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- RONALD JOHNSON
- (1935-1998)
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- Photograph by Jonathan Williams
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- HEIGHT of SPRING 1999
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In 1973, Guy Davenport wrote in America: "Our greatest living poet is usually a man as unknown to the professariat as to the corps of reviewers and the deaf custodians of the laurels. It was true of Whitman in 1873, and is true of Zukofsky in 1973." Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978) is still not yet canonized and demanded as the Sunday joint at the Muses' dinner table. But, those who read beyond the Ivy League Men About Town and the Cornbelt Metaphysicals are aware of his extraordinary skills and his ear for his second language, English. His first was the Yiddish of the slums of the Lower East Side of New York City early in the century.
The poet who replaced LZ in Professor Davenport's pantheon in America was Ronald Johnson, who has just died at the age of 62 in Topeka, Kansas, his native state. The professariat will, again, be absolutely in the dark. And few in Britain will know him either, though he spent years in England in the 1960s and wrote one of the best 'English' poems of the time, The Book of the Green Man, published by Longmans in 1967.
Ronald Johnson was born November 25th, 1935, in the small, ordinary, artless town of Ashland, in southwestern Kansas. Some of the names of places in that part of the prairie make them more exotic than is the truth: Buttermilk, Bloom, Protection, Acres, Moscow, Ulysses, Liberal, Kismet. Kismet, Kansas-- it's hard to beat. His father managed a lumber yard, as his father had before him. The family moved to Topeka, the State Capital. He spent a couple of years at the University of Kansas in nearby Lawrence and concentrated on English courses. He did two years of national service in the Army, in Georgia, Arizona, and California.
I met Ronald Johnson in Washington, DC at the beginning of 1958. I was using the proceeds of a Guggenheim Foundation grant to read in the Library of Congress for six months, and to publish two early Jargon Society books: Letters, by Robert Duncan, and Overland to the Islands, by Denise Levertov. One evening I went with the literary critic, Marius Bewley, to visit a pianist friend who lived on R Street, Northwest, in the house of Mrs. King-Smith, a notable hostess of the time, when the young of the well-to-do were taught dancing and deportment. Another roomer in the house was RJ. He was handsome, red-haired, feisty, ebullient, and clearly very bright. The friendship was immediate, though he was not at all sure that the new book of Denise Levertov I was clutching and showing off contained 'real poems'.
We joined forces. And I became a mentor, just enough older for that relationship to work. We moved to New York and I worked at the famous 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, while RJ completed a B.A. degree at Columbia College. We spent a lot of time at the Cedar Bar on University Place with friends like Joel Oppenheimer, Franz Kline, Dan Rice, Fielding Dawson, Gilbert Sorrentino, Esteban Vicente, many of whom I'd known from my earlier days at Black Mountain College. And we visited non-bar-type writers like William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and Edward Dahlberg.
I've always liked to play cicerone and to plan itineraries and rambles. In the summer of 1961, RJ and I hiked the Appalachian Trail from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to the Hudson River in New York, some 1447 miles. Perfect training for poets: learning to attend the names of birds and plants and stars and trees and stones. The summer of 1962 I was a writer-in-residence at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies in Colorado; and RJ had his first culinary job, at the Copper Kettle Restaurant. In the autumn of 1962 we headed for England and walked five weeks in the Lake District. On the Sunday of the weekend of the Cuban Missile Crisis the poets spent the day trying to locate the graves of Beatrix Potter in Near Sawrey and Kurt Schwitters in Ambleside-- and found neither.
