The insistently hyphenated words, along with the syllabically broken words ("a-/mong") ending lines, suggest here and throughout the poem how the hybrid domestication of this landscape is also a kind of breaking and making strange, as in the importation of the English rose among "unEnglish" environs to create an "almost English green" among the lands that "Indians knew" differently. Nonetheless, the native environment persists, as in the "terse Virginian" mocking-bird who alights on garden furniture among the artifice of "Narrow herring-bonelaid brikes" and imported pansies (Moore 1936, p. 5). In such lines, Moore's taxonomic approach, like Jefferson's before her, rejects the notions of superior British/European flora, fauna, people, even parodying the attempts to create an English environment in this new world. However, unlike Jefferson, the poem attends to the types of

tyranny imported, alongside the English garden designs, to suggest a "tyrant taste" that underscores European colonization and a national history that includes genocide and slavery.7

Identifying an American pattern of oppression in the histories that underpin the sites she tours, this tourist perspective captures distinctively visual enumerations of colonizing force—proceeding through place by citing visual evidence of what the poem calls "taking what they/pleased—colonizing as we say—" (Moore 1936, p. 8). Seeing boxed flower beds and sculpted gardens, for example, the speaker reads into the shaping of nature a colonizing ideology of tyranny that justifies itself as a "kindness". The poem's touristic cataloguing lays bare the oxymoron and contradiction of America's founding moment, its "inconsistent flowerbed" of protest against tyranny and simultaneous adoption of it, particularly pointing to the treatment of Native Americans and black slaves (Moore 1936, p. 6). Her natural history is carefully intertwined with a social history of colonial locations, primarily Jamestown and Williamsburg, and with a location that has taken on new meaning in relation to racial attitudes in twenty-first century America, the city of Charlottesville.8 The touristic encounter with Jefferson's home, in Trethewey, and the university, in Moore, offer complementary opportunities to consider American racial attitudes borne of applying natural history taxonomies to social organization. Jefferson's *Notes on the State of Virginia* haunts both poets, with Trethewey quoting directly from his text, while Moore's poem both echoes and questions the taxonomic approach that, accompanying the history of American colonization and nationhood, essentialized and hierarchized race.

Jefferson's appearance in "Virginia Britannia" is oblique in Moore's poetic text, but explicit in the notes. Moore cites Jefferson through referencing an architectural innovation, the curving serpentine wall, constituting an homage to good design common to Moore's poetics.9 The fleeting reference morphs in significance, however, from seeming praise to a more complex critique when one considers its placement and relation to the images that precede and follow it in the poem. In one quick moment, Jefferson—Enlightenment practitioner of "new" taxonomic methods—appears (unnamed in the poem) through the image of the serpentine walls distinguishing his architectural design of the University of Virginia, the "one-brick-thick-/wall serpentine shadows" dividing the campus gardens surrounding the main Lawn and the "Range", parallel rows of small student rooms conjoined down the length of the lawn, punctuated by large stately faculty homes, and descending from the classical-inspired dome of the Rotunda (Moore 1936, p. 7). Moore's choice to include Thomas Jefferson and his edifice to education as a part of this sequence is emphasized by her decision to provide the University a rare footnote, in a poem chock-full of perplexing and dense references and allusions but short on notes (unlike "An Octopus", with its pages of notes—although characteristically incomplete). Her note on Jefferson becomes one of a sparse few notes for this long poem, telling us that the "serpentine shadows" are "Of the University of Virginia's one-brick-thick wall designed by Thomas Jefferson", an engineering ingenuity that he adapted from England, but was popularly thought to have invented (Moore 1936, p. 23). Jefferson's own history of owning slaves, of involving them in the labor of building his home and University, and his uneasy rationale in *Notes on Virginia*, where cataloguing flora and fauna leads to justification for classifying humans, compromise the virtues of "intel-/lect and delicacy" advanced by selective and dominant depictions of the nation (Moore 1936, p. 8). These "shadows", like the broken word "intel-/lect", suggest the paradox Trethewey later terms, in speaking of Jefferson, "his bright knowledge, its dark subtext" (Trethewey 2012, p. 68).

7 See Tara Stubbs, discussing ideas of nationality in this "Virginia Britannia" and other poems, who usefully observes that the poem considers historical "ground" as "not only contested territories but also the identifying stamp that inhabitants place upon them" in following the "nature of colonial consumption" (Stubbs 2016, pp. 54, 55).

8 The white supremacist rally, Unite the Right, took place in Charlottesville on August 11 and 12, 2017 and brought far-right and white nationalist groups to the city, where they marched on the campus of the University of Virginia and gathered in a downtown park to protest plans to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. After the rally, a Unite the Right supporter drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, resulting in nineteen injuries and the death Heather D. Heyer. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite\_the\_Right\_rally.

9 See Kinnahan (2018) for a further reading focused on economics, labor, and race in Moore's work, including "Virginia Britannia" but also earlier poems.

The image of the serpentine walls suggests the beauty, strength, and engineering ingenuity of the walls (which can "star-/tle strangers"), but also specifies their "shadows", a word that tellingly opens onto a series of references to natural and historical colonizers. This series culminates in a consideration of race:

. . . one-brick-thickwall serpentine shadows startle strangers. The strangler fig, the dwarffancying Egyptian, the American, the Dutch, the noble Roman, in taking what they pleased—colonizing as we say were not all intellect and delicacy. A black savage or such as was subject to the deer-fur Crown is not all brawn and animality. (Moore 1936, pp. 7–8)

This imperial "taking what they/pleased" includes those that are deemed as the "black savage" and the "subject to the/deer-fur Crown", characterizations of Africans and Native Americans importantly relying upon the classification of human types, placing whites at the top of a racial hierarchy, which Jefferson (and others) deploys and that the mythos of Manifest Destiny promoted (Moore 1936, p. 8). The poem emphatically challenges this taxonomic justification for enslavement and/or genocide, insisting that the African and the Native American are "not all brawn/and animality", speaking as much to her own moment of racial strife and political xenophobia in America as to the past (Moore 1936, p. 8).

Moore's tour deviates, in such moments, from the popular approaches to tourism that she herself consulted. The tourist industry at this time directed its selling pitches to white Americans. Travel guides, like the *See American First* series, recounted "a history of American progress that glorified white, Anglo-Saxon America, thus allowing for tourists to retreat into this idealized America, escaping the realities of racial and ethnic conflict and other growing tensions in American society" (Shaffer 2001, p. 199). Moore, whose tourism experiences became—like everything—gist for her poems, conveys an uncanny sense of the early twentieth-century tourist industry as a vehicle for presenting a history of America that suits the racial priorities of the post-war decades of the twenties and thirties. In a nation experiencing intensified race conflict, non-white population migrations, and terroristic violence against blacks, the tourist industry in the teens, twenties, and thirties actively discouraged blacks from visiting historical sites, while tour guides presented a history in which they disappear.10 Thus, Clifton Johnson's 1922 tour book *What to See in America*, quoted by Moore in the earlier "An Octopus", clearly assumes the (unmarked) whiteness of the American tourist. The chapter on Virginia, for example, which is heavy in describing sites of Civil War history, only indirectly mentions slavery through a lens of natural harmony: in the one sentence noting the "one third of the population" of the state who are "negroes", Johnson assures his tourist that such numbers present no threat, and the "negroes" "are mostly employed in the tobacco factories, where they amuse themselves as they work in singing the quaint old plantation melodies" (Johnson 1922, p. 150). The "old plantations"

10 As Shaffer relates, "the Park Service consciously discouraged African Americans from visiting the parks. As stated at the 1922 parks conference, 'One of the objections to colored people is that if they come in large groups they will be conspicuous, and will not only be objected to by other visitors, but will cause trouble among the hotel and camp help, and it will be impossible to serve them ... While we cannot openly discriminate against them, they should be told that the parks have not facilities for taking care of them'" (Shaffer 2001, pp. 124–25). Conditions of segregation throughout the country, but especially in the South, motivated the publication of the annual *Negro Motorist Green-Book* from 1936 until 1964 to provide black travelers with information about businesses and services friendly to African Americans.

pictured in photographs accompanying the chapter are those of American "heroes"—Washington, Lee, and Thomas Jefferson—although the picture captions do not call them "plantations", nor is there any mention of slaves who built and maintained them.

In the midst of her taxonomic and precisely structured syllabic lines, Moore unsettles tourism's white-washed histories, whether they be Johnson's touristic assurance to whites that the "negroes" only raised their voices harmlessly in song, or Jefferson's earlier denial of speech to the "black". Jefferson's human classifications explicitly denied that blacks had a capacity for coherent speech, for he writes, "never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration" (Jefferson 1984, p. 267). Conversely, the poem specifies a more complex understanding of voice, evoking a "Black/idiom" to which Moore attributes the phrase that she uses in describing an alternative perspective on the nation's history, one gained through "advancing back-/ward in a circle" (Moore 1936, p. 6). Fiona Green locates this phrase in Moore's travel notebooks from her Virginia visits, in which she "began recording black speech" (Green 2017, p. 439). In August, 1935, gathering material for the poem that she will soon begin drafting, Moore writes of a witness in court who reports about a "colored man in court" that she "saw him advancing backward in a circle, a piece of scantlin' in his hand" (Moore 1935–55, 4v, quoted in Green 2017, p. 440). Green reads this reference and its incorporation into the poem as suggesting "shady business" or even "making light of the crime at the heart of Virginia history", conveying Moore's "genuinely ambivalent" attitude toward southern economies rather than critiquing them (Green 2017, p. 440).11 However, the backward circling that Moore records suggests a defensive motion; indeed, the man holding a "scantlin'" or scantling (a piece of lumber) seems to be more protective than "shady", his circling backwards comprising an alternative stepping to outsmart an opponent more so than an aggression.

The movement suggests a different kind of knowledge bridging "black idiom" as coded speech with Tretheway's retrieval of racial labels, chiming with the "mulatto-turning-backwards". This turn backwards signifies the body's language and its disruption of racial categories (the revelation of "blackness" in the seeming white body, or the whiteness turning "backwards" to African origins) as well the racist ideology determining illusory classifications of purity. The mulatto-turning-backwards threatens a throwback to blackness and a refusal of purity mythologized in the Americas' earliest racial categories—the mulatto is both a threat to visual certainty of race and she/he holds the potential to visually disrupt an illusion of whiteness, even while the categorizing rationale of whiteness insists that blackness never retreats and that the descendant of an African can never become "white". The notion of "advancing backward in a circle" similarly registers a movement through concealed knowledge, covered-over and retreating from view but threatening to return and thwart history's racialized categories. Such thwarting challenges the concept of nation idealized as free of "tyranny".

This is the "scantlin'" held in hand, brought to bear in the poem's repeated references to imperialism, colonization, and racial ordering, and activated with particular force in the serial images following the introduction of the "Black/idiom". Moore is "advancing backward" through America's originary claims, bringing a poetic stick to bear. The logic of the lines moves swiftly in the space of nine lines from the "Black/idiom" through a quick reference to colonizing Europeans ("taking the Potomac/cowbirdlike", for the cowbird lays eggs in another bird's nest, colonizing it), to the "Negro, opportunely brought", as the "backward" movement of bringing slaves to the new world translates into the "idiom" (Moore 1936, p. 6). As a trade that strengthens the colonies' financial might and capacity for successful revolt, but betrays the principles asserted for doing so, "the Negro" who is "opportunely brought, to strength–/en protest against/tyranny" speaks to the "inconsistent flowerbed" of the Old Dominion and is, indeed, a "backward" movement justified as forward progress in the colonies and among imperial powers (Moore 1936, p. 6). The breaking of "strength-en" across two

11 Green reads Moore's ideas about economy, nation-building, and history in relation to the poet's correspondence with and readings of Ezra Pound. Green attributes the idea that the image of "advancing backward in a circle" might reference a cake walk, or a black performance parodying white power, to Stacy Hubbard (Green 2017, p. 447).

lines suggests the inherent flaw or weakness in this revolt against a tyranny that, in dropping that word onto a new line, remains a characteristic that is attributed as much to the new nation as to the old. The "kind tyranny" referenced repeatedly in the poem reads, in this context and others in which it appears, as a sly critique of the oxymoronic justifications offered for any number of oppressions suiting "tyrant taste" in America's history of race, colonization, and capitalistic progress—indeed, the poem seems to ask, how can tyranny ever be "kind" (Moore 1936, p. 8)?

Rather than following the ideology or mythology of American progress as a constant forward motion, this "idiom" adopts alternative strategies and directions, suggesting an idiom of the indirect, the outside, and the marginal that motivates a retelling of colonial might. Rather than exemplifying the forward progress of history, the building of the American nation that is celebrated by these tourist sites suggests instead a series of displacements undertaken in the name of power and re-narrativized in the poem through botanical, biological examples of parasites and colonizers: displacing others "cowbirdlike" or, like the "fig strangler", which establishes itself upon a host tree it destroys, gaining a foothold through conquering others. These "colonizers" in nature are joined by other natural species that are specified in the poem, such as the crape myrtle or the pansy, all imported from Europe and, while dominating Virginia gardens, unable to subdue native flora and fauna, such as the buckeye tree or the Virginia mockingbird or the rattlesnake. Catharine Paul notes that "Moore's choice of species" in this poem is "linked to a larger commentary on how the native and the coloniser might collide" (Paul 2002, p. 190). Such a poetic presentation of history, which Westover usefully terms a "cartography of colonization", also maps the forced import of African people to build the "garden" and the economy of a new land, the use of slavery to create a nation (Westover 2004, p. 40). The oxymoronic tyranny of "establishing the Negro, opportunely brought, to strength-/en protest against/tyranny" joins the taxomomies of Moore's touristic moment.

