Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) (10 page)

NORTH AMERICAN POETS

J
IM
O’B
ANNON

Macon 1940–Los Angeles, 1996

J
im O’Bannon, poet and
football player, was equally susceptible to the allure of force and a yearning
for delicate, perishable things. His earliest literary endeavors are indebted to
the Beat esthetic, to judge from his first book of poems,
Macon Night
(1961), published in his hometown, in the short-lived City in Flames series. The
texts are preceded by long dedications to Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso,
Kerouac, Snyder and Ferlinghetti. O’Bannon didn’t know these poets personally
(at the time he hadn’t left his home state of Georgia), but he maintained a
profuse and enthusiastic correspondence with at least three of them.

The following year he hitchhiked to New York City, where he met
Ginsberg and a black poet at a hotel in the Village. They talked, drank and
recited poems. Then Ginsberg and the black guy suggested they make love. At
first O’Bannon didn’t understand. When one of the poets started to undress him
and the other began to stroke him, the terrible truth dawned. For a few seconds
he didn’t know what to do. Then he punched them away and left. “I would have
beaten them to death,” he was to say later, “but I felt sorry for them.”

In spite of the blows he had received, Ginsberg included four of
O’Bannon’s poems in a Beat anthology, which was published a year later in New
York. O’Bannon, who by that time was back in Georgia, wanted to sue Ginsberg and
the publisher. His lawyer advised him against taking legal action. He decided to
go back to New York and personally administer the lesson. For days he roamed the
city in vain. Later, he would write a poem about the experience: “The Walker,”
in which an angel crosses New York City on foot without encountering a single
righteous man. He also wrote his major poem of estrangement from the Beats, an
apocalyptic text that transports the reader to various scenes from history and
places in the human soul (the siege of Atlanta by Sherman’s troops; the death
throes of a Greek shepherd boy; daily life in small towns; caves inhabited by
homosexuals, Jews and African Americans; the redeeming sword that hangs over
every head, forged from an alloy of gold-colored metals).

In 1963 he traveled to Europe on a Daniel Stone Fellowship for the
Development of Young Artists. In Paris he visited Ètienne de Saint-Ètienne, who
struck him as dirty and embittered. He also met Jules-Albert Ramis, the great
neo-classical French poet and admirer of all things American. It was to be the
beginning of a lasting friendship. In a rented car, O’Bannon toured Italy,
Yugoslavia and Greece. When the money from the Fellowship ran out, he decided to
stay in France. Jules-Albert Ramis found him work at a hotel in Dieppe which
belonged to his family. The hotel turned out to be “more like a cemetery,” but
the job left O’Bannon plenty of free time for writing. The grey skies over the
English Channel gave his inspiration wings. At the end of 1965 an almost
unheard-of publisher in Atlanta finally accepted his second book of poetry, the
first he felt entirely satisfied with.

But he did not return to the United States. One rainy afternoon, a
tourist from Brunswick, Georgia, named Margaret Hogan, came to the hotel. It was
love at first sight. Two weeks later, O’Bannon had left his job and was
traveling through Spain with the woman who was to be his first wife and his only
muse. They were married in a civil ceremony six months later in the French
capital; an emotional, melancholic and declamatory Ramis gave the bride away. By
then O’Bannon’s book had received mixed reviews and prompted a range of comments
in the United States’ media. Some Beat poets, though not the movement’s main
figures, reacted in kind to the attacks of the ex-Beat O’Bannon. Others,
including Ginsberg, remained indifferent. The book,
The Way of the
Brave
, combines a singular vision of nature (a strangely empty nature,
devoid of animal life, turbulent and sovereign) with a clear bent for personal
insults, defamation and libel, not to mention the threats and bragging that
recur, one way or another, in every poem. Some spoke of the “rebirth of a
nation,” and a few enthusiastic readers believed that they were witnessing the
emergence of a new Carl Sandburg for the second half of the twentieth century.
Among the poets of Atlanta, however, the book met with a cool and aloof
reception.

Meanwhile, in Paris, O’Bannon had joined the Mandarins’ Club, a
literary group led by Ramis and composed exclusively of his young disciples, two
of whom were working on a translation of
The Way of the Brave
, soon to
be published under the same imprint as Ramis’ own books, a fact that was to play
an appreciable role in bolstering O’Bannon’s reputation among North American
poetry critics, attentive as ever to what was happening across the Atlantic.

