Of a “Mystic Surrealist”
Daniel Barbiero
September 2019
A Review of Philip Lamantia: Preserving Fire: Selected Prose
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From a very early age—he was only fifteen years old when he first published his poems in a prestigious, avant-garde journal—Philip Lamantia (1927-2005), the son of Sicilian parents who had emigrated to San Francisco, articulated a vision of a world pervaded by uncanny associations and startling, occulted significances. In short, a world whose mundane appearance was shot through with the marvelous. Although his poetry and thought underwent changes over the course of a long life and career, he seems to have retained—or at least consistently rediscovered–a basic orientation toward an ascendant imagination and an analogical way of thinking. In essence, he always was a visionary. His fundamental project was to attain and reveal, through his poetry, a third state in which the opposition of the external, empirical world and internal, imaginative world would be reconciled and transcended.
As a poet, Lamantia began as an orthodox Surrealist, changed to a more naturalistic style, turned toward psychedelics and other drugs for inspiration, reconverted to and then drifted away from the Catholicism of his childhood milieu, abandoned his art for a period and destroyed some of his work, and eventually returned to Surrealism, albeit an unorthodox Surrealism that, particularly toward the end of his life, he saw as being consistent with the Catholicism to which he once again reconverted. These vicissitudes of style and substance, as contradictory as they might appear on the surface, seem to have been more about changes of emphasis within an unchanging, fundamental framework rather than a series of renunciations and reversals. The 2013 publication of Lamantia’s Collected Poems demonstrated how all this played out in verse. Now, with the publication of Preserving Fire: Selected Prose, we have access to a generous selection of Lamantia’s prose writings on his poetry, aesthetics, intellectual and mystical strivings, and attitudes toward contemporary poetry and society.
Preserving Fire was edited by Garret Caples, whose informative introduction shows how Lamantia’s prose writings related to the different stages of his life and career as a poet. Caples knows Lamantia’s work well; in addition to editing this volume, he was co-editor with Nancy Joyce Peters, Lamantia’s second wife, and Andrew Joron of the Collected Poems. He is an excellent guide for placing the volume’s selections in the context of the poet’s experiences, alliances, ambitions and changing situations. In addition, Steven Fama’s bibliography meticulously documents the history of these pieces, many of which were occasional and written for ephemeral journals, were biographical or theoretical statements produced for anthologies and other publications, were part of private correspondence, or prefaced poetry collections that weren’t issued. For this supplementary—yet essential—information as well as for the writings it collects, the volume is most welcome. It provides valuable insight into a poet whose career runs like a connecting, if often twisting, thread through some of the most important heterodox poetic movements of postwar America: Surrealism, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, and beyond.
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It was Lamantia’s early encounter with Surrealism—with its works and some of its principal figures—that launched his career and set him on the artistic and intellectual path he would follow, not necessarily in a straight line, all his life. Surrealism helped acquaint him with some of the ways the hidden mechanisms of the imagination worked, and with some of the methods for accessing them. Although his poetic practices—and the systems of thought he drew on to inspire and justify them—would mutate over time, the life of the active imagination seems to have served him as a fundamental point of reference.
Lamantia was introduced to Surrealism in 1942, when the San Francisco Museum of Art hosted exhibitions of work by Dalí and Miró. His interest piqued, Lamantia delved into the available literature. In the museum’s library he found copies of VVV, the journal of Surrealism in exile edited by David Hare in New York; he also read David Gascoyne’s survey of Surrealist art as well as Alfred Barr’s catalogue to the Museum of Modern Art’s Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism show. Soon after, he submitted some poems to Charles Henri Ford, editor of the lavish avant-garde journal View, a sometimes rival of VVV also based in New York. Preserving Fire includes the transmittal letter Lamantia sent with his poems; it provides a portrait of the fifteen year old poet as a very young man both forward (“But I must be heard!”) and diffident, anxious to explain himself, soliciting comments on his work, and asking advice on where else to submit them. Already, the vatic voice is in evidence.
Ford accepted some of Lamantia’s poems and published them in the spring, 1943 issue of View. By the spring of 1944, he quit school in San Francisco and moved to New York, where he worked in View’s editorial office. It was in the View offices that he met André Breton for the first of their three in-person meetings. Prior to meeting Breton Lamantia had submitted some poems to him; Breton accepted three for publication in VVV’s February, 1944 issue. Breton, for whom personal loyalty and ideological orthodoxy were of the utmost importance, also asked Lamantia to “clarify” his position vis-a-vis Surrealism. Lamantia’s reply, given the portentous title “Surrealism in 1943” when it was published in VVV along with the poems, is remarkable as a youthful, yet self-aware, statement of principles. In it, Lamantia proclaimed his “formal adherence” to Surrealism, noting insightfully that the movement’s “revolutionary nature” appealed to his own rebellious temperament. He further averred his faith in the “poetic marvelous” and the unconscious as the true sources of inspiration for poetry and rebellion. Most tellingly, he predicted that the ideas he was expressing would “remain with me for some time to come.” As they in fact did, albeit with interruptions.
