters suggests a stammering confrontation ("w w w") with the vast expanse of ocean. In other words, decomposition of language allows the poem to explore other experiences and memories associated with the event beyond those conveyed in the legal report, working against the marginalization of female historical experience. It does so by evoking the breakup and dispersal of organic matter underwater.

Philip takes up the *Gregson v. Gilbert* legal report as one of the few documents related to the massacre extant in the archive of enslavement. The report recounts the massacre and the insurance claim that instigated the legal case: After serious navigational errors that extended an eight-week journey by ten weeks were compounded by leaking water casks, the crew of the *Zong* threw 150 abducted Africans overboard (Walvin 2011, pp. 88, 92).19 When they finally arrived in Jamaica, the owners of the ship submitted an insurance claim seeking to recoup the costs of their lost "property", because the Africans were "thrown alive into the sea" instead of dying of natural causes. In the report, the ship owner's lawyers claim that the issue "was a throwing overboard of goods" and could not constitute murder (Philip 2008, p. 211). Leong cites Ian Baucom to underscore how both the law and modern finance, via acts of insurance and speculation, rely on the violent erasure of black bodies "that is not only condoned but *anticipated*" (Leong 2016a, pp. 802–4, emphasis in original). Further, the legal text refers to all those thrown overboard as "negroes" or "negro slaves", effacing gender (Philip 2008, pp. 210–11). Yet, a letter from abolitionist Granville Sharp suggests that women and children may have been disproportionately thrown overboard due to their lower sale value compared with men, at least before the trade was abolished: "& how many of the Slaves so thrown overboard at most were not Women & Children & Infants which would have been of no great value & what comparative value individually in proportion to a Prime Man Slave" (quoted in Gervasio 2019, p. 11). Responding to this letter, Philip writes in her notes to the poem, "*women's voices surfacing in the text—which attempts to neutralize everything[;] suddenly references to menstruation and childbirth and rape—in contrast with the larger Caribbean text as it's articulated at present*" (Philip 2008, p. 201, emphasis in original). The poem's many references to blood and "bleeding memories" and the memory-work it depicts challenge the erasure of black female bodies (Nichols 1987, p. 5).

*Zong!*'s poetics of decontamination fractures the legal text to signal the break of the Middle Passage. In doing this, Philip both fragments the legal language (and its logic) and represents slavery's rupture of history. She then disperses that language in the "sea" of the page to render it newly expressive of the experiences of the enslaved in order to "exaqua" the submerged histories of the incident (Philip 2008, p. 201). As Birgit Neumann and Jan Rupp argue, "Philip retrieves an embodied, resonant, material memory: a memory of bones, cries, and wails of the Middle Passage" through "multiple references to material traces of the sea—salt, wind, the movement of water, the seabed as a liquid grave" (Neumann and Rupp 2016, p. 483). Taking the sea as a creative principle, decomposition produces a form for Philip to express the wound of language and of history, a wound Philip represents with memories that coalesce through recomposition, the second stage of decontamination.

#### *Continual Reformation*

Like the reconstitution of matter in the sea through nutrient cycles and energy flows, a process Philip E. Steinberg refers to as "continual reformation", recomposition in *Zong!* builds up fresh yet ruptured forms from the decomposed parts of the legal report. Like continual reformation in the

"cannot be told". At the same time, it registers difficulty and asserts the refusal of naming the thing that brought such terror: water. Fred Moten refers to the transatlantic slave trade as the "long history of water terror that stretches from the Gold Coast to the Leeward Islands, from Birmingham to Birmingham" (Moten 2017, p. 159). Christina Sharpe argues that, in the trauma of this moment, "[l]anguage disintegrates" (Sharpe 2016, p. 69). For her, this evokes the inability to speak because the mouth is utterly dry from thirst: "Language has deserted the tongue that is thirsty" (ibid.)

19 Walvin reports that the ship had taken ten weeks to reach the Caribbean, and then, once in sight of Jamaica, the crew made a serious navigational error: they mistook Jamaica for Cape Tiburon on St. Domingue, an enemy island, and steered away from it (Walvin 2011, pp. 88, 92).

sea, *Zong!*'s poetics involves creating new forms from the decomposed legal text in order to express what was inexpressible in the received language. In addition to breaking apart the phrases and words of the legal text, Philip's composition process indicates a process of continual decomposition and recomposition to produce new verbal formations:

Thus, every word of the twenty-six numbered poems (and the six unnumbered poems labeled "Dicta") in the first section of *Zong!*, called "Os" (Latin for "bone"), can be found in the *Gregson* decision. After working with (and working over) the legal discourse in this highly constrained manner, Philip has written the remaining four sections—"Sal," "Ventus," "Ratio," and "Ferrum" (Latin for "salt," "wind," "reason," and "iron")—with a word store composed of the words of the decision as well as any words to be found within each of those words (each word's imperfect anagram, that is). (Shockley 2011, pp. 807–8)

Philip does not simply break apart the legal decision into individual words used to compose the poems in *Zong!*, but she also creates new words from the letters within the legal decision's words. This composition process reflects the sea's capacity for continual reformation.

Recomposition activates memory: *Zong!* seeks a form and language that can express the experience of becoming flesh by allowing the drowned to haunt the text. *Zong!* produces new formations that imagine the drowned and fugitive memories, stories, sounds, quiet, images, and languages of those on board the ship. These new formations are able to express the rupture Philip identifies as central to the Caribbean. Further, they allow the poem to convey what the contaminated imperial language cannot. What emerges at times in Philip's poem is a language for those who were trafficked, especially the memories of enslaved women. *Zong!* gives rise to new forms for imagining the experiences that the archive ignores and obscures. It offers glimpses of the story that the legal document fails to express. In doing so, the poem emphasizes how "black women's fleshly existence remains a structural vulnerability to violence, a condition that is also a 'grammar'—an unconscious system of rules—that marks black women as the 'zero degree of social conceptualization'" (Leong 2016a, p. 22).

Philip re-forms the pieces of the legal text to create a rich soundscape with visual effects that concretize the sea's materialities as useful resources for decontamination. In this example from the section titled "Sal", "she" refers to a woman held captive on the *Zong* (see Figure 2):

The words fracture out of English into phonemes—the diphthong "o" and the unvoiced fricative "s"—and then recombine into the Latin word "os". As the bones of "os" fall down the page, the o's rise like bubbles of air. The sounds "oh" and "es" become the letters "o" and "s" that also graphically suggest the shape of an angelfish or butterflyfish, the rightmost o, o, and s forming its pointed snout. Whereas *Une Tempête* reconstitutes the drowned as coral and pearls—hard substances that are precious, *Zong!* visually reconstitutes its drowned words in the form of a fish. The fish also contains the letter s, o, s repeated three times, indicating the Morse code "SOS"—an appeal for help used by ships at sea.20

Moreover, the space between words and letters resists containment, opening up breathing room.  The poem increases its breathfulness with repetition of the diphthong "o" and the unvoiced fricative "s" sounds that produce what Christina Sharpe has called "audible breath" (Sharpe 2016, p. 109). Readers are meant to feel the puff of air that follows their pronouncing of the "oh" or in the slow exhale of the "s". This white space of decomposition and recomposition breaks the words of the legal text into breath, the breath denied to those drowned in the sea.

Philip's recomposition gives rise to decontaminated language in a form akin to Brathwaite's "nation language", language that can express Caribbean experiences. For Brathwaite, English is the language of a colonial education, of the official, and of the planter. The poems he learned in school explain snow, but he seeks a language that can describe the experience of a hurricane, for example. He defines nation language as "the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and laborers, the servants who were brought in by the conquistadors" (Brathwaite 1984, pp. 5–6). Characterized as "submerged" and emergent, nation language bears the traces of ancestral languages, including Asian, Amerindian, and African languages, and constantly transforms itself into new forms.22 Though it may include English words, its rhythms, timbre, and syntax are markedly not English. Brathwaite argues that nation language began to surface in mainstream Caribbean poetry when it broke the pentameter: "The hurricane does not roar in pentameters. And that's the problem: how do you get a rhythm which approximates the *natural* experience, the *environmental* experience?" (p. 10, emphasis in original).

**Figure 2.** Excerpt from *Zong!* (p. 63).

The urgent appeal in Baraka's "SOS", a poem that calls "all black people" in, echoes *Zong!*'s own plea: "save us".

Notably, nation language breaks down one form (the pentameter) through its own form, a move Brathwaite explicitly attributes to Eliot's influence (pp. 17, 30).23

Indeed, as words, shapes, and sounds recompose in *Zong!*, the enslaved's voices rupture the text as nation language. These ruptures tell of—"*dem cam fo mi in*/*de field me run*/*run*"—and describe the enslavers actions—"*sit dem*/*seh dem eat beef dem*/*have beer dem lav a*/*lav a*" (Philip 2008, pp. 104–5).24 They also share aspects of Yoruban spirituality: "*ba ba am beg you*/*do ebo fo mi*", which asks a father "baba" to offer a sacrifice, "ebo", for the speaker (p. 105). Further, an enslaved man asserts his personhood/humanity when called and treated like a dog: "good dog he pats it *me*/*I be man me man*" (p. 109). When these fragments of nation language first appear, they are in italics, but as the poem progresses, they appear in roman type, which indicates that the process of breaking through the legal text is becoming a new norm. The poem uses nation language to express the experience of those who were kidnapped and forced to migrate on the Middle Passage across the sea.

Nation language, in turn, allows *Zong!* to pull black women's memories from the decomposed legal text. These memories include the moment of capture, as above. Early in "Sal" and across the remaining sections, the poem repeats "she falls falling", referring to a memory of a woman falling into the sea from the ship, one of many repetitions in the poem that evoke ocean waves. This woman often appears in reference to "a rose", which further compares her with Africa, as in the line "she f alls falling/found a rose fou/nd Africa" (p. 63).25 The memories also illuminate black women's experiences at the hands of the captain and crew on board slave ships during the Middle Passage, particularly continual instances of sexual violence that highlight how "race is constituted by a repeated sadistic white pleasure in black female suffering" (Nash 2014, p. 52). *Zong!* relates some of these experiences through the point of the view of the crew. The white male speaker details how he wins sexual access to a particular enslaved woman in a poker game for "forty days nights" and how "she bend s/over the pain" (Philip 2008, pp. 106–7). The poem refers to the sexual assault of enslaved women throughout and often in the same breath as the speaker addresses the woman to whom he writes, the "Women Who Wait" per the Manifesto appearing in the book's textual apparatus: "dear/ruth dear dear ruth I won her was/wont to bed her bet/ten then forty/guineas first an/ace/of spaces the deuce it was that/got me her forty days nights" (ibid.). For Philip, focusing on violence against black women's bodies is vital to remembering the realities of the Middle Passage. Like rupture, women's experiences are paramount to the story of the Caribbean, and Philip's reading of the Caribbean is gendered for this reason: "Hold the image of the woman's body—the Black woman's body—as central to all that is happening in the Caribbean. Because when we think of the Caribbean we have to think of cut—as in wound—and cunt into which Columbus, emissary of the Old World, would penetrate on behalf of his master" (Philip 2017).

Emphasizing black women's experiences, *Zong!* takes a revisionary approach to male-authored writing from the Caribbean. It responds to Brathwaite's use of feminine symbolic language in figuring Barbados as Mother in *Mother Poem* and Walcott's "*mer* [as] both mother and sea" in *Omeros* (Walcott 1990, p. 231). More pointedly, *Zong!*'s revisionary response offers a "contradistinction to male-authored literary versions" of the *Zong* massacre, such as David Dabydeen's ekphrastic "Turner",

23 Brathwaite continues, "What T. S. Eliot did for Caribbean poetry and Caribbean literature was to introduce the notion of the speaking voice, the conversational tone. That is what really attracted us to Eliot. And you can see how the Caribbean poets introduced here [Claude McKay, George Campbell, John Figueroa, Derek Walcott] have been influenced by him, although they eventually went on to become part of their own environmental expression" (Brathwaite 1984, pp. 30–31). He further claims that it was Eliot's actual voice heard on recordings that drove this shift toward breaking the pentameter. Notably, T. S. Eliot is the only European influence on his poetry that Brathwaite will acknowledge (Pollard 2004, p. 2; Jenkins 2004, p. 95).

