This post was written by Professor Aaron Coy Moulton of Stephen F. Austin University, who has been researching our collections for information to support his work of The ‘Communist Hand’ in Cuba and Birmingham: Cuban Exiles and the U.S. Right.
Supported by the Kellems Family Fellowship, I had the opportunity to spend a week in Archives & Special Collections as part of my project on the activities of Cuban exiles across the United States. This was a truly productive experience thanks to the help of a generous and patient faculty who accommodated my eclectic requests. After all, tracking transnational subjects whose histories defy simplistic categories often requires a wide-ranging research methodology across diverse collections. Together, the Kellems Family Fellowship and the great staff gave me ample time to locate fascinating items regarding Cuban exiles who rallied US support against the 1959 Cuban Revolution and regime of Fidel Castro.
News release from Thomas J. Dodd, September 2, 1965, regarding incitement of American Negroes to violence.
Much of this can be found in the Thomas J. Dodd Papers. Dodd was an influential Connecticut Senator who supported myriad anticommunist causes during the Cold War, so I was curious about his relationships with anti-Castro organizations and Cuban exiles. Right away, I came upon Dodd’s many speeches and writings denouncing Castro as a Soviet puppet, and some directly cheered Cuban exiles seeking to remove the island’s regime. One that stood out was a September 2, 1965, press release where Dodd blamed the Los Angeles Watts Riots on Robert F. Williams, a North Carolina civil rights activist who fled to Havana where his writings and “Radio Dixie” radiobroadcasts encouraged self-defense rather than nonviolent protest.
Memo to Senator Dodd from Milt regarding comments made on Radio Dixie interview, August 31, 1965
Conspiratorial right-wingers frequently summoned Williams as proof that Cuban communism influenced US civil rights activism, yet Dodd held a moderate anticommunist reputation that diverged strongly from those who put forward such claims; it was strange to find that the Congressperson agreed and insisted that Williams’s work in Cuba influenced African Americans to commit violent riots. Dodd’s public stance grabbed attention, and CBS requested an interview on this very subject. This forced his staff to intervene because they argued over whether Dodd should go onto a national forum and publicize a supposed link between “Radio Dixie” and US riots without evidence.
Correspondence to David from Paul on Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba, Inc. letterhead, September 16
Dodd’s Papers reveal that anti-Castro organizations including the Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba (CCFC) responded positively to Dodd’s unfounded allegation. The CCFC brought together leading anticommunist activists ranging from Clare Boothe Luce and Edward Teller to Victor Riesel and Edgar Ansel Mowrer and blamed US social and cultural issues on Cuban communism. Hoping to know more about Williams and Cuba, one of Dodd’s assistants called CCFC executive secretary Paul Bethel about “Radio Dixie,” and Bethel gladly provided Dodd’s office with their materials on Williams. This demonstrates that Dodd’s office had a cordial relationship with the CCFC, illustrating how anti-Castro organizations assisted anticommunist Congresspersons.
Letter to Senator Dodd from Ernesto Freyer thanking him for speaking to the American Legion National Convention in August 1965, September 2, 1965.
Cuban exiles also cultivated these relationships. Dodd’s Papers hold a handful of letters from Cuban exiles who cheered Dodd for his vocal opposition to Castro. José Bosch of the Bacardi liquor company was just one exile who thanked the Connecticut Senator for denouncing Cuban communism. Cuban exile organization Representación Cubana del Exilio [Cuban Exile Representation, RECE] both encouraged Dodd and gave the Congressperson’s staff various materials that could help Dodd make additional anti-Castro speeches. One reason I have found an ample number of Cuban exiles’ writings throughout the United States is that RECE, CCFC, and others disseminated those materials with the help of likeminded Congresspersons.
Letter to Senator Dodd from General Generoso of the Cuban Army on Alianza Para la Libertad de Cuba letterhead referencing an invitation from Pepin Bosch and Ernesto Freyer of the Cuban political party Representacion Cubano Exilio, September 24, 1965.
Dodd’s Papers also shed light into another aspect of my research: divisions among Cuban exiles. Even before the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco of 1961, exiles competed to secure the US government and US public’s support for their competing anti-Castro activities, severely undercutting the possibility of a unified movement. As a result, exiles regularly wrote Congresspersons and published articles denouncing their rivals as inauthentic, incapable, or even communist. At the same time that the CCFC and RECE were helping Dodd’s staff, Generoso Campos Marquetti with the Alianza Para la Libertad de Cuba [Alliance for Cuba’s Liberty, APLC] wrote the Congressperson. Marquetti warned Dodd against helping RECE and Bosch based upon how they had opposed the previous dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista whom Castro succeeded. APLC was another exile organization who kept alive longstanding grievances about fall of Batista and the rise of Castro, thereby hindering a universal movement to retake the island.
Pamphlet, “Cuba – The Truth. We Shout “Victory” But Khrushchev Still Has Cuba”, undated.
One of the most surprising finds, though, did not come from the Thomas J. Dodd Papers but the Alternative Press Collection. Elsewhere, I have often found Cuban exiles who reached out to right-wing organizations in order to raise financial and material support. For this reason, the staff allowed me to peruse the Alternative Press Collection’s various folders, specifically those for the Citizens Anti-Communist Committees of Connecticut. Like their compatriots across the United States, Connecticut citizens launched anticommunist organizations that reproduced the writings and allegations of regional and national outlets. For this reason, the Citizens Anti-Communist Committees of Connecticut folder happened to have a pamphlet published by the Committee on Pan American Policy (CPAP), a right-wing organization that in the late 1970s merged with the conspiratorial John Birch Society. CPAP spent two decades focused on alleged communist plots in Latin America, and here I found one of their popular pamphlets, “CUBA – THE TRUTH: We Shout ‘Victory’ But Khrushchev Still Has Cuba.” The pamphlet encouraged US citizens to oppose Castro’s regime, and this is certainly why it was distributed by Connecticut’s anticommunist organizations.
Pamphlet, “Castro Admits Cuba is Communist. The Truth About Cuba.” Citizens Anti-Communist Committee of Connecticut, undated.
However, what I did not expect to find was a second pamphlet, this one titled, “Castro Admits Cuba Is Communist.” This pamphlet was produced by a well-known Cuban exile organization called The Truth About Cuba Committee (TACC). Led by Luis V. Manrara, TACC distributed anti-Castro materials, deployed speakers, and lobbied multiple US Congresspersons in opposition to Cuban communism. At first, this pamphlet does little more than reinforce what we already know about various exile groups. What makes this pamphlet stand out, though, is that it was stamped with the address of the Citizens Anti-Communist Committee of Connecticut based in Bridgeport. Not only did TACC mail its pamphlets from its Miami headquarters to Connecticut but the state’s anticommunists distributed TACC’s publications. This pamphlet in the Alternative Press Collection thus illustrates how local anticommunists amplified the work of Cuban exiles.
Further research might uncover even more materials about how the Cuban Revolution reverberated in Connecticut. Though my project focuses on those opposed to Castro, an investigation into those who supported the Revolution might show the other side of this history.
The following post is by Brandon Hurst, PhD student in UConn’s Department of English. His research interests include Nineteenth Century British and American Literature, Book History, and Digital Humanities and Media Studies.
The Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials consists largely of books published and printed during the nineteenth century—including novels, histories, and autobiographical/biographical accounts—assembled by the American Studies and literary scholar and faculty at the University of Connecticut, Wayne S. Franklin.
Wayne Franklin was a University of Connecticut Professor of English and Professor of SCI/American Studies from 2005 to 2026; he was regarded by his colleagues, students, and all who know him as a generous, kind, and encyclopedic scholar and teacher. Franklin arrived at the University of Connecticut to serve as director of the American Studies program and was chosen head of the English department in 2009. He authored the two-volume, definitive biography of James Fenimore Cooper: James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (2007) and James Fenimore Cooper:The Later Years (2017). Both volumes were Choice Outstanding Academic Titles. During his illustrious career, he authored or edited another 12 books (with an additional 2 authored books in progress upon the donation of the collection), including a study of early American travel writing, Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers (1979), and a study of Cooper’s frontier fiction, The New World of James Fenimore Cooper (1982). He founded the University of Iowa Press’s “American Land and Life” series in 1990, for which he edited 30 books. Franklin also served for 20 years as an editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature and served as a reader for several university presses. During his career he was a Mellon Foundation fellow (1981), Guggenheim fellow (2004), and awarded an American Antiquarian Society-National Endowment for the Humanities grant (1994).
Many of the items were collected for Franklin’s research and writing on James Fenimore Cooper, especially his two-volume biography of the novelist. Materials include early editions of works written by J.F. Cooper, his family, and his literary contemporaries; those providing context on Cooper’s historical sources, the contemporary socio-cultural landscape and literary milieu, or used for historical reference by Franklin; those owned by members of the Cooper family; and miscellaneous items. The collection has been arranged into three series, following Franklin’s own groupings and the installments in which they were received.
Presently, finding aid descriptions are only available for items in the first series, which I spent this summer assembling. This first series contains two subseries: early and first editions of Cooper’s works published in the U.S., England, and Continental Europe, and works owned and/or authored by the Cooper family. The first subseries, which Franklin assembled for research on Cooper’s publishing and printing history and Cooper’s navigation of the still emerging and tenuously enforced transatlantic copyright laws, makes up the bulk of the series.
The second series, received in 2022, includes works related to J.F. Cooper and early American literature more broadly, with the bulk of items related to maritime or naval literature and history. The third series, donated in 2023, contains largely reference materials acquired during Franklin’s research for the Cooper biographies and early American literature.
While the first series may, on initial glance, seem of interest mainly to scholars of J.F. Cooper, what I found most intriguing during my time working with the collection is that these earlier editions, initially collected for a biography and historical background on their author, held an abundance of insight into so many more individuals—the owners, the printers, the publishers, the users, (and, in the future, researchers), illustrating the importance of texts and literature in our lives and relationships. The material evidence of both the texts creation and these artifacts afterlives reveals much about the way literature mediates between the individual and sociocultural dynamics.
Perhaps the best, or at least one of the more interesting (to me), examples of this dynamic comes not in the form of any officially published edition of Cooper’s works. Rather, it was the paper-bound, cheap reprinting of Cooper’s The Red Rover by the London-based “Novel Newspaper” publication. The series republished novels cheaply, but did so by violating copyright. This inverted the more conventional practice, gestured to in the preface to the very first volume of the series (which contained “five of Fenimore Cooper’s novels: The Pilot, The Spy, The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans and Lionel Lincoln”), in which American penny newspapers and other publishers of inexpensive literature exploited the differences in English and U.S. copyright laws to reprint British novels in the U.S. without paying for the copyright, meaning their author’s received no compensation (Webby).
The Red Rover. A Tale. London: J. Cunningham, 1842. “Novel Newspaper”, 1842, /repositories/2/archival_objects/316176. Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials, 2021-0097. Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.
While the publishers behind this scheme justified their practice on moral and ethical grounds (and carried out their publishing quite ostentatiously, advertising in well-circulated journals their cheap reprintings of many American—and some British—works), what is particularly illuminating is that they also claimed that their work carried out a social good because it made Cooper’s novels more widely accessible and that the works would subsequently have an ameliorative influence on this newly reached class of readers. They wrote in the preface:
“Nor will Mr Cooper regret the wide circulation throughout England of the five novels contained in the present volume; since, being mainly on subjects of American history, they will tend to diffuse a better knowledge of his country amongst a class of persons whose national prejudices are even yet stronger than their reason.
Such practices and rhetoric point towards the shifting economics and politics of literary and cultural access in the nineteenth century. Book ownership, or lending, and printing was undergoing a large transformation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with new technologies, changing legal practices, and increasing literacy rates all impacting who read, what they were reading, and in turn, what was being written and why—and artifacts like the “Novel Newspaper” reprinting of Cooper’s Red Rover provide us with examples that can teach us more about these dynamics.