In contrast to his longtime commitment to the poetic marvelous in its many forms, Lamantia’s involvement with the milieu of Surrealism in exile was brief. As Caples has shown elsewhere, Lamantia had only one substantial meeting with Breton, a private dinner also attended by art critic Leon Kochnitzky, who acted as translator. Lamantia did associate with other Surrealists during his time in New York; in a 1998 interview with David Meltzer,* he mentioned the importance of his weekly lunches with the visual artist and scholar of the occult Kurt Seligmann, from whom he learned much about alchemy and hermeticism. The war in Europe ended only a year after Lamantia moved to New York; with the cessation of hostilities, Breton and most of the rest of the Surrealist diaspora returned home. Lamantia, having fallen out with Ford—a disagreement that aborted previous plans for View Editions to bring out a volume of First Poems—was back in San Francisco by the end of 1944.
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Lamantia’s first book of poetry, Erotic Poems, was published in 1946, shortly after his return. The introduction was written by Kenneth Rexroth, a central figure in the then-emerging San Francisco Renaissance. Lamantia had first met Rexroth shortly before the younger poet’s move to New York; upon Lamantia’s return to San Francisco, Rexroth became what Lamantia in 1998 described as a mentor. During this period, Lamantia spent a good deal of time with Rexroth, participating in the Wednesday evening gatherings of Rexroth’s Libertarian Circle and often staying over as Rexroth’s houseguest after late nights of talk. Lamantia’s “Letter from San Francisco,” published in the October, 1947 number of the UK magazine Horizon, reports on the cultural ferment taking place in the city, with a focus on the circle of activity surrounding Rexroth. Part advocacy and part critique, the letter dismisses the prewar West Coast as a “cultural desert” and brings to attention the new generation of poets influenced by anarchist and “non-statist” thinking as well as by “religious personalism.” In addition to Rexroth, Robert Duncan and William Everson, Lamantia calls attention to some now-lesser-known poets such as Thomas Parkinson, who became an academic and expert on Yeats; Richard Moore, who published poetry infrequently and in 1949 helped found the community-funded radio station KPFA; Janet Lewis, a slightly older poet who also was a novelist; and Robert Stack, whose poetry was informed by esoteric Christianity.
It was under Rexroth’s influence that Lamantia had ceased to regard himself as a Surrealist and was writing poems of a more naturalistic bent. Eventually, his poetry developed in a way that absorbed the best of Surrealist poetics—the arresting conjunction of figures, the dynamic chain of associations, the hints of meaning lying just beyond the horizon of comprehension—and carried it forward into the experiments with form and imagery that were taking place in San Francisco and elsewhere. Lamantia’s unique way of handling visionary content—indeed, his living demonstration of the essential fact, for him, that poetry must be visionary or not be at all–was to exert a significant influence on the Beat poets, with whom he was identified—albeit not without ambivalence on his part–for a period in the 1950s and 1960s.
Lamantia’s reflections on the Beats are contained in his “The Beat Generation”—the title is Caples’—written as a letter in August, 1961. As Caples points out, Lamantia’s understanding of the Beat Generation was very much his own. Some of the figures Lamantia includes in his roster of Beats weren’t necessarily considered Beats either by themselves or by observers of the scene, although all were contemporaries, and that fact may have been enough for their inclusion. For Lamantia the Beat Generation was precisely that, a generation, and one overshadowed by the threat of the atomic bomb: it was “an ‘apocalyptic’ generation…so frantic to live in certitude of sudden death.” What united poets like Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, Michael McClure, Charles Olson and others in Lamantia’s reckoning was their writing within a “new peak of revolution and renaissance of the language” and their attempts to live outside of the “SYNTHETIC/MECHANO/ORGANIZATION” of postwar consumer and industrial culture.
Lamantia’s association with the Beats may have been something that happened more or less in passing, but he famously was one of the five poets taking part in the legendary October, 1955 Six Gallery reading. Although he was the only one of the participants to have published a volume of his work by the time of the reading, he chose to read poems by his friend John Hoffman, who’d recently died in Mexico, rather than poems of his own. Lamantia’s refusal to read his own poetry was a consequence of his recent reconversion to Catholicism while living in Mexico; he was for the time being alienated from his earlier work and evidently felt it no longer represented him as a poet or a person. Regardless of his attitude toward his own poetry, for Lamantia Hoffman was an important figure and one whose work he esteemed. Preserving Fire contains two pieces Lamantia wrote on Hoffman, one of them an introduction to Journey to the End, a 1954 volume of Hoffman’s poetry and another introduction to a 1959 book of Hoffman’s work, neither of which were published at the time. (Journey to the End, which collected all of Hoffman’s surviving poems and included Lamantia’s introductory notes, was eventually published by City Lights in 2008. The volume includes Lamantia’s own collection Tau, which was originally scheduled for publication in 1955 but was withdrawn at the time by Lamantia due to its having been written pre-conversion.) What Lamantia said of Hoffman’s poetry to a large extent seems to have been what he saw as the goal of his own: to reconcile the real and the imaginative, to make “magical connections between the inner and the outer vision…[inspired by] a magnetism of symbols and imagery.”