Moore's double reference to the mule in lines that precede reference to a "black idiom" reinforce a reading of race as a site interrupting a white-washed mythology of American freedom. The mule, a "cross between a horse and a donkey", serves as "a perfect image for the miscegenation that troubled nativists" in Moore's time and vexed Jefferson.12

. . . The slowmoving glossy, tall

quick calvacade of buckeye-brown surprising jumpers, the contrasting work-mule and show-mule & witch-cross door & 'strong sweet prison' (Moore 1936, p. 8)

All items in this sequence exemplify or have "come about" from "advancing back-/ward in a circle", including the first prison in the British colonies, established at Jamestown to discourage disorder in the new land but, the poem suggests, importing a "tyranny" (Moore 1936, p. 6). "Advancing back-/ward", one discovers traces of other histories disrupting the touristic, patriotic, and historic claims that idealize the country's revolutionary past and ideals of equality. The "Indian-/named Virginian/streams" run through "counties named for English lords" as native lands are overtaken and overwritten by European conquest (Moore 1936, p. 7); the "tobacco-crop/gains have church tablets", as commerce and piety intertwine (Moore 1936, p. 7); the "Devil's woodyard swamps", signaling histories of runaway slaves, conjoin in a parallel syntax with the "one-brick-thick" serpentine walls of Jefferson's university, its "shadows" part of the history of the powerful "taking what they please" (Moore 1936, pp. 7–8).

\*

12 Westover (2004, p. 22). See also Kadlec (1994) and Phillips (1982) for discussions of Moore's work in light of contemporaneous discourses on eugenics and racial mixing. The figure of the mule appears also in Moore's earlier "The Labors of Hercules" (written in 1921 and included in Observations, 1924) and has been critically discussed as a criticism of notions of white superiority, especially in light of immigration debates and restrictions following the war.

Throwing light on the "shadows" or "dark subtext" of a celebrated version of American history, both Moore and Trethewey inspect the racial dimensions of nation building. Doing so, they consider inherited Jeffersonian taxonomies of race alongside the mechanisms of taxonomic logic itself. Both of the poets question how taxonomies of race imprinted upon and furthered by the founding contradictions of this country continue in everyday ways that seem common-sense in their familiarity (i.e., she is "near-white"), but are made strange in the step away from taxonomic thinking that each poet encourages. Given the rise of white supremacist activity in America over the past few years, evidencing energy and ideological organization that has remained for a long time submerged and out of sight for the majority public, a renewed urgency compels us to rethink and "make strange" longstanding racial and racist taxonomies and resist the false ideologies of whiteness attending the past and present imagination of "nation".

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

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

#### **References**

Green, Fiona. 2017. Moore, Pound, Syllabics, and History. *Twentieth-Century Literature* 63: 427–50. [CrossRef]

Westover, Jeffrey W. 2004. *The Colonial Moment: Discoveries and Settlements in Modern American Poetry*. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

White, Heather Cass, ed. 2008. *A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore 1932–1936*. Victoria: ELS Editions.

© 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* **Modernist Women Writers and Whimsy: Marianne Moore and Dorothy Parker**

#### **Will May**

Department of English, University of Southampton, Southampton S017 1BJ, UK<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Received: 1 October 2019; Accepted: 17 February 2020; Published: 6 March 2020

**Abstract:** This article assesses the work of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) and Marianne Moore (1887–1972) in relation to the aesthetic category of whimsy. It considers how whimsy has been used as a term of dismissal for American women poets, outlines ways both writers' receptions have been informed by this context, and explores questions of cost, worth, and value raised by their work. It situates whimsy in relation to Sianne Ngai's account of diminutive modes in *Our Aesthetic Categories* (2015) and suggests why American women's modernist poetry can be a useful context for exploring the aesthetic and cultural associations of whimsy.

**Keywords:** Moore; Parker; whimsy; poetry; poetics; New York; modernism

**Paper:** Dorothy Parker's publishing career begins with two women positing whimsy as a literary category:

"I'm reading that new thing of Locke's

So whimsical isn't he? Yes—"

"My dear, have you seen those new smocks?

They're nightgowns—no more, and no less." (Parker 2010, p. 203)

This is a passing mention, forgotten by the two speakers as quickly as the 1914 novel, which prompted it, the bestselling *Fortunate Youth* by British writer William John Locke. The poem, 'Any Porch', continues with sixteen couplets which yawn their way through an apparently indifferent conversation. Parker thought the poem sufficiently thin to omit from her *Collected Poems*, although its publication in *Vanity Fair* secured her first job as staff writer for *Vogue* (Meade 1988, p. 34). While the poem is a gentle satire on gossip, it blurs the lines between mimicry and echo: Parker's biographer glosses her early poems as 'trivia' (Meade 1988, p. 31), as if the poem were as insubstantial as the smocks. Yet it is striking that Parker's first published poem records a response to a male contemporary by a female reader that is half-engaged, half-dismissive in its gloss of 'whimsical'. It is telling, too, that Parker was keen to remove the poem from her corpus. The women's bored belittling of Locke might tell us they value literature no more than lingerie. However, the humour of the quatrain comes not only from the women's exacting ethical standards ('they're nightgowns') but the combination of precision and euphemism that expresses them ('no more, and no less'). When two people have agreed that a writer's work is characterised by the whimsical, what, exactly, have they agreed on?

Miriam-Webster defines whimsy as 'a fanciful or fantastic device, objective, or creation, especially in writing or art' (Whimsy 2019). Yet if the dictionary suggests a mode or quality particular to imaginative literature, it is hardly well documented. *The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetic Terms* contains no entries for the term. Neither monograph index nor journal article bears its mark. Literary critics take us little further than the two women on the porch, having such disdain for the category that even the act of definition would be an engagement too far. Susan Sontag upbraids the 'cold' and 'self-referring' whimsy of Ionesco where 'the terrible is always, somehow circumscribed by the cute' (Sontag 1966, p. 111), but says no more on the topic, in contrast to her infamous inventory of camp. More recently, Geoff Dyer has suggested 'nothing makes any difference with whimsy, whimsy

is for lower stakes [ ... ] there are no risks in whimsy. People think of whimsy as doing whatever you feel like, but there's less to whimsy than that' (Dyer 2012, p. 45). In as far as it is part of any critical conversation, it continues to be the word put at the farthest reach from anything worthy of our sustained attention. Dyer's own circulation around the word bears out his diagnosis. However unimportant we might think the category, it beguiles us by being even less significant than it appears. In all these accounts, disavowal sounds out more clearly than definition. Yet if it is always for low stakes, why is it such a crime, and why do poems and poets keep committing it?

As a term, whimsy has many of the 'diminutive' qualities Sianne Ngai explores in *Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute Interesting* (Ngai 2012, p. 59). Like her definition of 'cute', it is a word which sounds a strong note of judgement: it encourages us to believe we are in charge of it. It beckons us in, but we are minded to develop a distaste for it. In the women's conversation on the porch, it is less important for them to understand what formal attributes Locke's 'whimsical' work might have than to acknowledge a shared dismissal. It is significant that their use of the term aligns the work with its author: behind every whimsical work is a whimsical writer. The dismissal is studiedly low-key rather than challenging: the whimsical draws attention to itself, but in ways that do not threaten the mainstream. To discern whimsy, as Ngai suggests of minor literary categories, we will need to identify the 'low, often hard-to-register flicker of affect accompanying our recognition of minor differences from a norm' (Ngai 2012, p. 18). The hard-to-register is also hard to disentangle. The whimsical sounds affiliation with other, more aesthetically familiar terms—the camp, the comic, the eccentric, the playful. Yet unlike many of these terms, it has sometimes been an expedient category for critics to use of readers. The word appears, briefly but pointedly, in I.A. Richards' *Practical Criticism*, as he attempts to drum out the 'personal-whimsy' response of untutored eyes and ears (Richards 1930, p. 255). English studies was working hard to consolidate its position as a rigorous academic subject, and anything that was not criticism was merely whimsy. This suggests a potentially dangerous quality of the term: it has the power not only to topple a work of literature but also the critical responses to it. This doubleness seems a threat for an apparently toothless and insignificant word. In this article, I want to challenge the claim that whimsy is for low stakes and that the apparently generic conversation happening in 'Any Porch' is not one we should look at more carefully. I want to simultaneously explore the socially-constructed nature of the term, frequently an insult or act of dismissal which clings particularly to women poets, while considering whether whimsy might have some inherent characteristics that attach themselves to certain kinds of poetic texts. To do this, I want to bring Parker herself into conversation with a female contemporary poet who shares surprising affinities with her: Marianne Moore.

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) and Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) spent most of their lives on two islands separated by a bridge. They were also two of the most identifiable American women writer-celebrities of the twentieth century: Moore, the baseball-watching national poet of America dressed in academic robes, Parker, the epigram-laden wit haunting the cocktail bars of New York. If Parker's satirical and urbane verses seem to have little to do with Moore's gnomic and often involuted poems, their critical receptions, as we shall see, include strategic interventions that bear striking similarities. This article will consider some of the wider historical and cultural contexts for the term whimsy, before considering how these might play out in the poetics, aesthetics, and reception dynamics of both writers. It will then go on to suggest some distinct ways both poets examine the charges and costs both of writing whimsy and being whimsical writers.

#### **1. Whimsy in Context**

If whimsy has a literary history beyond being an expedient dismissal, it begins with John Dennis' 1704 treatise, *The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry*. For Dennis, the term offered a key differentiation: 'poetry is either an Art, or Whimsie and Fanaticism' (Dennis 1704, p. 5). In this formulation, whimsy is a work that has gone wrong, and failed to become a poem. It gives us a clue as to why the word might recur so deliberately and variously in literary insults across poetic genres and periods but so infrequently in critical and scholarly literature. It is the creation that has not spent enough time with

the creator, and should not be worth spending our time over. Two historical examples hint at the wide range of uses, or abuses, the term might encompass. For William Hazlitt, whimsy is the maniacal enthusiasm holding back Coleridge from greatness, meaning his work is 'fancy-bred from the maggots of his brain' (Hazlitt 1817, p. 488). It describes the inability of his art to be sure of where it is heading, positing whimsy as a kind of manic humor. For Samuel Johnson, the poet Edward Young is 'whimsical' for his decision to move from rhymed to unrhymed verse (Johnson 1875, p. 433). The adjective is justified for his apparently quixotic shifts in form, for choices too rapid and extreme to suggest due care. In this way, the critical term enacts its own kind of mercurial shiftiness: by never committing itself to a specific authorial sin, it is suitably vague to be endlessly appropriated.

If the term has been apparently banished from serious critical consideration, the risk of poetry being 'trivial' or light verse not being 'good enough' has been a constant in literary conversation. It was felt particularly sharply by modernist American poets: as Bonnie Costello has noted, the dominant mode of twentieth-century American poetry is 'tragi-comic', yet its reception often gives humour short shrift (Costello 2012, p. 340). Susan Howe in *The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History* notes American culture has a particular fraught relationship with the capricious and the whimsical, and polices its poetry accordingly: to be playful in a poem is also to play truant from 'canonical American literary expression'. Its democratic structure must banish 'false notion, caprice, whim' (Howe 1993, p. 12). Whimsy is the thing we leave behind, the failure which we endeavour to free ourselves from to yoke ourselves to structures and sentences more permanent. This notion might have distinct resonance for a national culture built on a constitution, rather than a series of eccentric legal precedents. Howe also notes 'fancy' is 'an irredeemably feminine word for most Americans', summoning the long Anglo–American tradition of aligning caprice with women poets. As I have noted elsewhere (May 2019, p. 74), notions of triviality and the whimsical have often been used to undermine and contain the role of intellectual women in society, as in Mary Wollstonecraft's observation her educated female contemporaries were said to be 'teeming with capricious fancies' (Wollstonecraft 2008, p. 103), or Margaret Cavendish's conviction that female wit needs the 'discretion' of male prudence in *The Female Academy* (Cavendish 1668, p. 654). Whimsy's status as a negative counter-definition shapes its long association with women poets: Adrienne Rich's 1977 'Women and Honor' notes that women, and by association their writing, have often been characterised as 'generically whimsical, deceitful, subtle' (Rich 1995, p. 186). Rich's collocation of the whimsical with the generic suggests the persistent link between questions of trust, genre, and form: to be whimsical is not only a way of not being taken seriously but also a way not to be trusted.

Given this literary and historical context, we may not be surprised to find the term's pejorative associations haunt the reception of a number of female American poets, as in the baffled account in *Atlantic Monthly* of Emily Dickinson's poetry as 'whimsical memoranda' which 'have a certain something, which, for want of a more precise name, we term *quality*' (Aldrich 1892, p. 133). The critical formulation is striking: 'whimsical' stands in for a term the male reader cannot find for a poetics he cannot decipher. His 'quality' is less a seal of approval than the identification of particularity, an acknowledgment of something distinct rather than something with distinction. It also suggests the double-bind of whimsy for women poets: the power of disavowal can be applied to the experimental and obscure, as with Dickinson, or that which appears generic and ephemeral. Can a vague term with such a history of projection and social construction be a useful aesthetic category or poetic mode? 'There is poetry and there is not' (Parker 1928, p. 77) wrote Parker, in a sharp 1927 review, apparently as clear on the binary distinction as John Dennis had been two hundred years earlier. How might we tell the difference?