Further revealing evidence about reading practices in the period, and the afterlives of these physical copies, can be found in the presence of bookplates in some of the volumes. (Notable bookplates in the collection include that of Henry A. Muhlenberg, son of U.S. Congressman Henry A. P. Muhlenberg; the American Antiquarian Society also holds bookplates from Muhlenberg. Another belongs to Dr. Noël J. Cortés, an early-20th-century collector of French manuscripts whose own collection is held at Yale. A third set belongs to Sir Frederick Milner (1849-1931), a former member of British parliament and a baronet).
These material markers of ownership personalize the text to the person, marking the book as one’s own while also identifying the individual as a “book owner” and “reader”. At the same time, by physically impressing or pasting a stylized signature and design, the physical book and content of the “text” become bound up with the owner’s identity. Together, owning the book and the intimate, process of materially making the book one’s own are acts of self-expression and identity-making.
The practice of adding a bookplate to a book is a curiously private and public act. The need to mark a text as one’s own implies that other readers may come across the text, and we need to identify our copy as ours—an inherently social practice. At the same time, the bookplate is pasted inside the book, and often kept in a private library, perhaps never to be seen by anyone. So not only does the bookplate signify an external act of identity/self-crafting, but it also reflects the very dynamics of identity itself: something deeply internal but defined by its capacity to be perceived and recognized by others.
Such practices can, we may intuit, create or become part of deeply affective relationships. Not only do we form intimate relationships with literature and the physical copy, but the act of ownership can become part of the rituals and interactions that help establish and/or cement interpersonal relationships. For instance, in the collection is a copy of The Bravo that bears two bookplates in each volume. One, a bookplate signed “Gertrude D Maling”, which reminds borrowers to return the book to its owner (again, the dually social and personal dynamics of book ownership and reading), and the other, a bookplate indicating the shared ownership of the book by her and her husband: Ex Libris Gertrude D. and Ernest H. Maling. The couple’s bookplate marks the book as belonging to a shared library—a manifestation of their shared lives together in the form of shared property—giving form, expression, and reaffirmation to a shared identity as married couple. At the same time, the presence of Gertrude’s own bookplate and her signature reminds us that her individuality is not erased in their marital union. She owns her own books, shares them with people she cares about, and is her own person; her reading/book owning practices give a material form to and outwardly express her multidimensional identity.
The Bravo: A Tale. Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1831. 2 vols. (Copy 2), 1831, /repositories/2/archival_objects/316187. Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials, 2021-0097. Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.
Gertrude’s bookplate reminds us that sharing books is another form in which books establish and reaffirm our affective, interpersonal relationships, a cultural practice we see further evidenced by the inscriptions many of the books bear, especially those in subseries two: the books owned and authored by the Cooper family. For instance, William Wake, D. D.’s The Principles of the Christian Religion Explainedcontains a signature marking the shared ownership of the book by the two Cooper sisters (inscribed “Susan & Caroline Fenimore Cooper | Paris May 15th 1831”), functionally reifying the sibling relationship in much the same way the Malings’ bookplate does for the marital connection. While this signature is partially overwritten, the evidence of their shared ownership of the book and the relationship it symbolized remains legible. Indeed, the palimpsest-like aspect highlights the accumulation of personal histories that the material book accumulates and records.
William Wake, D. D. The Principles of the Christian Religion Explained: in a Brief Commentary upon the Church Catechism. 16th edition “corrected.” London: C. & J. Rivington, 1826. Inscribed “Susan & Caroline Fenimore Cooper | Paris May 15th 1831”, 1826, /repositories/2/archival_objects/316140. Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials, 2021-0097. Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.
Many others in the series are gift copies (like this copy of Rural Hours, gifted on the winter solstice of 1993 “To Chris Schulty | Woodswoman | and | WYLDE writer”), with several being gifts between family Cooper family members, . The inscriptions mark the intimate, affective act of gifting, and the relationships these moments symbolize, reifying the familial bonds connecting one another, as demonstrated by Susan Fenimore Cooper’s gifting of her Rural Hoursto her sister Caroline, the copy of Pages and Pictures from the Writings of James Fenimore Coopershe gave to her brother-in-law H.F. Phinney, and the copy of Howitt’s Home and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets she received from Phinney. The fact that these books are owned and authored by family members accentuates these implications. As seen in Susan Manning Sage’s gift to J.F. Cooper Jr (great-grandson of J.F. Cooper), not only do inscriptions mark the personal moments and tie identity to book ownership, gifting, and receiving, but these books authored by self or a family member act as extensions of our self or physically instantiate a reminder of a shared lineage, link, and identity.
William Linn, D. D. (1752-1808). Discourses on Signs of the Times. New-York: Thomas Greenleaf, 1794. Bookplate of JFC Jr. [1892-1918], JFC’s great-grandson. Front flyleaf bears inscription to JFC Jr. signed by “S. M. Sage”, Sarah Manning Sage [Fenimore Cooper] (1841-1915), 1794, /repositories/2/archival_objects/316141. Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials, 2021-0097. Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.
To gift books in such a way can be “read” as gifting a part of the self, and a part of the self that is forever linked to the recipient. In some ways, it is to materialize and then gift the relationship itself in a material form.
This deeply personal relationship with books and reading practices can take on a poignantly political valence as well. For instance, two copies bear the signature of Mark J. Scearce (the inventor of the Mint Julep cup): The Headsmanand Sketches of Switzerland; By an American. Alongside Scearce’s signature is his inscription of his locale, Shelbyville, Kentucky, where he lived in the early to mid-twentieth century. Considering this context, Scearce’s owning and ostentatiously autographing the pastedowns of at least two first-edition novels by Cooper—a New York Yankee—can be read as a politically charged act of inscription. This is especially the case for a book like The Headsman, which Franklin describes as “intent on critiquing hereditary rank in all its forms. Every instance of it entailed a curse, if not on the heir then on humanity at large” (“Republican Principles” 141). Like with the bookplate, the signatures in the books tie the identity and self-expression of the Southerner with the texts of a Yankee (and, notably, two texts inspired by that Yankee’s experience in Switzerland—the second being Sketches of Switzerland, which itself was critiqued “by the European press for overzealously defending American republican principles” (AAS)). Scearce’s signatures and ownership become implicit expressions of political identity—intimately private yet externally material acts—articulating republican and egalitarian ideals in a region and time period in which race and class politics were especially fraught and tense. Yet Scearce explicitly identifies himself as a Kentuckian, inscribing his hometown alongside his signature. But doing so in these specific books reveals how politically and personally complicated that regional identity could be. In the evidence of these two signatures, we can see the role that literature and the material book play not only in an individual’s navigation of the complex dynamics of identity-crafting and self-expression, but also in the additional meaning this takes on amid the sociocultural and political climate of a given period and region.
The Headsman; or, The Abbaye des Vignerons. A Tale. 2 vols., 1833, /repositories/2/archival_objects/316197. Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials, 2021-0097. Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.
I’d like to end this blog with a brief aside about the variety of uses and reading habits on display in just this series of the collection. One copy of Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours bears markings and annotations from Franklin himself, offering a fascinating glimpse into a research- and scholarship-oriented reading and marking practice. Franklin’s annotations, cross-references, and systematic markings contrast with the marginalia by other readers, which range from unrelated poetry and drawings (like those shown below), to sporadic markings or annotating of passages which appear to have been marked for their personal or seemingly universal relevance, important plot moments, and corrective emendations. So, while the series may seem, on its surface, to be primarily about J.F. Cooper, it puts on display so much more about our relationships to books—material and conceptual—and the ways books mediate our relationships with each other and to larger sociocultural dynamics.
[Susan Fenimore Cooper], Rural Hours by a Lady. New York: George P. Putnam, 1850., 1850, /repositories/2/archival_objects/316130. Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials, 2021-0097. Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.
The Spy. NY: Wiley and Halsted. 1822. “Third Edition.” 2 vols., 1822, /repositories/2/archival_objects/316143. Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials, 2021-0097. Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.
I hope my discussion (and digressions; my many thanks to the readers who’ve indulged me to this point) has piqued some of your interests. And should you wish to explore the collection, following up on idea or item that sparked your curiosity, don’t hesitate to schedule an appointment in the reading room!
Webby, Elizabeth. “The Novel Newspaper and Its Role in the Transmission of American Fiction to Australia.” Reading Across the Pacific: Australia-United States Intellectual Histories, edited by Robert Dixon and Nicholas Birns, Sydney University Press, 2010, pp. 167–76.
The UConn Archives & Special Collections podcast d’Archive will release it’s 50th episode on April 24th, 2023 with a live broadcast at 10am EST on 91.7fm WHUS. Beginning in August of 2017, the Archives staff began expanding its outreach program to the airwaves by training on sound engineering and radio protocols in order to effectively bring its collections to new audiences. Since then the radio program and podcast has featured weekly episodes drawing from countless collections held by the Archives & Special Collections and amplifying the expertise of over 60 collaborators ranging from past and present archives and library staff, artists, journalists, curators, faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, high school students, visiting fellows and international students, activists, alumni, collectors and donors, family, and friends.
The following guest post is by K-Fai Steele, recipient of the 2019 James Marshall Fellowship.K-Fai (www.k-faisteele.com) is an author and illustrator who grew up in a house built in the 1700s with a printing press her father bought from a magician. She wrote and illustratedA Normal Pig. She illustrated Noodlephantby Jacob Kramer (a Kirkus Best of 2019 picture book) and Old MacDonald Had a Baby by Emily Snape. She also illustrated the forthcoming Probably a Unicorn by Jory John and Okapi Tale, the sequel to Noodlephant. She wasa Brown Handler Writer in Residence at the San Francisco Public Library, and the 2018 Ezra Jack Keats/Kerlan Memorial Fellow at the University of Minnesota. K-Fai lives in San Francisco.
K-Fai Steele, 2019 James Marshall Fellow
The job of a professional children’s book author and illustrator is challenging. There’s no one formula for, or definition of success. The job walks the line between commercial and creative disciplines and requires a bizarre combination of skills: not only writing and illustrating books but being able to perform in front of large varied audiences (toddlers one day, fifth graders the next), deftness at publicity and social media, teaching, and generally being able to project an aura of success and expertise. It can often feel competitive and lonely. And one is paid as a freelancer, so (at least in the United States) there is no economic safety net and it’s hard to plan for a long term career. Another aspect of the job requires constant learning, growth, and improvisation which can either be stressful or exciting and luxurious (if you have the time and space to fully devote to it). Whenever I feel stuck I end up in a library and I’ve learned that some of the best libraries and collections contain public collections of children’s literature preliminary materials. The University of Connecticut is one of these places, and through the James Marshall Fellowship I was given the time, space, and funding to spend time learning and luxuriating in their collection.
If you spend enough time with someone’s work you get a sense of their process; in a way it’s the closest thing you can get to a mentorship. In his essays Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books and Pictures, Maurice Sendak quotes Alphonse Mucha (a mentor to one of Sendak’s heroes Winsor McKay, the creator of the Little Nemo comic): “I think it would be wise for every art student to set up a certain popular artist whom he likes best and adapt his ‘handling’ or style… when you are puzzled with any part of your work, see how it has been handled by your favorite and fix it up in a similar manner.” It’s a very clever way to get a very good (and free) education.
Audio recordings of lectures by James Marshall presented to students of Francelia Butler
When you read a picture book you only see the finished product. When you visit archives, you see evidence of an often messy process, from sketches and sketchbooks to drafts, manuscripts, and original art. Occasionally you find very special pieces of media, like collections of audio cassette lectures. Francelia Butler was a professor of Children’s Literature at UCONN from the 1960s to 1990s and she invited dozens of authors, performers, and otherwise impressive thinkers to speak in her Children’s Literature 200 class, or as students referred to it, “kiddie lit 101.” She had the foresight to record most of these lectures which are now housed in the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection. James Marshall lived a couple of miles from the UCONN Storrs campus and would give a yearly lecture to her class of primarily undergraduates from 1976-1990 when he was 34 to 48 years old (he died when he was 50). These lectures are mostly off the cuff; he reads a book aloud (often George and Martha or The Stupids), discusses how he came up with ideas for books like Miss Nelson, then takes questions from the audience.
