{"id":95807,"date":"2016-03-23T13:18:49","date_gmt":"2016-03-23T17:18:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=95807"},"modified":"2016-03-23T13:58:00","modified_gmt":"2016-03-23T17:58:00","slug":"branded-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/23\/branded-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Branded Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

The long tradition of outlaw poets.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From the cover of Merle Haggard\u2019s Branded Man<\/i>, 1967.<\/p><\/div>\n

Max Nelson is writing a series<\/a> on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on Austin Reed\u2019s\u00a0<\/a><\/em>The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Early in the first volume of Panegyric<\/a><\/em>\u2014the bad-tempered, ironically self-deprecating eulogy he wrote for himself in the late eighties\u00ad\u2014Guy Debord sang the praises of a kind of writer he knew he could never become. \u201cThere have always been artists and poets capable of living in violence,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe impatient Marlowe died, knife in hand, arguing over a tavern bill.\u201d Five hundred years earlier, in the picture Debord goes on to imagine, the medieval poet Fran\u00e7ois Villon presided over a cluster of writers who lived raggedly and riskily at the banks of the Seine. These were outlaw poets, \u201cdevotees of the dangerous life\u201d\u00ad\u2014starved, browbeaten figures for whom pariahdom, persecution, imprisonment and homelessness were both facts of life and the materials out of which they made their art.<\/p>\n

Outlaw poets are what certain prison writers become when their term is up\u2014when they\u2019ve been let loose into a world that spurns them and whose values they reject. In some cases, the poetry they write from this position turns out bitter, sour, and defiantly indigestible, full of lines that dare their civilized, comfortable readers to tolerate rude language, unhinged imagery, and wild variations in refinement and shape. In others, it comes off as a seductive, pining lament, a plea for pardon or a performance of rueful self-blame. Some of the great outlaw poets shuffle unpredictably between these two tones. \u201cI\u2019d like to hold my head up and be proud of who I am<\/a>,\u201d Merle Haggard sang in 1967, less than a decade after the end of his two-year term in San Quentin: \u201cbut they won\u2019t let my secret go untold; \/ I paid the debt I owed \u2019em, \/ but they\u2019re still not satisfied; \/ Now I\u2019m a branded man \/ out in the cold.\u201d He could write an equally convincing song that placed the fault on precisely the opposite side: \u201cMama tried to raise me better<\/a>, but her pleading I denied; \/ that leaves only me to blame \u2019cause Mama tried.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The cluster of chart-topping records Haggard made in the late sixties; the verses Villon assembled into his long poem The Testament<\/a><\/em> after a short lifetime of thefts, assaults, arrests, and at least one imprisonment; the poetry Paul Verlaine wrote before, during, and after the eighteen months he served in a Belgian jail; the short collection Gregory Corso published in 1958 and dedicated \u201cto the angels of Clinton prison, who, in my 17th year, handed me, from all the cells surrounding me, books of illumination\u201d\u2014the canon of outlaw poetry is as motley and diverse as the circumstances of the outlaw poets themselves. It doesn\u2019t bear generalizations well.<\/p>\n

It does, however, suggest the unstable mixture of defiance and shame with which these poets all left prison. They played with abasing themselves to their parents, their patrons, and the polite society of their time while at the same time proudly courting that same society\u2019s condemnation. In some moods they wrote as if they craved the peace and quiescence of a settled life; at other points, they couldn\u2019t help raging against the good, settled people who\u2019d left them moldering behind bars. For the outlaw poet, there have always been particular difficulties involved in deciding how palatable a poem should be; how much it should conform to a reader\u2019s expectations; how smooth it should go down.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A page from The Testament<\/i>. Click\u00a0to enlarge.<\/p><\/div>\n