#### **2. Bridging the Gap**

Both Moore and Parker were subject to whimsical dismissal at various points in their literary career and posthumous receptions: their own writing and critical accounts of it often challenge, circumvent, or play with these characterisations. What is the nature of these dismissals, in what ways have both

writers and readers sought to address them, and what might this tell us about the category itself? In a 2004 review, William Logan identified whimsy as the 'besetting weakness' in Moore's work, her status as a public figure making 'poets, and poetry, seem slightly ridiculous' (Logan 2004). The charge linked her poetics with her persona, repeating a familiar trope of her critical reception: Cliff Mak notes how often her fastidious precision is equated with an 'ingrown cuteness' (Mak 2016, p. 873), echoing Ngai's categorisations. The poem which begins Moore's first collection is a dedication to an inter-mural rat, yet it is Moore's extra-mural activities which have given critics as much cause for concern: extolling the virtues of baseball or, in 1955, agreeing to devote serious time to naming the Ford Motor Company's newest car. Whimsy seems a challenging term precisely because its adhesive force is felt equally by the poet and the poem. Logan's attack suggests whimsy has the power to infect all poets and poetry with the 'ridiculous': it is a potent insult-by-association.

Moore criticism often characterises her poetry as a series of eccentric forms. Writing in 1982, David Bromwich compared her use of poetic innovation to 'a friend's matinal fondness for mango juice' (Bromwich 1982, p. 340); John Ashbery was keen to differentiate her Mary Poppins, presumably one administering medicine to help us stomach the sugar rather than the other way round (O'Connor 1988, p. 30). Here is, in part, an urge to out-quip a famously self-effacing and original poet, who tended to describe herself in terms still more bizarre than these: in a 1959 letter to Elizabeth Bishop, Moore cast herself halfway between 'Jack Abbot and Peter Rabbit' (Costello 1984, p. 130). The idea of the poet shifting between two competing identifies or locations is echoed in critical accounts, too. Robert Crawford notes the unsettling pull between 'whimsy and correctness' (Crawford 2004, p. 251) in her work: here, the playful and fastidious are in committed dialogue. Meanwhile, Cliff Mak has recently located within Moore's poetry an 'authoritative kind of surplus style', or a 'series of instabilities virtuosically integrated into a greater stylistic whole' (Mak 2016, p. 875). The tension between 'surplus' and 'authoritative' echoes the 'whimsical' and 'correct' in Crawford's reading, opening the door to the very aspects of Moore's work earlier critics have sought to downplay. For both Mak and Crawford, whimsy is part of a dynamic binary rather than, as for Logan, something immutable or all-pervasive. As T.S. Eliot remarks of Moore's work, 'if you aim at only the poetry in poetry, there is no poetry either' (Eliot 1935, p. 11). If poets and their readers could agree what whimsy was, would they also be able to agree how much a poem could take?

The same question haunts another famous defense of Moore, and one that feels keenly what damage a word like 'whimsy' might do. It appears in Elizabeth Bishop's memoir:

Lately I have seen several references critical of [Moore's] poetry by feminist writers, one of whom described her as 'a poet who controlled panic by presenting it as whimsy'. Whimsy is sometimes there, of course, and so is humour (a gift these critics sadly seem to lack). Surely there is an element of mortal panic and fear underlying all works of art? Even so, one wonders how much of Marianne's poetry the feminist critics have read. (Bishop 1994, pp. 143–44)

This passage has most often been marshalled to explore the underlying panic of Moore's or Bishop's work, while the other element is neutralised or ignored: Lionel Kelly suggests Bishop 'has no animus against whimsy for itself' (Kelly 2000, p. 1). Certainly, it seems to be the spirit of whimsy Bishop calls on in her poetic epistle to Moore, when she asks her to 'please come flying' with angels riding 'on the broad black brim of your hat' (Bishop 1994, p. 83). It is significant, too that whereas Bishop makes panic universal, underlying all works of art, whimsy, much more pertinent to Moore, is brushed aside with 'of course', normalizing as consensus something which, as have seen, is a vexed term with a long history of containment and dismissal. 'Of course' so often masks the things we have only recently come to know, or are trying not to highlight. Bishop resituates whimsy as a 'gift' the critic is lacking, rather than a poetic error to be corrected. Her critics are charged not only with misreading, but not reading widely enough. Over the last decade, we have sought new terms for the established languages of mastery and critique. What would our responses look like if we attended to

the whimsical, rather than sought to deny its existence? Bishop suggests that as well as defending poets from the charge, we might explore ways to make ourselves more alert to its power.

It is helpful here to turn to Dorothy Parker, a writer apparently hostile to whimsy, but aware of its pervasive role in literary culture. If 'whimsical' is a term of dismissal in her first published poem, she returns to the word with an unusually repetitious irritation in her own reviewing. Examples from her Broadway reviews give a hint of the circular quality of these uses and suggest its heightened currency in early twentieth-century America. Her account of Roi Cooper Megrue's 1924 play *Honors Are Even* casts a wry glance at a heroine's 'whimsical wondering', and frequently 'whimsical' rejoinders, casting her as 'the most determinedly whimsical heroine you ever saw in your life' (Parker 2014, p. 240). Arthur Richman's comedy *Not So Long Ago* has a 'whimsical tenderness', later qualified as 'overmuch whimsical tenderness', before she notes 'it is surprising what a long, long way even a little whimsical tenderness will go [ ... ] give me but one or two acts of it, and I'll manage to scrape along for a whole year' (Parker 2014, p. 145). Here, she suggests the question may be one of degree rather than kind. Meanwhile, J.M. Barrie's *Dear Brutus* (1917), a play of middle-aged wish-fulfilment, prompts the frustrated cry that 'it is practically impossible to talk about the play without bringing in "whimsical charm", and that spoils everything [ ... ] the play is simply packed with whimsical charm, and what can you do about it?' (Parker 2014, p. 58). It is notable how frequently in these cases, Parker draws our attention to a male writer's representation of a female character. The whimsical is the way to police the female and the sexual, to keep it securely in the category of entertainment. The empty return of these phrases in Parker's criticism also suggests the cloying quality of whimsy, its need to draw us in, making us unable to shape our response into critical distance. Its frequent arrival in her often satirical reviews suggests an aesthetic, as well as a cultural unease, at the term. It allows us to experience nothing, and to say nothing about what we have experienced: as Parker complains, 'what can you do about it?'.

Her ire is apparent in the 'whimsical' writer who suffered most under Parker's critical eye. Her notorious A.A. Milne review for the *New Yorker* under her popular pseudonym of the 'Constant Reader' confesses that by the first mention of 'Hunny [ ... ] this Tonstant Weader Fwowed up' (Parker 1970, p. 101). She quotes Piglet's lyric 'The more it/SNOWS-tiddely-pom', before noting his 'frequent droppings into more cadenced whimsy'. The metaphor is somewhere between cute and scatological. Her review did serious damage: a 1956 profile in *Time* magazine carried Milne's complaint that 'if I write anything less realistic, less straightforward than "the cat sat on the mat", I am [called] whimsical", that "most loathsome adjective"' (Unsigned Review 1956). It was an expedient attack to guard her own reputation, too: once Parker's first poetry collection *Enough Rope* (1927) passed into its third edition, her publisher made plans to sell her as 'another A.A. Milne'. This prompted an unloved temporary nick-name of 'Dotty-the-Pooh' (Adams 1935, p. 706), an advertising strategy she was keen to abandon. By pinning her word on Milne, she avoids it being applied to her own work. Yet her apparently physical disgust at whimsy belies her interest in having more purchase on the term: her reviews highlight the difficulty of defining its characteristics. How might her own poetry explore what 'cadenced whimsy' could do? If its presence in a work of art is usually overdone, might it still provide us with something worth keeping? In the remainder of the essay, I will identify ways the poetry of Moore and Parker complicate and thicken our understanding of whimsy's contradictions and possibilities.

#### **3. Gifts of Whimsy**

Bishop's notion of whimsy as a 'gift' is suggestive, allowing readers to get something they were not expecting, but to receive it in gratitude. This suggests less that whimsy is of no worth, and more that poets or their readers cannot be sure of its value. Parker and Moore's poetry explores this idea through sustained attention to how we value the things we make, give, and receive. An implicit conversation between Parker's poem 'Bric-á-Brac' (Parker 1928) and Moore's 'Walking-Sticks and Paperweights and Watermarks' (1936) suggests the complex relationship between all three. Parker's 'Bric-á-Brac' details the 'Little things that no one needs-/Little things to joke about'—(Parker 2010, p. 102). The two stanzas recount the domestic miniatures of 'little landscapes' and 'little morals, woven out', and the 'little brigs of whittled oak/Bottled painfully in glass'. In the final stanza, we learn the combination of littleness and profusion is not accidental:

Lonely folk have lines of days Long and faltering and thin; Therefore—little wax bouquets, Prayers cut upon a pin, Little maps of pinkish lands, Little charts of curly seas, Little plats of linen strands, Little verses, such as these. (Parker 2010, p. 102)

The repetition of little, like the obsessive return to the word 'whimsical' in Parker's reviews, suggests a quality that is difficult to quantify, so easier to repeat. The final line brings us up short, but enacts a Janus-turn too. The poem moves from a sniggering, if melancholy, inventory of domestic craft to elegiac self-diagnosis. The final deictic 'such as these' does painful work: by making an example of itself, the poem is both allowed to be entirely generic, and—exceptionally—to sigh for being so. It is built from layers of the time-killing littleness it observes. If Parker's reviews ensured she was never accused of whimsy by accusing others first, this poem refuses the insult by being the first to make it.

We seem to be in the world of what Derrida has called the 'frivolous', where the 'utility' of what is being described bears only on 'objects of little consideration or worth' (Derrida 1987, p. 118). Yet the poem is too knowing to cast itself as unnecessary, and its claim to be no more substantial than what it describes is disingenuous. By the poem's conclusion, it is no longer funny enough for a reader to 'joke about', but more complex than the earlier pathos for the 'lonely folk'. The poem reveals the rich and complex literary affects prompted by its 'bric-á-brac', and uncovers, underneath the unwanted objects, the profound feelings of the makers. While an art work might be dismissed as whimsical, its process of 'painful' bottling may be less so. If Parker's criticism glossed whimsy as an immovable obstacle—'what can you do about it?'—her poetry shows the affective power of what it can do. The poem's self-professed littleness matched Parker's own diminutive comments on her poetry. In a 1956 *Paris Review* interview, Parker declared, 'my verse is terribly dated [ ... ] I gave it up, knowing it wasn't getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent gesture' (Capron 1956). Yet her remark is more than wry shoulder-shrugging: like the poem, it suggests a mode which downplays its significance only to draw attention to itself.

Moore's notoriously opaque poem 'Walking-Sticks and Paperweights and Watermarks' (1936), which Luke Carson and Heather Cass White have noted remains 'mostly invisible to Moore scholarship' (Carson and White 2010, p. 341), also shows the complex burden of apparently insubstantial and whimsical gifts. If Parker's poem offers itself as a thing which no-one needs, Moore's poem was similarly discarded. Moore herself partially revised it before omitting it entirely from subsequent *Complete Poems* (1967). It sums up its own value with ambivalence: in the course of the poem, Moore's speaker describes a copy of her recent poetry collection *The Pangolin and Other Verse* (1936) as merely' an alphabet/of words and animals', and doubts the 'high-/way's wide giant trivia' (Moore 2017, p. 126). Like Parker's 'magnificent gesture' of renunciation, the scale of dismissal ('giant trivia') upsets its intent. The poem is built around a series of objects which make hovering analogies with the work itself, mostly private gifts which circulated among Moore and her close friends. The references for many of its quotations often rely on an intimate knowledge of a particular context, the tenor of its words on understanding what Empson called a 'compacted doctrine' (Empson 1948, p. 230). While Parker's 'Bric-á-Brac' was full of objects so everyday they resisted further comment, Moore's poem is built with objects so particular in meaning their worth cannot be understood.

