“Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances”1

1This chapter addresses different treatments of, and responses to, the monument in modernist literature, by comparing three equestrian statues in works by Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Frank O’ Hara. The equestrian statue in The Aspern Papers represents a masculine ideal against which James’s central character is judged; the equestrian statue in Nostromo commemorates an imperial power that has waned; the statue in O’ Hara’s poem is deliberately marginalised. These three moments are used to explore a process of remembering and forgetting in relation to commemorative statues to suggest how, over the period of time these moments map, commemorative public art loses its power to commemorate through public forgetfulness and through a post-World-War II rejection of the rhetoric of heroism. Robert Lowell, like O’ Hara, shows the post-war devaluation of monuments, but where Lowell makes this part of a critique of contemporary culture as evidence of a decline in civic virtues, O’ Hara makes it part of a celebration of the fluid, the ephemeral and the passing. His sense of the monumental—“that which recalls to memory”—leads him to explore the interface between personal memory and public or collective memory that is provided by the experience of the cinema, and the production of cultural icons in the context of contemporary cultural amnesia.

I. Preamble: The Equestrian

2The statue of Charles IV of Spain (1784-1819) is introduced in Chapter 6 of Nostromo: it stands “at the entrance of the alameda” (Conrad 1923: 48) and was clearly intended to signify the power of Spain, but, in the time of Conrad’s narrative, it now signifies instead the waning of that power.2 To paraphrase Jean Starobinski, the desire to perpetuate is inscribed in it, but the law of the past no longer runs. The narrator notes that it was “known to the folk from the country and to the beggars of the town that slept on the steps around the pedestal” as “the Horse of Stone” (Conrad: 48). In other words, it is no longer a homage to a distant ruler, it has become anonymous, merely “a vestige of a fact” (48), a trace of the former power in the land: “The weather-stained effigy of the mounted king… seemed to present an inscrutable breast to the political changes, which had robbed it of its very name” (49). The paragraph that introduces the statue implicitly compares it with another Don Carlos, Charles Gould. The “kingly cavalier reining in his steed… with his marble arm raised towards the marble rim of a plumed hat” (49) contrasts with the “other Carlos, turning off to the left with a rapid clatter of hoofs on the disjointed pavement” (48): the statue versus the living man, the assertion of an imperial power that has waned against the embodiment of a power that is current but hidden, a monument to an older imperial power versus the embodiment of the new imperialism of “material interests” (84). The equestrian statue and the equestrian Charles Gould are subsequently compared with a third equestrian figure: the iconic Carpataz de Cargadores, the indispensable man “Nostromo”, Gian Battista Fidanza. Nostromo’s equestrian appearance towards the end of Chapter 8 has all the panache of the “kingly cavalier”, but, like the statue, it is an empty performance. Nostromo, on his “silver-grey mare” (124) with “the silver plates on headstall and saddle”, is “got up with more finished splendour than any well-to-do young ranchero of the Campo had ever displayed on a high holiday” (125). His invitation to his Morenita to cut the silver buttons off his embroidered leather jacket, in a “carelessly public” display of his amours (129), is part of the same performance of identity. These characteristics of “splendour and publicity” (414) are essential for the maintenance of his reputation, but he is not “well-to-do”, he has no wealth, and his concern for his reputation leaves him open to exploitation by the rich and powerful. Nostromo is caught up in the performance of an identity, which we might see as the construction of a monument to himself within an oral culture.

3Conrad’s use of the equestrian statue of Charles IV invites comparison with James’s use of an equestrian statue in his impressionistically topographic novella, The Aspern Papers. The cosmopolitan story concerns a determined scholar trying to get his hands on papers relating to the fictional poet Jeffrey Aspern through cultivating the aged Miss Bordereau, the poet’s mistress and the subject “of some of Aspern’s most exquisite and most renowned lyrics” (James: 24). Towards the end of the story, after Miss Bordereau’s niece has offered herself in marriage to the scholar in exchange for access to the documents, he wanders in guilty confusion through Venice and finds himself in the Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo, one of the major monumental public spaces in the city, “standing before the church of Saints John and Paul and looking up at the small, square-jawed face of Bartolommeo Colleoni, the terrible condottiere who sits so sturdily astride of his huge bronze horse, on the high pedestal on which Venetian gratitude maintains him” (102-3). The statue was started by Andrea Verrochio and completed, after Verrochio’s death in 1488, by Alessandro Leopardi, who also designed the plinth.3 Fittingly, for the Jamesian context, the erection of the statue was the result of a slightly awkward bequest: Colleoni left a legacy of 700,000 ducats to the Venetian state, but with the condition that a statue to Colleoni had to be erected in the square before San Marco. The State resolved the awkwardness by erecting the statue in front of the Scuola de San Marco rather than the Basilica de San Marco as Colleoni had intended.