24 Per the glossary that appears at the end of *Zong!*, "lava lava" is West African patois for "talk" (Philip 2008, p. 184).

25 (*Zong!*)'s use of "rose" to refer to an enslaved African woman recalls Robert Hayden's poem "Middle Passage" in which "That Crew and Captain lusted with the comeliest/of the savage girls kept naked in the cabins; that there was one they called The Guinea Rose" (Hayden 1985, p. 50).

a poem "steeped in maternal imagery" that fails to consider women's experiences (Jenkins 2004, pp. 127, 191).26 In contrast, in *Zong!*, *Gregson v. Gilbert* is decomposed and recomposed into stories that give prominence to women's experiences of sexual assault. These imagined memories also show the agency of black women. One white male speaker, in a letter home, tells of putting a string ring on the finger of an enslaved woman whom he had raped, as though they were engaged. The black woman throws the string he has tied on her finger overboard and waves her hand to show that she has replaced it with a red string "for *san go* she says/and dives... smiles/and dives ruth pray for me" (Philip 2008, p. 118). The syllables "*san go*" refer to Sango, an Orisha, a god of thunder and lightning and anger who is associated with the color red (Shujaa and Shujaa 2015). The woman angrily rejects the crew member's fantasy of engagement and its assumption of consensual sex. Then, she commits suicide, diving overboard, with a smile, in an act of resistance. Citing Adrienne Davis, Nicole Gervasio comments that "history has all too frequently elided the possibility that enslaved women could have been 'gender activists operating independently of feminisms's official white foremothers or, even more radically, as their predecessors in recognizing and resisting gender subordination'" (Gervasio 2019, p. 3). *Zong!* challenges such elisions through a poetics of decontamination.

Moreover, in *Zong!*, these imagined but fugitive memories become entangled with representations of historical and material geographies of the sea. That is, the poem juxtaposes representations of black women's flesh with imagined historical texts that could very well be part of the archive of enslavement. In the disruptive underwater environment, the book imagines the crews' letters home floating amid sexual activity and fish life, as in this example from "Ferrum" (see Figure 3):

Here, the poem envisions a crew member's letter home—"I rode the mare to meet you that day on the dale"—interrupted by "fish sup a finger here a leg there make their home in bone" (ibid.). Fish have begun to eat the drowned thrown overboard, and the black female flesh is literally decomposed into parts—finger, leg, and bone—which becomes a home for the fish. The dispersal of the fragmented words on the page also allows "a finger here" to collide with "finger her", producing conflation between beloveds and victims, acts of love and sexual violence—conflation that appears throughout the book.27 More to the point, "fish sup a finger here/finger her" aptly conveys the contradiction between the captive body's "simultaneous thingness and sensuality" (Weheliye 2014). Violently revealed as flesh, black women stand outside the proper "mode of being Human" (Wynter 2003, p. 263).28 As the book progresses, the stories, speakers, and species become more entangled, with the text switching more rapidly among speakers, as if memory were supplanting the historical record through interruptions that come in the voices of the enslaved. Speaking back to Eliot's reconstituted whole and to the *Gregson v. Gilbert* text's historical authority, the poem's decontaminated history produces something incoherent and uncertain, partial and abyssal, springing from memory and loss.

26 For a more extensive comparative reading of Dabydeen's "Turner" and Philip's *Zong!* refer to Ellen Howley's essay "The Sea and Memory: Poetic Reconsiderations of the Zong Massacre" in *The Journal of Commonwealth Literature* (Howley 2019).

27 For a brief analysis of "the traffic between fact, fantasy, desire, and violence" in the archive of enslavement, see Hartman (2008) "Venus", pp. 5–6.

28 Wynter's category of "Man" is emblematic of the proper "mode of being Human" (p. 260). In Leong's reading of *Zong!*, she explains that "mechanisms of 'Man' have concentrated on establishing black populations as inferior" (Leong 2016b, p. 807). In other words, "to be 'Man' means to be non-black" (ibid.).

Through decomposition of the legal document, *Zong!* also evokes the sonic aspects of the marine world marked by quiet rather than silence.29 Not only the memories, but also the quiet of the enslaved break through the record. In *Zong!*, quiet is an expressive sonic disturbance that does not aim to fill the gaps from missing stories so much as to underline them.30 The poem's quiet dwells at the limit of meaning both to refuse the historical record's violent abstraction of slavery and to undermine the purposes of conventional language. Expanding what can be said, this sonic quality arises by way of formal innovation: the spacing of the words and letters on the page that inserts breath into the poem. In *Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing*, Anthony Reed argues that black experimental writing expands what can be thought and said through form (Reed 2014, p. 18). Reading *Zong!*, he proposes that Philip practices "broken witness", which is not "giving voice" but "voicing the silence" (p. 28). Reed's choice of the word "voicing" suggests that the blankness of the white space in *Zong!* is not silent. Again, the poem's breathing space is quiet rather than silent. It is a vibration, hum, or pulse that exceeds words and the expressiveness associated with language to offer another form of expression, a faint "black noise" through which Philip rethinks the past (see Figure 4):

**Figure 4.** Excerpt from *Zong!* (p. 137).

The space between the words evokes a pulse that undulates between syllables and letters, a vibration that interrupts the words and letters of "toe bone heel bone leg bone hip bone hand b[one]". Indeed, Philip's oral performances of *Zong!* exhibit the expressiveness of this sonic element through pauses, breaths, and the lengthening of letters into soft moans and murmurs (BeguilingAcronym 2010). The decomposition of a word like "water", along with the repetition of individual letters, as in "Zong! #1", creates this sense of the sound persisting and echoing underwater, as though the sounds of the drowned continue to echo underwater: "w w w gg d d d" (3). Philip's poetics of decontamination both helps the hum to persist and invites a practice that allows for hearing it. Philip supports this reading of quiet in *Zong!* when she considers "the idea of sound never ceasing within water" and wonders "whether the sounds of those murdered Africans continue to resound and echo underwater" in "Notanda" (p. 203).31 Sensing these sounds memorializes those whose stories were left out of the *Gregson* decision.

29 This brief discussion of quiet is in conversation with Kevin Everod Quashie's theory of black quiet. He understands quiet as "a quality or a sensibility of being, as a manner of expression" of the interior, or the inner life (Quashie 2009, p. 333). As such, quiet offers a frame for understanding black culture in a "richer, fuller, more complicated [way] than a discourse of resistance can paint" (p. 339). In so doing, it "honors the contemplative quality that is also characteristic of black culture" (ibid.) In contrast with silence, which "implies something that is suppressed or repressed", quiet, he argues, is "presence" and "can encompass and represent wild motion" (p. 334).

30 A distinguished scholarship explores the poem's formal effects in relation to the gaps and silences in the archive of enslavement, arguing that the poem seeks to tell the story of the *Zong* massacre while highlighting the missing voices from the archive. See, for example, Jenny Sharpe's "The Archive and Affective Memory in M. NourbeSe Philip's *Zong!*" (Sharpe 2014) and Evie Shockley's "Going Overboard: African American Poetic Innovation and the Middle Passage" (Shockley 2011). In particular, Manuela Coppola (2013) explores how the poem "engages history rather than merely representing it" through its use of gaps and silences that "explode" language complicit in oppression and that question traditional representations of memory (pp. 67, 72).

31 In a brief reading of *Zong!* in *Black and Blur*, Moten registers Philip's echoing "phonic remains" of "the shipped" as a quiet that is "barely audible, given only in distortion" but ongoing: "Her cryptanalytic immersion in the exhausted, mute, mutating language of animate cargo muffled by socially dead captains marks and extends this persistence" of sound in water (Moten 2017, pp. 160–1).

#### **3. Shoals**

In order to understand *Zong!*, we must see how it depicts the sea as a material space characterized by movement, multispecies relations, and continual reformation, not merely on the surface but below the surface as well. Engaging with the biochemical, physical, historical, and imaginative geographies of the sea, the poem enables a reading practice by which these new sonic and imaginative formations might be imagined as shoals. In her book *The Black Shoals*, Tiffany Lethabo King identifies black thought, study, and aesthetics as shoals that "disrupt the time and space reflected by Western disciplinary formations and their seminal texts" (King 2019, pp. 1–2). Shoals, she explains, are oceanic formations, such as coral beds, rock formations, and sandbars, "that cause one to pause before proceeding" and "create a bar or barrier that is difficult to pass": "Materially, it is a site where movement as usual cannot proceed" (pp. 2–3). Shoals are also large groups of fish swimming together. In addition to these meanings, "shoal" is "used in the form of a verb to describe how a ship or vessel slows down to navigate a rocky or rough seabed" (p. 3). I want to repurpose King's use of "shoal" to apply it to the products of continual reformation that emerge from *Zong!*'s decontaminating process. I argue that the new forms produced through this process—the bits of nation language, glimpses of black women's experiences, and the entanglements within multispecies assemblages—might be thought of as shoals. These imagined memories and sonic seascapes *shoal* our usual reading of the legal text.

Reading *Zong!* in this way also enables us to encounter the *Gregson v. Gilbert* legal report anew, newly able to cope with its legacy. Such an argument helps to account for the reprinting of the entire 500-word *Gregson v. Gilbert* legal report at the end of Philip's book. While Fehskens argues that this full reproduction of the legal decision represents the "open-ended yet rational presumptuousness of the Law" (Fehskens 2012, p. 422), I read the restoration of the original text differently, applying Hartman's notion of inheritance in her discussion of enslaver Thomas Thistlewood's meticulously kept diary: "what is more difficult [than 'recovering enslaved lives from the annihilating force' of Thistlewood's descriptions] is to acknowledge as our inheritance the brutal Latin phrases spilling into the pages of his journals" (Hartman 2008, p. 6). Thistlewood daily detailed graphic accounts of physical and sexual violence against the enslaved, the latter of which he recorded in simple Latin abbreviations: "a.m. About eleven o'clock, *Cum* Ellin, an Ebo, by the morass side, *Sup. Terr.* toward the little plantain walk" (Hall 1999, p. 29), meaning he raped Ellin on the ground (*Sup. Terr.*). Hartman signals that we inherit this violent history along with the difficulty of telling the stories of those who lived through such violence using the languages in which it was recorded. Further, Hartman charges that narrating such a history is essential to understanding how the afterlife of slavery licenses violence in the present: "narrating counter-histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a history of the present, by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom, and the precarious life of an ex-slave, a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and gratuitous acts of violence" (Hartman 2008, p. 4). Her point is that efforts to rewrite the past involve rewriting the aftermath of the past on the present. Philip takes up this mantle by allowing the legal document to exist whole again at the end of the book, because one legacy of the *Gregson v. Gilbert* text is the violence it sanctions in the present. But, through the decontaminating process staged in the poem that precedes the legal text in the book, *Zong!* invites a radically transformed encounter with this text. The poem shoals our reading of the reconstituted *Gregson v. Gilbert* text via decontaminated formations. We might even say that this last concluding fragment of *Zong!* "shoals" us against ruin by allowing us to confront it word for word, acknowledging it at once as inheritance and as a provocation.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Acknowledgments:** I wish to thank Courtney Thorsson, Paul Peppis, June Manuel, and, most especially, Karen Jackson Ford for reading early drafts of this essay. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thorough engagement with this essay, which had significant impact on its shape. I also thank Stacy Alaimo and Tianna Bruno for their helpful suggestions.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

© 2020 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Article* **Gwendolyn Brooks and the Legacies of Architectural Modernity**

#### **Jo Gill**

Department of English, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QH, UK<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Received: 2 September 2019; Accepted: 2 October 2019; Published: 22 October 2019

**Abstract:** This essay reads the work of poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, in terms of its critical engagement with the architectural modernity of her home city, Chicago. Taking her poetry from *A Street in Bronzeville* (1945) through to the 1968 collection, *In the Mecca*, as a primary focus, the essay traces the significance of Chicago style architecture on Brooks' aesthetic. It was in Chicago that some of the first tall office buildings were designed; it was here that structural steel and glass were first used to distinctive architectural effect, and it was here, in 1893, that the World's Columbian Exposition was held—an event that, for better or worse, was to shape American architecture well into the twentieth century. Brooks' poetry is alert to this history, attuned to contemporary debates about urban design and sensitive to architectural experience and affect. This context informs and shapes her work in often unexpected ways. Her approach is often oblique (registered in metaphor, style, and voice) but nevertheless incisive in its rendering of the relationship between architecture, modernity and power.