The objects in the poem are often made frail by questions about their durability, purpose and utility, building a 'fabric of inconsistency' which is 'moth eaten by self-substractives' (p. 124). The ornate, private, and gnomic qualities of the poem re-animate the 'thin' lines of Parker's domestic crafts. Its world is whimsical because while the eye can admire the beauty of the objects, it cannot explain the purpose of their arrangement, or their significance to the figures bestowing them. The poem is peppered with incentives to peel back its obscure layers, quoting the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno who held that 'difficulty is ordained to check/poltroons', (p. 124), but the reader is found wanting courage. Like the 'linen strands' knitted together in Parker's poem, the gift of the poem itself is one readers often do not know where to put or what to say on receiving. The presents given by whimsy are often handed out shyly, obscurely, and may not reach the reader at all. In this context, the poem's final stanza is telling, rewriting the festive carol of cumulative gift-giving:

"On the first day of Christmas My true love he sent unto me, part of a Bough of a juniper-tree", Javelin-ed consecutively. (Moore 2017, p. 128)

As Carson and Cass White suggest, this allusion combines the Christian story of redemption with the wish-fulfilment of a fairy tale, hoping to 'find a third term' that moves between doctrine and fancy (p. 359). In the final difficulty of the poem, we find a need for a word that can move between the miraculous and imaginary. The consecutive 'javelining' of the allusion animates a peculiarity of the carol, too: each day brings gifts surplus to requirements. If the carol's gifts of turtle doves and French hens are always symbolic, their cumulative effect can be preposterous. As we move closer to epiphany, the number of gifts multiplies, but the arrangement between them becomes ever-more perplexing. The two poems help map the journey between a work which declares that no-one needs it, and a work which needs to be known, but which no-one knows they need. Both might be taken for a kind of whimsy, and were partially dismissed by the writers themselves. Yet both poems also help us understand the surprisingly rich qualities of whimsy, drawing attention to its power, puzzle and pathos. They also show its breadth: we are led from the whimsy of the insubstantial in Parker to the whimsy of the inscrutable in Moore. If its gifts come unbidden, or are given ambivalently, can they still be cherished?

#### **4. The Whimsical Poet**

Moore and Parker suggest further ways to appreciate these gifts by attending to the uneven reception of whimsical writers. We are often encouraged to rethink the worth of minor poets in Moore's and Parker's work, to see the gaps and contingencies between their writing and their reputation. A series of Parker's epigraphs for writers mock-memorialises the unlettered and ungarlanded:

His little trills and chirpings were his best

No music like the nightingale's was born

Within his throat; but he, too, laid his breast

Upon a thorn.

('The Minor Poet, from Tombstones in Starlight', Parker 2010, p. 163)

The quatrain hovers between wry rib-tickling and gentle deflation. The accusation of being 'minor' or 'little' is qualified by being a subject worthy of elegy, though the poem's preference for his 'little trills' might suggest, similarly, that Parker's poem is a minor one. Its final line cuts itself off in mid-song, flattened into a stubby elegy: this act of affinity—a minor epitaph for a minor poet—complicates his status as a subject of ridicule. The task of authorship is no easier for the writer of 'trills' and 'chirpings'. These poems are often in dialogue with her own reputation: in 1927, Parker's fellow *Vanity Fair*

columnist E.E. Cummings satirized her literary pretensions with a wry tribute to the fictional 'poetess' named Helen Whiffletree, murdered in Paris. He gathers together enough topical allusions to make Parker a possible object of his satire. The mock-tribute celebrates a poetry where 'naivetë is carried to a pitch of unheard-of poignancy', and summons a comic portrait of the Algonquin set, as Helen arrives 'penniless but exultant, in Greenwich Village' to find a '*coterie* of struggling artists and models, many of whom lent her money in small quantities as a tribute to the surge of odes, triolets, roundels, roundeaux, chants royals [ ... ] which poured from her teeming brain almost ceaselessly at this fecund time' (Cummings 2017, p. 123). As the 'teeming' suggests, this is also the familiar model of the women poet as whimsical. The verse forms he lists are often seen as light, trivial, or absurdly over-complicated.

Parker responds with a series of parodies of modernist literary culture, which always work to lower the stakes. In her essays and opinion pieces, she summons a literary culture where 'to have written anything, whether it be a *Ulysses* or whether it be a report of who sat next to whom at the P.E.N. Club dinner, is to be a writer' (p. 64). In a work subtitled 'Showing that Anyone Can Write Modernist Verse', Parker offers a wry sequence of four poetic pastiches: Eliot's 'newspaper from vacant lots' from 'Preludes' (Eliot 1999, p. 9) become a 'litter of newspapers/Piled in smothering profusion' (Parker 2010, p. 227). Yet the newspapers are more beguiling than they should be, and the modernist manqué cannot quite leave them alone. Their 'supplements' are 'sprawling shamelessly open' presenting their 'lurid contents' to editorials 'crumpled in a frenzy of ennui'. The 'endless' and 'beginningless' heaps of newspapers pile ever higher, suggesting the gap between 'news' and 'news that stays news' is not so wide. If anyone can write modernist verse, anyone, too, might find themselves writing whimsy.

While Moore's own poetic portraits are necessarily more abstruse, there is a telling evocation of whimsical authorship in her 1916 poem '"He Wrote the History Book", It Said'. The poem, first published in the *Egoist* in 1916, recounts a conversation Moore had with a young boy named John, son of the historian Dr. C.M. Andrews, and takes his words as its title. Ostensibly, the poem mocks authority and individual claims to being definitive:

THERE! You shed a ray

Of whimsicality on a mask of profundity so

Terrific that I have been dumbfounded by

It oftener than I care to say. *The* book? Titles are chaff. (Moore 2017, p. 30)

Its central metaphorical tenet is to make whimsy a 'ray' and profundity 'a mask'. Whimsy is that unexpected beam of light which illuminates and explains, and profundity the forbidding disguise that hides a subject from us. The dismissive 'titles are chaff' might also implicate the title of this poem as mere dictation, or whimsy. Yet the poem's final sentence—'Thank you for showing me/Your father's autograph'—attempts another kind of playful inversion, laying doubt on the whole literary discourse of the poem by signing off with a low-key envoi. Moore makes still greater claims for what a whim might be, something not with hidden depths but hidden *under* depths. Both Parker and Moore, by considering in their own work how writers are categorised, and the role of literary and social contexts in defining it, show that mood and mode cannot be separated from social categories. The minor poet might still have a life worth recording, and the authoritative male historian might skate closer to frivolity than we expect. In both cases, Moore and Parker respond to potential attacks on their work by finding whimsy in unusual places, then detailing the ways we might value it.

As Moore's poem 'Novices' notes, the artist is 'the only seller who buys, and holds on to the money' (Moore 2017, 'Novices', p. 61). Moore's reductio-ad-absurdum of her collected works, vanishing stanzas when republishing her work or omitting poems altogether, offered a poetic economy that made new economic product from absence and destruction. In accepting the 1955 commission from the Ford Motor Company, and republishing their correspondence first in *The New Yorker* and then *The Marianne Moore Reader*, Moore aligned modern American poetry squarely with capitalism. As Irene

Ramalho Santos notes, the decision was 'not in opposition to but taking into account the rhythms and achievements of material culture' (Santos 2003, p. 265). Perhaps, in an age which suggested that the poem should 'work', like a machine or a pudding, this was no great mismatch (Wimsatt 1954, p. 4). Yet the project, like the car itself, could hardly be considered a success, even if the resulting correspondence makes wonderful reading: Moore begins by refusing to take a fee for her pains as she wishes to carry out the commission with 'unencumbered fancy' (Moore 1958, unpaginated). Moore's increasingly absurd suggested names for the Ford—Mongoose Civique, Utopian Turtletop, Dearborn Diamonte—were all politely rejected for the name of Ford's son, Edsel. Yet the final tagline for the car that, after all, Marianne Moore did not name is revealing: 'The EDSEL acts the way it looks, but it doesn't cost that much' (Neil 2016). By this point, the advertising campaign had nothing whatsoever to do with Moore, who had magisterially withdrawn from proceedings, but the tagline invites application to her own work and the mood that propels so much of it forwards. Whimsy neither acts the way it looks, not costs as little as it seems. Like the animals celebrated in Moore's poem 'Diligence is to Magic as Progress is to Flight', that have 'outstripped man's whim to suppose/them ephemera' (Moore 2017, p. 18), the work of Parker and Moore shows us how a diminutive mode can be capable of more than we can understand or express.

#### **5. Conclusions**

Whimsy is a literary-critical term that is most often an insult, negation, or act of dismissal, and an aesthetic category which has received little sustained attention. It has been applied particularly to poetry, and often to female authors. Its tendency to invoke a range of moods and modes makes it a challenge to understand its characteristics or affects. It has been the contention of this article that the work of women poets most often accused of being whimsical gives us a helpful starting point for considering the cultural, aesthetic, and political meanings of the term. By attending to the poetry of Marianne Moore and Dorothy Parker, I have suggested that whimsy is a mode which can often challenge its readers to question the value and process of meaning-making. Although it is a socially-constructed category, close attention to the work of 'whimsical' poets nevertheless opens the way to significant aesthetic questions of scale, affect, and value. Moore's cat poem 'Peter' (1920) encourages us to 'fly over the fence' and 'go in the wrong way' (Moore 2017); whimsy might be the way poets makes right from our wrongs, and attending carefully to its pawprint might show us how many trails it leaves in modernist women's poetry and its reception. The history of poetry counts whimsy as a poetic dismissal, but Moore and Parker's work uses it to identify limitations in our own readings, rather than the poems we read. As Moore put it in her commission from the Lead Pencil Manufactures Association: 'Velvet mat/is my cat [ ... ] Our best pencils/write like that' (Moore 2017, p. 420). Careful attention to the cultural politics and aesthetic possibilities of diminutive modes not only allows us to understand why and how poets are said to 'write like that', but rethink how dangerous 'that' might be. Judging by Moore and Parker, those most at risk of whimsical accusations proved the most dexterous in reframing them as possibilities.

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

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

#### **References**

Adams, Franklin Pierce. 1935. *The Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys*. London: Simon & Schuster, vol. 2.

Bromwich, David. 1982. 'Marianne Moore's Poems'. *Poetry* 139: 340–52.

Capron, Marion. 1956. Dorothy Parker the Art of Fiction No. 13. Available online: https://www.theparisreview. org/interviews/4933/dorothy-parker-the-art-of-fiction-no-13-dorothy-parker (accessed on 20 February 2020).

#### *Humanities* **2020**, *9*, 24

Carson, Luke, and Heather Cass White. 2010. Difficult Ground: Poetic Renunciation in Marianne Moore's "Walking-Sticks and Paperweights and Watermarks". *Twentieth-Century Literature* 56: 340–70. [CrossRef]

Cavendish, Margaret. 1668. The Female Academy. In *Plays, Never before Printed*. London: Maxwell.

Richards, I. A. 1930. *Practical Criticism*. London: Kegan.

Wimsatt, William Kurtz. 1954. *The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry*. Lexington: University of Kentucky. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 2008. *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman & a Vindication of the Rights of Men*. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

© 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* **'I've Put a Yule Log on Your Grate': Lynette Roberts's 'Naïve' Modernism**

#### **Siriol McAvoy**

Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales, Swansea University, Swansea SA28PP, Wales, UK<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Received: 25 September 2019; Accepted: 3 December 2019; Published: 19 December 2019

**Abstract:** In this article, I suggest that Lynette Roberts develops a 'naïve' modernism that emphasizes tropes of folk art, home-made craft, and creative labour as a therapeutic response to war and a means of carving out a public role for the woman writer in the post-war world. Bringing high modernist strategies down to earth through an engagement with localized rural cultures, she strives to bridge the divide between the public and the private in order to open up a space for the woman writer within public life. As part of my discussion, I draw on Rebecca L. Walkowitz's contention that literary style—conceived broadly as 'attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness'—is crucial to modernist writers' attempts to think in—and beyond—the nation. Embracing a liberating openness to experience and 'amateurish' passion, Roberts's 'home-made' style challenges imperial constructions of nationhood centred in authority and control with a more collective, constructivist, improvisatory concept of belonging (Roberts 2005, p. xxxvi). Probing the intersections between folk art, national commitments, and global feminist projects in British modernism, I investigate how a radically transformed 'naïve' subtends the emergence of a new kind of feminist modernism, rooted in concepts of collective making and creative labour.

**Keywords:** folk art; Welsh Modernism; Feminism; nationalism; ethnography

Powder shivers down the walls, grey as the cold grate. This is my own cold surroundings where green men call and death walks up the stairs. I go out stumbling to face reality. The kale roads are full of careless droppings, but this I think is a good omen. A land of plenty ... dig for Victory, back again to the soil.1

At the time of writing this passage, Argentine–Welsh poet Lynette Roberts had been living in rural Carmarthenshire in Wales for scarcely two months. Despite the bone-aching cold and lack of material comforts in her small cottage—neither she nor her husband had money, and their village was not yet networked to mains water or electricity—she was full of energy and a sense of possibility. The strange 'reality' of her new location seems to have unlocked her poetic creativity and given vent to her intellectual inquisitiveness: her diary from that time records her plans for a poem for the South Wales miners, and describes, in painstaking detail, elements of local life, from the brightly coloured window-dressings of her neighbours to the 'top-hat hag wringing out the tripes and swilling them at the running pool up by the Blacksmith's shed' (DLR, 4). Her ambivalent affiliation with Welsh culture as a liminal 'contact zone' not only helped Roberts to define her gendered identity as a poet, but also activated her sense of the possibility of radically transforming poetic form—and revitalizing national culture—from within and without, at the same time.

1 Lynette Roberts, 'A Carmarthenshire Diary', 10 December 1939, in *Diaries, Letters and Recollections*, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Roberts 2008a), 4. All further references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.

In this article, I suggest that Roberts develops a 'naïve' modernism that emphasizes tropes of folk art, home-made craft, and creative labour as a therapeutic response to war and a means of carving out a public role for the woman writer in the post-war world. 2 As several critics have noticed, that Roberts was a practicing artist as well as a poet is important to an understanding of her writing.3 However, the confluences between her poetics and the Primitivist scenes of domestic and village life that she painted throughout her career remain underexplored. Roberts trained at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in the 1930s, illustrated articles for the Argentine paper *La Nacion*, and, in 1955–1956, set up the Chislehurst Caves art project featuring Guyanese artist Denis Williams. During the war she contributed poems to the *Caseg Broadsheets*, a collaboration between poet Brenda Chamberlain, her artist husband John Petts, and soldier–poet Alun Lewis, on sheets of poetry and woodcuts intended for popular distribution.