Marshall is the perfect guest lecturer. He is funny, insightful, knows how to work a crowd, and best of all he’s a generous lecturer. He knows how to communicate ideas and make them accessible. At his core he was an educator; he worked professionally as one for a while, having taken over Maurice Sendak’s picture book making class at Parsons. Much of the insights he shares in these recorded lectures are still deeply relevant today, particularly in terms of the creative process and the job of a children’s book creator. Marshall agonized about writer’s block and felt the pressure to make money. He also spoke from the perspective of an outsider who worked extremely hard and never took the joy of making books for granted.
When I arrived at UCONN to start my fellowship I didn’t anticipate that most of my time would be spent using my ears rather than my eyes. I had spent three weeks in 2018 at the Kerlan Collection looking through dozens of his sketchbooks in their collection and since then have tried to read all of his books. I realized I was engaging in a bit of detective work, trying to put the pieces together of a fascinating, talented, funny creator through the crumbs he left behind. Hearing him talk about his work (getting a firsthand narrative) made me feel incandescent. I popped in one cassette after another and was grateful for my fast typing (as of the time of this blog post’s publishing only two of the cassettes have been digitized; according to the archivist it’s an expensive and laborious process). In this post I’m going to share some quotations from these audiocassettes, what surfaced for me as a picture book creator, and what I think other people in the field might find interesting, from his process to how he thought about creative work.
Character development from the sketchbooks of James Marshall
“I start off drawing. I develop a character, make it as crazy as I can, and put that character in a situation. I start with a visual. I couldn’t sit at a typewriter and start a story with words… Drawings first, and then I type it up” (1977, cassette 504). Marshall was known for his strong characters; consider George and Martha, Fox, or The Stupids; the story revolves around them and how they interact with other characters. It’s not so much about plot; Marshall at one point describes George and Martha as a comedy of manners. “I teach my kids at Parsons that to start out you must have a very solid rounded character that lives. I have lots of sketchbooks and I just develop characters as they go along” (1982, cassette 515). Marshall trusted that a good story would organically come out of a good character, particularly if put in an interesting situation where they have to react. There’s a sort of faith required in starting with a character; you don’t know who’s going to show up on the page. You get to know a character by the way they look, their gesture, and how they react to other characters.
Marshall didn’t discuss a specific method that he used to generate stories because he didn’t seem to have one. He described working intuitively, relying on his brain and hand to put together funny ideas. “People ask me often where the ideas come from. If I knew that I could probably spell it out to you… I don’t know where the good stuff happens. It happens when I work a lot, and late at night. Usually If I’ve been working 8-10 hours doing just mechanical stuff I’m so tired all my defenses are down. I’m not worried whether it’s going to be a success or not, and some nutty idea comes in, it’s like someone else told me that… You know it came from inside your head but you don’t know why or how” (1979, cassette 506). “What I do is try to sit down, and if I fall down and start laughing that’s a good sign” (1980, cassette 508). It seemed that he didn’t examine his story-making because he was worried that if he figured it out he would lose the muse. “What I do is intuitive and I don’t know why I’m sitting here talking to you because I don’t really know why I do what I do, and to talk about it is a little scary to analyze it. I’m afraid if I look at it too much and try to figure out what I do it’ll go away” (1985, cassette 525). Since he relied so heavily on intuition his fear of losing the muse makes sense. He mentioned this fear in several lectures, and it seems to really be the thing he feared the most: the bucket going down the well and coming up dry.
Perhaps this fear came from a sense of what we would now describe as imposter syndrome. “Often I have so much trouble coming up with endings. It’s just like hell. Because you think here I am, this is what I do for a living, but maybe I’m not so good anymore, maybe I never had any talent in the first place” (1987, cassette 527). Marshall continues in a 1990 lecture, “I’ve thrown up in my studio from the fear of thinking I’m all finished, I’m washed up, I have no talent, I can’t even write one of these dumb books, I can’t think of another joke” (cassette 531).
Perhaps it came because making good books for children is deceptively challenging. There isn’t a roadmap, particularly when you’re making something that pushes boundaries of humor, style, etc. “When I’m drawing it’s like heaven, even when it’s not going so well I’m really, really happy. I feel connected, I feel like I belong. Why it’s such hell to get started, I don’t know. I guess it’s because I’m scared. Chekhov had the same feeling, he thought he was no good, couldn’t cut it. If a guy that great can have those feelings maybe it’s not so abnormal, maybe you should have those feelings of insecurity. Because if you’re absolutely sure that what you’re doing is brilliant what you’re doing is copying yourself or copying someone else” (1988, cassette 529).
Or perhaps the pressure was more external; he needed to make more books in order to keep his career (and income stream) flowing. This is when his practice of writing intuitively probably chafed against a demanding publishing schedule. “I have an artistic problem: when a book is successful, editors like to see success perpetuated, so they hire you to do a sequel. I’ve done so many sequels but I haven’t gotten any quite right. It’s the hardest thing in the world to capture the spirit of another book when you don’t have an idea. I’m doing three picture books, all three are sequels, and I’m stalled on all three. It’s a sickening feeling to think that you’re going to have to turn that money back and that you’ve run out of ideas” (1985, cassette 525). Marshall’s output was prodigious; he made around eighty picture books during his 50-year life. What is the result of working faster than your machine wants to run? The quality may suffer, at least in the creator’s eyes. In one lecture Marshall says, “I’ve made 60 books and only about 20 am I really proud of” (1983, cassette 517).
Marshall’s writing and drawings have a sense of lightness and ease to them, particularly in the way he draws characters and communicates their emotions through their eyes (often simple dots). In 1997 several years after Marshall’s death, Sendak wrote in the New York Times, “Much has been written concerning the sheer deliciousness of Marshall’s simple, elegant style. The simplicity is deceiving; there is richness of design and mastery of composition on every page. Not surprising, since James was a notorious perfectionist and endlessly redrew those ”simple” pictures.”
Marshall drew with joy, and this is most evident in UCONN’s collection of his sketchbooks. In his lectures he talks about the phenomenon I hear a lot of other author-illustrators experiencing when they move from sketches to final art; some freshness is lost. “It’s when you have to prepare something that’s going to get published, at least not only me but everyone I know in the business, you get tense and frightened because this is going to be out there, there are going to be 20,000 copies of this, and it gets tighter and tighter. The best stuff I’ve done of any quality is in my sketchbooks and I pick that stuff out and I’m like why can’t I do that here?” (1984, cassette 520). Perhaps it’s different when you’re making final art because you know that you have an audience, that you’re relying on the art to make money.It’s less about amusing yourself; it goes from a private activity to a very public one. “The sketches are so much more interesting, that’s the fun part. It’s when you do a line that you know is going to be published you start to clutch and tighten up. I’m just now learning to do books and get a line that’s going to be published that’s as good as the one in the sketches. I’d love to take my old sketches out and publish them. I feel so much more comfortable with them. I don’t know if it’s a fear of success or fear of failure, it’s a really terrifying process to go through” (1981, cassette 511).
Preliminary sketches by James Marshall
Marshall also shared insights into how he thought he was perceived by gatekeepers of the industry, specifically librarians who had a more traditional sense of illustration and who also reviewed books and selected for awards (in particular the Caldecott Award). “I work in basically creative periods of about 3 weeks that’s all I can stand… This is dangerous because when I tell librarians (“conventional people”) if I tell them how short it takes me to do a book I can see in their eyes my stock going down. You have to tell them you worked 5 years on this book and you’ve drawn with the blood of your slaughtered children and then it’s a masterpiece” (1985, cassette 519) Marshall drew somewhat injured and bitter conclusions about why he had been overlooked, “People who are in children’s books are ashamed of being in children’s books. People on committees want to pick a book that shows they’re an important, art-minded profession” (1985, cassette 519).
Sendak wrote that Marshall “paid the price of being maddeningly underestimated — of being dubbed ”zany” (an adjective that drove him to murderous rage)… he was dismissed as the artist who could — or should or might — do worthier work if he would only dig deeper and harder. The comic note, the delicate riff were deemed, finally, insufficient. James knew better, of course, and he was right, of course, but he suffered nevertheless. There was nothing he could do to impress the establishment; that was his triumph and his curse. Marshall did fulfill his genius, and its rarity and subtlety confounded the so-called critical world. The award-givers were foolish enough to consider him a charming lightweight, and when Caldecott Medal time came around, they ignored him again and again.” Marshall also spoke about competition in the children’s literature world, which undoubtedly was connected to him not feeling appreciated, validated, or celebrated by the people who held power. “The world of children’s books I used to say is a nice world. It is not, it’s a nest of vipers, we all hate each other… we’re very competitive” (1982, cassette 513).
It was interesting to hear Marshall talk about the other authors and illustrators he was in community with. In nearly every lecture he named some of the people who he thought were doing the best work in children’s literature: Arnold Lobel, Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak, Tomi Ungerer, Rosemary Wells, William Steig, Edward Ardizzone, and Quentin Blake were all mentioned. “If you want to see some magnificent small jewels, look at the Frog and Toad books. I thought, oh I can do that. First I saw Sendak: oh, I can do that. Lobel: oh I can write stories about two friends too. They sort of gave me confidence. I didn’t know how hard it is. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s impossible to try and write two-page stories with a beginning, middle, and end” (1990, cassette 532). He clearly adored Maurice Sendak, who he referred to as “the granddaddy of us all” (1980, cassette 508) in terms of contemporary illustration. The Maurice Sendak Collection of James Marshall at UCONN contains several of Marshall’s books that he inscribed for Sendak, including a rare copy of his first illustrated book, Plink, Plink, Plink (1971) by Byrd Baylor which Marshall said “sunk, sunk, sunk” due to the “awful poems and awful pictures” (1977, cassette 504).
Copy of Plink, Plink, Plink inscribed to Maurice Sendak
This collection of recordings is a very rare and special item; you just don’t find a lot of authors speaking in their own words, at length, about their work. I think that this speaks to Marshall’s experience as an educator; someone who has good communication skills, a sense for what might be interesting content, respect for their audience, a willingness to be generous with the knowledge they possess, and their love for the work.
One of my favorite things that Marshall said had to do with the joy of getting to do the thing you love most in the world as a job. “To be able to support myself by doing what I really like to do best and by being creative, I never dreamed that that could be. I was raised with protestant puritant [sic] ethics. In Texas you had to bring home the bacon by doing stuff that you hated; my daddy hated his job, my mama hated being a housewife, everyone in my family hated everything. I thought when I became an adult I had to just swallow it. It’s not true. It’s a wonderful, wonderful feeling” (1983, cassette 517). This is something that you can easily lose sight of a children’s book maker as you get involved in the day-to-day of trying to meet deadlines, negotiate with art directors, redo cover art, schedule school visits, make money and budget wisely, etc. I’m writing this blog post in late spring 2020 in the midst of a global pandemic which has made clear that nothing is guaranteed, in particular human life, especially those most vulnerable in our society. For a while I wasn’t sure if books or art even mattered. But of course they do, and the act of engaging in joyful creative work is a much-needed lifeline, as Marshall attested to during his short life, ended by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in 1992. “One of the most wonderful things in the world is to do creative work, it is the greatest high, it makes your life come together” (1987, cassette 527).
Audio recording of James Marshall lecture from the Francelia Butler Papers
The following guest post is by Elizabeth Barnett, recipient of the 2019 Billie M. Levy Travel and Research Grant.Ms. Barnett is an assistant professor of English at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, where she is the director of the Midwest Poets Series and editor of the Rockhurst Review. Her essays and poems have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Gulf Coast, and The Massachusetts Review. She is working, with great pleasure, on Marshall’s literary biography, tentatively titled Egads!
“But how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not.”
—Frank O’Hara, “Personism”
James Marshall’s voice had two kinds of
drawls, the homey “ahs” of his Texas childhood—“I was told y’all are shy. You
can’t be any shyer than I am”—and the playful “ohs” of the queer, East Coast
communities he moved to soon after—“I live in New York as well as Connecticut
and I go to galleries all the time and everything I see in painting is soooooo
dull, suuuuuuch crap.” Marshall’s voice maps his identity. It also conceals it.