**Keywords:** Gwendolyn Brooks; architecture; modernity; Chicago

This essay reads the work of poet, Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000), in terms of its engagement with the architectural modernity of her home city, Chicago. It was in Chicago that some of the first tall office buildings were designed; it was here that structural steel and glass were first used to distinctive architectural effect, and it was here, in 1893, that the World's Columbian Exposition, or Chicago World Fair, was held—an event that, for better or worse, was to shape American architecture well into the twentieth century. Brooks' approach to this legacy is often oblique and her rendering of the everyday architectural environment proceeds primarily through the subtleties of structure, metaphor, style and voice. Nevertheless, the contemporary architectural context is everywhere present. It mattered to Brooks and it informs and shapes poems from *A Street in Bronzeville* (1945) through *Annie Allen* (1949) to *In the Mecca* (1968), providing an important foundation for her emerging politics and her distinctive aesthetic. By reading Brooks through the frame of Chicago architecture (and by reading Chicago architecture through Brooks' lens) we can see how the specificity of the contemporary built environment inflected lived experience and its poetic representation, exposing new layers of meaning and exemplifying Brooks' stature as an acute cultural commentator.

In this essay, I do a number of key things. I trace the history of architecture in Chicago—which is also, as will become clear, the history of racial segregation—and I show how Brooks evokes, or better still, exposes what this history means to black citizens. I offer a reading of her work which is attuned to the ways in which architecture is inflected in poetry—often in subtle or circumspect ways.1 With Adrienne Brown's recent *The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race*in mind, I further reflect on Brooks' experience of architectural innovation. Brown's point is that the rise of modern architecture—heralded and thereafter epitomized by Chicago style—was predicated on "processes of racial perception and apprehension" (Brown 2017, p. 3). Specifically, skyscraper architecture (born in

1 My emphasis on architectural detail provides a different focus to, for example, Courtney Thorsson's reading of "Gwendolyn Brooks' Black Aesthetic of the Domestic" (Thorsson 2015).

Chicago) compromised or "disrupted" accepted hierarchies of race and power; the view from the top rendered the subject below in miniature and as a powerless black dot, thereby problematizing whiteness at precisely the moment when whiteness was felt to be under threat (Brown 2017, p. 22). Brooks' poetry, I propose, traces the ways in which black subjectivity is negotiated in such a context and provides an important perspective on the relationship between architecture, modernity, race and power.

#### **1. Chicago Architecture**

Brooks' Chicago is a city of architectural innovation. In the late nineteenth century it was the crucible and testbed for architects and engineers such as John Wellborn Root, Dankmar Adler, Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan, and in the early twentieth century, of a new generation of moderns, including Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe.2 The first group pioneered the use of structural metal frames, for example in Root's Monadnock Building of 1888–92 and Root and Burnham's Masonic Temple of 1890–92.3 Assisted by innovations such as Bessemer steel (mass-produced, economical and load-bearing) these architects were successively able to build higher, to open out a building's interior and to broaden window apertures thereby maximizing natural light and, of course, freeing up more space for rent. Other new technologies, including electric lighting and elevators, further coincided to make it suddenly possible to build tall, robust, usable and financially viable structures. The skyscraper, soon to be regarded as the defining feature of urban American modernity, was born. More broadly, and as a consequence of these and related developments, what we now identify as "modern" architecture—tall buildings, open plan spaces, clean lines, and the use of steel, glass and other light, transparent or reflective materials—also began to emerge, as characterised by the "silver" and "bright glass" of Chicago's Michigan Avenue (Brooks 1993, p. 47).

Chicago at the turn-of-the century was exactly the place to make one's name as an architect. Originally located on ancient Potawatomi Indian lands at the point where goods coming from the north via Lake Michigan could be transferred via the Des Plaines River to the Mississippi (Dyja 2013, p. xxii), the city grew rapidly—sustained in part by the development of the railways—until by 1871, it covered half a mile and had a population of some 300,000 (Algren 2011, p. 110). In October of that year, the Great Fire burned out most of the city's infrastructure, inadvertently providing a clean slate for investors, developers and architects. At the same time, the transition across America away from agriculture and towards manufacturing, and population shifts including the post-Civil War move north of African American workers, generated a thriving economy and an urgent need for industrial premises, housing and infrastructure. Chicago from the outset was open to, indeed depended on, the spirit of invention. As Thomas Dyja notes in his compelling account of the city's growth, Chicago regarded itself for some considerable time as America's premier city.

The rush to develop was largely predicated on the labour of black and ethnic workers and, particularly in the case of black communities, on their segregation.4 We see something of the different, and hitherto occluded, experience of these groups in fellow Chicago writer, Carl Sandburg's, poems "Chicago" and "The People, Yes" (Sandburg 2003, pp. 3, 437–617). As Chicago's great new buildings emerged and as the city became more and more crowded, prejudice against black migrants pushed them into certain restricted areas on the city's South Side, the so-called "Black Belt" or, more affirmatively, "Bronzeville," as per the title of Brooks' first collection. In a 1969 interview, she recalled: "I started out talking about Bronzeville, but 'Bronzeville's' almost meaningless by now, I suppose, since Bronzeville has spread and spread all over. Bronzeville, incidentally, was not my own title. That was invented by the *Chicago Defender* long, long ago to refer to the then black area" (Brooks 1972, p. 160). The emergence of

2 For an idiosyncratic account of the period, see Louis Sullivan's *Autobiography of an Idea* (1956) and for a broader view of the history of modern American architecture, see (Giedion 1967, *Space, Time and Architecture*) and (Waldheim and Ray 2005, *Chicago Architecture*).

3 On the Masonic Lodge, see (Wolner 2005).

4 For an early and influential account of this history, see (Drake and Cayton 1945, *Black Metropolis*).

improved transport links to areas outside the city subsequently fostered the growth of the suburbs and the phenomenon which became known as white flight. Brooks' "Beverley Hills, Chicago," discussed later, reflects on these circumstances while "The Ballad of Rudolph Reed" from her 1960 collection, *The Bean Eaters*, traces the violent repercussions for a black family that seeks a home "in a street of bitter white" (Brooks 1987, p. 377).5 At the same time as white suburbs were expanding, urban housing was subject to onerous restrictive covenants and other discriminatory lending practices which meant that black citizens were denied access to any but the poorest and meanest of areas, or what Brooks in *Maud Martha* calls the "unhandsome gray and decay of the double-apartment buildings" (Brooks 1993, p. 5).6

As I will argue later, these larger processes are crystalized—and critiqued —in a number of Brooks' poems, most notably, "kitchenette building" (from *A Street in Bronzeville*) and "In the Mecca" from the collection of that name. Of kitchenettes, as Rashad Shabazz notes, they "were the place and mechanism that enabled blacks to be packed into the Black Belt. Through their tight and incommodious geography, these one-room shacks jammed with people were an assault on black dignity and a physical reminder of containment" (Shabazz 2015, p. 34). Residents of the Mecca building and the other kitchenettes that feature in Brooks' poetry were living Louis Sullivan's influential architectural truism that "form ever follows function" (Sullivan 1947, p. 208; Sullivan 1956, pp. 258, 290). What I mean by this is that if the "function" is perceived by a powerful white culture to be the provision of barely adequate housing for black citizens, then it becomes possible for the "form" of that housing—undersized rooms, decaying infrastructure—to take hold. The adage was fundamental to the development of modern American architecture. It is not a phrase that Brooks ever cites; nevertheless, her poetry exposes and critiques the principle and its consequences.

At the same time as black residents were confined to particular spaces, the move in modern architecture, certainly from the 1930s onwards with advances in technology and new ideas from Europe, was towards the further opening out of space. In the work of Chicago architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, for example (with which Brooks was evidently familiar—see the note in her memoir, *Report from Part Two*, about performing a reading at a home of his design (Brooks 1996, p. 98)) we find a celebration of open spaces, horizontal lines, a lateral and expansive vision and the removal of boundaries. Interviewed by *Time* magazine, Wright reflects "I was working towards the elimination of the wall [ ... ] as a means of opening up space" (Usonian Architect 1938, p. 30); it's an important point because so much of Brooks' work is about walls, and the effect these have on black citizens. Another way of putting this is to say that Brooks' work offers a counter-narrative of architectural modernity—or a view of its effects when seen from a hitherto (and in many ways deliberately and structurally) obscured perspective. When Wright proceeds to rationalize his architectural vision as a riposte to the "crowding" which he saw as a characteristic of late nineteenth-century Chicago, and as fundamentally democratic in intent (he wanted to deliver that "sense of space as should belong to a free people" and to open "a new world of thought that would certainly tear down the old world completely" (Wright 1954, pp. 14, 21, 22)), we can see both how his aspirations might speak to the conditions of life in black Chicago but also how, fundamentally, he failed, or stopped short, of making that connection. If Wright's vision is of "a freedom of space [ ... ] that was quintessentially modern" (Levine 1996, p. 57), and if black citizens are denied access to that space, are they thereby rendered "unmodern"? Brooks reads the material conditions of her subjects in terms that engage with this abstract rhetoric of space, freedom, lightness and modernity. With Adrienne Brown's work in mind, I suggest that her poems "illustrate the ways the built environment affects the perceptual and affective life of race" (Brown 2017, p. 30).

5 Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Brooks' poetry are taken from her 1987 collected volume, *Blacks*. I have replicated her choices with regards to the capitalization of certain titles, e.g., "kitchenette building," discussed later.

6 For more on the history of the suburbs see Jackson (1985) *Crabgrass Frontier* and the essays in *The New Suburban History* (Kruse and Sugrue 2006). It is worth remembering the case of Carl Hansberry (father of Brooks' contemporary, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry). In 1938, Hansberry's father, a Chicago property developer who had acquired his wealth by sub-dividing units in black areas, was confronted by a "restrictive covenant prohibiting nonwhite residence" when he tried to move his family into the predominantly white Washington Park area (Jurca 2001, p. 216, n. 50).

#### **2. Bronzeville**

Brooks' first collection, *A Street in Bronzeville*, is firmly located in the distinctive architectural environment of mid-century Chicago and has, I will argue, a particular architectural register. "The old-marrieds," the first poem in the title-poem sequence that opens the collection, places its subjects in the "crowding darkness" (Brooks 1987, p. 19). This is at one and the same time, an urban street scene akin to those that we see in Brooks' modernist predecessors (T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane, for example) and, more importantly, a physical and material location. Black housing in Chicago was typically over-crowded, poorly lit (formerly spacious departments were subdivided to form smaller "kitchenette" units) and badly maintained (Shabazz 2015, p. 36). The "crowding darkness" thus has a specifically architectural meaning. The oppressive nature of this environment is evident from the poem's first word, "But," and from the sense of denial and exclusion apparent in the subjects' (self?) silencing: "not a word did they say." The poem tries hard to read this context as a possible site of loving affection, hence allusions to "pretty-coated birds," to "lovers," glimpsed up side streets, and to the auspicious timeframe (a midnight in May). Nevertheless, as line two cautions, and as the repetition in the final line of the sombre initial phrase makes clear, the "crowding darkness" continues to prevent intimacy, paradoxically denying the "old-marrieds" the chance of closeness: "not a word did they say." This initial and terminal repetition, coupled with the flat rhyme scheme (*aabbaa*) produces a clamped and claustrophobic effect commensurate with the built surroundings.