The marrying of visual art and poetry was a particular feature of Anglophone Welsh women's cultural production at this time. Together with Welsh-identified 'border' writer Margiad Evans, Roberts and Chamberlain are figured by Tony Conran as members of the 'heroic generation' of Welsh women poets.4 All three were visual artists as well as writers, and their work, in Conran's view, exhibits the 'primitive' style traditionally associated with poets without a formal training in literature. These writers' idiosyncratic visuality and flouting of literary convention is symptomatic, for Conran, of the expression and negotiation of their charged relation—as women and partial outsiders—to Wales *and* to the English literary tradition.5

Roberts adopts a 'naïve' style—informed both by her own art, and by her interest in 'indigenous' folklore and ethnography—in order to assert a specifically gendered point of view within the framework of modernist traditions, and to lend form and significance to shared, communal experience. Bringing high modernist strategies down to earth through an engagement with localized rural cultures, she strives to bridge the divide between the public and the private in order to open up a space for the woman writer within public life. Although an understanding of the contexts for Roberts's practice as a visual artist informs this article throughout, my discussion focuses on her transformation of the 'naïve' into a distinctive literary poetics and mode of social and political engagement. In this, I draw on Rebecca L. Walkowitz's contention that literary style—conceived broadly as 'attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness'—is crucial to modernist writers' attempts to think in—and beyond—the nation.6 Embracing a liberating openness to experience and 'amateurish' passion, Roberts's 'home-made' style challenges imperial constructions of nationhood centred in authority and control with a more collective, constructivist, improvisatory concept of belonging.7

#### **1. Lynette Roberts and the Modernist 'Return to the Folk'**

The recent rediscovery of Roberts's poetry, as Leo Mellor observed, 'has decisively changed several literary-critical narratives' surrounding both gender and poetic subjectivity, and British literary

2 This article thus sounds the implications of Patrick McGuinness's suggestion that 'Her extraordinary freedoms of scale, subject and imaginative conception ... are unique to Roberts, and to what we could call her "home-made" world.'

3 William May analyses Roberts's gendered engagement with the ekphrastic tradition in his essay 'Verbal and Visual Art in Twentieth-Century British Women's Poetry', situating it in the context of 'the female writer's re-examination of painting's assumptions and expectations' during and after the modernist period. Tony Conran, John Pikoulis and Patrick McGuinness have similarly emphasised the visuality of Roberts's imaginary and the forms of hermeneutic invited by her poetry. See (May 2011, pp. 42–61; Conran 1997; Pikoulis 1983, pp. 9–29; Roberts 2005, pp. xi–xxxix).

4 (Conran 1997, p. 165).

5 Ibid. May has similarly pointed out the connections between the 'verbal-visual' interplay in women modernists' poetry and their gendered renegotiation of literary tradition, suggesting that Stevie Smith, Liz Lochhead and Roberts 'seemed particularly conscious of the visual as a category where they might both draw attention to and escape the label of "women" writers.' (pp. 45–46).

6 (Walkowitz 2006, p. 2).

7 (Roberts 2005, p. xxxvi). This article sounds the implications of McGuinness's suggestion that 'Her extraordinary freedoms of scale, subject and imaginative conception ... are unique to Roberts, and to what we could call her "home-made" world'.

experiment of the 1940s.8 Read in the context of her personal writings and prose, it also illuminates forgotten patterns of cultural transit connecting Britain, Wales and the Americas during the 1940s and 1950s. Born in Buenos Aires in 1909 to parents of Welsh heritage, Roberts was brought up in Mechita, a small railway township to the west of the capital, where her engineer father was stationed. Her family were part of affluent British 'colonial' circles in Argentina; she recalls their yachts and racehorses, and an *estancia* with white peacocks. Educated in a French and Spanish Convent in Buenos Aires and later in a boarding school in Bournemouth, as a young woman she acted as her father's official companion and held soirées, with her friend Mariusa Fernandez Beyro, for members of the Hispanic intelligentsia. She returned to London in the mid-1930s, eventually gravitating toward the outer rings of Fitzrovia's bohemian literati.9 It was in 1939 at a Poetry London event that she met Keidrych Rhys, poet and 'flamboyant impresario'10 of Welsh letters; he 'was charming and spoke like a prince'.11 They married in October 1939 in the village of Llansteffan (with Dylan Thomas as best man), and moved to Llanybri, a tiny village near the south coast of Carmarthenshire, perched just across the Taf estuary from Thomas's Laugharne. Roberts lived there for the duration of the war, and much of her poetry is anchored within the life of the locality.

Because her writing is 'grounded in a variety of places: West Wales, South America, London', locating Roberts within the late modernist literary scene can be a difficult task.12 She collaborated with Robert Graves on his poetic myth odyssey, *The White Goddess* (1948), and was close friends with Edith Sitwell. Her poetry, which includes her first collection, *Poems* (1944) and a long 'heroic' poem of the Second World War, *Gods with Stainless Ears* (written 1941–1943, published 1951), is at turns riskily experimental and stylishly artless. Though her poetry found considerable acclaim among British and North American readerships, it gradually fell out of favour in the 1950s, and became subject to critical neglect for much of the twentieth century. Patrick McGuinness's republication of Roberts's *Collected Poems* in 2005 has re-ignited interest in her work, but she has yet to enjoy the belated canonization conferred on fellow 'colonial' women writers, such as Katherine Mansfield or Jean Rhys.

Critics have long noticed the challenges posed by Roberts's poetics to norms identified with Britain's literary centre. Maroula Joannou has observed that her poetry is remarkable for its 'commitment to Modernism within an anti-metropolitan modernist framework', while John Wilkinson sees it as a 'highly localised modernism, intent on reanimating bodies of tradition to resist a planned and administered world.'13 One way of understanding Roberts's poetry is in relation to the Welsh modernist formation that took shape around her husband Keidrych Rhys's experimental journal *Wales* during the late 1930s and 1940s.14 Identified with such figures as Dylan Thomas, Idris Davies, David Jones, and Margiad Evans, Welsh modernism, as John Goodby and Chris Wigginton have suggested, was a distinctive and relatively 'belated' phenomenon, which subverted and pastiched high modernist claims in the creation of an 'internalised, imploded, even mimic modernism'.15

In particular, Roberts's poetry speaks to a strain of Welsh modernist practice identified by Daniel G. Williams as the 'return to the folk'. Similar to the 'proletarian' modernism of other Welsh writers,

8 (Mellor 2019, p. 156).

9 For instance, Sonia Brownell, the future wife of George Orwell, was a close friend, and she met Wyndham Lewis and Augustus John at their studios. Patrick McGuinness's Introduction to *Collected Poems* offers a comprehensive, reliable account of Roberts's biography. Roberts's own 'Notes for an Autobiography', collected in *Diaries, Letters and* Recollections, also offers instructive insights (it was originally published as 'Parts of an Autobiography' in the *Poetry Wales* special issue on Lynette Roberts, 19/2 (1983): 30–50). However, McGuinness has advised that readers take into account the circumstances under which these notes were written, pointing out that Roberts had experienced significant difficulties in her mental health during this period. See *Diaries, Letters and Recollections*, 228.

10 (Thomas 1999, p. 84).

11 (Roberts 2008b, p. 205). All further references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.

12 (Roberts 2005, p. xx).

13 (Joannou 2012, p. 116; Wilkinson 2007, p. 190)

14 Keidrych Rhys edited and published three series of this magazine, which became the primary channel for new English-language writing in Wales, between 1937–1939, 1943–1949, and 1958–1960.

15 (Goodby and Wigginton 2000, pp. 95, 106).

this sought to counter high modernist elitism through the use of 'low' vernacular forms, but it directed its attentions not toward fragmenting industrial heartlands, but to those rural cultures threatened by modernity's orthodoxy of progress.16 Of course, as Raymond Williams has pointed out, the valorization of the 'vitality of the naive' had always been a mainstay of the international avant-garde, and some readers have been critical of what they see as Roberts's tendency to '[co-opt] or [appropriate] the local indigenous [Welsh] culture into her modernist vision'.17 This essay, however, takes as its point of departure Daniel G. Williams's suggestion that the 'return to the folk' coexists in women writers such as Margiad Evans and Zora Neale Hurston 'with a self-conscious literary attempt at giving voice to repressed and marginalized female consciousness.'18 As I show, through its rupturing of linguistic conventions and multiplications of perspective, Roberts's presentation of rural Welsh life calls colonial and patriarchal dynamics of viewing and interpretation into question. Harnessing ethnographic discourses of conservation and protection, her writing suggests that the project of voicing gendered consciousness in art is coextensive with the project of lending visibility to repressed cultural minorities. But while Roberts's poetry has been seen as attempting to disclose a putatively 'real' Wales, I suggest that she employs 'naïve' tropes of craft and folk art, linked to images of costuming and disguise, to call that 'reality' (and the 'reality' of the gendered self, with which Wales is rhetorically connected) into question.19 To address these questions, I explore in turn what I consider to be three major locations for Roberts's deterritorialized, reinvigorated 'naïve': the cottage; the rural village; and sewing.

#### **2. Home Making: Rootedness and Re-Enactment in the Shadow of War**

Roberts's writing is in many ways motivated by her search for a 'place'. Although most of her life was unsettled and nomadic, as her daughter, Angharad Rhys, recalls, she 'always longed for a simple home, with a fire and a table — a place to look after friends in need'.20 Accordingly, domestic space, especially that of her two-roomed cottage, 'Tygwyn', has a central presence in Roberts's poetry, radiating out to touch all other aspects of life. The home appears in her poetry as a site of performance offering an 'inner spiritual continuity' with a Welsh past, and the habitualized return to the rural hearth becomes a way of composing the self—literally and figuratively—among the 'ruins' and havoc of war.21 The spectacle of violence erupting within the confines of the 'home front' during the 1940s forced a new attention to everyday life during this time, lending ordinary, daily rhythms a new importance and significance. Accordingly, rural household tasks—drawing 'water from the well',22 'bak[ing] bread' (CP, 4), or 'hang[ing]/Dishcloth over the weeping hedge' (CP, 7)—often take centre stage in Roberts's poetry; presented in a heightened, ritualized form, they are imbued with pointed emotional significance. Take, for example, her poem 'The Shadow Remains':

To speak of everyday things with ease And arrest the mind to a simpler world Where living tables are stripped of a cloth; Of wood on which I washed, sat at peace: Cooked duck, shot on an evening in peacock cold: Studied awhile: wrote: baked bread for us both. But here by the hearth with leisured grace I prefer to speak of the vulgar clock that drips

16 (Williams 2010, p. 811).

17 (Williams, p. 58; Evans 2010, p. 40).

18 (Williams 2012, p. 121).

19 In this, I draw on readings of Frida Kahlo's self-construction offered by Alice Gambrell in (Gambrell 1997, p. 67).

20 Angharad Rhys, Preface to *Collected Poems*, ix.

21 (Robichaud 2007, p. 108).

22 (Roberts 2005, p. 3). All references to Roberts's poetry are to this edition and henceforth will be given parenthetically in the text.

With the falling of rain: woodbine tips, and yarrow. (CP, 4)

Roberts saw in Llanybri's rural traditions an opportunity to clarify her life and language— 'To speak of everyday things with ease'—by anchoring it in something that *mattered.* In this sense, her poetry subscribes to the 'back to the source' discourse that saw resurgence in the troubled 1930s and 1940s: she told soldier–poet Alun Lewis in the early years of the war that she was 'at a time in my life when I want to get down to those emotions thoughts and ideas which are to be found only close to the earth.'23 Placing itself in dialogue with the spiritualized rhetoric of purification and renewal found in contemporary texts such as *Four Quartets*, 'The Shadow Remains' appears to essentialize what Roberts elsewhere called the 'earth rhythms' of rural Welsh life, in order to enlist them as part of a modernist 'recreation refolding of the world' in language.24

The 'grace[ful]' performance of country life found in poems such as 'The Shadow Remains' speaks in part of what scholars such as John Pikoulis have recognized as Roberts's Yeatsian valorization of the 'integrity, dignity, and unfeathered ways' of the rural 'peasantry': in her diary, she notes admiringly that 'The people I have met here in Llanybri seem to me to retain all the natural and true qualities of an aristocrat' (DLR, 17).25 But, significantly, Roberts rejected what she saw as the sentimental vagaries of the Celtic Revival: after a visit by Yeats's close friend Ernest Rhys, she noted that '[h]e was still caught up in [the] aura' of 'rather a mock Celtic Twilight' when she met him, 'and, frankly, this nauseated me.' (DLR, 13) She preferred to direct her poetry outwards, towards external social worlds, staking her desire 'to be just a normal person who can take my full share of responsibility.' (DLR, 3)

Roberts's conception of the 'peasant' thus perhaps bears closer relation to the modern, sociological definition of the term, as a subordinated class of subsistence rural worker—a group with whom she identified Llanybri villagers and Argentine rural 'peons' alike.26 Poems such as 'The New World', for instance, vividly dramatize the Argentine peasants' dispossession by global capital:

Death ate their hearts like locusts over a croaking plain, Fell tears red as fireflies on the rising dust; Barbed wire fenced them in or fenced them out, these outcasts of the land. [. . . ] Lost now. No sound or care can revive their ways: La Plata gambles on their courage, spends too flippantly, Mocks beauty from the shading tree, mounts a corrugated roof over their cultured hut. (CP, 28–9)

As Roberts put it in her diary, 'That is why I have such an interest in the village of Llanybri. I see that in the future it will be forced to change for the worse' (DLR, 17). The veneration of vernacular simplicity (as embodied in the 'cultured hut') in 'The New World' and 'The Shadow Remains' is also redolent, as Daniel G. Williams has shown, of strategies adopted by Welsh modernists such as Idris Davies and African American writers such as Langston Hughes. For proletarian Davies, simplicity was a way of articulating commitment to his industrial Valleys communities, while in Hughes's case it served his aim of expressing the particularity of African American culture; as he suggested, 'I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz. I am as sincere as I know how to be'.27 As I show, 'The Shadow Remains' bespeaks Roberts's search to materialize, in writing, the invisible—to 'grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms' of domestic Welsh life—in order to investigate and lend expression to the gendered experience of cultural difference.