A voice, as opposed to the words it speaks, can’t be “on the record,” so can
supplement, complicate, and contradict those words.
I knew Marshall’s authorial voice—witty,
warm, and weird—from gentle hippo friends George and Martha; sweet teacher Miss
Nelson and her witchy alter ego, Viola Swamp; and the tragiocomedic Stupid
family.[1]
More than 25 years after his death, I
came to know Marshall’s actual voice when University of Connecticut archivist
Kristin Eshelman guided me to an amazing and extensive cache of recordings.
From 1976 to 1990 Marshall visited his friend, one-time landlady, and devoted
admirer, Francelia Butler’s “kiddie lit” class most semesters, reading his
stories; chatting about the art world, publishing industry, and their
intersection in picture books; and, most revealingly, participating in
Q&As. Thanks to the generosity of Billie Levy and the University of
Connecticut Libraries, I was able to listen to the run of these tapes, which
begin at the peak of Marshall’s career and end two years before his death of
complications from AIDS.
Marshall’s first visit, from the Fall 1976 class photo album. (The class made a photo album!). Francelia Butler Papers, Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library
A question I had for the tapes: how did
Marshall navigate being a gay artist at a time when it was, full stop,
impossible to be an openly gay man making books for children? Eavesdropping on
those Regan-era, AIDS-blighted years, I never heard Marshall say he was
gay. He never spoke as though he
weren’t. Marshall’s authorial persona, distilled in his voice, suggests a key
insight about his books, which also had to straddle the line between authentic
artistic creations and market-dictated norms. What he says and how he says it
are analogous to the words and pictures in one of his books. The voice says
what the words can’t, just as the pictures, at times, undercut the moralistic
conventions of children’s literature.
In Butler’s classroom, for example, I
heard Marshall gesture to the limits of what he was allowed to say in an
October 10, 1979, interaction with a female student. The student asked if
Marshall was married. Marshall answered first with several beats of silence,
then with a single word, “no,” then another beat of silence, then “I’m not”
followed by a dismissive “next question.” The question asker perhaps wanted to
catch Marshall out or perhaps didn’t understand what Marshall’s voice had been
telling her. She asks an “innocent,” superficially unobjectionable question.
But that banal surface hides (or not) the power of the dominant culture that
the question summons. It really asks: Are you one of us? The asker uses the
language of power and Marshall subverts that language by making it superfluous,
his answer conveyed through silence and tone, not the words themselves.
This brief interaction reminded me of
“Split Pea Soup,” the first story in 1972’s George
and Martha, Marshall’s first book as both author and illustrator. It
begins, “Martha was very fond of making split pea soup. Sometimes she made it
all day long. Pots and pots of split pea soup.” These three simple sentences
amplify each other and give a sense of something a little off about Martha’s
soup making, the repetition mirroring Martha’s repetitive actions, recasting
conventional domesticity as a less-cozy compulsion. Why is she making soup all
day long? Why is she making so much? What begins in a normal place ends in a
slightly absurd one. Or perhaps it’s just that the absurdity of normality comes
through in the repetition. In the illustration, the framed slogan “Soup’s On”
underlines Martha’s extreme enthusiasm for soup.
James Marshall, George and Martha
The illustration shows Martha, a hippo,
in a massive checkered apron tied with an equally massive bow. She wears no
other clothes. Her performance of femininity draws attention not to her
femininity but its status as performance. (Here I echo and Marshall anticipates
Judith Butler’s theorization of performativity). She is a topless large animal
playing the part of a demure housewife. A drawn border surrounds the image,
emphasizing that, like Martha in the kitchen, the book itself is performing.
The redundant border puts “children’s story” in quotation marks by not allowing
the page itself to function as the boundary, by insisting on something more
artful, and by drawing attention to that artificiality.
So Martha loves making soup. We then
learn that George hates split pea soup but eats it anyway to make Martha happy.
However, he’s only hippo and reaches a point where he can eat no more. How,
though, can he tell Martha that this good, normal thing she’s doing makes him
miserable? He can’t—he pours the soup into his loafers. His pink loafers. And
Martha catches him.
James Marshall, George and Martha
“Light in his loafers” was a common
euphemism for homosexuality in the mid-century heyday of loafers and sexual
repression. Pink is coded as female or gay. Until a new, more economical method
of full-color printing was pioneered in Japan in the mid-1980s, most of Marshall’s illustrations were color
overlays, which means that Marshall drew the picture then traced each thing
that he wanted to be yellow, or blue, or red onto separate sheets of paper and
colored those in with graphite, indicating if any colors were to be diluted by
giving the percentage of that color to be applied. All to say, the pink was
absolutely a deliberate choice.
Example of color overlay from George and Martha One Fine Day. de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection, University of Southern Mississippi.
George’s disposal of the soup in his
loafers might be read as a symbolic refusal of compulsory heterosexuality. It
is also a refusal of language, suggesting the complicity between the two.
George “says” he hates the soup through his actions because language would
imbricate him in the very power structure he’s resisting. I see Martha as the
question-asker here. She is playing the feminine role as she’s supposed to.
She’s aligned with the dominant culture. George is Marshall; he can’t tell
Martha he hates the soup because here she is doing exactly what she’s supposed
to do (however inane), and he’s messing it up. George avoids the language trap
just as author/illustrator Marshall does—they don’t put the subversive part
into words.
The too-pat ending of “Split Pea Soup,”—Martha
tells George, “Friends should always tell each other the truth,” and they eat
chocolate chip cookies—to me signals that Marshall wants his reader to feel the tension between what the story says
and what it means. I probably think that because that’s what I hear happening
in the classroom interactions on the archive’s audio tapes. Marshall’s
language, punctuated with strategic silences and curtness, insists on its own
inadequacy, drawing an arrow to what’s left out. The story’s sharp turn to the
didactic reads to me like the drawn border around the illustrations. It signals
its own performativity, here of the norms of the picture book, which are
weakened, rather than reinforced, by their inclusion.
Frank O’Hara’s 1959 critique of poetry-as-moral-vitamin
anticipates Marshall’s later refusal of children’s literature’s didactic
imperative. In both cases, queer writers already existed outside of mainstream
culture, their morality maligned by that culture. It follows they may have been
especially wary of the inherent value of literature being used for ethical
indoctrination. Both suggest the value of their art form is not the moments it
teaches us something, but the moments it refuses to.
In 1979 Marshall “answered” the student
question with words that would not endanger his art and livelihood. Marshall’s delivery suggests he wants the
audience to know that’s why he’s saying them. The performative conformity is
one way to understand the more conventional moments in Marshall’s startlingly
original body of work. He tells us when he’s playing by the rules to protect
the magic of when he’s not.
[1] The latter credit Harry Allard with authorship but, as Jerrold
Connors convincingly argues in his post on this site, and Marshall’s
materials confirm, Allard often provided the creative spark for a piece, but
Marshall shaped the narrative and the finished prose.
Currently a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Literature, Media and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology, Dr. Nick Sturm is an Atlanta-based poet and scholar. His poems, collaborations, and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, PEN, Black Warrior Review, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. His scholarly and archival work on the New York School of poets can be traced at his blog Crystal Set. He was awarded a Strochlitz Travel Grant in 2018 to conduct research in the literary collections, including the Notley, Berrigan, and Berkson Papers, that reside in Archives and Special Collections.
In my first-year writing course at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta where I teach as a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, my students are reading books by Second Generation New York School poets to critique and creatively reimagine concepts of youth, coming-of-age narratives, and the overlap between do-it-yourself and avant-garde aesthetics. We already read Joe Brainard’s I Remember and Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, two versions of youth, memory, and selfhood constructed by male poets of the New York School, and were beginning to read Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) to extend this intertextual conversation about youth through the perspective of a female poet. While re-reading Mysteries, a book of autobiographical poems that tracks Notley’s “I” through the prismatic complexities of life and writing, I returned to her poem “Waveland (Back in Chicago)” in which Notley, challenged by the responsibilities and strictures of living inside concepts like motherhood and femininity in the mid-’70s, describes her process of collage-making, a practice Notley continues to be devoted to.
Frozen collection of world—this is “art” I don’t
write much poetry;
I’m thinking with my hands—a ploy against fear—
I have a pile of garbage on the floor
The poem then catalogs a series of collages with titles like “WATERMASTER” and “DEFIES YOU THE RHYTHMIC FRAME,” and also describes a collage composed of “a photo of a stripper I’ve named / Barney surrounded by cutout words she / dances to poetry.” Reading these lines, I remembered that I had actually just seen this collage in Notley’s papers at the University of Connecticut. Among a couple dozen collages by Notley, there was Barney herself, headless, cape trailing behind her, walking across a fragment of moon. After discussing this poem in class, I was able to show my students the collage to talk about how seeing an example of Notley’s visual art helped us think about her critiques of femininity, motherhood, and aesthetics. Students were surprised that I had such an example to show them—what had seemed like a passing reference in a poem suddenly become material. They immediately started to describe the effects of juxtaposing the collage’s title “2 Nursery Rhymes” with the presence of a nearly-nude woman. They asked what it might mean for Notley to be a “brilliant mother” in association with the mythological feminine connotations of the moon. And they noted how the epistolary gesture that opens the collage’s text, “hi Carlos Dear Henry,” resonated with Berrigan’s The Sonnets, which is riddled with salutations like “Dear Marge,” “Dear Chris,” and “Dear Ron.” Seeing Notley’s collage projected in front of them, pairing the material evidence of the poem’s description with a conversation about how the visual medium supplemented their reading of the text, students said they felt a different connection to the poem, to Notley’s work, and to our entire discussion that day.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without my recent visit to the archives at the University of Connecticut. Thanks to the generosity of a Rose and Sigmund Strochlitz Travel Grant, I spent a week in the papers of poets and artists like Notley, Ted Berrigan, Bill Berkson, and Ed Sanders, among others, reading voluminous correspondence with Joe Brainard, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Lewis Warsh, Ron Padgett, and a litany of other Second Generation New York School writers. Well-known for its Charles Olson Research Collection, the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center is also home to a wealth of materials associated with the New York School and is a necessary destination for any scholar of 20th century American poetry. And though a week of nonstop work in the archive allowed me to read and assess a lot of material, the sheer amount of New York School material stored at UConn, much of which has only barely begun to be utilized by scholars, meant that I was inevitably rushing through stacks of papers, quickly unfolding and refolding letters, swiftly scanning folder titles, and scratching my own nearly incomprehensible notes in a frenzied, focused attempt to see and catalog as much as possible before having to return to Atlanta. Like Notley’s description of collage-making in Mysteries, the archive is a place where I’m also “thinking with my hands” as I arrange, photograph, and order material in “a ploy against [the] fear” of overlooking or not knowing the full extent of what’s present in the archive. Every piece of material, like in Notley’s collage, is necessary and meaningful. This is how “a pile of garbage” becomes both art and scholarship. Starting with what you touch, a life and intelligence are animated.
Notley wasn’t the only poet whose visual artwork is held at the University of Connecticut. Take this incredible poster-size collage “Blues Bombard” (1965) by Ron Padgett with the poet’s thick, elegant cursive painted over sliced fragments of sheet music that frame a photo booth portrait of Padgett, face half-obscured, cool, and mysterious. It’s rare to find visual artwork by Padgett that isn’t a collaboration with friends like Brainard or George Schneeman, and this piece is particularly astounding both for its size and the quick, pleasing, and humorous visual narrative that follows from the newspaper clipping-title, down across the rhyming and chiding main text ”more than likely this stinks greatly,” the arrows and question marks that logically and quizzically suggest a set of correspondences, the appearance of the artist mid-gesture, and the small, humorous, non sequitur conclusion “a hole in one. THE END.” It’s a lovely piece, and entirely Padgett in its cartoonish wit and simplicity.