The long period from the late 1940s through the late 1960s—a period that encompassed the San Francisco Renaissance as well as the ascendency and eclipse of the Beat movement and the beginnings of the psychedelic culture–were for Lamantia a time of wandering, heroin addiction and intervals of silence. Lamantia described some of the events he’d witnessed and undergone in a 1970 biographical statement for a literary booking agency. It’s a fascinating, self-revelatory document that speaks of a break from and return to Surrealism and automatic writing; drug experiences with indigenous peoples in the Americas and North Africa; a return to Catholicism that proved to be temporary and marked by “gratuitous fasting and clairvoyant experiences;” periods spent living in Southern Europe; and the eventual return to Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.
In his 1998 interview with Meltzer, Lamantia described his life from 1948-1952 as a “kind of descent into the underworld” of drugs and criminals. He began using heroin in the late 1940s as an habitué of the New York jazz world. His 1959 collection of poems titled Narcotica reflects his experiences with addiction as well as the rhetorical influence of the Beats. Also influenced by Beat rhetoric is a previously unpublished declaration on psychedelics titled “Vision and Investigation of Mescaline 1961.” Dedicated to the Nicaraguan poet priest Ernesto Cardinale, the piece is a hybrid of prose and poetry, a verbal collage of images and recorded experiences inspired by the drug and a paean to it as the “LONGEST/LASTING MOST INTENSE READILY AVAILABLE NON-ADDICTIVE VESSEL OF TRANSCENDENT VISION!” Lamantia emphatically dissociated mescaline from heroin and declared it the better alternative: a more benign avenue to seeing the divine. The explicitly religious vocabulary pervading the piece anticipates some of the rhetoric of the psychedelic movement then just getting underway.
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In 1970, Lamantia again declared himself a Surrealist. His statement for Contemporary Poets of the English Language, a reference work published in that year, lays out his position with a directness worth quoting:
I consider myself essentially a surrealist, but as Breton qualified this,
it is not a “school,” but a way of life.
Lamantia’s declaration goes beyond the matter of aesthetics. With this single sentence, he laid the groundwork for gathering together the disparate ways and detours of decades, which—from the overarching perspective of Surrealism as a way of living out and disclosing the marvelous immanent in the mundane—could be seen as having stemmed from a deeper unity of purpose. The otherwise inconsistent events and works that made up his life were, seen from this perspective, stations along the route of a single quest, no matter how many veerings and switchbacks it comprised. The quest was the quest for the marvelous as manifested in poetry, eros, and the life of the spirit.
With his re-espousal of Surrealism, Lamantia became an active member of the Chicago Surrealist group headed by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont. He remained engaged with that group through the 1970s. During the same period, a Surrealist group was formed in San Francisco around Lamantia and the poet Stephen Schwartz. Members met weekly at Lamantia’s North Beach home for long evenings of talk and listening to music.
It was for the Chicago group that Lamantia wrote a comprehensive statement on his poetics, titled “Poetic Matters,” which appeared in the spring, 1976 issue of the group’s journal Arsenal. “Poetic Matters” is partly a polemic and partly a positive programmatic statement in which Lamantia stakes out a position defined on the one side by a Hegelian belief in the “unfettered imagination” as the engine of poetic content, and on the other side by the vehement rejection of a poetics based on the transcription and displacement of the visual image—a poetic approach he identified with Pound and traced through Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, Levertov and Olson. Lamantia’s opposition to what he called the “post-Olson generation” of poets was complex but ultimately came down to his refusal of what he argued was their ultimate source, through Pound, in Marinetti’s Futurism, from which they derived their reliance on the formal technique of fragmentation.
In contrast to the “post-Olson” generation’s poetics of perception, Lamantia advocated a poetics of imagination. Interpreting somewhat, it would seem that for Lamantia, the imagination was a projective act that grasps the traces of the unconscious and the dreamworld in the waking state, or the convulsive beauty immanent in the everyday. This active, projective force of the imagination can be distinguished from the mere “image making” he denounced in the poets whose example he rejected. Although he doesn’t quite put it this way, poetry of the imagination is poetry as project, a positing of a state the non-being of which is simply the prelude to its realization through the pursuit of the desire to make it be. It is, as a specifically Surrealist project, a “disinterested means of emancipation” and thus a way to reveal the concealed meaning of human existence. For Lamantia as for Surrealism itself, there was much more at stake in poetry than the capture of the image or the formal play of language.