23 (Roberts n.d., p. 2).

24 See (Roberts 2008f, p. 150).

25 (Pikoulis 1983, p. 17). The quotation is from the same unpublished letter to Alun Lewis as above, 4.

26 (Thomas 2019, p. 32).

27 (Hughes 1926, p. 694).

Speech, thought, and organic matter: all are held in harmonious, if perhaps precarious, balance in 'The Shadow Remains'. Patrick McGuinness has observed that, unlike high modernists such as Pound and Eliot, Roberts demonstrates 'an enabling—and in the best sense unsophisticated—belief in language's sufficiency', and the poem speaks of her continued faith in the possibility of bringing language, self, and word/world into harmony.28 Central to the poem's thematic structure is an attempt to integrate the spiritual and the material everyday. Robert used her diary to record moments when 'even the most dreary tasks take on an ethereal quality' (DLR, 26), and an analogous transformation of daily life can be seen in this poem. Ordinary actions such as washing and baking bread are imbued with the solemnity of the Eucharist, while the bare, altar-like 'wood' and consumption of flesh are suggestive of pagan ritual. Alliteration ('everyday ... ease', 'wood ... washed', 'here ... hearth') and loosely-applied tetrameter smooth the surfaces of the poem with a sense of (informal) convention, while the pointed use of the colon and semi-colon further elongates the lines' 'leisured' rhythms, shaping moments of silence (or pauses in the speaking voice) that suggest that these traditional activities of Welsh domestic life allow considerable time for thought. The 'vulgar clock' offers material and imaginative connection to the generations of women who may have sat and listened to the rain, and is portrayed as implicitly healing: the same rain nourished the 'yarrow' on the shelf, a plant revered since ancient times for its healing properties (its Latin name, *Achillea millefolium*, signals that it was named after the god Achilles, said to have employed the plant to staunch wounds on the battlefield).

Integrating the 'spiritual' world of literature and the everyday world of the body was an important task for modernist women writers. In her essay 'Professions for Women', Virginia Woolf owned that, as a writer, she continued to stumble upon a central feminist conumdrum: 'telling the truth about my own experiences as a body'.29 In Roberts's poem, domestic labour, placed in a relation of flow and equivalence with acts of thinking and writing ('Studied awhile: wrote: baked bread for us both') opens up the private lyric to collectivity and embodiment. It also foregrounds the body as a mode of intertextual engagement with an unofficial, gendered tradition, rooted in the domestic, the material and the particular—what Welsh modernist Margiad Evans called 'a corner cupboard history, a deliberate evocation, a summary of man's odd needs.'30

For Roberts, the devil (divinity?) was in the detail. Similar to David Jones, her poetry seeks to 'make sacral, or give otherness to', the particular, as a means of articulating the experience of cultural difference. In his preface to *Epoch and Artist* (Jones 1959), Jones argued that, while modern Western culture may have repressed the 'primitive' tendency to confuse the universal with the relative and particular, this tendency persists in all of us. Moreover, the confusion of the human and the divine, the real and the ideal, is the foundation stone of poetry:

*poiesis* should and sometimes does make radiant 'particular facts' so that they become intimations of immortality or, if the reader won't stand for that, then intimations of *some otherness of some sort* [my emphasis].31

Roberts's concentration on local or domestic minutiae in her poems thus alludes to an 'otherness' hidden within the fabric of the familiar.

Luminously illuminated but also somehow always in shadow, Roberts's domestic interiors display a broader 'ethnographic impulse to document ways of living and thinking' in British literary culture of the 1930s and 1940s.32 'The Shadow Remains' references a specifically Welsh anthopology that, associated with H.J. Fleure and folklorist Iorwerth Peate, intersected in significant ways with the development of both Welsh nationalism and Welsh literary modernism (Fleure's article on 'The Welsh

28 (Roberts 2005, p. xxxvi).

29 (Woolf 2008, p. 144)

30 (Evans 1939, p. 286). Evans similarly posits a subterranean link between the spiritual past and domestic everyday by speculating on the connection between domestic culture in rural areas and 'the dispersal of the monasteries'.

31 (Jones 1959, p. 16).

32 (Williams 2012, p. 127).

People', for example, was published in the tenth (1939) edition of *Wales*, alongside writing by vanguards like Dylan Thomas, Margiad Evans, George Barker and John Cowper Powys).33 As Gareth Evans has noted, 'Roberts was familiar with Peate's involvement in the reconstruction of representative, traditional Welsh household rooms at the National Museum in Cardiff and an advocate of his ideas for an Open Air folk Museum that would serve to recover traditional Welsh culture for the nation.'34 Yet, while Peate saw his project in terms of the conservation of an 'authentic' Welsh past, poems such as 'The Shadow Remains' recast his ideas from the perspective of gender to subtly destabilize the idea of a coherent, unified national culture.35

Katie Gramich has observed that 'Roberts's cottage in Wales is simultaneously an embodiment of Wales's history and of her own autobiography as a cosmopolitan, much-travelled, avant-garde writer.'36 Roberts described 'The Shadows Remains as 'a good poem of my v. simple life' (DLR, 47), explaining that it depicted her bathing practices at a time when water, like many other commodities, was scarce in the village:

Keidrych (that is my husband) and I wash once a week: we boil a bucket of water, strip-tease exposing a small bare patch of flesh, we scrub the exposed part violently, then cover the part with wool, and immediately attack another part. Soon, our whole body is cleansed from our head to toes. We work thoroughly and methodically, each bending over his or her basin sharing the soap which rests between us on the kitchen table. (DLR, 9)

Like Frida Kahlo, another Hispanic modernist who took inspiration from 'indigenous' folkloric culture, Roberts's 'creative impulse'—and her modernist mythography—always emerged 'from her own concrete reality'.37 In fact, her poetry resonates with the 'autoethnography' identified by Alice Gambrell in the work of figures such as Kahlo, Ella Deloria, and Zora Neale Hurston, all of whom set about doing 'fieldwork' within their 'home' communities.38 Gambrell uses the term 'insider-outsider activity' to describe their bifurcated, self-reflexive practice, which sought at once to revision both 'metropolitan' and 'home' cultures.39

'Insider-outsider' would seem an apposite way of describing Roberts's hyphenated identity as what Nigel Wheale terms 'the one and only Latino-Welsh [sic] modernist'.40 Affiliated to Wales in a legal sense via her marriage to Rhys, her writing often manifests her commitment to Wales and the Welsh nationalist project that gathered momentum after the founding of Plaid Cymru in 1925; *Gods with Stainless Ears*, for instance, makes an invocation to 'my people' to 'Upshine, outshine the day's sun' (CP, 53). In seeking, like David Jones, to re-route the universal through the local and particular, her writing speaks of her conviction in the poet's role in 'the development of a politically charged national tradition' whose rhetoric mirrored that of similar national movements elsewhere in the world; in 1937, artist Salvador Azuela announced that 'our vote is for the work of the Republic's artists to be more Mexican, to the extent of being more universal and human.'41 But Roberts also always saw herself as something of a 'stranger' within Wales and her chosen community, maintaining a posture summarized by the speaker of her poem 'Lamentation' as 'always observant and slightly obscure' (CP, 8). In 'The Shadow Remains', the national dream of full belonging and presence attached to the idealised rural 'folk' (or, in Wales, the 'Gwerin') is revealed to be more a dream than a readily

33 (Fleure, pp. 265–69).

34 (Evans 2010, p. 40).

35 Evans maintains that as 'A fervent cultural nationalist, Peate sought to define both the history and the future of the Welsh nation by reuniting the 'folk' with its tradition—expressed through building, crafts, costume and folklore—and also with its identity in a revitalized Wales.' (Evans 2010, p. 55).

36 (Gramich 2019, p. 56).

37 (Mundye 2013, pp. 23–28; quotation from Lowe 1995, p. 27).

38 (Gambrell 1997, p. 1).

39 (Ibid., p. 3, p. 32).

40 (Wheale 1994, pp. 4–19).

41 (Gambrell 1997, p. 58, Azuela, quoted in Tibol 1993, p. 102).

achievable reality. Moreover, it becomes increasingly untenable as the pressures of history, in the form of the war, begin to cast their 'shadow[s]' within the cottage:

And below, brazier fire that burns our sorrow, Dries weeping socks above on the rack: that knew Two angels pinned to the wall—again two. (CP, 4)

Unity and fragmentation, 'pair[ing]/And peel[ing]' (CP, 45) apart, are strong themes in Roberts's poetry, reflecting, perhaps, not only the 'doubleness' of her situation, but also the reality of separation and dislocation that marked many people's experience of World War II. She herself was separated from Keidrych Rhys when he was called up to serve as a gunner on the South coast in 1940, an experience that was a source of great suffering and loneliness for her. In 'The Shadow Remains' national dynamics of unity, community and disunity are explored through the physical objects that bear witness to a private history. The hanging socks by the fire signal the speaker's 'paired' domestic life; figures for the ordinary, bodily existence of herself and her partner, they are mirrored by a pair of decorative angels on the wall. These can be seen as images of the couple's poetic, transcendent selves: Roberts acknowledges the connection in her 'Notes for an Autobiography' when she remarks that '[t]he two angels were given me by Sonia Brownell symbolising Keidrych and myself who have not been acknowledged in the literary world for over 30 years' (DLR, 212–3). Angels and images of flight recur in Roberts's work; her painting of 'Llanybri Old Chapel', for example, includes an image of her neighbour Rosie Davies as a flying angel wearing 'her best harvest apron' (CP, 35). The painting of the old village chapel depicts both a space that she considered sacred and fields spread with manure, and her homely angels offer a similar synthesis of the material and the spiritual.

The socks depicted in 'The Shadow Remains' are not only terrestrial doubles for the angels; they are also 'weeping' for them as figures they once 'knew'. This suggests that while the domestic realm can sometimes act as a peaceful haven for the poetic self, it can also 'murder' it; indeed Robert often owns in her diary to feeling 'cramped and barred from life, imprisoned' by domestic labour and the 'ties of marriage life' (DLR, 9). '[P]inned to the wall', the angels could also be seen to foreshadow the persecution of 'outsiders' under fascism, a group with whom Roberts identified as a poet; the final part of *Gods with Stainless Ears* sees its central characters, the 'gunner and his girl', return from futuristic 'cloud in fourth dimensional state' to a dystopian landscape dominated by the sign '*Mental Home For Poets'* (CP, 64, 69). Like the 'society of outsiders' imagined by Virginia Woolf in *Three Guineas*, the homespun angels become suggestive of cross-gender solidarity and a shared struggle against totalitarian forces within the space of the home. Luce Irigaray defines angels as '[t]hese messengers who never remain enclosed in a place, who are also never immobile'. Neither male nor female, angels, for Irigaray, are 'endlessly reopening the enclosure of the universe, of universes, identities, the unfolding of actions, of history'.42 Roberts's angels, then, might also be understood as subversive images for that part of the self that can never be contained by gender or national/domestic ideology, indicating a desire to break out of the mental enclosures imposed and reinforced by war. We leave the interior of 'The Shadow Remains' as a kind of dramatic set-piece, peopled by ghosts—actors who remain somewhere just off-stage. Welsh culture and the domestic space that encloses it is thus revealed not as a 'natural or coherent [object]', in Rebecca L. Walkowitz's words, but as a 'construct', an 'achieved fiction'—though the narrative of this poem is, significantly, left open-ended.43

#### **3. 'You should want to know even if you**/**Don't want to know about my village': The Welsh Village as Centre for the Avant-Garde**

Roberts's writing is concerned with survival—with what goes on after change and disaster. In her depictions of Welsh village life, she draws upon Fleure's idea of survivals—the concept that the rural

42 (Irigaray 1993, p. 15).