I was also interested to work in Ed Sanders’s papers at UConn, which includes a wealth of material from the Peace Eye Bookstore, the infamous “secret location on the lower east side” where Sanders’s mimeograph magazine Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts was published from 1962-65 until the store was raided by the NYPD on obscenity charges. Incredibly enough, the collection includes both a handwritten note from 1964 instructing Sanders to call an FBI agent and Sanders’s January 1965 mugshot following his arrest. After Sanders defeated the charges against him, Peace Eye temporarily reopened in 1967 with a Fuck You-style gala event auctioning off “literary relics & ejeculata from the culture of the Lower East Side.” The collection includes the handwritten notecards Sanders used to identify the various items for sale in the auction, like an “iron used by rising young poets to iron the buns of W.H. Auden during the years 1952-1966,” “Allen Ginsberg’s Cold Cream Jars,” and a letter—likely in protest—from Marianne Moore to Sanders in response to receiving a copy of Fuck You in the mail. Some of the material actually confiscated by the NYPD in the raid of the bookstore is in the collection as well, with the police evidence identification slips still attached, like a copy of a Joe Brainard drawing described by police as “Blue colored Headless Superman drawing with private parts exposed.”
Among collages and obscenity charges, the New York School material at UConn also runs parallel to and benefits from the archive’s already well-known collections of Frank O’Hara and Charles Olson papers. The resonance of these collections is embodied in two postcards; one from Frank O’Hara to Ted Berrigan and another from Berrigan to Charles Olson. Much can be made of the micro-lineage threads of the New American poetry and New York School that run through these three poets. Not only are Olson and O’Hara canonical energies within Berrigan’s The Sonnets, but Berrigan’s self-described “rookie of the year” arrival in American poetry occurred at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference, over which Olson’s presence loomed large. Additionally, O’Hara’s work had been a guide for Berrigan on how to live as a young poet. What’s great about the 1962 postcard from O’Hara to Berrigan is that it offers a reversal on the standard hierarchical narratives of literary tradition. Here, it’s O’Hara praising Berrigan’s poems as he invites him out for a drink and “to meet K. [Kenneth] Koch,” who would also be a New York School hero to Berrigan. Evidenced by the tape arranged on the edges of the card to harden and preserve it, Berrigan clearly treasured this correspondence from O’Hara, which due to the use of Berrigan’s full name, seems to have been their very first formal exchange. One images Berrigan, then 27 years old and having just moved to New York City the year before, formally expressing his admiration for O’Hara’s poems in his initial note. This postcard shows Berrigan’s first-hand devotion to his aesthetic sources. On the other hand, the August 16, 1966 postcard from Berrigan to Olson reveals an already well-established and easy going correspondence with the author of The Maximus Poems and “Projective Verse,” as Berrigan, referencing the postcard’s text on the other side, writes, “Dear Charles, We’re about to beat upwind. A loon is crying tonight. Maine is full of sky,” and signs off, “Be seeing you, Ted + Sandy.” Likely having stopped in to see Olson in Gloucester, Massachusetts on the drive up to Maine with his first wife, Sandy, Berrigan is playfully following up with the elder poet only about three weeks after the death of O’Hara. Though Olson himself would die in 1970, and it’s unclear if further correspondence between the two poets exists, Berrigan’s “full of sky” note to Olson again shows his sense of intimacy with the poets whose work he respected and learned from. The archive, as it often does, is showing us how lineage, tradition, and aesthetic exchange are never abstract.
I’m looking forward to returning to the archives at the University of Connecticut to spend more time thinking through the material traces of the poets I love and study, and to continue to utilize these important and still-growing collections to illustrate the ongoing importance and value both of the New York School’s second generation gems and the pedagogical, personal, and scholarly correspondence that archives allow us to develop. “I must be making my own universe / out of discards,” Notley writes in “Waveland (Back in Chicago),” and there’s a sense of that same construction of a world in the loose, wayward ephemera of the archive. What’s most fulfilling is how the process of looking and reading in the archive is always one of presence, and often magically, of being in contact with your sources.
Anna Zarra Aldrich is majoring in English, political science and journalism at the University of Connecticut. As a student writing intern, Anna is studying historical feminist publications from the collections of Archives and Special Collections. The following guest post is the final post in the series.
The feminist movement has long struggled with incorporating different groups’ concerns and modes of oppression into the movement. This problem was exacerbated by the multifaceted, turbulent U.S. political atmosphere that characterized the 1960s and 1970s. The differences between black and white women’s views of the movement clashed on several essential dimensions. But the issues of other minority groups were given less attention by the feminist movement, and by society in general, due to the fact that their ethnic/racial factions were much smaller than African Americans’.
Another marginalized group that galvanized in the activist culture of the 1960s and 1970s in America were Native Americans. These men and women sought to have their tribal autonomy recognized. They were also fighting issues such as environmentally harmful mining practices on their resource-rich lands and high rates of substance abuse and poverty within their communities.
Native American women had a unique relationship with the feminist movement because the issues this minority group faced were different from those that white or black women faced, and the ethnic population of which they were a part was a severely marginalized minority. U.S. Census data from 1970 shows that a whopping 98.6 percent of the total population was either white or black/African American (87.5 percent and 11.1 percent respectively). Native Americans constituted less than .004 percent.
Native Americans were fighting for their unique political rights as well as larger environmental concerns during this period.
The March 1977 issue of “Off Our Backs” includes an article summarizing the findings of a report by the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA), a non-profit organization founded in 1922 to promote the well-being of Native Americans and Alaskan Natives. The report found that Native American children are placed outside of their families at a rate 10 to 20 times higher than that for non-Native American children.
The AAIA argued that this practice deprives Native American children of the ability to be raised with a proper awareness of and appreciation for their culture. This concern emphasizes the fact that Native American women who were involved in the feminist movement during this time were simultaneously combatting the United States government’s systematic efforts to diminish their independence and culture as well as the wide-spread sexism that was the feminist movement’s main concern.
Native American culture celebrates its strong connection to and appreciation of nature. When Native American tribes were forced off their lands in the nineteenth century, they were put on reservations in states like Oklahoma and South Dakota. The U.S. government later came to realize these areas were rich with natural resources such as oil and uranium.
“In the days of diminishing U.S. energy resources, the push is on to take what’s left of Indian land,” according to an article in “Off Our Backs.”
The U.S. government used environmentally hazardous practices to extract these resources, exposing people living on the land to cancer-causing radioactive materials. It also paid the Native Americans working in these hazardous mines very low wages. These practices led to outcry by Native American men and women.
The Longest Walk was a major event in the Red Power movement.
In 1978, thousands of Native Americans participated in The Longest Walk, a protest organized to bring attention to threats to tribal lands pose by several pieces of proposed legislation.
“In effect, these bills could force Native Americans to complete assimilation into the U.S. mainstream and destroy all sovereignty of the Indian nations,” the article on the march said.
In the same August/September 1978 issue that covered the march, “Off Our Backs” included coverage of a conference in New Mexico that addressed the upsurge in domestic violence against Navajo women. This increase was attributed to a “pressure cooker syndrome” created by white culture: “women-battering and child abuse (were) once practically non-existent…and has now reached crises proportions.”
The attempted forced assimilation of native people into white culture created a class system that did not exist in Navajo tribal society. This led to high poverty and unemployment rates which in turn came to be correlated with high rates of substance abuse and domestic violence.
The writers draw attention to the fact that few of the speakers at the conference were from the Navajo or from any other Native American community. Calling attention to the lack of authentic representation at this conference may be an indication of the evolution of “Off Our Backs” in how it dealt with minority issues. When the paper first began in 1970, it struggled to expand their coverage to minority women’s issues, as evidenced by its problematic coverage of a black feminist group’s conference in 1974.
Similar to black women who were involved with groups like the Black Panthers, politically active Native American women were part of efforts led by men. Women of All Red Nations (WARN) was a Native American women’s group that brought attention to issues that affected their community including the displacement of their children, forced sterilization, tribal rights, resource exploitation and racism in the educational system. The group invited several Native American men to speak at a conference it held in South Dakota in 1978 as it did not “believe in the separation of men and women who were working for the same objective.” This serves as a perfect parallel to black women activists who wanted to be a part of the black and feminist movements.
Burning Cloud’s letter serves as a quintessential example of a woman’s struggle to find a way to be politically active as someone with a complex set of oppressed identities.
In the December 1978 issue of “Off Our Backs,” the editors printed a letter from Burning Cloud, a self-described “Filipina/Indian Dyke.” In the letter, Burning Cloud shared a sentiment common with those expressed by black women — that she was “Indian first and above all other matters.”
Burning Cloud felt she could not be both an Indian and a gay woman in society. She also expressed frustration with the fact that non-black minorities’ concerns are much more widely disregarded because there are comparatively few of them in number.
Burning Cloud’s letter included a call to action for environmental activism which, from her perspective, was something of which native people were much more conscious due to their spiritual cultural connections to the earth.
“If Mother Earth is to die WE ALL DIE. Think about that one. What is the future of your children and sisters and mothers to be?” she wrote. “Are we not killing each other because we allow such things as racism, classism, separatism right here in the Lesbian community. How shall wimmin be totally free when three-quarters of the (Coloured Wimmin) are dying?”
(Feminists took to using alternative spellings of “women” and “woman” in order to avoid using the masculine root of those words.)
Native American women also faced the issue of forced or coerced sterilization. In “Off Our Backs” article from December 1978, WARN said that 25 percent of Native American Women were forcibly sterilized.
During this period, the United States government instituted polices of population control that targeted minority, underclass women. One third of Puerto Rican woman of reproductive age had been sterilized in 1976. This policy was veiled as a necessary method of population control that would help Puerto Rico develop economically. However, many argued that the problem was not overpopulation, rather that the available resources were concentrated in the upper echelons of society.
In her 1976 University of Connecticut Ph.D. thesis “Population Policy, Social Structure and the Health System in Puerto Rico: The Case of Female Sterilization,” Peta Henderson found that in addition to medical reasons, the law in Puerto Rico regarding female sterilization allowed for women to be sterilized or use other contraceptive methods in cases of poverty or already having multiple children. Henderson found that most sterile Puerto Rican women said they voluntarily chose to have the operation. However, she explores how this choice was corrupted by the fact that government actors worked to persuade these women that sterilization was in their best interest.
The U.S. Government put forth the idea that having fewer children was the surest path to wealth for minority women, ignoring institutional issues including racism and sexism that impeded their social mobility.
These kind of population control polices were also implemented elsewhere in Latin America.
The April 1970 issue of “Off Our Backs,” a female member of the Peace Corps who went to Ecuador said, “Providing safe contraceptives must be a part of a comprehensive health program,” Rachel Cawan said. “Most importantly, however, there must be available other emotionally satisfying alternatives to child raising.”
The prevailing feminist interpretation of these population control programs was that they masqueraded as liberating family planning alternatives when, in fact, many of these women were being coerced or forced to stop having children.
The Young Lords Party was founded in 1960. The men who founded the organization had a series of objectives including self-determination for Puerto Rico, liberation for third-world people and, problematically, “Machismo must be revolutionary and not oppressive.”
Early in the party’s history, the men in the movement did not listen to women’s ideas and concerns during meetings. These women were limited to essentially being glorified secretaries for the party according to a November 11, 1970 New York Times article.
The women in the movement soon tired of this dynamic and demanded to be taken seriously – and they succeeded. Several women were able to assume leadership positions in the party and the pillar relating to machismo was changed to one supporting equality for women. However, this victory did not mean women were automatically able to achieve true political and social equality within the party or on a larger scale.
In a subsequent issue of “Off Our Backs,” a black/Native American woman wrote a response to Burning Cloud’s letter, which had also said black people should support Native Americans’ issues, saying that: “There is a need for Dialogue, a conversation, between Indian people and Black people…We have been divided in order to be conquered, even though for many, our blood flows together.”
A theme that emerges again and again when studying the second-wave of the feminist movement is that by separating women into sects with seemingly irreconcilable differences, men have managed to prevent them from forming a powerful united front capable of combatting not only sexism, but racism and other social ills that afflict them.