A similar sense of constraint informs the next poem in the collection, "kitchenette building" (Brooks 1987, p. 20). Again, a restrictive architectural environment seems to curtail the subject's experience, opportunities and sense of self. Again, the speaker's self-restraint, revealed in the cautious, qualifying "But" at the beginning of stanza two and the persistent negations—"not well! Not for a minute" (final stanza)—tell us much about the necessary accommodations she must make in order to tolerate such a setting. "Kitchenette building" describes conditions in the multiple multi-occupancy buildings of Chicago's South Side. As a young married woman in 1939, Brooks moved into the first of a succession of such apartments. Here, as her biographer George Kent notes, she "felt the cramped dreariness, the increep of bleakness" (Kent 1990, p. 47). This unsavoury environment dehumanizes its residents; "we are things," as line one of "kitchenette building" explains. "We" are subject to the oxymoronic "involuntary plan"—where "plan" means someone else's dictates and, more broadly, the architectural and urban development policies then determining the size and shape of the city. We are "grayed in, and gray," or sapped of light and space and thus of life.

Chapter 15, "The Kitchenette," from Brooks' 1951 novel, *Maud Martha*, further expands on these conditions—on the rats, the roaches, the atmosphere: "The color was gray, and the smell and sound had taken on a suggestion of the properties of color, and impressed one as gray too" (Brooks 1993, p. 63). "Gray" functions as a metonym for black experience in a dark, decaying environment. In *Maud Martha*, again: "there was a whole lot of grayness there" (Brooks 1993, p. 64). In emphasizing the grayness of the black experience in this architectural context, Brooks signals that it is the black citizens' status in relation to whiteness that determines the conditions in which they must live; whiteness is seen to entitle the bearer to superior accommodation whereas "grayness" and/or black identity ("the properties of color") denies one that right. Race, in effect, is doubly-marked. First by the context—after all, it is only black citizens in this period who are living in this way—and then by explicit reference. The point exemplifies Brown's argument that during this period race had to be carefully delineated in order to avoid the disorientating, vertiginous or "giddy" effects of the new architectural environment; in line two of Brooks' poem, "'Dream' makes a giddy sound, not/strong."

Amidst the grayness, the poem's speaker must find other ways of evoking the particular conditions of the "kitchenette building": through smell ("onion fumes," "garbage"), taste ("fried potatoes") and sound (an "aria"). That her speaker can hear an "aria" is a pointed riposte to received views about appropriate places for (and voices of) poetry, for example, to Edmund Wilson's view, writing in *Vanity Fair*, that the Chicago environment "does not naturally lend itself to the music of majestic verse" (Wilson 1920, p. 66). Indeed, the really interesting thing about this poem is the tension that it generates

between the pervasive, soul-destroying atmosphere of life in the kitchenette buildings of Chicago and the refusal on the part of the speaker to let that environment, or this architecture, control her aspirations. Her "dream," introduced at the beginning of stanza two and suspended through to the end of the next stanza, although tentative and qualified ("could a dream send up [?]"), nevertheless survives. The syntax of these two central stanzas, with the delayed performative "let it begin" at the end of stanza three which answers the question about the dream, keeps open the possibility of change, or of living beyond these current circumstances. The final clause in the poem, referring ostensibly to lukewarm bath water (and her "hope to get in it") nevertheless leaves a vestige of "hope" alive. Brooks is weaving a careful path through a set of circumstances which, although they must be exposed, cannot be taken as wholly determining black residents' lived experience. In this respect, too, Brooks is engaging with a set of contemporary debates about architectural determinism—defined as a preoccupation with the effects of buildings, places and living conditions on the manners and morals of residents, or a perception, that "buildings themselves were [ ... ] acting upon people, or social material" (Forty 2000, p. 174). This was a particular bugbear of privileged commentators when concerned about the lower classes and black and ethnic groups. "We" may be treated as "things," the poem notes, "We" may be subject to someone else's "plan." Nevertheless, "we" can mediate our own environment (hence "anticipate a message" in stanza three) and, through our "dream[s]" and "hope[s]," settle our own interpretation and intent.

It is characteristic of Brooks' style, and crucial to its effect, that she articulates or names these conditions in order to recast or deny their influence. In *Maud Martha*, for instance, she describes the dirty, decaying conditions in which the "tiny lives" of the children are played out, precisely so as to demonstrate that their own colour, and noise and energy exceed—erase—their immediate circumstances: "cramp, inhibition, choke—they did not trouble themselves about these" (Brooks 1993, p. 5). Similarly, in "the independent man" from *A Street in Bronzeville*, the addressee seems at first to be confined to a "tiny life/In one room or in two rooms or in three" (Brooks 1987, p. 33). But the form and tone of the poem with its rhetorical flourishes and buoyant and expansive thinking, undermine that premise. No one, it transpires, not "any woman," not even a "wife," and certainly not the strictures of the architectural environment, can curtail his spirit. Turning back to "the old-marrieds," too, we should perhaps modify the view that circumstances render Brooks' subjects entirely mute. Instead, what we see in these and other poems is her speakers negotiating or entering into a dialogue with architectural modernity. There is a refusal in other words to be passive, to live the oppression that the architecture seems to impose, and there is a commitment instead to speaking from and of the nuances of what architectural critic Sophie Psarra terms "embodied experience" (Psarra 2009, p. 13).

Brooks invokes the aesthetics of Chicago style architecture without necessarily explicitly naming buildings, drawing on the distinctive look as a way of reflecting on (black) identity, aspiration and agency. "Hunchback girl: she thinks of heaven," also from *A Street in Bronzeville*, takes the emphatic "verticality" which is characteristic of the new urban architecture (Bender 2002, p. 51) as an implicit backdrop to, and stimulus for, the first-person speaker's upward gaze. "My father," the poem opens, heaven must be "a blue place/And straight. Right. Regular" (Brooks 1987, p. 27). Perfection, taking its cue from the contemporary architectural ideal, must be clear ("blue") and as "regular" and true as the Chicago grid and the steel-framed buildings that had arisen post-1871 from the city's swampy ground. Here, anything "crooked" is to be spurned; the straightness of the speaker's aim and her desire for perfection are rendered in an inescapably architectural metaphor—in the embrace of a "love that runs without crookedness/Along its crooked corridors." Heaven, she goes on to insist, is "a planned place surely" (where, again, the plan refers both to a sense of order and to contemporary urban planning). Other poems from *A Street in Bronzeville*, as we have seen, portray disordered, chaotic, or "crooked" environments. "Hunchback girl" shows us the body itself distorted by its surroundings. Likewise, in "the birth in a narrow room" from her next collection, *Annie Allen*, the labouring woman exclaims: "'How pinchy is my room! how can I breathe!'" (Brooks 1971, p. 3). When the hunchback girl thinks of heaven, she thinks of a place distinguished in terms that reflect the architectural idiom

of the day, in straight lines and planes. This is a "planned" spatial order which, in her imagination, sets right the social and affective disorder (the crookedness) of her reality. Free of her body and of the "crooked corridors" that constrain her, she will, in the words of the penultimate line, "walk straightly through most proper halls" (Brooks 1987, p. 27).

Similarly, in the slightly earlier poem, "southeast corner," the "Madam's" final resting place, "out at Lincoln" is marked by a monument the shape and look of which draws its power from contemporary skyscraper architecture (Brooks 1987, p. 23). Here, "the thickest, tallest monument/Cuts grandly the air." The conceit of "Southeast Corner" is that the "Madam," like the skyscraper magnates of the era (Rockefeller, Woolworth et al) converted her wealth into a memorial made of "cool hard steel." Architecture thus becomes a metaphor for a certain power and a particular legacy. In both cases, what we also see is the speakers, at last, staking a claim to a particular space. To fully understand the implications of this, we need to remind ourselves both of the segregated nature of urban Chicago and of the exponential overcrowding that pertained within the Black Belt (the black population of Chicago "more than doubled in the 1910s, from 44,103 to 109,458" (Bluestone 1998, p. 391)). The irony of both poems is that the black female speakers can only lay claim to this space in fantasy (the dream of heaven) or in death (the graveyard plot).

Another poem from the same period, "a song in the front yard," makes a more cautious claim. "A song" is ostensibly, and allegorically, about a good girl's desire to try a little of life on the wild side, or to give in to the temptations of a "good time" (Brooks 1987, p. 28). But this aspiration, again, is realized in terms of the architectural surroundings and, specifically, of restrictions on space. As the poem's opening lines explain: "I've stayed in the front yard all my life./I want a peek at the back." At issue in each of these cases are black Chicagoans' rights to particular spaces. In the architecture of the period, as we saw with respect to Frank Lloyd Wright, space defines modernity (Giedion notes of early twentieth-century architecture, that it was intent on "organizing space in ways that gave form to contemporary feelings" (Giedion 1967, p. 26)) and access to space is a sign of democracy. A lack of space is thereby unmodern, and the denial of space to black citizens is a covert way of refusing the rights and privileges of a democratic society.

#### **3. Plain Style**

I have spoken already about the aesthetic of plainness that shaped modern architecture and the model of clean lines that characterized Chicago style (Wallace Stevens commented that "modernity is so Chicagoan, so plain" (Stevens 1977, p. 53)). In Brooks' work, as in contemporary architectural discourse more widely, this clean, modern ideal masks a persistent tension whereby the pull of the past, or of traditional styles, materials and ornament, continues to exert an influence. The architectural debate mirrors a broader cultural and political dialectic in the interwar period (and, arguably, beyond) of tradition *versus* innovation; conservatism *versus* change; old world *versus* new; the past *versus* the future. Brooks engages with these discussions and draws on specifically architectural metaphors in a number of poems. In "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith," for example, the much-lauded Satin-Legs is seen rising in the morning and preparing to present himself to the world, "That no performance may be plain or vain" (Brooks 1987, p. 42, stanza three). In the lengthy fifth stanza, we see him working consciously, if quizzically, on his planned appearance for the day. Should he bathe in lavender or pine, lilies or roses? Which ornament, in other words, will best express his identity and mood? In invoking flower motifs, Brooks is replicating the use of foliage as an architectural embellishment. Bluestone explains that the interior balconies in Chicago's Mecca Building were "heavily foliated" (Bluestone 1998, p. 384) while William Hansell notes Brooks' use in that poem of flowers seen withering on the vine (Hansell 1974, p. 203). There is a hierarchy of values—and of power—here. For all that Satin-Legs fantasizes about draping himself in "gentle garden in the best/of taste" he is forced to remember that his true locus is "alleys, garbage pails." The mode of representation that he seeks is out of reach. Denied floral representation (in stanza six, "No! He has not a flower to his name"), Satin-Legs

must find alternative means of self-projection, perhaps through clothes—although the ermine and diamonds of royalty that he yearns for must needs be replaced with less precious materials.

Here we come to the complex crux of this highly ambiguous poem. Just as Satin-Legs must choose the best mode of self-representation, we are asked to weigh up relative values of ornament and simplicity, richness and plainness, and finally to assess the innate beauty of Satin-Legs' own form with his "neat curve" and "angularity" and his "technique of a variegated grace." Courtney Thorsson notes, with this poem as an example, that "the notion that black is beautiful saturates Brooks' poetry" (Thorsson 2015, p. 154). In this look we find, as the next stanza proceeds, "all his sculpture and his art/and all his architectural design." And we are asked to choose between this simple aesthetic—the angles, curves and grace that are emblematic of modern, unadorned style—and an alternative, formed of "marble, complicated stone." It's a superb manoeuvre; Brooks sets up (traditional) ornament as the aspiration but shows us that the true ideal—one that actually is within Satin-Legs' grasp—is of (modern) simplicity. At the same time, the poem leaves open a question about why Satin-Legs should have to reconcile himself to plainness when the culture that surrounds him continues to value ostentatious display. Ornament in this context, or the embrace of embellishment, becomes a form of self-care to which he is entitled even if some would, apparently, urge him to "think with horror of baroque/Rococo." Thus, even if contemporary architecture is turning to embrace the plain and unadorned, residual value attaches to the highly worked, and Satin-Legs should not be denied this rich, decorative pleasure. That the architectural context is, at least in part, at play here is apparent in stanza thirteen with its brutal reminder that, his ideals notwithstanding, a landscape of "broken windows" and "sore avenues" is his lot.