43 (Walkowitz 2006, p. 9; Clifford 1998, p. 95).

west was a treasure-trove for lost 'thoughts and visions' that remained yet discoverable in material form. But while she sometimes identifies Llanybri with the timelessness attributed to the colonial periphery, telling Robert Graves that 'rural villages in Wales are still so medieval in craft & manner',44 she also sees it as embodiment of a vibrant, living history, in which changes wrought by modernity (war, the aeroplane, 'galvanised sheds', the chemical factories at Llandarcy) constantly 'break before us' to '[change] its contour'(CP, 44).45 The Welsh village thus emerges as a 'centre for the avant-garde' in her poetry—a space of experiment in which art and life coalesce.46

But Roberts's relationship to her village community was often vexed and always complicated. Gill Plain asserts that 'wartime women [during the Second World War] were assumed to be performing rather than inhabiting the identity of public citizen';47 this paranoia—which laid bare the instability of women's relation to nationhood—made itself felt in Roberts's relations with Llanybri; she was, for a while, suspected by her neighbours of being a German spy, an experience that she encodes in her poem 'Raw Salt on Eye'. Her poetry thus explores the difficulties, as well as the regenerative potential, of the woman poet's attempt to assume a place in society during wartime. Like fellow Anglophone Welsh modernists Brenda Chamberlain and Margiad Evans, Roberts found herself situated on the borders between different cultures, and all three occupied the overlap between disciplines, as practicing artists as well as writers. As I have already noted, Tony Conran has suggested that Roberts, Chamberlain and Evans should all be seen as '"primitives" in the sense that we use the word of painters—poets without a training in literature, whose work therefore involves problems in appreciation.'48 Citing the facts that Roberts was extremely well-read and artistically trained, McGuinness prefers to use the term 'naïve' to describe her work, 'in the specific sense of the naïve painters' such as Henri 'Douanier' Rousseau, but he concurs with Conran's statement that, in Roberts's poetry, 'the clear boundaries most poets with literary training make between private and public worlds are frequently transgressed.'49

Village craft becomes a touchstone for Roberts's interest in the relation between art and artlessness. Furthermore, she shows how 'home-made' art can serve to bridge divisions between the private and public, thus allowing the outsider woman writer to participate within communal life. In 'Earthbound', the making of a wreath is transformed into a public ritual that serves to integrate the solitary artist within the circle of her village community. A diary entry from 1941 explains that the poem was inspired by the poet's act of making a wreath with a female evacuee friend for 'a village death' (DLR, 32):

We made the wreath standing on the white floor; Bent each to our purpose wire to rose-wire; Pinning each leaf smooth, Polishing the outer edge with the warmth of our hands. The circle finished and note thought out, We carried the ring through the attentive eyes of the street: Then slowly drove by Butcher's van to the 'Union Hall'. We walked the greaving room alone, Saw him lying in his upholstered box, Violet ribbon carefully crossed, And about his sides bunches of wild thyme. No one stirred as we offered the gift. No one drank there again. (CP, 10)

44 (Roberts 2008d, p. 170).

45 (Roberts 2008c, pp. 133–38). All references are to this edition and henceforth will be given parenthetically in the text.

46 (Harris 2010, p. 169). Harris notes that 'It seems counter-intuitive to describe English villages as centres for the avant garde', but, in the context of the late 1930s, 'it certainly cannot be left out of the account.'

47 (Plain 2009, p. 168).

48 (Conran 1997, p. 165).

49 (Roberts 2005, p. xxxiv; Conran 1997, p. 165).

Roberts was an expert in flower arrangement, for she had trained as a florist with Constance Spry, and once set up a flower-arranging business named Bruska in her private rooms in London. This wreath, therefore, represents a home-made art (or decorative craft) that is at once local and traditional—constructed, we could presume, from wild flowers—and avant-garde: Spry was well-known for her edgy designs that pioneered mixed materials and the unusual decorative use of vegetables, such as kale or rhubarb leaves.

Over the course of the poem, the wreath becomes, in Conran's assessment, 'a symbol of participation; almost a symbol of the poem that has been made of it.'50 The text foregrounds how the artists' bodies, infused into their craft through the 'warmth of our hands' become integrated, through their sacrificial gift, into the body of the community. The concept of the poem as gift or offering suffuses Roberts's work, gesturing to bardic Welsh conventions such as the *cywydd gofyn*, where the poet traditionally petitions a friend for a gift, and the *llatai*, the poem as love-messenger (the word comes from the word '*llad*' meaning gift), it emphasises what David Jones called the 'gratuitous' in literary production.51 The 'gratuitous' for Jones is that making which is not 'merely utilitarian' or 'simply functional'; it is defined by absence, as the 'extrautile', and is connected by the poet to humanity's religious impulses as 'the preserve of saints—lovers, and all kinds of unifying makers'.52 Kicking against the unequal exchanges of capitalism and imperialism, the poem-as-gift thus suggests a different way of structuring the relations between the poet and her readers (or audience); home becomes the sacred site for the creation of a gendered communal art that serves to mediate between public and private experience. During her time at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, Roberts designed and made printed textiles, carved wooden panels, 'made a traditional table of my own design', and learnt gesso work and gold leaf application (DLR, 197). This experience seems to have influenced her lifelong interest in material and decorative surfaces—both of language, and of a culture. It is relevant to note here that the ideas of William Morris, proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement, would have been in the air at the time Roberts was studying; for socialist Morris, as for Roberts, traditional crafts—invented as much as reclaimed—became an avenue for reclaiming art and beauty for the community.

Similar to Dorothy Wordsworth, Roberts used her diary to note down detailed observations on the flora, fauna, birdlife, geology, customs, and speech of Llanybri, raw data that she drew on and transformed in the making of her poems. We can see this most clearly in her 'Poem from Llanybri', a text that, in Gareth Evans's view, presents itself as a kind of storehouse or 'synecdoche of traditional local culture'53:

If you come my way that is. . . Between now and then, I will offer you A fist full of rock cress fresh from the bank The valley tips of garlic red with dew Cooler than shallots, a breath you can swank In the village when you come. At noon-day I will offer you a choice bowl of cawl Served with a 'lover's' spoon and a chopped spray Of leeks or savori fach, not used now, In the old way you'll understand. (CP, 3)

Roberts was an avid student of cultural traditions, but here the speaker portrays herself as something of a teacher, too.54 The poem was initially written as an invitation to Alun Lewis, whom Roberts met

50 (Conran 1983, p. 130).

51 (Jones 2001, p. 126).

52 (Jones 1959, pp. 176, 181; Hague 1980, p. 93).

53 (Evans 2010, p. 59).

54 (Gambrell 1997, p. 65).

in Longmoor in the spring of 1941, and the speaker here takes the role of a guide or ethnographic 'informant', welcoming her reader into the village and offering a bridge to its cultural otherness.55 As Alice Gambrell explains, women artists and writers were often subject to 'the expectation that they would serve as containers, transmitters, or translators of the very forms of experiential immediacy' whose loss in war is lamented by Walter Benjamin in his essay 'The Storyteller'.56 This intimacy of experience is indicated by the speaker's breezy use of vernacular names and 'private allusion[s]', a technique which some readers have perceived as deliberately 'riddling':57

. . . The din Of children singing through the eyelet sheds Ringing smith hoops, chasing the butt of hens; Or I can offer you Cwmcelyn spread With quartz stones from the wild scratchings of men: You will have to go carefully with clogs Or thick shoes for it's treacherous the fen, The East and West Marshes also have bogs.

The 'valley tips' of wild garlic are so described because, according to John Pikoulis, they reminded Roberts of lilies of the valley; 'wild scratchings of men' is possibly an allusion to traces of bronze age settlement in Cwmcelyn, a bay on the western marshes overlooking Laugharne (Roberts was a member of the Carmarthenshire Antiquarian Society).58 Again, we find Roberts inscribing a sense of place that is rooted in her personal experience, and elucidating a national culture that finds expression in particular details whose opacity except to the most local of readers subtly resists the politics of coherent representation they seem initially to support.

Echoing Katherine Mansfield's contention 'I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World', 'Poem from Llanybri' seeks to imbue this 'undiscovered country' with 'a sense of mystery, a radiance, an afterglow'.59 Llanybri's utopian, dream-like dimension is mirrored by the temporal structure of the poem. Placing itself in a conditional time 'between now and then', it is orientated both to an imagined past and an imagined future, and the speaker's gendered role as hostess and conserver seemingly enables her to participate in a (still conditional) project of national reconstruction:

You must come—start this pilgrimage Can you come?—send an ode or elegy In the old way and raise our heritage. (CP, 3)

'Poem from Llanybri' also poses as a homespun 'offering' designed to alleviate the stress and anomie of the homesick soldier, and in a sense this is what it is: Bill Ashcroft et al., have shown how, in postcolonial literatures, the imagination, like the magical worldview of folk culture, can offer an enabling escape from the violent dialectics of dominance and subservience that is exposed by *Gods with Stainless Ears* as a primary feature of the war machine's encroachment on west Wales.60

The portrayal of the village here also speaks to traditional textiles in the 'naïve' style, such as the *arpilleras* that emerged from Peru in the 1980s. Made by proletarian women in mothers' clubs in towns and cities, the *arpillera* drew on ancient traditions of Andean dollmaking and textile art to depict scenes from rural life.61 As Mary Louise Pratt notes, these representations set out a kind of

55 (Pikoulis 1983, p. 13).

56 (Gambrell 1997, p. 5).

57 (Conran 1983, p. 125; Pikoulis 1995, p. 205).

58 (Pikoulis 1983, p. 15).

59 (Mansfield 1954, p. 94).

60 (Ashcroft et al. 2002, pp. 33–34).

61 (Pratt 1992, p. 141).

'atemporal mapping' of place that 'celebrate[s] plenitude, variety, and detail', while also depicting 'a social space teeming with people and domestic animals whose activities contribute as much to the variety as the plant world does.'62 Like these fabric pictures, 'Poem from Llanybri' fills its entire canvas with detail and plays with perspective so as to represent a 'whole way of life'. Pratt holds that the *arpillera*, while aimed in part at an Anglo-European consumer, is also 'an autoethnographic gesture, transculturating elements of metropolitan discourses to create self-affirmations designed for reception in the metropolis'. In these kinds of representations, 'subjugated subjects engage, and seek to engage, the metropolis's constructions of those it subjugates', and 'Poem from Llanybri' can be seen to perform a similarly transcultural 'mirror dance'.63

Roberts's depiction of Llanybri walks, as it does in many of her poems, a gossamer line between clarity and opacity, 'cultural "revelation" and cultural "silence"', an effect seen by Pikoulis as willfully teasing.64 Indeed, tropes of evasiveness are not uncommon in 'insider-outsider' modernist women writers and artists; Gambrell notes that the 'textual elusiveness' of figures such as Hurston, Leonora Carrington and Kahlo signals their resistance to being construed as transparent containers or transmitters of exotic otherness.65 In Roberts's poetry, an 'incomplete intimacy' signals a gendered appreciation of cultural (and linguistic) difference that cannot be grasped within the knowledge structures of metropolitan scrutiny.66 This we see in her poem 'Plasnewydd'. As in 'Poem from Llanybri', the speaker playfully adopts the role of Clifford's ethnological 'informant':

You want to know about my village. You should want to know even if you Don't want to know about my village. (CP, 4)

The village is initially presented as a small, static location to pass through: 'You could/Pass it with a winning gait. Smile.' (CP, 4) Moving from the general (the whole village) to the particular, the speaker effects an abrupt shift of perspective, focusing in on a village cow:

WAR. 'There's no sense in it. Just look at her two lovely eyes Look at those green big big eyes And the way she hangs her tail. Like a weasel. Ferret. Snowball Running away on the breast of a hill. WAR. There's no sense in it. (CP, 5)

While the passage perhaps invokes Ovid's *Metamorphoses*, a more important source is surely the 'Hanes Taliesin', as collected in Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the *Mabinogion* (1838–45), in which Gwion Bach, sought after by a shape-shifting witch Ceridwen, is chased for his poetic powers, with both characters becoming subject to a dizzying array of metamorphoses into different animal forms. The legendary narrative of Gwion's transformation is used by Roberts in order to provide the effect of viewing the village through a kaleidoscopic range of changing perspectives: the cow's anthropomorphic presentation serves to blur the division between human and animal, while the gaze of her 'big big eyes' on the viewing subject (the reader) blurs divisions between the viewing subject and her ethnographic 'object'. The cow's sudden movement away over 'the breast of a hill' suggests the impossibility of fully 'knowing' the 'other' that is Llanybri. In this respect, the position of Llanybri

62 (Ibid., p. 142).

63 (Ibid, p. 143; Taussig 1987, p. 305).

64 (Ashcroft et al. 2002, p. 58; Pikoulis 1983, p. 15).

65 (Gambrell 1997, p. 32).