Underlying Lamantia’s poetics would seem to be a deeper set of assumptions about the world and its intelligibility. These deeper assumptions were in fact the point of contact between the poet and Surrealism as he—not inaccurately–understood it. A significant part of Surrealism’s appeal to Lamantia was the logic of correspondence and analogy it claimed to see pervading the world and that, reciprocally, it deployed to fathom the meanings conveyed by the ostensibly mundane happenings, often overlooked, of coincidences, contingencies, and unexpected encounters. For Lamantia as for Surrealism, the world was a tissue of meanings to be unraveled and read. The message it was trying to send was astonishing and detectable to one who attained a visionary state through whatever means: hypnotism, drugs—or mysticism.
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Just as he returned to Surrealism, Lamantia eventually experienced another reconversion to Catholicism. This latest and last conversion happened in 1998, as the result of a mystical experience Lamantia underwent. Specific circumstances aside, the religion of his upbringing seems to have exerted a lasting influence on him, as if he were unable and unwilling to extricate himself from its gravitational pull. Lamantia was conversant with the mythologies of the natives of the Pacific Northwest as well as the Western hermetic tradition, but the vocabulary of symbols and the theological concepts and structures of Roman Catholicism—the particular terms composing its weave of revelation and tradition–seem to have held a more profound, almost primordial, appeal. They seem to have resided at some foundational level within him and one that never eroded completely under the friction of the circumstances of his life or the pressures of his other ideological commitments.
When considering Lamantia’s intellectual, poetic and spiritual development, what’s striking right away is the symmetry of his engagement with both Surrealism and Catholicism, a symmetry of alternating espousal and alienation. It was a pattern that also marked his relationships with friends and associates. Lamantia was eventually diagnosed as bipolar, and this may have been a significant factor in his history of inconsistent allegiances. Lamantia’s abandonment of Surrealism in the late ‘40s prefigures his abandonment of Catholicism following his first reconversion roughly ten years later, just as his renewed affiliation with Surrealism in 1970 finds its parallel in his final reconversion to Catholicism in 1998. One has to ask whether either really went away, or simply went dormant only to reawaken in response to the evolving demands of Lamantia’s poetic and personal situations. What seems probable is that there was an affective continuity binding him to them: they both remained meaningful to him, if not always explicitly so.
In this regard, one of the final pieces in Preserving Fire is also one of the most revelatory. In 2001 Caples conducted what probably was Lamantia’s last interview. Having come toward the end of his life, the interview serves as Lamantia’s self-summary and apologia. Intended for a San Francisco area magazine, which ultimately rejected it, the interview turned into an occasion for Lamantia to explain his relationship to the two, seemingly antithetical, systems of meaning that served as the attracting poles of his poetry and his life—Surrealism, historically militantly anti-clerical and seeking liberation in dreams and desire, and Roman Catholicism, finding transcendence in divine ekstasis—and the way he conceived of their coexistence. At the time of the interview, Lamantia had largely withdrawn from public life; a 1998 interview with Stephen Schwartz that appeared in the conservative Catholic publication San Francisco Faith had alienated him from many in the local poetry world. In the 2001 interview, he sought to clarify his position. This was, quite simply, that there was no contradiction between his own, self-admittedly unorthodox Surrealism, and the mystical tradition of the Church. As he put it, “[l]ike mysticism, poetry aims to reveal what is unknown to us.” For Lamantia, the conflict between Church and Surrealism ultimately was subsumed and transcended by their common aim of disclosing the marvelous.
That Lamantia had been able to reconcile to his own satisfaction the apparently contradictory systems of Surrealism and Catholicism may in fact have represented the ultimate transcendence of opposites in pursuit of the marvelous that he set out to accomplish in his poetry and in his life from the beginning. In declaring himself a “mystic surrealist” as he did in the last interview, he may have been declaring that there was a consistency to his life and work that was more real than apparent.
Lamantia’s final interview with Caples is a fitting ending for this most welcome collection. Preserving Fire makes this often elusive poet intelligible and further helps make the case for his importance to American poetry of the second half of the twentieth century.
*Published in San Francisco Beat: Talking to the Poets, David Meltzer, ed. (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001)
Philip Lamantia: Preserving Fire: Selected Prose
Edited & with an Introduction by Garret Caples
(Seattle/New York: Wave Books, 2018)
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Daniel Barbiero is an improvising double bassist who composes graphic scores and writes on music, art and related subjects. He is a regular contributor to Avant Music News and Perfect Sound Forever. His latest releases include Fifteen Miniatures for Prepared Double Bass, Non-places with Cristiano Bocci & their most recent collaboration, Wooden Mirrors.
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