4For James’s narrator, however, the statue has other significances. First, he comments on its aesthetic value: “the finest of all mounted figures, unless that of Marcus Aurelius, who rides benignant before the Roman Capitol, be finer” (103). Then he observes: “but I was not thinking of that; I only found myself staring at the triumphant captain as if he had an oracle on his lips” (103). Then he further glosses this: “if he were thinking of battles and stratagems they were of a different quality from any I had to tell him of” (103). James’s narrator focuses on Colleoni’s success as a soldier with a self-deprecating awareness of the discrepancy between Colleoni’s military activity and his own scholarly manoeuvres. However, implicit in this is another comparison, which James’s narrator ignores. As the description quoted above suggests, the statue of Colleoni presents an idealised image of martial masculinity: for his part, the narrator has what he calls “a passionate appreciation of Miss Bordereau’s papers” (104), as a result of which he has entered into an ambiguous relationship with Miss Bordereau’s niece—which, in turn, has produced this moment of crisis. Miss Bordereau had earlier raised the question of the narrator’s manliness: she had questioned whether it was “a manly taste to make a bower of your rooms”; he had defended himself by claiming his interest was in “growing flowers” not decorating his room with them: “There is nothing unmanly in that: it has been the amusement of philosophers, of statesmen in retirement; even I think of great captains” (56). Now he is confronted by one of these “great captains” and found wanting. It might also be significant, as the English renaissance traveller Thomas Coryatt noted, that Colleoni “had his name from having three stones, for the Italian word coglione doth signify a testicle”. Whether James’s imagination works in this way is another question.

5O’ Hara’s poem, “Music” also features an equestrian statue—in this case, the gilded bronze statue of the Civil War victor, General William Sherman, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, which stands at the south-east corner of Central Park, across from the Plaza. General Sherman is mounted on a horse with the Angel of Victory striding in front of him, flourishing a palm frond. When the statue was unveiled in 1903, Henry James was critical of “all attempts, however glittering and golden, to confound destroyers and benefactors”; for James, Sherman represented “the very breath of the Destroyer”.4 O’ Hara’s treatment of the statue is as follows:

If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe, that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s and I am naked as a tablecloth, my nerves humming. Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared. (O’ Hara 1995: 210)

6O’ Hara does not name General Sherman—the statue is a familiar piece of street furniture, referred to by a generic name, which seems to be the name of a bar or restaurant—and the treatment of the statue in the first four lines is anti-heroic and even mocking. There is more attention paid to the choice of sandwich than to the statue, and the suggestion that “that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s” is debunking like the Southerners’ joke about the statue: “Just like a Yankee: make the lady walk” (Schjeldahl: 80). These opening lines are also reminiscent of Larry Rivers’ treatment of another American hero, George Washington, in his painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1953), painted the previous year. Rivers observed “what could be dopier than a painting dedicated to a national cliché”, and he deliberately painted against the famous work by the German-American academic painter, Emmanuel Leutze, which hung in the Met (Larry Rivers, “Why I Paint As I Do” in O’ Hara 1975: 112). Where Leutze took the crossing of the Delaware as “another excuse for a general to assume a heroic, slightly tragic pose”, Rivers “saw the moment as nerve-wracking and uncomfortable”: “I couldn’t picture anyone getting into a chilly river around Christmas time with anything resembling hand-on-chest heroics” (112). O’ Hara’s 1955 poem, “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art” picks this up precisely:

Now that our hero has come back to us
in his white pants and we know his nose
trembling like a flag under fire (O’ Hara 1995: 233)

7Not only is he trembling—from cold or fear—but there is also at least the suggestion that the flag, like his pants, might be white. In “Music”, O’ Hara metes out similar treatment to the monumental public art of Saint-Gaudens: heroics are displaced, and the focus falls instead on the nervous living body.