In 1970 O’Bannon returned to the States, where each year the bookshop
windows displayed a new collection of his poems.
The Way of the Brave
was followed by
Untilled Land, The Burning Stairway of the Poem,
Conversation with Jim O’Brady, Apples on the Stairs, The Stairway of Heaven
and Hell, New York Revisited, The Best Poems of Jim O’Bannon, The Rivers and
Other Poems, The Children of Jim O’Brady in the American Dawn
, and so
on.

He made a living giving lectures and readings all around the country.
He was married and divorced four times, although he always said that the love of
his life was Margaret Hogan. Time mollified his literary invective: there is a
yawning gulf between the aggressive sarcasm of “Negative of John Brown” and the
Olympian serenity of the ailing poet in “Homage to a Vine Street Dog.” He
remained firm in his disdain for Jews and homosexuals to the end, although at
the time of his death he was beginning, gradually, to accept African
Americans.

R
ORY
L
ONG

Pittsburgh, 1952–Laguna Beach, 2017

R
ory’s father, the poet
Marcus Long, was a friend and disciple of Charles Olson, who used to spend a few
days each year at the Longs’ house in Aserradero, Arizona, near Phoenix (where
Marcus was a professor of American literature); a brief, pleasant stay in the
company of one of his cherished disciples. So it was in all probability the
master himself (and the boy’s father, of course) who taught young Rory the right
way to read a book of poetry, and gave him his first lessons in projective and
non-projective verse. Alternative scenario: hiding under the porch, Rory
listened to them talking, while the Arizona dusk settled into eternal
fixity.

In any case, to summarize: non-projective verse conforms to
traditional versification; it is personal, “closed” poetry, in which it is
always possible to detect the self-regard of the citizen-poet, fondling his
navel or his balls, complacently displaying his joys or woes; by contrast,
projective verse, exemplified on occasion by the work of Ezra Pound and William
Carlos Williams, is “open,” the poetry of “displaced energy,” written according
to a technique analogous to “composition by fields.” In a word, and to fall into
the very same hole as Olson, projective verse is the opposite of non-projective
verse.

Or that was how young Rory Long saw it, anyway. “Closed” poetry was
Donne and Poe, Robert Browning and Archibald McLeish; “open” poetry was Pound
and Williams (but not all of their poems). “Closed” poetry was personal: by the
individual poet for the individual reader. “Open” poetry was impersonal: the
hunter (the poet) tracking down the memory of his tribe for the recipient and
constituent of that memory (the reader). And Rory Long supposed that the Bible
was “open” poetry, and that the great multitudes moving or crawling in the
shadow of the Book were ideal readers, hungry for the luminous Word. And this
enormous, empty edifice was complete in his mind before he reached the age of
seventeen. He was energetic then as ever and he set to work immediately. He had
to populate and explore the edifice, so the first thing he did was to buy a
Bible since he couldn’t find one in the house. And then he began to memorize
passage after passage, and saw that the poetry spoke directly to his heart.

At twenty he became a preacher in the Church of the True Martyrs of
America, and published a book of poetry that no one read, not even his father,
who, being a true son of the Enlightenment, was ashamed to see his son crawling
with the other crawlers in the shadow of the great Nomadic Book. But no failure
could daunt Rory Long, who was already tearing through New Mexico, Arizona,
Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Utah and back to New Mexico, on a whirlwind,
counter-clockwise tour. And that was more or less how Rory Long felt: in a
whirl, inside out, guts and bones on display; disillusioned with Olson (but not
with projective and non-projective verse), whose poems, when he finally read
them (which he was slow do to—dazzled by the theory and his own ignorance),
seemed almost fraudulent (after reading
The Maximus Poems
, he vomited
for three hours); disillusioned with the Church of the True Martyrs of America,
whose members could see the plains of the Book but not its centrifugal force,
not the volcanoes and underground rivers; disillusioned with the times—the
seventies, full of sad hippies and sad whores. He even considered killing
himself! But instead he went on reading. And writing: letters, plays, songs,
television scripts and movie screenplays, unfinished novels, stories, animal
fables, comic-strip plots, biographies, economic and religious pamphlets, and
above all poetry, in which he blended all the foregoing genres.