If black spaces are literally and metaphorically cramped and constrained, white spaces, by contrast are imbued with light. Light in this context signals architectural modernity; it suggests the new, the free, the liberated and unconstrained. We recall the lifeless, lightless "gray" of "kitchenette building." In "Beverley Hills, Chicago" from *Annie Allen*, Brooks works with multiple gradations of light and shade in tracing differential access to particular loci, thus imbuing the poem and its context with connotations both architectural and racial. The poem offers a critical commentary on the rise of the suburbs and of so-called white flight. "Beverley Hills, Chicago" is the eighth in the fifteen-poem sequence, "The Womanhood." It opens with an epigraph from fellow poet, E.M. Price, "'and the people live till they have white hair'" (Brooks 1971, pp. 48–49). The line establishes the theme of dignity, longevity and racial difference that sustains the rest of the poem and the tone of longing that persists throughout. It also introduces one end of the spectrum or colour palette that the rest of the poem proceeds to develop. More than this, it tacitly registers something of the wider context—the contemporary housing crisis—which lies behind the growth of the (white) suburbs and the (black) speaker's visit to it.

"Beverley Hills, Chicago" describes the speaker's drive through this privileged environment. The "people" who live here, we know already, are associated with whiteness and with the luxury of a long and leisured life. In the first line of the poem, shades of brown appear in the image of the "dry brown" leaves heard "coughing" beneath the homeowners' feet. It is a metaphor which both diminishes the black subjects and identifies them with some form of malaise. Moreover, it renders them voiceless (they can cough but they can't speak clearly). This theme is echoed in the muted tones throughout the poem and reinforced in the final line where, silenced by the injustice of what they have just seen, the visitors' "voices are a little gruff." From "brown" we move in line three to the suburbanites' lighter "golden gardens." Later again, in stanza three, the setting is rendered in shades of "everlasting gold" where the residents take tea against a "gold-flecked backdrop." By contrast, the speaker and her peers are associated with "little black dots," sour lemons, and noisy and cramped ("sweatingest") apartments (stanzas three and four). In carefully measured tones, marked by exaggerated courtesy and emphatic—if not entirely successful—denials, the speaker insists; "Nobody hates these people" (stanza six). But she cannot let go of a sense of the injustice by which "these people" in this place with this power have so much when we "have not enough." The smooth, restrained surface notwithstanding, it is clear in the final two stanzas that something is awry (or "crooked" to return to "hunchback girl:

she thinks of heaven"), morally, politically, and spatially. "It is only natural" as the poem concludes, that the speaker should expect something different.

"Beverley Hills, Chicago" is more, though, than simply a complaint or lamentation. Just as "kitchenette building" unexpectedly discovers a voice, or an "aria," thus revealing a hitherto overlooked complexity and quality of experience, so too this suburban poem shows us something we may not have expected to find. It is a poem that proceeds discreetly, with so many subtleties and denials that we might miss its substantial point about the unregistered presence of black people within this suburban enclave; they are, after all, here all the time—as gardeners (sweeping up the "brown leaves"), as tea-makers, as burnishers of golden ornaments, as layers out of corpses (see stanza five). This is a poem about denial (hence the repetition of "Nobody" and "not"), constraint and multiple forms of injustice which are experienced at a personal level and in terms of restricted access to particular architectural spaces.7 But it is also a poem that exerts control over the situation and that covertly sets an important alternative narrative of experience.

A counterpart poem, "The Lovers of the Poor," from the slightly later collection *The Bean Eaters*, is even more explicit in its comparison of suburban luxury and urban grime (Brooks 1987, pp. 349–52). Again, the poem opens with a pattern of light and shade as though to replicate the racial dimension. Again, a succession of emphatic, often rhetorical, negatives (this is "Not Lake Forest, Glencoe./Nothing is sturdy, nothing is majestic" (lines 41–42)) is used to bring into view the thing ostensibly being occluded.  In both poems, defamiliarisation is key to the exposure of architectural and social difference. The league visitors cannot help but exclaim at the "Squalor!" and at "This sick four-story hulk, this fibre/With fissures everywhere" (lines 74–75; note the metaphors of disease). And it is a short step from the ladies noting this to Brooks invoking a larger and crucial context—the "puzzled wreckage/Of the middle passage" (lines 70–80). The line refers both to the narrow confines of the building's corridors and, pointedly, to the history of slavery and racial oppression that lies behind what the ladies see. Nevertheless, the poem closes with an assertion of the perspective of the black residents and with now-unguarded contempt for the white women as, in rising panic (hence the transfer of their hysteria onto the building itself, emphasized by the claustrophobic rhyme of "hall" and "wall") they flee:

Keeping their scented bodies in the center

Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,

They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall[.]

#### **4. In the Mecca**

The unnamed building that the ladies flee at the end of "The Lovers of the Poor" resembles Chicago's famous Mecca Building, also the subject of the title poem of Brooks' 1968 collection. The Mecca Building, labelled the "strangest place in Chicago" in the December 1950 feature by John Bartlow Martin in *Harper's* magazine that Brooks takes as her epigraph, was built in 1891. Designed as an apartment building by Willoughby J. Edbrooke and Franklin Pierce Burnham, and originally featuring 98 large flats, the building was, in its moment, a model of architectural innovation and, with its use of light, open space and the latest materials, of Chicago style. Bluestone notes that it was constructed as part of "the building boom that accompanied the 1893 World's Columbia Exposition" (Bluestone 1998, p. 388). He further records that the Mecca was designed with two extensive wings, featuring "an enormous interior skylit atrium [ ... ] each one measuring 33 by 170 feet. In each wing a

7 This poem writes back to a body of work on the suburbs and anticipates Langston Hughes's 1967 poem, "Suburban Evening." For more on suburban poetry in general, and Hughes's poem in particular, see (Gill 2013).

ground-story lobby, stairs and heavily foliated ornamental balconies, cantilevered from the atrium's walls, provided access to the individual apartments" (Bluestone 1998, p. 384). In this way, the lives of the residents were made visible even as the separate apartments pretended to the kind of cozy intimacy more typically associated in the period with the individual family home.

In 1900, the Mecca was home to 365 people in 107 units most of whom were working or lower-middle class, and all of whom were white. Some twenty year later, with the rise in Chicago's black population noted earlier, and their restriction to certain areas, there were 510 residents, most of whom were black, in 148 units. By the early 1940s, the period when the poem is set, the Mecca housed more than 1000 crammed into multiple sub-divided units, each in poor repair after decades of neglect at the hands of a succession of absentee landlords including, latterly, and as I'll explain later, the Illinois Institute of Technology, or IIT (Bluestone 1998, pp. 390, 394). Brooks had briefly worked in the building as "secretary to a spiritual advisor who sold lucky numbers and 'magic potions'" (Brooks 1996, p. 150). By 1958, when she first drafted the poem, originally as a novel (Melhem 1987, p. 153), the Mecca was gone, demolished some 8 years earlier, and against considerable resistance from the community who lived there, to make way for the development of the IIT, including for buildings designed by acclaimed modernist architect, Mies van der Rohe. Mies was an important figure in contemporary, and specifically, "international style" architecture.8 He left Hitler's Germany in 1938, arriving in Chicago to take up commissions for the city's Armour Institute and IIT. For reasons of space, I won't rehearse the long and fraught history of this event (although Dyja provides a good overview).9 I would note, though, that just as Brooks' earlier poems make tacit, but nevertheless critical (in both senses of the word) reference to the architectural history that determined the particular places in which black Chicagoans were permitted to live and work, so too "In the Mecca," tells a story, albeit sometimes obliquely, of the rise of modernity. Melhem suggests of the poem that, "in the course of Mrs. Sallie's search for her daughter, Brooks sketches a representative number of tenants and addresses a broad range of contemporary and philosophical subjects" (Melhem 1987, p. 159) to which I would add that there is also a crucial architectural concern. If black communities in Chicago are restricted to the Black Belt and crammed into crumbling buildings like the Mecca, what happens when even these spaces are denied to them?

The plight of the Mecca Building exemplifies the larger architectural (and racially segregated) history of Chicago. The IIT had been acquiring neighbouring land and razing buildings to enable its own expansion across the 1930s; it was left the Mecca in a will and thus became, in Dyja's words, the "'reluctant landlord' of some one thousand tenants." The Institution's "opinion of them," he goes on to say, "is evident in a 1940 map showing the status of acquisitions—the corner where the Mecca stands is listed as 'vacant'" (Dyja 2013, p. 17). For the decade that IIT owned the building, the institute neglected to improve or even maintain it, apparently in the expectation that—the current housing shortage notwithstanding—tenants would decide to move out. This is the sorry story that Brooks' poem brings to life. What is apparent is that the conditions of life for Chicago's African American communities are inextricably linked with the larger story of architectural advancement. Brooks is clear about the architectural foundation: in her notes on "Work Proposed for 'In the Mecca'" she explains that her aim is "to touch every note in the life of this block-long block-wide building" and thereby to "capsulize the gist of black humanity in general" (Brooks 1972, p. 190). The loss of amenity, the denial of the right to occupy certain spaces and to live in a humane way is the price, it seems, to be paid for progress.

8 The concept of an "international style" captured some of the changes evident in the early decades of the century as transnational influences, developments in other artistic fields, and innovations in techniques and materials coalesced. A 1932 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern art, "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition," and the subsequent catalogue *The International Style* helped disseminate the term. See (Hitchcock and Johnson 1995).

9 See also the essays in (Lambert 2001).

The poem traces the trauma of one family and one mother, Mrs. Sallie, as she returns to her home in the Mecca only belatedly to realize that one of her children, the aptly named Perdita, is lost. In seeking this child, she sets off on a hopeless quest through the labyrinth of the building. Her journey in and out of dark corners and up and down precipitous steps and lengths of balcony shows us architecture as lived experience and as reification of her vulnerability, confusion and fear. The building was designed for looking, or as a space of "urban spectacle" (Bluestone 1998, p. 392). Here that capacity is pushed to its limit; the architecture itself has allowed someone to be taken. Its lines of sight have either inured the watchers or have proved to be inadequate—for every clear view, there is an equal and opposite corner of obscurity—thus preventing her discovery. Architecture has failed. It is in this context that the opening stanza, with its reference to an acclaimed proponent of modern architecture, is to be read:

Sit where the light corrupts your face. Miës Van der Rohe retires from grace.

And the fair fables fall.

(Brooks 1968, p. 5)

Brooks' metaphor of "light" is particularly significant. It recalls "The Ballad of Rudolph Reed" with its exposé of the hegemony of architectural modernity, realized in the "bitter white streets" that violently, murderously, repel him (Brooks 1987, p. 376). She draws on, while also critiquing, the use of light as an important medium in modernist architecture—a tendency which developed from the light-inducing steel structures and horizontal window apertures of turn-of-the-century Chicago style. These opening lines suggest something, to return to Adrienne Brown, about the anxious defence of whiteness in this culture, especially among those who saw the novel perspectives of contemporary architecture as somehow threatening established racial categories. And it sets the whole poem in a broader figurative frame whereby all that is right and good and proper (line two's "fair") is both posited as a virtue and put under question. The fact that "light" here is twinned with corruption and then associated with Mies who, in turn, "retires from" (not "retires in") "grace" suggests that we are in the presence of a fundamental rethinking of the hierarchies of value which might otherwise pertain. In her notes towards the poem, Brooks is clear about the relationship between light and dark: "I wish to present a large variety of personalities against a mosaic of daily affairs, recognizing that the *grimmest* of these is likely to have a streak or two streaks of sun" (Brooks 1972, p. 189; emphasis original). In line three, where "fair fables fall," there is an aural echo of sables (or blacks) and thus a telling oxymoron (light or "fair" *versus* dark or sable) and there is a trace of rhyme ("fall"/wall) which speaks to the wider context of containment and suggests, perhaps, that certain walls—of ignorance or prejudice—might be about to "fall." That the "fair fables fall" implies also that Brooks' mission is to expose the stories, or "fables," which would determine our understanding of life in the Mecca. The *Harper's* article she cites as a lengthy epigraph has been regarded since as perpetuating a highly damaging narrative of black squalor and passivity—a kind of othering which Brooks, as Daniela Kukrechtová indicates, is determined to resist. Light and dark; white and black function in complex and sometimes unexpected ways to structure the poem's meaning.