8At first glance, O’ Hara’s lines also seem to be working against the commemorative role of public art: they seem to flatten time and reduce it to a complex of non-hierarchised simultaneous events—the sandwich, the statue, the humming nerves. In his poem “Having a Coke with You”, he had written:

it is hard to believe when I am with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles (360)

9However, on closer examination of the lines in “Music”, it is remarkable how history presses back into this moment. The Mayflower Shoppe, as the mock-ar-chaic spelling suggests, itself commemorates the arrival of English colonists in North America. Even the humble sandwich commemorates the 4^th Earl of Sandwich and his marathon 24-hour gambling session. And the transition from the nervous body to “the fear of war” (210) is clearly a response to the unnamed statue. As we know, space has a history, and history is mediated through tourist shops and foodstuffs as well as through public statuary.5

II. For the Union Dead

10O’ Hara’s treatment of Saint-Gaudens’s statue of General Sherman bears comparison with Robert Lowell’s treatment of another Saint-Gaudens Civil War memorial in his poem “For the Union Dead”.6 Lowell worked on the poem between January and June 1960 for the Boston Arts Festival. He had returned to Boston in 1955, and he was to leave Boston for residence in New York later in the year. At the centre of the poem is Saint-Gaudens’s bas-relief near the State House commemorating Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54^th, the regiment of African-American volunteers he commanded, many of whom had died in an attack on the Confederate forces at Fort Wagner, South Carolina.

11Lowell’s poem is obviously a response to Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (Tate: 20-23).7 Tate’s poem, written in 1926, had used the trope of “the heroic past and the empty present” (Louis D. Rubin Jr.: 208) to articulate what he saw as the predicament of the South.8 Rubin articulates this vision in the following terms: “The agrarian community that had been the Southern way of life was with all its faults vastly preferable to what was taking place now” (Rubin: 208). The persona of the poem is a young white Southerner, in a Confederate graveyard, facing the acres of headstones. It celebrates the heroism of the past explicitly:

You know the unimportant shrift of death
And praise the vision
And praise the arrogant circumstance
Of those who fall… (Tate, 20)

12It also celebrates it indirectly by invoking heroic names, beginning with Stonewall Jackson and ending with a roll-call of heroic Civil War actions: “Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run” (21).9 The present generation is dwarfed by contrast: we “who count our days and bow / Our heads with a commemorial woe / In the ribboned coats of grim felicity…” (Tate, 20). The heads bowed in commemoration also suggest heads bowed in defeat.

13Lowell’s poem uses the same trope of the heroic past and the empty present, but the Civil War heroism he invokes is that of the North and Abolition. The poem’s epigraph, “Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam”, celebrates the heroic sacrifice of the Union soldiers, but also aligns the poet with that tradition of service to the public.10 The poem begins with Lowell’s memories of himself as a boy in 1920s Boston with his face pressed against the glass of the aquarium, a memory matched and cancelled by a more recent memory of being “pressed against the new barbed and galvanized/fence” (1496) to observe the excavations on the Common. The start of the poem is rooted in the topography of Boston Common. It registers the dismantling of an older Boston in the interests of a new urban order through the demolition of the old South Boston Aquarium and the turning of part of the Common into a building plot for the construction of underground carparks (“parking spaces luxuriate”, 1496). The building work has even impacted on the Civil War memorial, “Colonel Shaw/ and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry/ on St. Gaudens’ shaking civil war relief” (1496), undermining it and leaving it propped up with a plank.11 As Patrick Cosgrove suggests, Lowell uses the memorial to represent the values and “aspirations of the past”, but also, through the way in which the monument is treated in the present, to pass judgement “upon the present” (Cosgrove: 149). As John Crick points out, those values are not simply conventional military values (Lowell had refused conscription during World War II), but rather “civic virtues”—a commitment to the cause of African American freedom that looks forward to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s (Crick: 91).

14The poem’s layering of different times goes back, before Lowell’s childhood, to 1863, when Shaw and his regiment marched through Boston, and to 1897, when the memorial was erected:

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe (1496)

15William James had given the dedicatory speech at the unveiling of the memorial, and Lowell’s wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, was working on an edition of James’s letters while Lowell was writing the poem. Where the Boston of 1897 had celebrated Colonel Shaw and his men, now “Their monument sticks like a fishbone / in the city’s throat” (1496). Lowell compares the fate of the monument to that of other Civil War memorials: “The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier / grow slimmer and younger each year— / wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets” (1497). If these monuments (and the values they stand for) are now neglected, nevertheless there was something to be commemorated publicly at the time. By contrast, Lowell observes “There are no statues for the last war here” (1497). Instead, he notes “On Boyleston Street, a commercial photograph/ shows Hiroshima boiling/ over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages” / that survived the blast” (1497). Lowell had refused conscription in part because of the Allies’ mass bombing of civilian populations in Germany (Crick 11). Now the mass bombing of the civilians of Hiroshima has become the backdrop to an advert for a safe, while the religious discourse of the “Rock of Ages” has also been warped to the same commercial purpose. If these lines serve as a reminder of the imminence of nuclear destruction and “the impermanence of all values in a nuclear age”, they also set up the advert as an alternative war memorial, as a monument to commercial values and their inhumanity. It is finance that has survived the war, and financial interests that are now destroying Boston.