He tried to be impersonal: he wrote visitor’s guides to the Book and
survival kits for explorers of the Book. He got two tattoos: a broken heart on
his right arm, which symbolized his quest, and a book in flames on his left arm,
which symbolized his calling. He experimented with oral poetry: not shouting or
onomatopoeia, nor the wordplay of the zombies who seem to belong to a tribe
parallel to, but different from, the people of the Book; not the whispers of a
farmer remembering childhood and sweethearts, but a voice that spoke in warm,
familiar tones, like a radio host at the ends of the earth. And he befriended
radio hosts, to see if he could learn something from them, like how to recognize
the impersonal voice roaming America’s radio waves. A tone at once colloquial
and dramatic. The voice of the man-who-is-all-eyes wandering around until it
finds the consciousness of the man-who-is-all-ears. And so, as the years went
by, he moved from church to church and house to house, publishing nothing
(unlike his peers), remaining obscure, but writing, submerging himself in the
muddy waters of Olson’s theory and other theories, weary but open-eyed, worthy
son and heir (in spite of himself) to the poet Marcus Long.

When he finally emerged from the underground, he seemed a different
man. He was thinner (he measured six foot one and weighed 132 pounds) and older,
but he had found the way or at least some short cuts that would soon lead him to
the Great Way itself. He had begun preaching for the Texan Church of the Last
Days, and his political ideas, which had been muddled in former times, were
clear and coherent now. He believed in the necessity of an American
resurrection. He believed he
knew
the
quite unprecedented characteristics of that resurrection. He believed in the
American family: its right to receive the manifold, true message, and its right
not to be poisoned by Zionist messages or messages manipulated by the CIA. He
believed in individuality and America’s need to resume the space race with
renewed vigor. He believed that a large part of the Union’s body was infected
with a mortal disease and that a surgical intervention was required. Having put
Olson and his father, but not poetry, behind him (he published a successful
collection of short stories, poems and “thoughts” entitled
Noah’s Ark
), he devoted himself to
spreading his message in the Southwest. And in that he was successful too. The
message spread. Via radio waves and video cassettes. It was that simple. And
although the past was fading more and more quickly, sometimes he wondered how it
could have been so hard to find the true way.

He grew fat (at one point he weighed 265 pounds) and rich, and soon he
went where rich people go: California. There he founded the Charismatic Church
of Californian Christians. And he had so many followers and it was so easy to
spread the Message that he even had time to write sarcastic and humorous poems:
texts that made him laugh, and his laughter transformed them into mirrors
reflecting his face, unblemished, alone in some Texan room, or with strangers as
fat as he was, who called themselves his friends, his biographers, his
representatives, at charity dinners within other charity dinners. For example,
he wrote a poem in which Leni Riefenstahl makes love with Ernst Jünger. A
hundred-year-old man and a ninety-year-old woman. Bones and dead tissue bumping
and grinding. God in heaven, said Rory in his big malodorous library, Old Ernst
is riding her hard, showing no mercy, and the German whore is crying out for
more, more, more. A good poem: the eyes of the elderly pair light up with an
enviable brightness; they suck at each other so hard their old jaws creak, while
they glance sidelong at the reader, hinting at the lesson. A lesson clear as
water. It is time to put an end to democracy. Why are so many Nazis still alive?
Take Hess, for example, who would have made it to a hundred if he hadn’t
committed suicide. What makes them live so long? What makes them almost
immortal? The blood they spilled? The flight of the Book? A new level of
consciousness? The Charismatic Church of California went underground. A
labyrinth where Ernst and Leni went on fucking, unable to uncouple, like a pair
of dogs on fire in a valley of sheep. In a valley of blind sheep? A valley of
hypnotized sheep? My voice is hypnotizing them, thought Rory Long. But what is
the secret of longevity? Purity. Searching, working, preparing for the
millennium on various levels. And some nights he felt that he was touching the
body of the New Man with the tips of his fingers. He lost a hundred pounds.
Ernst and Leni were fucking in the sky for him. And he realized that this was no
vulgar, if torrid, hypnotic therapy, but the veritable Host of Fire.

Then he went completely crazy and Cunning occupied every nook of his
body. He had money, fame, and good lawyers. He had radio stations, newspapers,
magazines, and television networks. And he had robust good health, until one
midday in March 2017, when a young African-American man named Baldwin Rocha blew
his head off.