The architectural framework to this poem of fifty-seven extended stanzas, although skeletal (and thus not explicitly visible) persists throughout, complementing other structuring features. As Karen Jackson Ford argues, "ancient social structures undergird the human architecture of the Mecca building" (Ford 2010, p. 385) while for Kukrechtová, the stanzas "reflect the design of the building, namely the long corridors punctuated by numerous doors" (Kukrechtová 2009, p. 460). We can further trace the architecture in fleeting references to stairs (stanza two); doors and steel (stanza three); to the "threshold" (stanza four) and, later, to windowsills, glass, grilles, gargoyles and so on. In stanza four, where we might expect the oppressive architecture to determine black experience, or subjectivity, we find that the subjects themselves mediate or modify their surroundings, hence "Hyena/The striking debutante" who "bursts" free of her "dusty threshold" to become "One of the first and to the tune of hate,/in all

the Mecca to paint her hair sun-gold." The moment marks a refusal, akin to that of "Satin-Legs Smith" or the residents of the "kitchenette building" to wholly succumb to the dust and the decay.

Shortly thereafter, we are introduced to Mrs. Sallie and straightaway to her dissatisfaction with her environment; "It is bad, is bad," she observes, of her "sick kitchen." Again the metaphor of light is used to invoke contemporary architecture and specifically the loss of access to certain spaces and amenities: "all my lights are little!" she exclaims. The utterance registers her frustration with her lot in general, with the specificity of her living conditions and with her failure or powerlessness to change them:

'I want to decorate!' But what is that? A

pomade atop a sewage. An offense.

First comes correctness, *then* embellishment.

(Brooks 1968, p. 8; emphasis original)

Ford suggests that "associating embellishment with the appeasement of suffering, Brooks [ ... ] recruits lyric effects to calm the poem after its storm of sorrows and terrible losses" (Ford 2010, pp. 385–86). More than this, Brooks engages with contemporary debates about relative forms of architectural value—the familiar ornament of traditional styles *versus* the austere look of the new, epitomized by Mies van der Rohe and other scions of modernity. Just as Satin-Legs Smith did in "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith," Mrs. Sallie is defending her right to rich ornamentation, even as she acknowledges that to get the embellishment right, or to achieve the look she desires, there needs first to be a level of order or "correctness." Elsewhere, for example in "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi, Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" from *The Bean Eaters*, Brooks' poem on the Emmet Till murder, it is the erosion of the decorative surface that signals the rupture in the social fabric beneath. There, the white woman implicated in Till's fate recognizes "with terrible clarity" that "her composition/Had disintegrated" and that "although the pattern prevailed,/The breaks were everywhere" (Brooks 1987, p. 335). Another way of reading the images in both poems is to say that Brooks is conceding that even simplicity (aesthetic "correctness") is an effect which is achieved only by careful work—an insight which stands for this very poem. Its ostensibly straightforward ballad form, its narrative thrust, its cast of characters, all are the fruits of "correctness, *then* embellishment." The point confirms one of Wright's principles of modern architecture: the idea that ornament should be "integral to building as itself poetry" (Wright 1943, p. 347). What he means by this is that ornament should be structural, or part of the integrity ("correctness") of the design and not something that is applied only superficially.

In the end, as the rest of "In the Mecca" seems to confirm, the aspiration to improve this place is in vain, or comes too late. Yet the final stanzas do revert to some of the decorative or ornamental motifs which Mrs. Sallie has yearned for (roses, singing birds) in order to invoke the possibility of something better and, to return to Martin's *Harper's* article, "The Strangest Place in Chicago," to give voice to the otherwise silenced. The image of singing birds in particular responds to Martin's closing assertion that as he leaves the Mecca building, he can hear only "unintelligible" words, or "just a human voice, muttering, and it is impossible to tell whether in anger or in joy; it is only sound" (Martin 1950, p. 97). For Brooks, what can be heard is more than "unintelligible [ ... ] sound." It is the echo of Perdita's voice, proclaiming her subjectivity against the odds. As Ford observes, "at the end we hear her song, as the child comes alive for us for the first time" (Ford 2010, p. 386).

Gwendolyn Brooks' poetry from the mid-1940s through to the late 1960s, shows us how contemporary urban architecture looks and feels from an unanticipated and usually overlooked perspective. Where much poetry of the period, for example, Sandburg's "Hats" (Sandburg 2003, p. 160), makes the most of the view of the city from above, Brooks' work shows us the experience of urban architecture from below, from crowded corridors and dark corners, or—as in the case of "Beverley Hills, Chicago"—from the outside. This is a body of work that refuses to be overwhelmed by the spectacular buildings that tower above, or to be silenced by the dominant narrative of architectural

progress. Brooks offers a different sensibility; one that is highly attuned to contemporary debates and alert to—and critical of—unintended architectural effect.

**Funding:** Some of the initial research for this paper was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (RF-2015-313).

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

Algren, Nelson. 2011. *Chicago: City on the Make*, 5th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. First published 1951. Bender, Thomas. 2002. *The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea*. New York: The New Press.

Jackson, Kenneth T. 1985. *Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States*. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sullivan, Louis H. 1956. *The Autobiography of an Idea*. Foreword Claude Bragdon. New York: Dover. First published 1924. Thorsson, Courtney. 2015. Gwendolyn Brooks' Black Aesthetic of the Domestic. *Melus* 40: 149–76. [CrossRef] Usonian Architect. 1938, *Time*, January 17, 29–32.

Waldheim, Charles, and Katerina R ˝uedi Ray, eds. 2005. *Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wilson, Edmund. 1920. The Anarchists of Taste. *Vanity Fair*, November. 65–67.

Wolner, Edward W. 2005. Chicago's Fraternity Temples: The Origins of Skyscraper Rhetoric and the First of the World's Tall Office Buildings. In *The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories*. Edited by Roberta Moudry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1943. *An Autobiography*. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1954. *The Natural House*. New York: Horizon.

© 2019 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Article* **Living up to Her "Avant-Guardism": H.D. and the Senescence of Classical Modernism**

#### **Suzanne Hobson**

Department of English, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Received: 31 August 2019; Accepted: 3 October 2019; Published: 14 October 2019

**Abstract:** In a journal entry from 1957, H.D. writes that Adorno's description of the aging of modernist music might easily apply to the fate of her own work in the post-war period: "Among other fascinating things, he [Adorno] says that Bartók 'could not quite live up to his own avant-guardism' [sic] [ ... ]. I felt the phrase applied, in a way, to myself and my Helen sequence" (H.D. 2015, p. 40). H.D.'s remark refers to her long poem, *Helen in Egypt* (1960), which, with its engagement with classical sources and epic themes, seemed to some to be a throwback to an earlier modernist period in which Pound, Joyce, Eliot and H.D. herself had looked to ancient models as a means of reinvigorating modern literature. What did it mean for H.D. to feel that her work had outlived its time, to be a first-generation modernist still writing in that mode after many of her peers and their achievements had passed into history? This article explores H.D.'s sense that her practice was at odds with contemporary demands for poetry to answer to immediate historical concerns. It also considers her case against the critics in letters, notes and in *Helen in Egypt* which contains its own defense of the relevance of classical modernism to the post-war present day.

**Keywords:** H.D.; *Helen in Egypt*; Adorno; late modernism; epic; avant-garde

#### **1. Introduction**

In a journal entry from 1957, H.D. touched on the work of the Frankfurt School theorist, Theodor Adorno. She wrote that Adorno's description of the aging of modernist music might apply to the fate of her own late work: "Among other fascinating things, he [Adorno] says that Bartók 'could not quite live up to his own avant-guardism' [sic] [ ... ]. I felt the phrase applied, in a way, to myself and my Helen sequence" (H.D. 2015, p. 40). H.D.'s remark refers to her long poem, *Helen in Egypt* (1960) which, with its active engagement with classical sources, might easily have seemed to be a throwback to an earlier modernist moment, a belated example of the Joycean mythic method or the classicizing style of Imagism—the product of an avant-garde that had had its day. This was not just, however, a case of being artistically behind the times. H.D. worried that her poem did not live up to the increasing demand for art to be responsive to present-day realities and, indeed, that her choice of an epic subject could be seen as an attempt to eschew the difficult realities of history *altogether* in favor of the consolations of the distant past. These fears were not unfounded. H.D. had, and would again, be accused of being an "anachronism" by critics and art-theorists who preferred the conspicuous social and political commitments of realist or documentary forms to the opacities and indirections of modernism (Burnett 1990, p. 92). But they were, she felt, misplaced because her poem *was*, after all, a reflection on "actuality" albeit in an epic guise. While there is now little doubt about the quality and significance of H.D.'s writing in the 1940s and 50s, questions remain about the context in which it was produced: To what extent was H.D. working against what she took to be the prevailing artistic and political tide? And to what purpose? How might we understand her adherence to a "high" modernist aesthetic in explicit defiance of critics and art-theorists who were talking about its demise?

This article builds on studies of late modernism which have generally focused on the succession of a first generation of writers by a second late generation (Miller 1999, Davis 2016) or on the ways in which

modernist lives and careers often extended beyond, and sometimes went on to question, the artistic moment from which they emerged (Whittier-Ferguson 2014, MacKay 2007). Among this second group, changes in practice are often related to wider social and historical developments and in particular to what Thomas S. Davis calls "the disorder in the world-system" that led to transformations in Britain's global status, sovereignty and sense of "political belonging" (Davis 2016, p. 16). Until recently, H.D. had rarely been considered in this context although, as Lara Vetter and John Whittier-Ferguson have both pointed out, she fits the framework well (Vetter 2017, pp. 20, 21; Whittier-Ferguson 2014, n. 211).1 Having made her name in the 1910s as part of the Imagist movement, H.D. continued to write across a range of genres into the 1940s and 50s, producing poetry, experimental memoir and a series of "historical" novels, as well as the epic poem *Helen in Egypt*. This late phase of H.D.'s career has often been dismissed as *belatedness* and her output in these years criticized for its focus on mythical and ancient worlds rather than the concerns of the present day. Yet as Vetter points out in the first book to take H.D. seriously as a late modernist, H.D. had never been so closely interested in politics as she was in the period during and after World War II and, while she understood why some thought her work remote from contemporary issues, she nonetheless resisted the idea that to write of the classics was in any way an avoidance of present-day realities: "H.D. was dismissive of allegations of escapism, for she did not believe that the only way to write about a war was to describe its battlefields" (Vetter 2017, p. 14). Vetter finds evidence to support this claim in H.D.'s neglected late prose where rather than abandon her modernist aesthetic H.D. transformed it to better accommodate an analysis of the social and historical dynamics of her own times.