16The poem also sets up another alternative to the commercial photograph of Hiroshima. Lowell writes:

Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his “niggers”. (1497)

17In his dedicatory speech, William James presented Shaw’s life, death and burial as bearing witness to the brotherhood of man:

As for the colonel, … his body, half stripped of its clothing, and the corpses of his dauntless negroes were flung into one common trench together, and the sand was shovelled over them without a stake or stone to signalize the spot. In death as in life, then, the Fifty-fourth bore witness to the brotherhood of man. The lover of heroic history could wish for no more fitting sepulchre for Shaw’s magnanimous young heart. (William James, Memories and Studies, in Mazzaro: 125-6)

18In his speech, James expressed his preference for the humanity of peace over the heroism of war. Nevertheless, he argued that there were two enemies that had to be fought: “physical nature and whatever opposes moral will” (Mazzaro: 126). In this part of his speech, James revalues the image of the ditch: from being a monument to the brotherhood of man, it becomes suggestive of the “great ashpit of Jehoshaphat” and the pit of hell. “As time collapses and the ditch draws nearer… these enemies still must be defeated” (Mazzaro: 126). Lowell repeats this revaluation of the image. If his reference to the stone statues and frayed flags of New England towns had suggested that the values for which the Union forces had fought and died have been forgotten, Lowell now corrects himself, in the face of the steamshovels on the Common, with the ambiguous thought that “the ditch was nearer” (1497). The Abolitionist struggle is set against the “drained faces of Negro schoolchildren” (1497) on television, recording the attempt to desegregate schools. In 1959 Eisenhower had passed a bill to desegregate schools; Governor Faubus of Arkansas had brought out the National Guard to resist desegregation, and the scenes at Little Rock, where “Negro schoolchildren” were forcibly prevented from entering schools, were widely broadcast.12 In a letter to Village Voice, Lowell described the poem as a lament for the “loss of the old Abolitionist spirit” and a recognition of “the terrible injustice, in the past and in the present, of the American treatment of the Negro”.13

19The poem negotiates the devaluation of monuments, the neglect of their values, and the replacement of old Boston civic virtues by the inhumane commercial values of the present. At the end of the poem, the aquarium has been replaced by a second, mechanised nature with “grand finned cars nosing forward like fish”, and the public service of the epigraph and the war memorial has been replaced by a new public sphere where “a savage servility/ slides by on grease” (1497).

III. “I like the movies, too”

20“what movie is good as the movies of childhood”14

21The conception of the poetic oeuvre as monumental is a commonplace of early modernist writing—from Yeats’s “monuments of unageing intellect”, Eliot’s notion of the tradition of literary “monuments” and the new work of art that reconfigures it, through to Pound’s monumental project, the Cantos.15 Indeed, the Cantos can be seen to have set a precedent for later modernist poets—the non-narrative long poem that was also a life-long research project became one of the characteristics of modernist poetry. Louis Zukofsky’s A; David Jones’s works from The Anathemata onwards; Charles Olson’s Maximus poems all follow this pattern. O’ Hara, however, does not. “Personism: A Manifesto” rejects monumentalism: “I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures” (498). It advocates the smaller scale of the address to another person and an improvisatory practice of going “on your nerve”. It also mocks the idea of any morally improving agenda towards the reader:

Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies, too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. (498)

22In the first part of this essay, I have suggested that, unlike Conrad or James, O’ Hara is not interested in monuments in the form of public statues. Instead of the monumental, whether statues of stone or bronze or large-scale poetic undertakings, he favours the fluid, the ephemeral, the passing. What I want to work with in this section is a different sense of the monumental as “that which recalls to memory”, and what I want to explore, through O’ Hara, is the interface between personal memory, felt in the blood and felt along the nerves, and social or collective memory. And I want to do this through exploring his engagement with Hollywood film.

23Cinema has been important within modernism. Joyce famously opened the first film-theatre in Ireland. With financial backing from four Trieste business-men, he set up the Volta Cinematograph in Dublin in December 1909.16 When Pound told Lawrence in 1910 that he was returning to America “to conquer riches”, Lawrence suggested, perhaps rather wickedly, that “he should run a Cinematograph: a dazzling picture palace; for which valuable suggestion he tendered me a frown” (in Carr: 283). Pound despised the cinema and its audience, but H. D. fell in love with it: “for H. D. it was a mythic medium, speaking a universal language” (Carr: 851). Her friends Kenneth Macpherson and Bryher set up Close-Up, the first British magazine devoted to film, but this was dedicated to European art cinema rather than Hollywood (Guest 189-190).17

24As Brad Gooch records, O’ Hara was introduced early on to cinema by his Aunt Lizzie, who even allowed him to see movies banned by the Catholic Legion of Decency: “Greta Garbo movies, Marlene Dietrich movies, B movies” (Gooch: 34). O’ Hara recalled: “I went to my first movie /And the hero got his legs / Cut off by a steam engine / In a freightyard…” (O’ Hara 1995: 291). Ronald Reagan’s unconsciously comic performance as footballer George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American (1940) didn’t put O’ Hara off. His unpublished novel, The 4^th of July, recounts a young boy’s enjoyment of afternoons at the movies.