Anna Zarra Aldrich is majoring in English, political science and journalism at the University of Connecticut. As a student writing intern, Anna is studying historical feminist publications from the collections of Archives and Special Collections. The following guest post is one in a series to be published throughout Spring 2018.
The feminist movement has long struggled with incorporating different groups’ concerns and modes of oppression into the movement. This problem was exacerbated by the multifaceted, turbulent U.S. political atmosphere that characterized the 1960s and 1970s.
“Chrysalis,” a quarterly women’s periodical that was self-published in Los Angeles from 1976-1980, struggled to incorporate African American women’s issues into its editors’ ideals for the movement. In an issue of the magazine that came out in spring of 1979, poet Adrienne Rich wrote an article called “Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism and Gynophobia.”
“Chrysalis’s” article sharing the story of Annie Mae was a clear attempt to give a black woman a voice in the publication.
Rich’s article emphasized some of the inherent similarities between the struggles of black people and women in America. She wrote that all women and all black people in this country live in fear of violence being committed against them solely due to their gender or race without the hope of justice being served.
Her article went on to explain that dividing women against each other has historically been a means by which men have maintained their oppression: “The polarization of black women in American life is clearly reflected in a historical method which, if it does not dismiss all of us altogether or subsume us vaguely under ‘mankind,’ has kept us in separate volumes or separate essays in the same volume.”
Rich urged women that they “can’t keep skimming the surface” of the women’s movement by refusing to engage with black women’s issues.
“Chrysalis’s” winter 1980 issue featured a story called “I am Annie Mae” which was the story of Annie Mae Hunt, a 70-year old black woman from Texas. Annie Mae’s story was told through a transcript of hours of interviews.
Annie Mae’s story shared the hardships of her life, including her dropping out of school after fifth grade, getting married and having her first child when she was only 15. Annie Mae was pregnant a total of 13 times in her life and had six living children at the time of the article’s publication. Annie Mae said she was never educated about birth control and was told having more children was better for her.
“Birth control – that wasn’t in the makings then. I mean the black people didn’t know it. Poor people like me. There may have been some well-to-do people that knew about it,” Hunt said.
While this article was an earnest effort by “Chrysalis” to tell the story and plights of a woman of color, it was only through a white mouthpiece that Annie Mae was able to share her story; the reporter who conducted and organized the interviews was white as was the staff and, presumably, much of the magazine’s readership. Furthermore, aside from Rich’s essay and this article, examples of “Chrysalis” covering women of color’s issues are sparse.
“Off Our Backs,” a bi-weekly newspaper printed in Washington D.C. (1970-2008) did put forth a more valiant effort to communicate the struggles of black women in America through their own voices even if they often fell short of true intersectional understanding.
In the April 15, 1971 issue of “Off Our Backs” an unnamed black woman, identified as someone who held a “high position in the Health, Education and Welfare Department,” was interviewed about her response to the women’s liberation. She pointed out at that at time the women’s movement was predominantly led by and composed of white, middle class women. She said that black women do not want to be a part of what they considered to be a, frankly, racist movement.
In their article on the Kitty Genovese Women’s Project, “Off Our Backs,” asks directly about this criticism of racial bias.
The 1960s and 70s were a period rife with tension in multiple dimensions, only one of which was the women’s lib movement. This period saw the continuing struggle by African Americans for equality and civil rights. The woman interviewed for the April 15 article emphasized that she, and many other black women, identified as black first and a woman second in terms of their identity and sources of oppression.
In 1977, the Kitty Genovese Women’s Project, named for the woman who was murdered while numerous people who were aware of what was happening did nothing, posted a list of 2,1000 male sex offenders in Dallas County. A group of 30 women handed out over 20,000 copies of the list. Many black feminists took issue with the list as black men were disproportionately represented due to a higher conviction rate among blacks for all crimes due to the racial bias of the criminal justice system.
In 1966, the militant civil rights activist group the Black Panthers formed in in Oakland California. Many black women were involved in the black movement and wanted to work with the men in that movement to achieve their collective goals. Many white feminists, however, argued for a complete break with men.
This argument originated during the first wave of feminism in the United States. Some male abolitionists argued that it was the “Negro’s Hour,” during the last ninetieth century, to quote Wendell Phillips. Men such as Phillips, and Frederick Douglass believed the main focus of the period had to be black men’s rights and that women’s suffrage would have to be pushed to the back burner.
This led women’s suffrage leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to found the women’s-only National Woman Suffrage Association. This break from the abolition movement may be viewed as a break from black issues in general, which sowed the seeds for the division that reemerged in the next phase of the movement.
In June 1979, “Off Our Backs” published a special “Ain’t I a Woman” issue, named for a famous speech given by Sojourner Truth at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Truth’s speech confronted the stark differences between the treatment of white and black women: “Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?”
The special issue included a statement from the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist group from Roxbury, Massachusetts. The statement said: “As black women, we see black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppression that all women of color face.” They emphasized that, “Black women’s development must be tied to race and class progression for all blacks.”
This special issue was produced by the Ain’t I a Woman Collective, a black feminist organization based in D.C.
The black women and feminists of the period did not believe their plights as black people living in America and as women living in America could be separated. They believed they could not progress as whole humans without both issues, in addition to class, which was often correlated with race, being addressed.
One of the important issues that black women said white feminists did not grasp was welfare. A much larger proportion of black women were in poverty than white women during this period. The U. S. Census (Current Population Survey and Annual Social and Economic Supplements data) from 1975 shows that 27.1 percent of black families were in poverty compared to 9.7 percent of all families. Those statistics become even more staggering when we look at poverty rates for single-female households. 50.1 percent of black families with a single mother were in poverty compared to 32.3 percent of all other single-female households.
Intersectionality hinges on the idea that people have a complex identity that is shaped by a variety of demographic and experiential factors such as race, class and education. Black women were dealing with a variety of issues and sources of oppression during this period that, evidently, many of the white leaders of the feminist movement did not see as falling in line with their goals.
In the winter of 1974, some of the “Off Our Backs” staff attended the first meeting of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). The group’s mission was to “fight racism and sexism jointly.” “Off Our Backs'” coverage of the event acknowledged that black women have an ethos to speak about issues that white women are unable to assume: “While ‘Off Our Backs’ has never been vague about its commitment to cover the issues and to carry messages about them to feminists, only a group like NBFO deeply immersed in the survival struggles of low-income black sisters and their own experiences, can be a valid messenger and a forceful mover of these issues.”
The coverage of the event emphasized that racism has kept women systemically divided by making minority women feel they could either be black or a feminist. Unfortunately, the article is critical of the fact that that many speakers ranked racism over sexism in terms of which was a more pressing issue. This clearly displays that many white feminists could not grasp the fact that these women felt they needed to confront the systemic racism in the country in tandem with, and perhaps, some would argue, before, sexism.
The “Off Our Backs” article said that black men did not want black women to join the feminist movement and point out that male-dominated black media outlets like “Jet” or “Ebony” did not attend the meeting when many white feminist presses did. The writers also criticized black feminists for not utilizing these feminist outlets. This provides an interesting area to use to examine the underlying issues here – black women’s issues were not covered well by most white-dominated feminist media outlets, yet the writers of “Off Our Backs” suggest that these women were not reaching out to allow their stories to be told by these papers.
It is necessary to mention that there is a conspicuous lack of exclusively black feminist publications in Archives and Special Collections’ holdings at the Dodd Center. This may be attributable to gaps in the collection or there may have been few publications that served this specific interest group. It seems that black women’s issues were split between the feminist and black movements with some overlap in the media for each.
Anna Zarra Aldrich is majoring in English, political science and journalism at the University of Connecticut. Anna is a student writing intern studying historical feminist publications from the collections of Archives and Special Collections. The following guest post is one in a series to be published throughout the Spring 2018 semester.
In February of 1970 a terrorist group took over a prominent underground newspaper in New York.
The Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.), a direct-action political group, along with several other women’s groups and female “RAT” staffers took over the newspaper for what was supposed to be a single, token issue of the paper. The headline on this issue read, “Women Seize RAT! Sabotage Tales!”
This comic, published in the women’s issue of RAT illustrates the takeover which was enabled by numerous women’s groups including W.I.T.C.H.
The women’s issue featured an essay by Robin Morgan, an American writer and noted feminist activist, titled “Goodbye to All That.” The essay sharply criticizes the advertisements using photos of women that bordered on pornographic and the continual exclusion of a feminist viewpoint from the paper.
“We have met the enemy and he’s our friend. And dangerous,” Morgan wrote.
Morgan’s article rallied against the white, male domination of the radical anti-war/anti-establishment movement. She said, “Goodbye, goodbye. To hell with the simplistic notion that automatic freedom for women – or nonwhite peoples – will come about zap! with the advent of a socialist revolution. Bullshit.”
Grievances against male radicals were common among feminist writers during this period. A pamphlet written by Andrea Dworkin in 1973 titled “Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals” stated that men permitted women to take part in their vision of the revolution so long as they kept their own demands moderated and subsumed within the male-dominated agenda.
“Liberal gestures of good will are made when we are shrill enough or when we are fashionable enough as long as we do not interfere with the ‘real revolution.’ Increasingly we understood that we are the real revolution,” Dworkin wrote.
The January 25-February 9, 1970 issue of “RAT,” the last one published by the male editorial staff, included numerous articles on pornography and masturbation. An article by Uncle Leon Gussow argued that pornography gives young men unrealistic views of sex and creates a separation between him and the act of sex. The women who worked at “RAT” took issue with how this topic was approached by the male staff; they believed this article, and the paper in general for quite some time, promoted pornography. Many women saw pornography as problematic as it often portrayed violence against women and this became a major issue in the women’s liberation movement.
The women also disliked the fact that the tongue-in-cheek titles that appeared on the masthead of each issue were often demeaning and stereotypical to women, referring to them as “princess” or “muffin purchaser.”
The Feedback Page of “Vortex” following the Women’s Lib issue
After the women of “RAT” published their issue they were loath to return control to the men who had been running the paper since its inception in 1968. So they didn’t.
In the next issue, the women still made up the entirety of the editorial staff, but some men came back temporarily as production staffers to ease the transition. In a letter to the readers, the editors said they were trying to “work it out” with the men. All male staff members were eventually asked to leave the paper and control remained in exclusively female hands.
A letter to the readers from former editor Paul Simon explained that after a “stormy” meeting between the men and women of the paper, it was decided that the paper would continue to be published by the women.
The takeover at “RAT” inspired women working at other papers across the country to follow suit. In the April 4, 1970 issue of “Vortex,” an underground paper published out of Lawrence, Kansas, W.I.T.C.H. wrote a letter to the paper saying, “you are a counterfeit left male-dominated cracked-glass-mirror reflection of the American nightmare.” The letter said the group was preparing to organize a boycott of the paper.
This letter was published in the issue of the paper following issue on the women’s liberation similar to the one that initiated the permanent takeover of “RAT.” In September of that same year, “Vortex” moved to a collective model of publication. This altered the existing editorial structure at the paper and gave women a larger say in its production beyond their single issue which, unfortunately is not available at the Dodd Center Archives.
“RAT” continued its coverage of issues like the Vietnam War and the trial of the 21 members of the Black Panther Party who were charged with coordinating attacks on a series of New York City buildings. However, the new editors made sure to make women’s issues and the accomplishments of female activists more prominent.
The cover of the January 12, 1971 issue celebrated the anniversary of the women’s takeover of “RAT”
They featured letters from Mary Moylan, one of the Cantonsville Nine, a group of activists who burned draft files to protest the war. Moylan went underground, hiding from the authorities for a period and her letters about her time underground were published in “RAT” and other publications like the women-run “Off Our Backs.” “RAT” also featured articles about women’s role in the Israeli-Palestine conflict.
In March of 1971, the paper changed its name to the Women’s LibeRATion.
One thing the women sought to dissemble with their takeover was the hierarchical structure that had allowed men to squelch their voices for so long. This led them to establish a newsroom that was much more free-flowing and less rigidly structured. In a letter to the readers, the editors describe the RAT work collective’s meetings as “un-chaired and chaotic.”