Fran\u00e7ois Villon claimed to be no more than thirty when he wrote The Testament<\/em>, but by then he had already, as he put it in the poem\u2019s first lines, \u201cdrunk down all my shames.\u201d His troubles began soon after he received the second of his two degrees from the University of Paris in 1452, where he\u2019d come from his adoptive childhood home in the Burgundy town of Villon. Fran\u00e7ois grew up in a church cloister, and the first two crimes for which he was charged were both strikingly anticlerical. In 1455, his translator Barbara Sargent-Baur relates, he was accused of \u201ckilling a priest in a brawl\u201d; a year later, he helped steal a small fortune from the theology faculty of a Paris college. From then on he led a mostly uprooted, wandering life. The Testament<\/em> was composed late in 1461, no more than a month or two after a royal pardon freed Villon from the Orleans prison in which he\u2019d been locked up for months and periodically subjected to water torture.<\/p>\n

Villon\u2019s great poem was an outsized gesture of defiance; reading it, you wonder to what extent it was also meant to stand as an effective will. Most of The Testament<\/em>\u2019s 2,023 lines consist of a long roster of itemized bequests. Of these, the greater part is prankish and mischievously nose-thumbing. (\u201cItem, since the Keeper of the Seals \/ has chewed so much bee\u2019s excrement, \/ I give him (for he\u2019s a worthy man) \/ his seal already spat upon \u2026 \u201d) Others, with light revisions, could be mistaken for Merle Haggard verses:<\/p>\n

\n

Item, to my poor mother I give
(For her to hail our mistress with) \u2014
Who for me has bitter grief,
God knows, and many sorrows too, \u2014
No other castle have I, or fort
Where I may shelter body and soul
When harsh distress comes down on me,
And neither has my mother, poor thing! \u2014<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In some cases Villon left his heritors ballades and songs rather than objects, and these poems-within-the-poem show Villon at his most tonally unhinged. Randy come-ons\u2014\u201cat waking time, when her belly resounds, \/ she climbs on me so as not to waste her fruit\u201d\u2014follow bitter jeremiads about the passage of time and the briefness of youth. (\u201cAnd you the pretty sausage girl, \/ who are so nimble when you dance \u2026. \/ don\u2019t show your teacher disrespect \/ or soon you\u2019ll have to shut up shop \u2026 \/ when you become withered and old.\u201d) Occasionally he tells parables like that of the robber Diomedes, whom an emperor bought out of poverty and thereby, the poet slyly argues, rescued from his life of crime. (\u201cIf I could arm myself like you,\u201d the criminal tells the richer man, \u201cLike you I\u2019d be an emperor.\u201d) The sensibility that emerges from these cluttered elements was decidedly nasty and prickly\u2014that of a young man who\u2019d prematurely taken on an old vagabond\u2019s mistrust of other people and, for all his affronts to organized religion, an old cleric\u2019s distaste for sensual pleasure. It was as if, in many cases, he couldn\u2019t decide whether his warnings to \u201cpretty sausage girls\u201d and his cautionary tales to aspiring thieves were in earnest or jest.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Verlaine drinking absinthe in the Caf\u00e9 Fran\u00e7ois 1er in 1892. Photo: Paul Marsan Dornac.<\/p><\/div>\n

A similar ambiguity lingers over the poems Paul Verlaine wrote between 1872, when he\u2019d more or less abandoned his wife Mathilde and their child in favor of Arthur Rimbaud, and 1890, by which point even his more generous critics tend to agree the quality of his work had declined. (As most likely did Villon, he died young, shortly before his fifty-second birthday, in 1896.) Verlaine led a turbulent life\u2014between his marriage in 1870 and his flight to Belgium with Rimbaud two years after, he\u2019d had to decamp to the country briefly for his involvement in the Paris Commune\u2014and the poems he wrote during this period show him both pining for and repudiating a more settled state of mind.<\/p>\n