25O’ Hara begins his early poem, “An Image of Leda”, by declaring that “The cinema is cruel/ like a miracle” (O’ Hara 1995: 35). The poem evokes the simultaneously private and shared experience of sitting in the darkened cinema, the white screen turning black, and then our projection of ourselves into the narrative (“We our-/selves appear naked/ on the river bank/spread-eagled while/ the machine wings/nearer”).18 The experience resembles that of the reader of romantic fiction, as described by R.L Stevenson. Stevenson begins his essay, “A Gossip on Romance”, by evoking the “absorbing and voluptuous” nature of the reading process: “we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images” (Stevenson: 119). He ends the essay by describing “the triumph of romantic storytelling”:

Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves; some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realised in the story with enticing and appropriate details. (Stevenson: 128)

26For Stevenson, the reading process is rooted in desire and accords with the logic of the day-dream. O’ Hara’s account of film-going in this poem, while still rooted in desire and the day-dream, presents something that is far from a pleasurable experience—or, rather, is a more complicatedly pleasurable experience. The light “holds us fast”, and then “Our / limbs quicken even / to disgrace under/ this white eye…” (36). The title suggests the divine rape of the human as the controlling metaphor, and the words “miracle” and “prayer” reinforce this quasi-religious dimension, but these lines suggest a guilty responsiveness to this enforced experience in a tangle of religion and sensuality.19 The poem ends with a more guilty thought about emotional involvement in film (“as/ if there were real/ pleasure in loving/ a shadow and caress-/ing a disguise!”, 36). The play of “real pleasure” against “shadow” and “disguise” entails ontological and ethical anxieties in the affirmation of “real pleasure”.

27O’ Hara’s poem “Ave Maria” seems to draw on memories of his adolescent afternoons in the cinema. It begins with advice to the “Mothers of America”:

let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to it’s true that fresh air is good for the body

but what about the soul that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images (371)

28But rather than dwell on those “silvery images”, the poem explores the “darker joy” of cinema going:

they may even be grateful to you
for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
and didn’t upset the peaceful home (371)

29“Ave Maria”, in its playful and ironic way, suggests how cinema-going contributes to individual, personal memory. As with “An Image of Leda”, the emphasis is on the physical experience of cinema-going rather than on the content of the films; and, again, this experience draws together the religious and the sensual. In other poems, however, those “silvery images” provide the interface between private and social memory.

30“To the Film Industry in Crisis”, for example, again draws on O’ Hara’s memories of afternoons at the theatre during the early 1940s and the stars who were at their peak in those years. After expressing his love for the “Motion Picture Industry” in general, he becomes more particular and itemises the technological attributes of his beloved:

glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound… (232)

31This celebration of a particular period of film history has moved from the purely private memory of the individual viewer to the collective memory of a generation of cinema-goers, for whom these technical advances would have been proffered in cinema posters and in the opening minutes of the films themselves. This is then followed by a long list of film stars that runs chronologically from silent films like Tol’able David (1921) through to the fifties.20 Most are references to specific films and particular iconic moments in those films: “Richard Barthelmess as the “tol’able boy” barefoot and in pants”; “Eric von Stroheim, the seducer of mountain-climbers’ gasping spouses”; “Mae West in a furry sled”. Indeed, this aspect of the references becomes more pronounced as the list proceeds:

Miriam Hopkins dropping her champagne glass off Joel McCrea’s yacht and crying into the dappled sea, Clark Gable rescuing Gene Tierney from Russia and Allan Jones rescuing Kitty Carlisle from Harpo Marx, Cornell Wilde coughing blood on the piano keys while Merle Oberon berates,
Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls (232)

32They appeal to those simultaneously shared and private experiences of film. They recall to memory our own film-going experiences: they are little fragments of film, citations, that synecdochically represent the whole film. For example, Cornell Wilde as Chopin to Merle Oberon’s George Sand calls to mind the biopic Song to Remember. But other references are more generalised, less easily placed, less like publicity stills and more like studio portraits:

Jeanette MacDonald of the flaming hair and lips and long, long neck,
Sue Carroll as she sits for eternity on the damaged fender of a car
And smiles… (232)

33In numerous poems O’ Hara exploits this appeal to collective memory embodied in film references. In “Steps”, for example, he plays two different kinds of modern monument against each other. The poem begins:

How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left. (370)

34This is followed by references to Lana Turner “out eating” and Garbo “back-stage at the Met”, on the one hand, and “the Seagram building”, on the other. The lines equate these two distinct memorial discourses: film and the buildings of New York, its monuments to religious or corporate power. Incidentally, since the Seagram building on Park Avenue, which recurs in O’ Hara’s poetry, was designed by Mies van der Rohe, it might also be read as a monument to the International Style.21

35In his recent book Glamour: A History, Stephen Gundle describes the assembly-line production of the film star by the Hollywood film industry:

Suspended between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the real and the ideal, the stars were the gods and goddesses of a modern Olympus. … Their fabulous lives were choreographed, pictured, described and evoked by publicity departments that drip-fed the world’s press with news and information. (Gundle: 172)

36While early stars of the silent-film era, such as Valentino or Greta Garbo, were promoted for their mixture of “mysterious and exotic elements” (173), “the star as a fabulous everyman or everywoman emerged fully in the 1930s” (172). Gundle describes these stars as “dazzling images that promised instant personal transformation and provided rich material for daydreams” as part of “a new second-order reality that overlay daily life” (175). In order to bring this about, the construction of the star by the studio was no less a process of transformation: Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, Cary Grant were all studio creations. Names were changed; biographies invented; awkward marriages or other inappropriate sexual histories were edited out; appropriate romances written in. The aim, Gundle argues, was “to make quite ordinary people into fascinating ciphers of individual dreams and aspirations” (179). Costume, make-up, played an important part in this process of transformation. The studio photographers were crucial in the final stage of this process of transformation, “making the stars into Hollywood icons” (189). Disseminated through fan magazines and other media, studio portraits of stars presented images of timeless physical perfection.

37In “To the Film Industry in Crisis”, O’ Hara presents and celebrates this second-order reality of mediated identities. Most of the poem is taken up with an invocation of roles, disguises, performed identities, and, where “An Image of Leda” ended with a guilty questioning of the “real pleasure” of “loving/a shadow” (36), this poem concludes with a hymn of praise for this denatured nature: “Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances” (232). “Appearances”, of course, are both actors’ performances and part of a philosophical discourse of appearance and reality. The next lines acknowledge the financial motives for film making and further demystify this world of appearances by taking us “on set” to see the “kleig lights”, the make-up, and the actor’s labour that produce (and are concealed by) the “marvellous appearances”. The final lines return to a celebration of this world of artifice, this second-order nature: not only do the film-stars “illumine space” in the cinema through the procession of their onscreen images, but “the heavens operate on the star system” (232). The complex interplay between these two lines sets up the products of Hollywood as an equivalent creation. In the same way, the final prayer (“Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!”) simultaneously evokes the material basis and technology of film and echoes those interrogations of Nature that we find in Wordsworth. On the one hand, there is the despairing sense of the natural order as purely material that we find, for example, in Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems:

No motion has she now, no force
She neither hears nor sees
Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees.22

38On the other hand, there is that Romantic idealisation of nature that we find in “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey”:

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (Wordsworth 164)

39It is precisely this concern with the eternal and the transient that I want to address in the final section of this talk, and I want to approach it through O’ Hara’s pre-occupation with death and the impact of one particular death upon him.

IV. “a ceremony for one of my dead”

40Brad Gooch notes how the death of James Dean had a particular impact upon O’ Hara. Dean died on 30 September 1955, in a crash in his Porsche Spyder, at the age of twenty-four (Gooch: 266). O’ Hara responded by writing a number of elegies (from October 1955 to April 1956). Immediately after the crash, he wrote the first of these, “For James Dean”, which begins “Welcome me, if you will, as the ambassador of a hatred / who knows its cause” (228). Through this glancing allusion to Dean’s role in Rebel Without a Cause, O’ Hara simultaneously begins an asserted identification with Dean and rejects the notion of causeless rebellion. The poem that follows aims at a certain formality: “For a young actor I am begging / peace, gods” (228). As Gooch notes, it was influenced by a number of classical elegies, which Dean’s death prompted O’ Hara to read: Milton’s “Lycidas”, Shelley’s “Adonais” and Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”—all elegies written for the death of young men. As David Thomson has noted, Dean’s fatalism showed up the restricted nature of the world he inhabited in the films in which he performed (Thomson: 176). But it was not this aspect of Dean that O’ Hara addressed (“I speak as one whose filth / is like his own” [228]). The next day he wrote another elegy, later included as “Obit Dean, September 30, 1955” in “Four Little Elegies”. Where “For James Dean” was written from a personal perspective, this second elegy, as the title suggests, is written in the public manner of a newspaper obituary. However, it begins in the vein of the classical invocation of a goddess or the prayer to a saint to intercede or, possibly, a cocktail party introduction: “This is / James Dean, Carole Lombard. I hope / you will be good to him up there” (248). Carole Lombard was thirty-four when she died in a plane crash in 1942. She had made her name as the witty blonde in romantic comedies in the thirties and was married to Clark Gable at the time of her death. O’ Hara’s linkage of the two presents them, in public and professional terms, as iconic figures of talent cut short.