The paper continued publishing with relative consistency through 1972 and then stopped abruptly for several months. Then, in April of that year, a newsletter came out.
The single printed sheet explained to readers that the fate of “RAT” was in limbo due to internal fractionalization. A group of six black gay women had seized control of the paper after airing their grievances against the white feminist viewpoint that had been almost exclusively featured by the paper.
The black women writing the article said there were too many fundamental misunderstandings between the white and third-world women in the movement to be reconciled into a cohesive vision in which all voices could be heard.
The letter published on the back cover of the single-sheet issue asked readers to respond with feedback and monetary donations to support the continuation of the publication
The newsletter closed with a request for feedback from readers, “Your responses will determine the outcome of the almost defunded ‘RAT;”. The paper also asked for monetary donations to help keep the presses running.
Unfortunately, it appears these women were unable to keep the paper afloat either due to a lack of interest or lack of funds.
The downfall of “RAT” showcases the lack of an understanding of the idea of intersectional feminism during this time. Perhaps it also demonstrates a lack of will on the part of white feminists to create connections with minority women and engage in meaningful dialogue to understand their issues. Minority voices were not generally included in the more-prominent feminist outlets, or if they were given a space, it was still through the good graces of white editorial staffs. This is an unfortunate truth that the feminist movement continues to grapple with today.
Anna Zarra Aldrich is majoring in English, political science and journalism at the University of Connecticut. She is a student writing intern studying historical feminist publications from the collections of Archives and Special Collections. The following guest post is one in a series to be published throughout the Spring 2018 semester.
During the 1960s and 1970s feminist writers established themselves with a distinct and demanding voice. In order to accomplish the feat of integrating a prominent female presence into the literary world, women created and utilized exclusively female publishing mediums. Women took to using alternative methods that allowed them to cultivate this unique literary culture outside the realm of the traditionally male-dominated publishing world.
In 1985, noted librarian and author Celeste West published a book titled “Words in Our Pockets: The Feminist Writers’ Guild handbook on how to gain power, get published & get paid.” The book provided an in-depth look at the publishing world through a feminist lens and provided women with resources and options for alternative paths to publication.
The cover of the book depicts a woman’s portrait composed of the words of a poem by Denise Levertov’s from which the book gets its title. It reads: “But for us the road/ unfurls itself, we count the/words in our pockets.”
The introduction of the book states that, “The present wave of feminism is…creating a women’s cultural renaissance, the first since matrifocal times. At last, we are building, in large numbers, our own literary tradition, finding our own audience, and from these, shaping a world view.”
This book emphasizes the fact that many of the most influential members of the movement have been writers who use the power of the written word to express the urgency and necessity of the changes they demanded.
West’s book begs the question: “Who among us can afford silence?” West wanted to encourage women to make their voices heard through the literary mire that was oversaturated with male perspectives.
The book goes through a basic how to process for practical elements of publication including writing proposals, making sense of the legal jargon in contracts and financing options. The book also deals with the sexism of the industry. The book provides advice on how to deal with people, namely powerful men, who refuse to take women writers seriously and list feminist publishers and a guide on self-publishing as a means to circumvent discouraging male publishers.
“You are a writer, not a wallflower. Why wait for some gentleman publisher to sweep you into his arms and carry you off to the Big House?” West proposes.
In an article published in the summer 1979 issue of “Chrysalis” magazine, West wrote “Book publishing, like all industries, is controlled by rich, white, heterosexual men. To retain this power, their books naturally reinstate status quo attitudes of privilege and discrimination.”
The article cites the figure that 70 percent of books published were produced by 3.3 percent of the over 6000 publishing houses that existed at the time. West calls independent, alternative press outlets “the slice of tomorrow.”
The book’s engagement with the challenges female writers faced showed that even as women encouraged each other to write, the established system often operated to keep them excluded. This created a space for female-run literary publications that provided a platform for women writers who were not welcomed into traditional literary circles.
“Aphra” was an feminist literary magazine published quarterly from 1969 to 1976 out of New York City. The magazine got its namesake from the pioneering English poet, playwright and author Aphra Behn (1640-1689) who was the first woman known to have earned her living by writing.
“Aphra’s” mission statement was “Free women thinking, doing, being.” In the preamble to their first edition, the editors state that the purpose of the magazine is to provide women with an outlet to express themselves: “We submit that one reason for the form of the current upsurge in feminism…is that the mass media provides such biased and commercially oriented material. The literary and entertainment scene are dominated by male stereotypes, male fantasies, male wish fulfillment, a male power structure,” echoing West’s complaints.
The magazine was a clear response to the male domination of the literary field in contemporary American society and historically. Each issue contained a collection of “Aphra-isms” which were quotes from feminist figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth and more modern feminists like Kate Millet. The section also featured historical and modern examples of sexism from literature and the news.
“Aphra” published work from a variety of authors, including Margaret Atwood and Alice Walker, who each provided a unique take on feminist issues of the day yet they all had an underlying tone that was unapologetic and focused on confronting the problems they observed in society.
In a short story by one of the magazine’s editors, Elizabeth Fisher, titled “My Wife,” she explores the downside of the sexual revolution which allowed and encouraged women to enjoy the sensual pleasures of sex. The story is told from the perspective of a man who believes he has the honor of sexually awakening his future wife. The man becomes disenchanted with his wife soon after they are married and her body changes as a result of her pregnancies and their sex life naturally dwindles. The kicker of the story is the conclusion when the husband overhears his wife admitting to a friend that she faked every single orgasm he thought she had had with him. This sends the narrator into a devastating existential crisis as his fragile male sexual ego is absolutely destroyed.
“I look at the children. They’re my daughters, but they’re hers too. Will they, too, grow up to betray me and their husbands, a man’s whole raison d’etre?…There’s nothing left. How can I live now, how can I go on?”
This desperate conclusion to the story shows how a female writer revealed the negative side of the sexual revolution. Since women were now allowed to admit they enjoy sex, they were expected to. Despite this revolution in sexual philosophy and the growing availability of a variety of birth control methods, male views of sex remained chauvinistic and self-centered. The narrator displays a kind of toxic masculinity that created a culture in which women felt obligated to fake orgasms and feign pleasure. These women felt they had to play the role of the sexually liberated woman even when reality remained stalled in antiquated sexual attitudes that prioritized male sexuality and pleasure.
An unsigned editorial in the second issue of the magazine addresses the difficulties the second-wave feminist movement faces in terms of measurable accomplishments. The first iteration of the women’s movement in the early 20th century was focused primarily on women’s suffrage. The passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 was a clear victory for the movement and led to its dormancy for the next forty years. The goals of feminists in the 1960s, aside from fighting to achieve the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, were geared toward largescale social change. The author of the editorial astutely observes that, “It is an aim which all too often proves illusory since you can’t legislate orgasm — produce it by fiat, despite all the promises which seem to say, ‘Let there be orgasm!’”
In the spring of 1971, “Aphra” had a special “Whore Issue”. This issue dealt with problems of women being condemned for sexual promiscuity as well as the exploitation of women as sex workers.
An editorial by Fisher argues that the problem with sex is that it has been made into a commodity. Women are defined by their sexual relationship with men as a wife, a mother, a mistress or a whore. Fisher writes that by viewing sex in these terms, female pleasure is devalued and the woman is transformed into a dehumanized sex object.
While “Aphra” was primarily a literary journal, through Fisher’s editorial leadership it engaged questions of the sexist nature of sex. Fisher also wrote repeatedly on the role of men in procreation, which had recently become optional given advancements in invitro fertilization.
A similarly satirical take on issues of sexual freedom can be found in a 1973 issue of another feminist literary magazine, “Velvet Glove.” A story by Susan Watkins follows a woman working in a pharmacy who is required to inquire if a customer is married before she is allowed to sell them contraception. The female protagonist asks her condescending male manager if people could not just easily lie and he tells her she must ask anyway in compliance with the law. The protagonist’s retort is to wonder if she should also be required to ask young women buying menstrual products if they’re 12-years old. This story is another example of satirical writing which was clearly a way feminists saw fit to combat the social ills they observed.
Feminist have long been thought of as humorless and in modern times many even refer to them as “feminazis.” While much of the work published in literary journals like “Aphra” and “Velvet Glove” is of a serious nature, it also provides women with a platform to express a brand of humor that would not have been well-received by a male audience.
Even “Words in our Pockets” participates in this emergence of a female comedic culture as the copyright information on the inside of their front cover warns readers that “a Surveillance MicroblastchipTM embedded in this spine will blow you to bits in the event of unauthorized copying.”
When women were writing to and for other women, they embraced the satirical and humorous side of the movement. Women could rarely do this publicly for fear of being dismissed as frivolous; but women’s publications provided women with an outlet for their special brand of ingroup feminist humor.
Women began working their way into the literary world earnestly and consciously during the 1960s and have not turned back since. In 1960 only 24 percent of the books that landed on the New York Times Bestseller List were written by women. That number fluctuated each year but never rose above 40 percent until 1992. Since then, the gender divide has been roughly equal, though never exceeding 50 percent. It is not a stretch to say that publications like the ones described here have helped establish the feminist literary tradition that has allowed modern female writers to have much more proportional representation in the field.
“Words in our Pockets” ends on a poignant and unmistakably optimistic note. The second to last page contains the words “The End.” When the reader turns the page, she reads: “The statement on the other side of this page is false.” And clearly, that latter statement was correct.
The following guest post is by Stefanie Heine who was was awarded a Rose and Sigmund Strochlitz Travel Grant in 2017 to conduct research in Archives and Special Collections. Dr. Heine studied English, Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University of Zürich. She was a Research and Teaching Assistant at the Department of Comparative Literature in Zurich. After completing her PhD (cf. Visible Words and Chromatic Pulse. Virginia Woolf’s Writing, Impressionist Painting, Maurice Blanchot’s Image. Wien: Turia + Kant, 2014), she started working on a post-doc project on the poetics of breathing and she is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto (Centre for Comparative Literature).
“we are ourselves both the instrument of discovery and the instrument of definition”
“this instant, […] you on this instant, […] you, figuring it out, and acting, so”
– Charles Olson, Human Universe
Without my knowledge, the GPS of the car I rented at Boston Logan airport was set to “discovery route”. I drove for over three hours, red maple, black oak, sweet birch and white ash making me indifferent to the fact that map turned to maze.
I arrived at the University of Connecticut on the day of the solar eclipse. Caught in those first moments of archive fever, I probably would have forgotten about it, if my partner hadn’t texted me: “You should go out now.” When I did, I couldn’t see. Only for a few seconds the blaze yielded to a clear-cut sickle through the glasses a woman lent me in front of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.
These two scenes composing the mood of my arrival at the Charles Olson Research Collection kept determining my exploration of the archive, and they turned out to be instances where Olson’s paths crossed mine. On the one hand, they were points where my own research met Olson’ methods. “methodos […] turns out to be meta hodos […] the principle of—PATH”, “the way the path is known”, Olson explicates in a letter to Robert Creeley in June 1952 (152). The way the path is known involves the person on it and for Olson, research is inextricably linked to the experience of the individual who conducts it, in the very moment it is conducted. On the other hand, there are more specific correlations between what I encountered on the way to and through the archive and Olson’s methodological and poetological approaches. The title of a section of the Maximus Poems, “Each Night is No Loss, It is a daily eclipse, / by the Earth, of the Sun” (448) can be read in line with these approaches. The phenomenon of eclipse could be considered as something that happens on a continual basis when we do research and write: instances of blindness and sudden illumination reoccur, again and again. In an unpublished essay I came across in the archive, Olson explicitly comments on the overlaps of “blindness” and “recognition” in the process of literary production, the creation of poetic form: “A form does only disclose itself if a man does go blind.” (Form, no more than means, is caused) With his emphasis on the writer’s or researcher’s sensation of blindness (literary writing and scientific discovery are inextricably linked for him), Olson counteracts what he considers as the most dominate way in which knowledge is achieved, the ‘Western logos’, in which the rational mind at clear daylight engages in classification and abstraction. This method is what for Olson prevents an immediate involvement of the writer or researcher with their objects of discovery and destroys the “kinetics of the thing” focused on (“Projective Verse” 16). In the archive, the proximity to the new material as such prevented any critical distance for me. The massive amount of writing held in the Charles Olson Research Collection offers too much input to process straightaway; most of the time, I was in a haze, reading and copying as much as I could, assembling material to be ‘investigated’ later. But maybe the point where I was closest to ‘knowledge-bringing event[s]’ in Olson’s sense (he borrows that term from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example in A man’s life is a continual allegory) was in the archive itself.