I follow Vetter's lead in seeing H.D.'s late modernist aesthetic in *Helen in Egypt* as an intervention into the contemporary, but suggest that the intervention is more reflexive in nature than that seen in other genres. *Helen* raises questions about the fate of poetry after WWII and whether art necessarily becomes ideology by continuing to invoke classical sources and methods that not only seemed remote from the present but whose express purpose, in the case of the Homeric epic in particular, was the commemoration of heroic actions performed in war. It speaks broadly in other words, to the question that has since become closely, if not always accurately, associated with Adorno's name and, as H.D.'s brief comment on his work suggests, was already linked with him in the period in which she wrote her last works: How, and whether, art can ever be adequate to the representation of the destruction of life in WWII. As scholars have long pointed out, for Adorno the question is not about the difficulty of thinking or of representing the magnitude of the suffering because the means of destruction was entirely in keeping with a technologized and rationalized culture and society in general. Rather, as J.M. Bernstein argues, the destruction can no longer be made culturally intelligible because culture itself is subject to the same processes. This essay does not seek to provide detailed analysis of Adorno's thinking on this subject: His significance here is that for H.D. he briefly captured the attitude of the times towards her own aging generation of artists, a significance that is increased by the fact that Adorno's theories regarding the senescence of modern art have since become part of the standard account of late modernism from which others take their cue. The first part of my article explores some key contributions to this standard version of late modernism before describing the means by which H.D. came to her own understanding of what it meant to have outlived one's own aesthetic moment. Adorno is the spur to thinking more broadly about the demand felt by H.D. in the post-war period for art to be responsive to its times. The second part of the article reads H.D.'s "heroic epic", *Helen in Egypt*, as an answer of sorts to the problem it might otherwise be seen to manifest: The poem certainly does not offer a direct and realistic treatment of war, but nor is its engagement with classical and epic materials a flight from actuality, far less an argument for art to continue in the Homeric tradition of remembering heroism in battle. *Helen in Egypt* asks whether the epic tradition was, or

1 John Whittier-Ferguson does not consider H.D. in his book on late modernist literature as some of her late works, *Trilogy* most obviously, have long been the centre of critical attention. He nonetheless observes in a footnote that she would 'fit admirably into the frame I have constructed' (Whittier-Ferguson 2014, p. 211).

ever could be, a transparent response to the "actuality" of war and, in suggesting that it could not, drives towards an insistence on the ultimate ambiguity and unknowability of what really happened in war. In concluding his discussion of Adorno on the condition of art after WWII, Bernstein argues that, "the only legitimate cultural practices now would be ones that reflectively put themselves and their past in question" (Bernstein 2001, p. 422). By this measure *Helen in Egypt*, which goes back to the primal scene of Western culture to ask what it means to write about war in the contemporary, would seem altogether more responsible to its times than the more present-focused and realistic modes to which it was unfavorably compared.

H.D. was not alone among first-generation modernists in her use of "anachronistic" sources to reflect on post-war politics and society. Pound was involved in his own epic project, the Cantos, in the same period and the fascist associations of the late additions to this poem undoubtedly compounded the view that the genre was ideologically and politically suspect. William Carlos Williams published *Paterson* between 1946 and 1958 and, although he had always distanced himself from the classicizing modernists, he viewed his own epic as Joycean in character. H.D. does, however, seem to have been particularly vulnerable to charges that her art had outlived its moment. This was certainly connected to her iconic status as the original Imagist, a label that she found difficult to shake. As Burnett points out, critics often took no account of the fact that H.D. had realigned herself with other avant-gardes in the 1920s and 30s from the *Close Up* group to the set around Eugene Jolas's *transition* (Burnett 1990, p. 96). Gender also had a role to play in the sometimes hostile reception of her late works and, although H.D. found more academic success later in life than her contemporaries Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy, she did not benefit in the same way as T.S. Eliot from the entry of modernism into the American academy and nor was she given the same license to re-invent herself and her work. Not all of H.D.'s late readers, it should be said, were critical. At the same time that commentators such as Randall Jarrell were announcing H.D.'s obsolescence, a younger generation of poets, including Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, were taking her mythic methods and use of classical sources as the template for their own "timely" creations.

#### **2. The Senescence of the Avant-Garde**

The essay which came to H.D.'s attention in 1957—Adorno's "The Aging of the New Music"—is a key point of reference in the debate over the lateness and/or out-datedness of modernism. Georg Lukács, for example, draws on this essay in "The Ideology of Modernism" as part of his argument that literary modernism is bourgeois art in its final, decayed form of allegory (Lukács 1963, p. 37).2 "The Aging of the New Music" is also prominent among the essays discussed in Edward Said's *Late Style* where Said seeks to recuperate the awkwardness and difficulty of late modernist art as a means of disrupting imperial fictions of progress and national destiny. According to Said, "The Aging of the New Music" offers two main insights. Firstly, "new music" cannot simply reproduce the traumatic effect on the audience of the first performances of Berg or Stravinsky by slavish adherence to a "system" of dissonance or shock (Said 2006, p. 16). To transform Schoenberg's "compositional freedom" into Webern's "strict domination of 12 tone procedure" is, by definition, to destroy it (Adorno 2002, p. 187). Secondly, Said notes that the genuinely late work refuses assimilation. It functions neither as the crowning achievement of the composer's career, nor as the final seal on his posthumous reputation, but as a manifestation of an "increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism" (Said 2006, p. 17). There appear, then, to be two senses in which avant-garde art might age: Either regressively, as its shock value dissipates and it is absorbed into the academy, or disgracefully, by refusing such absorption along with what Said terms "the rewards offered up by being comfortable inside society, not the least of which was to be read and understood easily by a large group of people." According

2 Lukács picks up on Adorno's notion that the '*angst*-obsessed vision of life' has diminished among bourgeois intellectuals. This has led, he argues, to the loss of authenticity in the modernist artwork.

to this second definition, Adorno himself proves the very model of a late writer, refusing his readers the crutch of summaries or specialisms and producing an "overabundance of material none of it compressible into an Adornian system" (Said 2006, pp. 21, 22). For Said, Adorno rejects the option of growing old comfortably in the academy in favour of cultivating a more awkward and implacable form of lateness that refuses assimilation to the end. The difference between Said's subversive late avant-garde artist and Luckác's complicit late modernist is indicative of the way lateness has been revised and reclaimed in recent years and Adorno's essay with it. H.D.'s work, it should be said, fits neither paradigm especially well. Few would now claim, as did Jarrell and others, that her late work is an "anachronism". But nor is she easily reclaimed as Said's "disgraceful" late modernist either. She very much hoped to see her difficult late prose works in print and, although not successful in this particular respect, she did, as noted above, enjoy recognition and academic plaudits in the latter part of her career.

The essay by Adorno on which both of these critics draw is less interested in tracing the fate of a particular career than in analysing a dialectic that is internal to avant-garde music itself:

Music wanted to do justice to the Kantian idea that nothing sensuous is sublime and the more the market debased it as a childish game the more it pressed to maturity through spiritualization. [ ... ] Music had to pay a price for all this, which Valéry suspected was the case with all new art. In New Music this price is its senescence. (Adorno 2002, p. 188)

"The Aging of the New Music" identifies in the avant-garde resistance to the market a pull to "spiritualization" that is both a rationalization and what Peter Dews has described as "desubstantialization" (Dews 1989, p. 42). By rationalization, Adorno designates the process by which the artist impresses a subjective form and unity on to nature to create the autonomous art-object. Desubstantialization describes the obverse side of this process: The artist *subtracts* himself from the equation and fetishistically worships the art-object for its illusory "freedom". To return to the example given in "The Aging of the New Music", when Schoenberg's "compositional freedom" becomes a "twelve-tone system", man thinks he has found the musical "thing-in-itself", the essence and life-form of modern music: "Deluded man sets up something artifactual as a primal phenomenon and prays to it; an authentic instance of fetishism" (Adorno 2002, p. 194). At this point, both subject and object disappear. The artist forgets himself as the subjective origin of the unified object and forgets the object in its affinity to nature in order to worship an illusory "system" instead.

The senescence of modern art is shorthand, then, for the process by which art, keen to retain its autonomy from the market, denies its artefactual nature (its man-made origins), and in so doing effectively speeds up its own disappearance. Adorno recognizes as one of the catalysts in this process the attempt to reconcile art with science. Rather than ensuring the survival of art in a rationalistic world, this endeavour serves to hasten its end because the transformation of art into a science only emphasizes its uselessness in a world in which everything must have a purpose:

The vain hope of art, that in the disenchanted world it might save itself through pseudomorphosis into science, becomes art's nemesis. Its gesture corresponds to what is psychologically termed identification with the aggressor. (Adorno 2002, p. 193)

Adorno draws on the language of psychology to suggest the perversity of art's attempt to prolong its existence by these means. This language is more pronounced in the first English translation of the essay and perhaps provided a point of entry and comparison for H.D. who employed, as she often did, psychoanalytical frameworks and vocabularies in *Helen in Egypt*.

H.D. knew Adorno's essay second hand. She had read an article in *The Listener* published in 1957 titled "The Modernity of William Walton" in which Donald Mitchell provides a digest of Adorno's essay recently, and very loosely, translated by Rollo H. Myers in *The Score* as "Modern Music is Growing Old".3 In Myer's hands, "senescence" loses its dialectical character and becomes a more straightforward description of art's failure to be responsible to its times, a failure that he reads as a form of repression. The most recent translation of Adorno's essay describes the "danger of dangerlessness" proceeding from the tendency for the "once shocking to be absorbed back into the tradition" (Adorno 2002, p. 181). This is the institutionalization of the new, the process that Edward Said describes in *Late Style*. In Myer's translation, however, the artwork is personified, even pathologized and the result is to transfer the agency of the institution to that of the individual artwork itself: New music, he says, has repressed the element of anxiety—it is afraid of being afraid (Adorno 1956, p. 19). Seeking a reason for this repression, Mitchell points to a deficiency in "conscience" curiously attributed both to the composer and to the "character of certain central works":

Both "anxiety" and "duty" imply the existence of a conscience; and when we come to inspect the nature of Walton's output, and the character of certain central works, we find, I suggest, on the one hand, an alert artistic conscience promoting a valid (even anxious) modern idiom; on the other, a comprehensive conservatism, markedly free of an anxiety, private or socially induced, maintaining traditions not normally associated with the role of the modern composer. (Mitchell 1957, p. 245)

Mitchell's interpretation observes a direct correlation between "an alert artistic conscience" and the production of works in a particular style that he describes as "a valid (even anxious) modern idiom". It is difficult to know of what exactly he imagined this idiom to consist—the key point is that it must not reproduce "traditions" that are not usually thought of as "modern", presumably classical and epic traditions among them.

Mitchell thus simplifies what is, in Adorno's essay, a complicated relationship between art and actuality post-WWII. Here as elsewhere Adorno argues that since Auschwitz all art must have a "bad conscience" because confronted with an event that cannot be made ethically intelligible, and a form of death that cannot be made meaningful, art is forced to admit the lie in its past claims to self-sufficiency as well as the limits of its claims to universality. As Bernstein remarks with reference to *Negative Dialectics*, Adorno implies that "the only legitimate cultural practices now would be ones that reflectively put themselves and their past in question" (Bernstein 2001, p. 422). In *Negative Dialectics*, culture is revealed as "garbage", while in "The Aging of the New Music", it takes on the appearance of ruins: "Since the European catastrophe, culture hangs on like houses in the cities accidentally spared by bombs" (Adorno 1990, p. 367; 2002, pp. 199, 200). For Mitchell, on the other hand, art might assuage its bad conscience by manifesting a level of anxiety consonant with both private and "socially induced concerns", in other words, by developing an "alert artistic conscience" (Mitchell 1957, p. 245). The sense of rupture, the "World Catastrophe" in Adorno is curiously muted. In its place is a historical scale of anxiety—greater in some ages, lesser in others—to which the artist must respond appropriately according to his or her conscience.

#### **3. "Living [** ... **] Aesthetically above [One's] Means"**

The Hirslanden journal entry for 12 February 1957 seems at first to concede that *Helen in Egypt*, written between 1951 and 1955, is a belated contribution the modernist (and thereby no longer avant-garde) poetry H.D. produced earlier in her career: "Adorno is quoted as from The Score, in The Listener. Among other fascinating things, he says that Bartók 'could not quite live up to his own avant-guardism and was living, so to speak, aesthetically above his means.' [ ... ] I felt the phrase applied, in a way, to myself and my Helen sequence" (H.D. 2015, p. 40). The influence of Mitchell is evident in the manner that H.D. reads "senescence" in this passage. It would seem to mean the

3 In the notes to *Essays on Music*, Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will are less than complimentary about Myers's translation efforts for *The Score*: "A peculiar, abbreviated and completely confabulated paraphrase of Adorno's essay, translated from the French, was published in *The Score* in December 1956" (Adorno 2002, p. 200).