41O’ Hara then wrote a short elegy (“James Dean/ actor/made in USA”) in the sand at Water Island and a longer poem “Thinking of James Dean”, which is based on his brief stay on the island. It begins with the evocation of a sunset through a fusion of high art and up-to-date cinema technology: “the flushed effulgence of a sky Tiepolo / and Turner had compiled in vistavision” (230). This serves to introduce Dean’s death, which then runs like a submerged river beneath the poem. Through an account of his time on the island, in which sleeping, swimming, the beach and friendship are played against intimations of death, O’ Hara comes to consider, first, “had I died at twenty-four as he” what he would have amounted to, and, then, what his present life, despite its pleasures, amounts to (“the cold last swim / before the city flatters meanings of my life I cannot find” [231]).23 The poem concludes: “A leaving word in the sand, odor of tides: his name” (231). What at first hearing seems like an assertion of the enduring power of “his name” reveals itself, on reconsideration, to be a memorial to the fading of that name, written in sand and washed away by the tide. The final elegy, “A Ceremony for One of My Dead”, written in April 1956, addresses the same issues of achievement, fame and death. It notes that, even after such a short passage of time, “Other drivers are racing / on superior speedways and salt flats in shinier cars”, and “Your name is fading from all but a few marquees” (250).

42Gooch suggests that, after seeing East of Eden, O’ Hara had come to identify with Dean. Dean’s character, Cain, had “struck chords” with O’ Hara’s sense of his own identity within his family: “a sort of naughty boy, wondering why he’s different” was O’ Hara’s description of Cain in a letter to Fairfield Porter; “the relationships and the things said were very close” (O’ Hara in Gooch: 267-8). Similarly, in “Obit Dean”, O’ Hara described Dean in East of Eden as “playing himself and us” (249). Through these elegies for Dean, O’ Hara, far from erecting a monument to Dean, uses the figure of Dean as a way of addressing issues of sexuality, death and value that engaged him. Viktor Shklovsky observed that Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International drew meanings and associations to itself (see Lynton). And Dean, in these poems, works in that way for O’ Hara. But the questioning of achievement and value, as we have seen, also raises doubts about any enduring fame—and these, in turn, raise doubts about the value of any monument.

43Two poems O’ Hara wrote around this time address some of the issues raised by the figure of James Dean. The first is the poem written to commemorate the death and burial of the aunt who had first taken him to the movies:

When I die, don’t come. I wouldn’t want a leaf
To turn away from the sun—it loves it there.
There’s nothing so spiritual about being happy
But you can’t miss a day of it, because it doesn’t last. (244)

44The other poem, “Returning”, invokes a very different figure:

As Marilyn Monroe says, it’s a responsibility being a sexual symbol and as everyone says, it’s the property of a symbol to be sexual. (246)

45But it comes to a similar conclusion:

They do what they can in gardens and parks,
in subway stations and latrines,
as boyscouts rub sticks together who’ve read the manual,
know what’s expected of death. (246)

46In O’ Hara’s use of film in his poetry, we have seen how the ephemeral endures through reproduction and repetition. Film is a time-based medium, but it finds a place in individual and social memory. Films have their own associations—the contexts, venues and technologies through which they were first experienced. But the film industry also worked to produce film as collective memory with film-stars as iconic figures. O’ Hara has regularly been related to what Peter Middleton and Tim Woods term “non-textual practices of memory” (Middleton & Woods: 6). O’ Hara’s walking through Manhattan foregrounds the moment, emphasises simultaneism, but this walker is also “a rememberer”: “the sights and sounds of the stroll will inevitably be enmeshed with moment-by-moment memories as well as perceptions”, while “traces of the past emerge in the present” through the historicised nature of space (Middleton & Woods: 84). As I suggested earlier, space has a history, and we have seen something of that history being brought into the poems through the buildings of Manhattan and their staging of religious power or corporate social control. However, film exists as a second-order reality that is also a discourse of memory. O’ Hara’s poems place film memories side-by-side with experiences of the historicised space of the built environment. Film icons become symbols with which to think. At the same time, as we have seen with O’ Hara’s response to the death of James Dean, O’ Hara has doubts whether any fame endures, and, if fame does not endure, what price achievement—and what price any monument?

