Patchen's Evil Book

Dogs with broken legs are shot; men with broken souls write through the night.

Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight

Under the pressure of events in the late spring of 1940, the poet Kenneth Patchen, then living in Greenwich Village, set aside his projected epic, "The Hunted City," and began working hard on a multilayered visionary narrative about the new war, much of it in the form of a daybook. He called it The Journal of Albion Moonlight. At the time, Patchen enjoyed a rising reputation as one of the most outspoken and inventive of the young writers who were just breaking free of the Great Depression. His first books of poems were published by Random House and James Laughlin's fledgling New Directions, already the imprint of the best advanced writing. He was noticed in the Pulitzer Prize voting for 1939. Amos Wilder devoted a chapter to Patchen's work, along with chapters on Conrad Aiken, Hart Crane, Robinson Jeffers, D. H. Lawrence, William Butler Yeats, and T. S. Eliot, in his important study The Spiritual Aspects of the New Poetry (1940).

Patchen was "a man who reads newspapers and has nightmares," as Anaïs Nin remarked after seeing early drafts of The Journal of Albion Moonlight (63). The news and nightmares of those days, when Nazi Germany was running wild, had to do with barbarians at the gates and the sickening descent of the US into the moral condition of war. Patchen was, as he remained, an uncompromising pacifist of a kind not entirely exotic at the end of the 1930s, when heroic memories of Randolph Bourne were stirring, Mohandas Gandhi regularly published exhortations to nonviolence in American magazines, student activists swore to defy militarism, and A. J. Muste, just returned from his excursion among the Trotskyists, was reinvigorating the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Patchen was also a man of uncomfortable conscience who felt himself to be personally implicated in the disorders of his time. He could not establish any degree of psychic distance from what he called the cesspool of history.

The colleagues closest to him during the composition of The Journal—Nin, who came to dislike him, the young Robert Duncan, and Henry Miller—grew rather too carelessly accustomed to thinking of him as a transcendental figure, both cursed and ennobled by his identification with a fallen humanity, who might redeem the time by enacting a personal sacrifice through his prophetic art. Their romantic attitudes reinforced his own sense of mission, at some considerable cost to peace of mind and literary temperance, and impressed him with the responsibility to clear away the dying past and speak with anew voice. He would not be satisfied with familiar kinds of writing against war—with narratives, for instance, in which sympathetic characters bear witness to the common suffering by being exposed to extremes of it. Even the best of them—even Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) or E. E. Cummings's The Enormous Room (1922), to use the example of works Patchen would certainly have known and respected—took refuge by the dexterities of art in some sort of emotional separate peace. Rather than registering the maze of directions, counterdirections, and dead ends, the phantasms of unsorted experience, they moved symbolic points of view sequentially through narrow corridors of history. They invented literary solutions to moral problems.

In response to the moral disequilibrium between war and received literary treatments of it, Patchen tried his hand at a new kind of expressive form, compromised as little as possible by literary convention. He proceeded by fragmenting, then reassembling in unfamiliar configurations, often arbitrarily, not only the integrity and continuity of events but the integrity and continuity of the consciousness witnessing them. The process was neither artless nor random, but it was intended to give shape and voice to the chaotic—which was, of course, one definition of folly for most of the mainstream literary people who noticed the book at the time.

There...