One of these events particularly stands out: in one of Olson’s early notebooks from 1945, a passage on syntax caught my attention. Being aware that this must be one of Olson’s the very first written reflections on literary composition and one of the first attempts to formulate principles for his own writing, I was excited. But my enthusiasm was soon overshadowed by a banal fact: Olson’s handwriting, which needs some time to get used to in general, is specifically hard to decipher on these two pages of the tiny notebook covered densely with words in pencil. I was entering a domain where language becomes utterly private and is almost impenetrable because of its singularity. “Syntax is a key”, Olson writes – and it seemed to me at first sight that it would be denied to me to unlock the gate presented by Olson. “I have a hunch I allow too much of … into my syntax.” I was too curious about what he thought he allows too much of in his syntax to turn away from the passage. When I met Melissa Watterworth Batt on the next day, knowing her experience with Olson’s manuscripts, I asked her to help me with the passage. The collaborative effort turned out to be fruitful – in the process of thoroughly scrutinizing the text, one word after the other came to light. We turned the notebook around in our hands to change the angle so that a fresh perspective might change curves into letters and a magnifying glass helped to make visible what our eyes failed to see. We zoomed in and out digital images of the page on laptop and iPhone – lines turning into pixelated patches and then to a “b”, an “l”, an “o”. The last hitherto obscure word became legible when I was back in my hotel room in Vernon, and there it was:
I tend to think that I need to maintain a more natural syntax than the process of my thinking + feeling sometimes accomplishes. I have a hunch I allow too much of the complication of both to intrude into my syntax. Yet how to arrive at an objective language without changing the syntax? Nouns, verbs, and images are the answer (see Yeats or Pound for this). Actually, of course, all this is technical + the thing will come out of me as a poem. Otherwise, no. So I must continue + be led by my nose, willy-nilly. I have no choices. Hammer each step of the way. You have rid yourself of the orphic, a little. Continue to beat with the hammer to get the proper sculpture.
The proper sculpture – the image Olson uses to describe a poem in process ceased to be a metaphor when I had the deciphered passage in front of me. In fact, the whole process of deciphering echoed the activity of a stonecarver. Or, rather, the archeological experience with Mayan glyphs Olson describes in his letters to Robert Creeley in 1951. Tracking the shape of penciled lines was a sensual experience of words as things, graphite on paper, it was a physical engagement with Olson’s written material that may come close to what Olson perceived in Lerma while digging out the stones on which the glyphs are engraved, holding words in his hand as solid objects. The transformation of curves into letters and words I observed while deciphering allowed me to partake in a “kinetics of the thing”. I was involved in an act of paying attention to “what happens BETWEEN things”, which, according to Olson is one of the last “acts of liberation science has to offer” (“The Gate and the Center” 169). Between things: between the words on the page, between my eyes on the page and the digital image, between my eyes and Melissa’s.
Washington Fall 1945 I. Charles Olson Research Collection. No. 55. October 25, 1945 – December 19, 1945
The process of deciphering is not the only way in which I experienced the archival material in its physicality. A preoccupation with Olson’s papers does not only involve investigating the contents of his thought. The writings archived in Storrs do not only occupy the mind, they are things to be experienced with all senses. The material dimension of his texts does not only become perceptible through the resistance caused by Olson’s handwriting – when the words’ meaning is interrupted by their particular shape. It is primarily the things Olson used to write on that strike the eye: besides notebooks, notepads and sheets of different size, colour and texture, and objects he found in front of him like a paper placemat, he scribbled notes between the printed words of flyers and booklets, even his passport.
The principle extrications and new coordinates now called for. Charles Olson Research Collection. Prose No. 40. Holograph/typescript. 8p. ca. September – December 1951
Olson’s passport. Charles Olson Research Collection. Annotated. No. 64. 1957.
You can’t use words as ideas. Charles Olson Research Collection. Holograph. October 1964.
After this personal account of my “discovery route” through the Olson archive, a few words on the research project that led me to Storrs: In the first chapter of my planned book titled “Poetics of Breathing” I investigate how breath is discussed as a compositional principle in the context of the Black Mountain School and the Beat Generation. The focus is on concrete attempts to establish an embodied poetics of breathing. In this context, I explore how Olson sketches compositional principles based on breath in essays, poetological manifestoes, notes and letters about his own writing practice. The unpublished material I found at the Charles Olson Research Collection gives me further insights in the development of Olson’s poetics of breathing and the Rose and Sigmund Strochlitz Grant I was awarded enabled me to make important steps on the path towards my book.
-Stefanie Heine
Works Cited
Archival Material
Olson, Charles. A man’s life is a continual allegory. Charles Olson Research Collection, University of Connecticut. Prose No. 136. Typescript. 4p. December 26-27, 1963.
Olson, Charles. Olson’s passport. Charles Olson Research Collection, University of Connecticut. Annotated. No. 64. 1957.
Olson, Charles. The principle extrications and new coordinates now called for. Charles Olson Research Collection, University of Connecticut. Prose No. 40. Holograph/typescript. 8p. ca. September – December 1951.
Olson, Charles. Washington Fall 1945 I. Charles Olson Research Collection, University of Connecticut. No. 55. October 25, 1945 – December 19, 1945.
Olson, Charles. You can’t use words as ideas. Charles Olson Research Collection, University of Connecticut. Holograph. October 1964.
Published Material
Olson, Charles and Robert Creeley. Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence. Volume 10. Ed. Richard Blevins. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1996.
Olson, Charles. “Human Universe”. Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1997, 155-166.
Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse”. Selected Writings. Ed. Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, 1966.
Olson, Charles. The Gate and the Center. Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1997. 168-173.
Olson, Charles. The Maximus Poems. Ed. George F. Butterick. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Anna Zarra Aldrich is majoring in English, political science and journalism at the University of Connecticut. She is a student writing intern studying historical feminist publications from the collections of Archives and Special Collections. The following guest post is one of a series to be published throughout the Spring 2018 semester.
The second advent of the feminist movement that washed over American society in the 1960s and 1970s like a tidal wave emphasized a pervasive message of empowerment which manifested in a variety of periodicals during this period, including art journals.
Women had largely been excluded from the world of fine art for centuries as geniuses like Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Picasso, Dali and Monet were celebrated and revered while their female contemporaries, such as Georgia O’Keefe or Frida Kahlo, were few and far between as their talent went largely unencouraged and unrewarded.
“The Feminist Art Journal” was published quarterly from 1972 to 1977 out of Brooklyn, New York by Feminist Art Journal Inc. One of the early editions of the journal from 1973 addresses the idea that women have created art for the centuries during which they were strictly confined to the home. An article titled: “Quilts: The Great American Art,” discusses how quilts, tapestries and other home décor have acted as mediums of female artistic expression that have historically been disregarded by men as mere frivolous decorations. The article states that, “Women have always made art. But for most women, the arts highest valued by male society have been closed to them for just that reason.”
An editorial from the same issue emphasizes the need of women to “rediscover their own history.” One of the primary aims of “The Feminist Art Journal” was to reclaim women’s place in art history through articles such as the one on quilts and by discussing issues of female representation in classical art. An intriguing article on Marie De Medici from the Summer 1977 issue explores how the powerful Florentine heir-turned-French-monarch commissioned portraits of herself and her life accomplishments like those that were traditionally done for prominent males of the period. Medici also pointedly decorated her palace with statues of great women like Saint Bathilde and George Sand. The article emphasizes how Marie de Medici understood the power of art as a political statement, underscoring another one of the journal’s core messages: art is political.
Interestingly, a short-lived lesbian feminist journal published from 1973 to 1975, the “Amazon Quarterly: A Lesbian-Feminist Art Journal” expressed a much different viewpoint from “The Feminist Art Journal”. “Amazon Quarterly” was published from the other side of the country, in Oakland, California by Amazon Press.It should be noted that both of these journals were published independently, sustained by revenue from subscriptions, single issue sales and advertisements. Both journals also had exclusively female editors.
The “Amazon Quarterly” commended women’s lack of participation in the male-dominated art world, in which they were routinely objectified in the works of male artists, rather than seeking to place women’s accomplishments within this patriarchal frame work.
Both “The Feminist Art Journal” and “Amazon Quarterly” promoted and provided a platform for female artists to share their literature, poetry, drawings, photography. However, “Amazon Quarterly” made promoting the art of women, specifically lesbians, its primary artistic goal, rather than engaging in discussions of history.
The division in purpose and ideology of these two journals which served, broadly, the same role, reflected a deeper division in the feminist movement between lesbians and straight women. Some lesbians believed women could not fully participate in the true revolution of the feminist movement so long as they were still sexually involved with their male oppressors, a radical idea that is discussed in articles published in the journal.
In an article, “Distinctions: The Circle Game” from the February 1973 issue of
“Amazon Quarterly” written by one of the editors, Laurel Galana, whose byline is simply a familiar: Laurel, explores these divisions within the movement.
Laurel breaks down the group of women who are feminists into increasingly small subcultures from lesbians to “new lesbians” to dykes. The “new lesbians” Laurel describes had several verboten relations including those with men and straight women, whom they viewed as “men’s women.”
Laurel herself abides by these taboos, she explains, “My energy, my time, my sisterly love was indirectly useful to the male for keeping his woman content. And secondly, I decided not to relate to straight women because they already had made a choice which did not include me – that is all of me.”
The piece goes on to criticize lesbians who distinguish themselves based on class, believing that such internal divisions will only cause the movement to fracture and be less effective. She seems to miss the irony of the fact that she believes lesbians should not associate with straight feminists and form a united front of all feminist women.
Much of the art and especially the literature published in the journal reflected the fact that “Amazon Quarterly” branded itself as a periodical that intended to cater specifically to lesbian women. Many of the pieces published in the journal deal with tales and the feelings associated with homosexual awakenings and attraction. The publication had an entire issue dedicated to the topic of sexuality as their swan song before shutting down in 1977.
While the journal ceased publication in 1977, the editors went on to run Bluestocking Books, a publishing house which published a few novels including “The Violent Sex” by Laurel Holliday. Holliday’s book confronted the evolution of masculine sexuality and behavior that has led to the sexual and social oppression of women.
Despite their differences, both these journals considered art in an expansive sense, including all forms of visual and literary art, and stressed the importance of the inclusion of the female perspective in them.
While these two journals had different audiences and somewhat different goals, they both served to underscore the important idea that art is political, and that women had to understand how they could use any and all forms of art to express their ideas and achieve their objectives.
The art of many female artists of the period, during which feminist art truly began to flourish and find its foothold, was clearly in line with this philosophy. Some notable works include Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” which portrays a dinner party of 39 notable historical women, and Hannah Wilke’s avant garde “Starification Object Series,” a series of photographs for which she covered her body with wads of gum folded to resemble female genitalia.
These two journals and the art they supported show how women utilized the arts to promote the feminist agenda as they worked toward achieving social and political equality despite divisions within the movement.
In a 1977 interview published in “Chrysalis” magazine, Chicago commented on the value of art to the feminist movement.
“Art is particularly important for women and can catapult women into a different realm of consciousness by symbolizing and objectifying our experience. That expression, that impulse, has such potential power, and it is that power that society tries to contain by trivializing, by repressing, by suppressing the art impulse,” Chicago said. “As long as women participate in that process, we will never be able to realize our full creative potential. We must bust out of that, just absolutely bust out of that and reclaim art as the basic outpouring of the human spirit and pour out our songs and all our feelings and all our beliefs and all our visions in a way that everyone can hear.”