Not long after Verlaine fled with Rimbaud, he started performing his guilt and regret on the page. In one 1873 poem, he longed for the \u201cgay moist tenderness\u201d he imagined he and his wife had enjoyed. In another, he despaired over his dependence on his younger lover: \u201cI\u2019m tired of the varnished holly-tree \/ and of the shining boxwood too \/\/ tired of the field\u2019s monotony \/ and of everything, alas, but you!\u201d He titled his 1874 collection Romances sans paroles<\/em>, and in an 1889 poem he imagined those same \u201clove songs without words\u201d stinging his \u201cwashed-out heart\u201d with their accord discord <\/em>(\u201cdiscordant chord\u201d). By the time that earlier collection was published, Verlaine had been imprisoned in Mons for wounding Rimbaud in a drunken fight (that he was openly gay and a former Commune member surely did not help his case).<\/p>\n

His next book, Sagesse<\/em>, reflected the position in which he found himself after his release: lonely, financially pressed, a new convert to Roman Catholicism who struggled no less to submit to the faith than he\u2019d had to submit to marriage. (In one poem, he approvingly imagines \u201cthe soul that calmly bears its wrong\u201d as a \u201cvoice that sustains \/ artlessly its marriage-song.\u201d) In these later Verlaine poems, death often appeared as a form of consolation and difficulty as a kind of virtue:<\/p>\n

\n

The humble life with tedious, simple work
is an act of choice, and a deal of love it asks
To keep gay through dismal weeks and not to shirk,
To be strong, and waste yourself in wretched tasks \u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Verlaine left prison a branded man, at least in his own assessment, and a recurring fantasy in these poems is of forgetting his disgrace in a kind of work mostly unknown to this Paris-raised poet: agricultural labor. (One of the brightest poems in Sagesse <\/em>imagines a harvest in which \u201call is a breathless straining and a stir.\u201d) He traveled widely in the early eighties\u2014including to Britain, where he taught at various schools and survived another intense, tragic love affair\u2014but he spent his final years destitute in his home city, an urban outlaw whose lifestyle stood at an odd remove from the pastoral, spritely freedom he considered poetry\u2019s highest state:<\/p>\n

\n

Let your verse be a quick-wing\u2019d thing and light\u2014
such as one feels when a new love\u2019s fervor
to other skies wings the soul in flight.<\/p>\n

Happy-go-lucky, let your lines
disheveled run where the dawn wings lure,
smelling of wild mint, smelling of thyme \u2026.
and all the rest is literature.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

*<\/p>\n

In his biography of Verlaine, Stefan Zweig suggested a memorable, if possibly dubious, picture of the poet\u2019s upbringing:<\/p>\n

\n

His mother, all goodness and devotion, spoiling him with too much tenderness and forgiveness, passes through his life with uniformly quiet tread; she is a wonderfully noble martyr \u2026 Once when with hat on his head he had slept out the remainder of a wild night, her only comment was the silent one of holding a mirror before him.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For Villon, Verlaine, and Merle Haggard, mothers did the work of conscience; their \u201cbitter grief,\u201d in Villon\u2019s words, was a powerful source of regret and shame. That Gregory Corso ended up writing comparatively guiltless poems, some of which revel in the same kind of criminal freedom Verlaine fretted over, is partly because his mother had a different place in his private mythology. Barely a year after Gregory\u2019s birth, in 1930, Michelina Corso fled her husband, a physically abusive garment worker, to return to her hometown in Italy. As a child Corso lived with a series of foster parents, then, miserably, with his birth father. By his early teens, he was serving repeated sentences in New York municipal jails. He did his longest period of time, in Clinton, at seventeen. \u201cEvery poem I wrote,\u201d he once told Jack Kerouac in a long letter from 1958 about his early writing,<\/p>\n

\n

had something to do with a mother \u2026 I remember when Allen [Ginsberg] took me to see Mark van Doren my first year out of prison. I really wasn\u2019t too intent on going to see him, but Allen persuaded me, and he had me bring all my poems. Van Doren didn\u2019t make any comment, but when Allen and I got up to go he said: \u201cToo much mother.\u201d That night I burned all my prison poems.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In another letter from the same year, he summarized the state of mind from which all of these outlaw poets sporadically wrote: \u201cThough I learned much in prison \u2026 I had not learned how to live in the world; and thus when I found myself alone, lost, hungry, I became almost afraid, almost like a pregnant rat with a broom over it, and so I struck.\u201d<\/p>\n