"repression" of anxiety about the times and is manifest (or not) in the form and idiom of the artwork. H.D. sees the relevance of this condition to *Helen* but ultimately pushes back against the idea that an "epic" idiom is necessarily evidence of "repression":

I escaped from the epic Angst of which again Dr. Adorno says (in regard to music) that "the distinguishing feature of the 'finest moments' of this heroic epoch was the 'element of anxiety (Angst)' an element that in our own day has been 'repressed'." (I quote from *The Listener* article, Adorno's distinction between "modern" and "contemporary" music). Superficially, I feel kinship with this, though my heroic epic was the actuality of war, re-emerging in the heroic Greek legend, in which Paris takes over in reverse, as it were, after Helen's parting with Achilles. (H.D. 2015, p. 40)

This passage is clearly indebted to Mitchell's tentative interpretation of "angst" as akin to "duty". The first word (incompletely translated by the English word "anxiety" as Mitchell notes [245]) describes a condition of dread that although existential in character is said to be felt especially strongly in the "epoch" of the first avant-garde. The second word, "duty", suggests that it is incumbent on the artist to somehow acknowledge this condition in an art that is appropriate to the times. To do so, in Mitchell's terms, is to manifest an "alert artistic conscience." H.D. acknowledges, albeit "superficially", that since the passing of this epoch the sense of "angst" has been repressed and that, no longer able to do its duty in responding to this condition, art has been impoverished as a result. To continue to use the modes and idioms of the first avant-garde might be, then, to "liv[e] asthetically above [one's] means" in the sense that they are an empty currency, disconnected from the moral and existential imperative that gave rise to them in the first place. This is a gloomy prognosis but it is not one with which H.D. entirely agrees. There is, she thinks, still value in the old clacissizing ways and this value inheres in their capacity to do precisely what Mitchell thinks can only happen in a "modern (even axious) idiom": To give thought and representation to present-day concerns, specifically the "actuality of war", and, further, to examine the impossibility of doing so *without* invoking the past or, as H.D. puts it in response to criticism from Harriet Monroe, "drag[ging] in a whole deracinated epoc[h]" (H.D. 1997, p. 9).

This argument brings the journal entry into line with H.D.'s other notes and prose works from the pre- and post-WWII period in which she frequently tries to reconcile her concern for suffering in the present with her use of ancient and mythological models. In *The Sword Went Out to Sea* written in the 1940s and published in recent years, H.D. offers W.H. Auden as an example of the kind of politically-committed poet whose contemporary significance she thought to have outstripped her own: "He's a gifted young man and I'm trying to catch up to him" (H.D. 2007, p. 28). Elsewhere she responds more directly to her critics who sensed, precisely, a lack of "conscience" in H.D.'s recourse to the classics. In "Notes on Parsanius, Euripides and Greek Lyric Poets", H.D. compares these critics, ironically, to the Furies bent on punishing her for failure to live up to moral expectations: "I am not fleeing from the present, pursued by present-day art-theorists, serpent crowned Erynnes. I think myself rather beyond the fashion, ultra-modern" (H.D. 1990, p. 96). "Ultra modern" is a term that recurs in H.D.'s writing not to suggest an extreme degree of modernity—the avant-garde of the avant-garde—so much as the condition of seeing the present as connected to and reanimating all that has come before. In her translation of Euripides' *Ion*, for example, the "ultra-modern" is defined as time that is "accordion-pleated" allowing for concentration and distension so that past and present are potentially proximate (H.D. 1937, p. 83). In a note to Norman Pearson (sometimes referred to as "Note on Poetry"), H.D. recalls a letter she received from Harriet Monroe in the midst of the Zepplin raids in WWI "when I had staggered home, exhausted and half asphyxiated." Monroe demanded that she should "get into 'life', into the rhythm of our time, in touch with events". H.D. counters by arguing that the "tragic spectacle of our times" is not to be approached by recording events as they unfold in the present. Instead, the poet needs to address the "suppressed" memories that condition our experience of these events (H.D. 1997, pp. 9, 8). This is a Freudian approach to an Adornian problem—art's "bad conscience"—that, as mediated by Mitchell, appears conveniently as a problem of collective repression. *Helen in Egypt*'s return to classical sources—to some of the earliest poetic accounts of war—is a way

of reflecting obliquely on the "actuality" of the recent war as well as a refusal to accept the critics' definition of what counts as the actual.

#### **4. "Was Troy Lost for a Kiss?"**

*Helen in Egypt* thus resists the solution to the problem of art's bad conscience offered by the "art-theorists" and critics referenced in H.D.'s notes and letters. This poem is not written in a "modern idiom" and in any case, as H.D. argues, this would not guarantee the presence of an "alert artistic conscience" because it cannot account for the way that disavowed artistic practices and traditions nonetheless condition the cultural record in the present (Mitchell 1957, p. 245). In *Helen in Egypt*, H.D. looks to ancient models—to what the Hirslanden journal calls the subject matter of "heroic epic"—as a means of representing the "actuality" of war. "Actuality" in this context suggests reality in a factual (independently existing) and, as I will suggest below, artefactual (man-made) mode as well as, in a sense close to the French *actualité*, a current or newsworthy state of affairs. *Helen in Egypt*'s claim to represent actuality can be understood in two ways. Firstly, it describes the manner that *Helen* sifts through the fragmentary remains of ancient cultures to recover images that prefigure the events of WWII. As Elizabeth Willis points out in an essay on H.D. and the Bomb, phrases including the "holocaust of the Greeks" and the "flash in the heaven at noon that blinds the sun" are charged with contemporary significance (H.D. 1985, p. 229). Lines such as "The break in the Wall" (H.D. 1985, p. 170) and "a blasted shell, my city, my Wall" (H.D. 1985, p. 133) point via numerous similar images in H.D.'s war poems to the buildings destroyed during the Blitz as well as to the breach made by the RAF in the "Steel Wall" of the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain (Willis 2007, p. 82). (H.D. herself traces the origins of this phrase to Goering in *The Sword Went Out to Sea* (H.D. 2007, p. 6)). Secondly, as I argue below, *Helen in Egypt*'s engagement with actuality is reflective in nature: It considers exactly *how* art might be supposed to manifest an "alert artistic conscience" as regards history and the misunderstanding of both art and actuality that resides in the expectation that it should. H.D.'s poem uses the deficiencies of the epic record to show why "getting in touch with events" might be precisely the wrong demand to make of art and *never more so* than at the present time. A version of post-enlightenment reason (calculating, skeptical and scientific) operates in *Helen in Egypt* to turn what Adorno describes as "events worth reporting" into artefacts falsely created by the method of enquiry and then worshipped as if they had a life of their own (Adorno 1991, p. 24). H.D. does not give up on the idea that art might reflect on actuality—her answer to Adorno suggests that she thought this is precisely what she was doing in *Helen in Egypt*. Rather, perhaps more Adornian than some of her critics, she thought that modern methods, *especially* when they pretended to a direct and realistic treatment of events, were not necessarily more truthful than the old. Moreover, insofar as modern practitioners failed to put their new methods into historical context, they might be unaware of their complicity with tradition in this respect.

From the beginning, *Helen in Egypt* refuses the idea that the classical record as it stands is an objective or disinterested account of events. H.D. does not expect to find in the work of the Homeric poets in particular an alert artistic conscience, especially not when it comes to the representation of Helen and the role she played in the Trojan War. Helen has been misrepresented, firstly, by members of the "powerful war-faction" who identified Helen as "Hecate and a witch" (H.D. 1985, p. 18) and, a second time over, by the poets who depicted her as the immediate cause of the conflict. *Helen in Egypt* pays tribute to a counter-tradition which, beginning with Stesichorus's *Pallinode* and continued in Euripides' *Helen*, holds that Helen herself was never actually present in Troy at all. Instead, she was "rapt" (H.D. 1985, p. 242) away to Egypt by Zeus and her place on the walls taken by "a cloud".4

4 The line is spoken by a servant in Euripedes' *Helen*: "Were all our toils in vain, then, for a cloud?" (Euripedes 1997, pp. 140, 210). The sentiments expressed, which as the Oxford editor points out are those of the 'ordinary solider', echo throughout *Helen in Egypt* in lines such as 'Was Troy lost for a kiss?' (H.D. 1985, p. 230).

It seems at first as though the purpose of H.D.'s poem is to set the record straight, to fix the inaccuracies and inconsistencies that are present in the dominant Homeric account. *Helen in Egypt* demands to know the truth as to Helen's actual whereabouts: "Is this Helen [in Egypt] actually that Helen [of Troy]?" (H.D. 1985, p. 8) Further, it offers to restore to the story those elements that had not previously been thought worth reporting:

tender kisses, the soft caresses, given and received; none of these came into the story,

it was epic, heroic and it was far from a basket a child upset and the spools that rolled to the floor; (H.D. 1985, p. 289)

The voice, that of Helen in this instance, gives equal weighting to the values set up as opposites in this section. Matriarchal are played off against patriarchal values, familial against national interests and the compassion revealed in the intimate embrace against the heroism manifest in public actions. The "bowman" who shot the arrow is arguably Eros, not Apollo: "I, Helena, know it was Love's arrow" (H.D. 1985, p. 83). The musical motif of the poem is sounded by the lute not the trumpet: "was Troy lost for a subtle chord? [ ... ] because Apollo granted a lute-player, / a rhythm as yet unheard, / to challenge the trumpet-note?" (H.D. 1985, p. 229). And finally, although *Helen in Egypt* tackles an epic subject, it does so, as Susan Stanford Friedman points out, in a lyric voice which allows for the expression of intimate thoughts and feelings that are little in evidence in the heroic versions of the story (Friedman 1986, p. 215).

The suggestion that intimate exchanges are just as worth recording as heroic and epic deeds means that *Helen in Egypt* has often been read as a feminist and pacifist rewriting of its Homeric sources.5 There is little, however, to be gained in the way of a good artistic conscience by doing so. Instead of acknowledging and making reparation for violence, upending the values of the "powerful war-faction" (H.D. 1985, p. 18) merely brings to light another source of conflict and dislocation, one that has been more completely repressed. As Susan Edmunds points out, the spools referenced in the passage quoted above are suggestive of Freud's *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* and the child's attempt to master the absence of the mother. Edmunds adds that the poem as a whole might be read as a study of the dire consequences of a mother's abandonment: "Male rivalry is the cause of war, but its secret cause is woman's neglect" (Edmunds 1994, p. 134). The spectre of Achilles's mother, Thetis, hovers over *Helen in Egypt* and her carelessness in failing to dip her son's heel in the river Styx—"O careless, unspeakable mother" (H.D. 1985, p. 253)—has repercussions beyond her death: "O Thetis ... / so she failed at last, / and worse than failure, / the mockery, after-death" (H.D. 1985, p. 254). By contrast, while Achilles might be blamed for his failure to save Iphigenia, his actions are given a rational explanation by the person we might expect to be most sympathetic to Iphigenia's fate as a pawn in the game of war: "Achilles himself, Helen argues, would have been stoned to death by the 'elect,' if he had tried to rescue Iphigenia" (H.D. 1985, p. 87).

Responsibility in general, regardless of whether it is directed at an individual or at a group, a worldview or a set of values, is not as easily apportioned in this poem as might at first seem to be the case. This is partly a consequence of the way that H.D. uses voice to undercut narrative authority. As Robert O'Brien Hokanson points out, much of *Helen in Egypt* is told as if it were Helen's own story but she is neither a reliable nor authoritative witness to events and consistently questions the