66 (Ibid., p. 56). Daniel G. Williams explores similar dynamics of linguistic difference in relation to Margiad Evans's writing in his chapter on (Williams 2010, pp. 810–13).

and the Welsh culture it represents is shown to mirror Luce Irigaray's conception of the 'feminine' as 'already elsewhere than in the discursive machinery where you claim to take [it] by surprise'.67

Patrick McGuinness has suggested Roberts's literary style emulates the 'naïve' painting in its intricate harmoniousness, its eclectic combination of images (*Gods with Stainless Ears*, for example, gives us 'euclidian [ ... ] air', 'sprockets of kale', 'Women titans [as] weathervanes' in the space of a few stanzas (CP, 47)), and in its tendency to '[play] fast and loose with [scale and] proportion'.68 Her naïve style is also evident on the level of tone, contributing to the 'problems of appreciation' noted by Conran: in a review of *Gods with Stainless Ears* in 1951, a *Times Literary Supplement* critic dismissed 'the contrast between the high tragic tones of the poet and the naivety of her incidents' as 'irresistibly ludicrous'.69 Indeed, in 'Plasnewydd', the seriousness of the subject matter—'WAR'—is belied by the speaker's comic levity. This is not down to Roberts's lack of understanding of literary conventions, however: rather, as Walkowitz has shown, a tone marked by naturalness and triviality can be seen to challenge the principles of proportion and literary 'decorum' that writers like Joyce and Woolf portray as supporting the imperial project.70

Although Roberts was a skilful formalist, critics have observed that there is a 'calculated awkwardness' to her poetry—a contention borne out by the image, in 'Poem from Llanybri', of walking 'carefully with clogs'.71 Patrick McGuinness has insisted that 'Some of her alleged obscurity, and much of her oblique or inverted syntax' can be attributed to her 'tendency to transcribe, unaltered, the idioms and phrases she hears all around her.'72 She shared George Orwell's association of the metropolitan political establishment with a corrupt language that, detached from any shared referential value, served as an instrument of power and oppression. Like Orwell, she thought clarity and democratic representation might be achieved only through public recourse to the 'vivid, homemade turn of speech' that she recognized in the inhabitants of Llanybri:73 she opined in her diary that 'the officials speak at their own low level, and do not understand the wise and simple minds of the agricultural community', adding, 'And if we do not listen to the rural wisdom of the common man we shall be a lost Nation.' (DLR 17) Many of the villagers were Welsh speakers who used an accented, idiomatic English, and, as Laura Wainwright observes, 'Roberts seems to revel in the linguistic oddness and expressive potency of this vernacular mode'.74 But rather than constructing a 'synthetic vernacular', as does Hugh MacDiarmud, poems such as 'Plasnewydd' use the oral vernacular 'to signify the insertion of the outsider into the discourse.'75 Nineteen of 'Plasnewydd"s thirty-nine lines are taken up by direct speech quoted more or less verbatim from Roberts's friend Rosie Davies, a local farm worker then in her forties. The conversation is described in Roberts's diary (note the class distance inherent in the use of her married name):

'Well you see, it's like this, Mrs Rhys' ... and Rosie stands on one foot with her hand on her hip, she licks around her mouth, then begins talking again, and it is always the same, 'Well you see, it's like this, Mrs Rhys. I can't imagine the war or fighting at all, I've never travelled at all, only to go to Cardiff, so I can't imagine this war at all. She's very wrong mind you (meaning the WAR), and what I feel is they're all flesh and blood like you or I Mrs Rhys, aren't they? If you were to be stabbed you would feel it just as much as they, wouldn't you? WAR there's no sense in it. We're simple people we all get on. War there's no sense in it'. (DLR, 16)

67 (Irigaray 1988, p. 103).

68 (Roberts 2005, pp. xxxiv–xxxv).

69 Review of *Gods with Stainless Ears*, *Times Literary Supplement*, 16 November 1951, quoted in (Roberts 2005, p. xxxiv).

70 See (Walkowitz 2006, p. 56).

71 (Goodby and Wigginton 2013, p. 175).

72 (Roberts 2005, p. xxi).

73 (Orwell 1946, p. 252).

74 (Wainwright 2018, p. 62).

75 (Ashcroft et al. 2002, p. 55).

One of the things that lends Roberts's 'naïve' style its uncanniness—its sense of the familiar in the strange, and vice versa—is its tendency to place objects or literary styles within unusual contexts; *Gods* sees a tiger-like 'striped rhizome cat' escaping over the waters of the estuary (CP 57), while modern-day town mayors wear the 'torques' of princes as they wade out to sea after a plane crash (CP, 50). By re-placing the language of war within the realm of the female and oral with the refrain 'WAR. "There's no sense in it ... .", 'Plasnewydd' estranges and deheroizes the rhetoric of conflict, robbing it of its engrained meaning and power. While the technique has something in common with Surrealism's 'simulations' of voices of madwomen, in Roberts's work, the ventriloquized voices of Welshwomen are eminently sane.

The 'calculated awkwardness' of Roberts's style calls attention to the fact that 'Hers is an impressive impersonation—for such it surely is—of cultural authority'.76 As in 'Poem from Llanybri' where the reader must 'go carefully with clogs', or 'The Circle of C', whose vatic investigations culminate in the prosaic lines: 'Heard Rosie say lace curtained in clogs/I've put a Yule log on your grate' (CP, 7), the sense is projected of the speaker walking and *talking* in Rosie's shoes (stuffing bits of lace in them to make them fit?) to achieve a practical understanding of her point of view. Following the ideas of Sianne Ngai, it can be suggested that Roberts's poetry thus shows how thinking through and about powerlessness can generate new modes of thought.77 Indeed, her work often emphasizes the centrality of copying and mimicry within a culture's formation, but this inherent performativity does not, for her, seem to be antagonistic to authenticity. Her sensuous recollections of Argentina in 'Royal Mail' include 'peacock struts and nets mimicrying butterflies' (CP, 27), while the notes to *Gods with Stainless Ears* include a reference to Romantic 'poet Iolo Morganwg in particular, who forged numerous parchment poems' claiming to be ancient texts of the Welsh tradition (CP, 72). Understood in its composite dimensions, as mimic/cry, the word informs the 'naïve', tragi-comic tone of Roberts's poetry.

#### **4. Make do and Mend: Fabricating Self and Society**

Early on during her time in Llanybri on 20 March 1940, Roberts was already mimicking the Llanybri villagers: 'I drew my scarlet cape around me and walked leisurely, as village people do.' (DLR, 9) Although the vibrant apparel signalled Roberts's love of colour, a statement of her proud individuality within the 'damp and stony stare of a village' (CP, 27), it was made, as her daughter, Angharad Rhys recalls, of Welsh wool (she later gave it to her friend, the writer Celia Buckmaster, as a gift) and was well designed for keeping the cold winds at bay. A practical item that served both as a disguise, a means of adaption and a revelation of Roberts's personal self-identity, it often appears, in a mythic guise, within her poetry.

Although the extent and complexity of Roberts's engagement with tropes of costuming and textile in her poetry are beyond the scope of this essay, similar to Kahlo, she uses clothing and disguise to present a self perpetually in motion, as in 'The Circle of C' where 'I walk and cinder bats riddle my cloak' (CP, 7).78 Playing on the desire on the part of her readers that she disclose her 'real' self, she instead calls that 'self' into question. This we see in her poem 'Low Tide', which depicts Roberts's experience of miscarriage, also in March 1940:

Every waiting moment is a fold of sorrow Pierced within the heart. Pieces of mind get torn off emotionally, In large wisps. (CP, 5)

The text seems to establish itself in the confessional mode, but all we really see are layers of a fabricated ('sewn-together') self and its fraying edges, only hinting at the pain that is felt within. This

76 (Thomas 2019, p. 26).

77 (Ngai 2005, p. 14).

78 (Gambrell 1997, p. 54).

questioning of the 'true' subject of disclosure through images of veiling and costuming extends to her representation of Welsh culture: take, for example, her use of Rosie's patterned apron as a border for her painting of 'Llanybri Old Chapel', or her description of a neighbour's cottage:

Here an old widow of eighty-four lives. She always seems to have a pink geranium flowering at her window throughout the year. I cannot tell you more about her as I pass, as today she has fussily put up a lace curtain right across the lower window frame, drawn two citrine curtains towards the middle of her window, which she told me she had dyed with her own water. She has at the side of these two dark blue hangings of baize. Then there is as well the navy-blue blind just inside the small frame of the non-opening window. Such are the window dressings of many in the village. (DLR, 5)

Here we have an image of the 'periphery' as excess and 'gratuity'; an idea of Welsh culture, glimpsed from a female perspective not in synecdoche or totality, but in a series of ever-proliferating decorative details. The window coverings signal Roberts's exclusion as outsider, while alluding to a collective reticence that she ascribed to the 'continual subjugation of the Welsh by conquerors' (DLR, 68) which meant that they 'never failed to exercise the flexibility of their wit to conceal their thoughts'.79 The impression is given, though, that cultural identity is revealed in the layered materiality of the window displays, not behind or before it, even as the elderly woman's difference is hinted at, yet left in shadow.

As Gambrell, following Jean Franco, has shown, Kahlo's self-portraits trouble masculinist-imperial fantasies about female interiority by portraying her interior as broken and pierced, thereby collapsing the boundaries between inside and outside.80 In a similar manner, Roberts harnesses the naïve mode to present the Welsh 'heart' as an item of home-made craft; pierced; on display; but always, rather like the English language in which it is written, obscuring as much as it reveals. This we can see in her description of a typical coracleman's house: 'a great pride, just now I am thinking of one home in particular, a pincushion in the shape of a heart, studded in design with glass coloured beads, and set in a glass box.' (DLR, 138) Again, 'pointedly incomplete intimacy' inscribes a difference that yet exceeds the capacities of the English language to contain it.81

Through her development of a unique late modernist 'naïve' style, Roberts seeks to create visibility for Welsh culture *and* gendered experience by transforming the consciousness of her readers. Using the idea of the 'naïve', the 'amateur' and the 'home-made', she reformulates our conceptions about literary art in order to give women writers a stake in national culture. The folk practices she portrays, while seeming to comply with the centre's constructions of a 'primitive' periphery, are somehow always in excess of metropolitan norms, and are used to assert the importance of cultural difference in the face of Fascism and totalitarianism. Although Roberts's work is concerned with continuity, she is no nostalgist; rather, in her adoption of a naïve style, she shows a desire to move away from patriarchal ideas of tradition and heritage in order to explore multiple forms of affiliation. The oral vernacular becomes embedded in Roberts's exploration of language as a malleable, heterogeneous entity, without unified origin. Using sewing and craft as model and metaphor for the lines of entanglement linking people across disjuncture and difference,82 she weaves her own story as female outsider into new patterns of Welsh culture.

79 (Roberts 2008e, p. 128). All references are to this edition and henceforth will be given parenthetically in the text.

80 (Gambrell 1997, p. 72).

81 (Ibid., p. 56).

82 (Anderson, p. 227).

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

**Acknowledgments:** Many thanks to Angharad and Prydein Rhys for their generosity in granting permission for the use of all unpublished material by Lynette Roberts in this article. I am also grateful to Angharad for her insights into her mother's life and work, which proved invaluable when writing this article. I extend my gratitude to Carcanet for all citations from *Collected Poems* and *Diaries, Letters and Recollections*. Kirsti Bohata, Katie Gramich and Jane Moore offered helpful and insightful observations on this research at various stages of its development, and Victoria Chen's precise and attentive editing has been greatly appreciated during the publication process.

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

#### **References**

Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. *Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation*. London and New York: Routledge.

Roberts, Lynette. 2005. *Collected Poems*. Edited by Patrick McGuinness. Manchester: Carcanet.

Roberts, Lynette. 2008d. Letters to Robert Graves. In *Diaries, Letters and Recollections*. Edited by Patrick McGuinness. Manchester: Carcanet, pp. 167–88.

Roberts, Lynette. 2008e. Simplicity of the Welsh Village. In *Diaries, Letters and Recollections*. Edited by Patrick McGuinness. Manchester: Carcanet, pp. 127–32.

Thomas, M. Wynn. 1999. *Corresponding Cultures: The Two Literatures of Wales*. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Wheale, Nigel. 1994. Lynette Roberts: Legend and Form in the 1940s. *Critical Quarterly* 36: 4–19. [CrossRef]

Wilkinson, John. 2007. The Water-Rail of Tides. In *The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess*. Cambridge: Salt, pp. 189–94.

Williams, Raymond. *The Politics of Modernism*. London and New York: Verso. First published 1989.

Williams, Daniel G. 2010. Welsh Modernism. In *The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms*. Edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth and Andrew Thacker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 797–816. Williams, Daniel G. 2012. *Black Skin: Blue Books: African Americans and Wales, 1845–1945*. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Woolf, Virginia. 2008. Professions for Women. In *Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays*. Edited by David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 140–45.

© 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* **"From Scotland to the World": The Poetry of Hope Mirrlees, Helen Adam, Muriel Spark, and Veronica Forrest-Thomson**

#### **Dorothy McMillan**

Honorary Research Fellow, English Literature, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Received: 12 September 2019; Accepted: 5 December 2019; Published: 10 December 2019

**Abstract:** The four poets that provide the material for this chapter did not know each other and they probably did not know each other's work. However, they had important formative experiences in common: They were all educated in Scotland and they all left Scotland after that early education. Yet, they all retained special, although different, ties to that country, to its history, and its writing. They were all "modern" in their poetry, sometimes bizarrely so: Of each of them it could be said, "There was no one like her." This strangeness they also share, as they share a willingness, even desire, to shock, a muddling of contemporary and archaic, of real and legendary. Veronica Forrest-Thomson's "Hold on to your seat-belt Persephone" is an indicative phrase. I aim to show that these serially inimitable modern writers have complicated and intertwined Scottish and international connections.

**Keywords:** Scotland; ballads; kaleidoscope; Charles Bernstein; Edwin Morgan

English critics in particular, seemingly mesmerised by Irish writers, have only gingerly grappled with what has been happening north of Carlisle. We like spacemen as well as bog men. We like, and write about, both kinds of chip. We are carnivalesque, and will never give up the comedic mode. We have long feelers that extend into America and Europe rather than into England.