His poems were no less ways of striking out than his thefts. Gasoline<\/a><\/em>, which he published in 1958 together with his earlier collection The Vestal Lady on Brattle<\/a><\/em>, is full of outbursts that fray and divide the poems that include them. From \u201cI Am 25\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

With a love a madness for Shelley
Chatterton Rimbaud
and the needy-yap of my youth
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 has gone from ear to ear
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I HATE OLD POETMEN!
Especially old poetmen who retract
who consult other old poetmen
who speak their youth in whispers,
saying:\u2014I did those then
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 but that was then
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 that was then\u2014<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"corso-gasoline-vestal-lady\"If Villon and Verlaine were always staging conflicts in their poems between outlaws and the parents who weep over them, Corso\u2019s voice as a poet was pointedly parentless. He \u201clet his lines disheveled run\u201d more than Verlaine ever did, in one case\u2014\u201cOde to Coit Tower\u201d\u2014letting them spill to more than five times the width of the page. He nurtured strong sympathies for rootless and disposed figures like the vagrant at the center of \u201cThe Last Warmth of Arnold,\u201d who \u201cused to walk around South Street \/ wondering about the various kinds of glue.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much later in life, Corso would serendipitously reunite with his mother in Trenton, New Jersey; but in these early poems, her image seems to goad him into further imaginative excesses rather than restrain him or bring him to shame. He was willing to write lines that could seem ridiculous (\u201cRose is my visionic eyehead of all mysticdom\u201d), and he sold those leaden lines with such flair that they could seem as \u201cquick-wing\u2019d \u2026 and light\u201d as Verlaine and Villon\u2019s more obviously graceful ones. Most often, his attitude resembled that of the narrator of Haggard\u2019s 1969 single \u201cI Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am<\/a>,\u201d who \u201ckeeps thumbing through the phone books \/ and lookin\u2019 for my daddy\u2019s name in every town,\u201d yet still turns his vagabondage into a point of satisfaction. (\u201cThings I learned in a hobo jungle \/ Were things they never taught me in a classroom \/ Like where to find a handout \/ While thumbin’ through Chicago in the afternoon.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Haggard\u2019s father died when he was a child. In an interview from 1977, he told Billboard<\/em> that his mother Flossie Mae, who \u201chad a good education,\u201d soon thereafter \u201ctook a job as a bookkeeper for a meat company\u201d to support Merle and his brother. The family lived in a renovated boxcar to which rooms had been added as annexes. Pride\u2014national, familial, personal\u2014has always been an elusive concept for Haggard, whose many public political judgments are for the most part cautious and open-ended enough to allow an unhelpful range of interpretations. The outlaw persona he popularized required an odd mixture of proud convict\u2019s defiance (\u201cI paid the debt I owed \u2018em, \/ but they\u2019re still not satisfied\u201d) and Christian self-recrimination.<\/p>\n

Like many of the best outlaw poets, Haggard has always hesitated to resolve this contradiction. He has preferred to settle with images that suggestively combine loyalty and transgression, bravado and shame. \u201cShe had a boy who was, uh, more than wild,\u201d Haggard said of his mother in the same interview. \u201cThere was a period that came up that my mother just couldn\u2019t handle. My dad wasn\u2019t there and my older brother tried to step in and of course I resented that. It just got all confused and messed up. Momma certainly did try.\u201d<\/p>\n

Max Nelson\u2019s\u00a0writings\u00a0on film and literature\u00a0have appeared in <\/em><\/em>The Threepenny Review,\u00a0<\/em><\/em>n+1, <\/em><\/em>Film Comment, and<\/em><\/em>\u00a0Boston Review, among other publications.\u00a0He lives in New York.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Previous entries in Prison Lit<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n