47That aspect of the practice of Andy Warhol that responds to the Hollywood star-system as strongly as O’ Hara picks up on this. However, Warhol turns a source of anxiety into a cause for celebration. As Stephen Gundle points out, the images of stars of the recent past, such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, had been so widely circulated as to become “public property”: Warhol’s repeated screen-prints based on these images underlined “the iconic status of these stars in the public consciousness” (Gundle: 307). Gundle suggests that “he at once demystified their aura and re-enchanted it” (311), but it is perhaps more productive to see Warhol’s practice as part of a process of appropriation and “democratisation”, turning from the monumental celebration of particular individuals, with that inscription of the desire to perpetuate, to the production of anti-monuments that embrace their own transience. Even if Warhol himself demystified and re-enchanted, appropriating particular iconic images on his own terms, Warhol’s recirculation of these treated images has had its own consequences: as the British artist Gavin Turk has observed, “There’s an art button on every computer that allows you to Warholise even your family snapshots and portraits” (Turk in O’ Hagan, 32). What O’ Hara apprehended was a Hollywood culture which produced its own icons and monuments, but was also geared up to replace yesterday’s icons by today’s, which relied on the cultivation of amnesia to advance its new products. It is in that context of cultural amnesia that modern versions of the monument have to find their mode of operating. If monuments embody exemplary persons or commemorate exemplary events, what happens when the person, the event and the shared ideas they stand for are forgotten? Is modern celebrity the equivalent—or the replacement—for the public monument? Is modern celebrity itself transformed by the possibilities of digital media?

48In 1956 O’ Hara wrote his own poem about a military cemetery. This poem, called simply “Military Cemetery”, deals with World War II cemeteries and seems to take off from the homogenised image on war memorials:

We’ve got to get our war memorials corrected.
At the time of the great fatigue of 1949
I found that all the names were spelled wrong
in the cemetery rosters and on the very stones,
that is, there was but one man in every grave,
the selfsame troubadour with regrets and looks,
“good looks” they’re called by cemetery people. (262)

49As the poem develops, after proposing that this individual needs to be taken “out of all the graves but his own”, and those who belong in the graves killed and buried, O’ Hara imagines how we will “get a caravan of movie stars / to consecrate our cemetery”, bringing together the commemorative role of statuary and the collective memory of film. The poem concludes with this imagined restoration of order:

And the wind will again whisper through the poplars
When we plant them, and we’ll be able to concentrate
On the green stains we get on our trousers when
We lean against the stones in springtime reading books. (263)

50This scene, with the wind whispering through the poplars, takes us back to the surroundings of Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead”, but in quite a different mood.

51John Wilkinson has written of O’ Hara’s “anti-monumentalism” in his long poem “In Memory of My Feelings” (CP, 252-7) and in his Odes. In these poems, Wilkinson argues, O’ Hara’s anti-monumentalism “is not satisfied with over-throwing, vandalizing or discrediting art-objects; he does not submit to the fleeting moment, nor seek to belittle any artist or author” (Wilkinson: 103). Instead, “monuments are restored in the instant of encounter with their undeniable greatness”, even though this restoration “provokes their further collapse” (104). In Wilkinson’s reading of these poems, the aesthetic encounter with the art object reconciles “instantaneity with eternity” and thereby “promises life in an impossible fulness” (Wilkinson: 104). However, he goes on, “the encounter itself depends on life’s sexual, painful, transient (and joyful) acceptance and sacrifice, or else it is sterile and the work of art a funerary monument” (104). For Wilkinson, O’ Hara’s poetry is a constantly renewed resistance to the marmorealising power of art. As we have seen, in poems such as “Music”, O’ Hara displaces the heroic and monumental for an emphasis on the nervous living body in the context of the fluid, the ephemeral and the passing. “Military Cemetery”, however, is clearly not addressed to the aesthetic encounter that “promises life an impossible fulness”. It begins with war memorials, with a form of public art that already has the status of a funerary monument. However, the poem’s imaginative processes playfully bring about a transformation so that the final lines replace death with springtime, suffering and sacrifice with sartorial self-contemplation and the pleasures of the text.