We met the extraordinary writer and illustrator, Barbara Jones, and rented a four-room flat in her house in Well Walk, Hampstead. It was 12 guineas a week! There were parties with friends of Barbara's like Olivia Manning, Kay Dick, and Stevie Smith. We met other London people through our bookseller-friends, John Sandoe, Arthur Uphill, and Bernard Stone: Adrian Mitchell, Mervyn Peake, Christopher Middleton, John Wain, Michael Hamburger, Paul Potts, Anselm Hollo, Christopher Logue, Tom Raworth, Eric Mottram, Rayner Heppenstall, John Heath-Stubbs, R.B. Kitaj, Tom Phillips, Adrian Berg, Andrew Young, Jocelyn Brooke. Barbara's pioneering book, Follies & Grottoes, led us all over England and beyond. We went up to Ardgay in Easter Ross in the north of Scotland to meet Ian Hamilton Finlay. We saw Hugh MacDiarmid in both Langholm and Biggar. We saw Basil Bunting up the Tyne above Newcastle at Wylam. And Herbert Read at Stonegrave House in the hills north of York. We went to Broad Town under the Wiltshire Downs to see Geoffrey and Jane Grigson. Geoffrey took us to Faringdon for Lord Berners' folly tower, to Buscot Park for Burne-Jones's Briar-Rose paintings, and to Lydiard Tregoze for the splendid interior of the Church of St Mary. Jane fixed Welsh girdle cakes for bre akfast, the first we had ever tasted. We visited the graves of Blake and Palmer, Stanley Spencer and Walter Sickert, Delius and William Morris. In the spring of 1963 we walked from the mouth of the River Wye at Chepstow, up its long, winding valley, to its source high on the flanks of Great Plynlimmon. We hitched a few rides to allow us to add Kilpeck Church to Francis Kilvert's at Bredwardine along the route. And Strata Florida and the site of Hafod House further into Wales. And more pilgrimages that summer. To Nottinghamshire to Southwell Minster and the amazing foliate heads and plant carvings in the Chapter House. To Gilbert White's Selborne in Hampshire. To Samuel Palmer's Shoreham in Kent. To the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset. To Compton in Surrey for the Watts Mortuary Chapel. To Brighton for John Nash's Royal Pavilion. We were looking for all things, as RJ said, 'most rich, most glittering, most strange'.
And we kept on looking. In the autumn of 1965 we were back in England. One hike took us from Land's End along the north coast of Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset. We ended it in the Cheddar Gorge, where we discovered the Rev. Toplady had once composed 'Rock of Ages'. Someone told us about The Miner's Arms, a pub at Priddy, where an ex-academic (Paul Leyton) was serving very good food. We walked on to Priddy and found this to be true. There were snails from the Mendip Hills on the menu. And Priddy Oggy. What that was I have forgotten. The name is unforgettable... Another six months in London. This time only a two-room flat chez Barbara Jones at 7 guineas a week. One night we invited William Burroughs and R. Buckminster Fuller to dinner and neither knew who the other was-- just a couple of old Harvard men. RJ produced a Shaker lemon pie for afters and Burroughs muttered: "Hey, man, that is the craziest lemon pie. I mean groovy!" Since two pies had been baked, RJ wrapped the second one up and El Hombre Invisible took it home with him.
In the spring of 1966 the U.S. Information Agency set up a tour for me to read my Mahler poems in the six Austrian cities and that allowed us to go also to Bruckner and Webern sites and many rococo churches and palaces. We drove down through the Dolomites to Milan Airport and picked up two friends from Georgia who had hired us to transport them around Italy and France. With three months in hand we saw much on the tourist routes, but we added a few delicacies: the Villa Lante, the Garden of the Monsters at Bomarzo, the cemeteries in Milan and Genoa. And in France, the Parisian cemeteries, the Pique-Assiette House in Chartres, the Ideal Dream Palace of the Postman Cheval in Hauterives. The latter we saw after lunching at Fernand Point's Restaurant de la Pyramide in Vienne, the best food any of us had ever tasted.
In 1967 I was back at the Aspen Institute as a scholar-in-residence. RJ worked again at the Copper Kettle. Things were about to change. Our companionship of nearly a decade was always much more peripatetic than restricted and passionate. Roving legs meant roving eyes. When RJ realized I was tired of living in cities, he packed his bags one day and got a ride to San Francisco with some mysterious amoroso. He was 32 years old and wanted more space between himself and the perils of rustic living and Kansas, the Sunflower State.
He led a hand-to-mouth existence in San Francisco for about 25 years and we saw each other very rarely. He would report that he was bartending in a club for bikers and leather boys; or, that he had established a little catering business. He published a few poetry books and four excellent cookbooks: The American Table, Simple Fare, Company Fare, and New & Old Southwestern Cooking. The American Table is a classic work, right up there with M.F.K. Fisher at her best. (The American Table will be re-issued in the autumn by Moyer Bell Publishers in Rhode Island. They will also publish RJ's last cookbook, one written for people who hate to cook for themselves.) Occasionally he would get a semester's teaching job: at the University of Kentucky in 1971; at the University of Washington in 1973; at Stanford University in 1991; and at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1994. Now and then he would be helped financially by stalwart friends like Donald B. Anderson, Dorothy Neal, James Laughlin, Gus Blaisdell, and Guy Davenport.
For over twenty years Ronald Johnson composed and fitted together an architectonic poem in 99 sections called Ark. It is in the traditions of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Robert Duncan. It is a formidable achievement and it will require readers not easily daunted, who have untrammeled imaginations. Thom Gunn and Robert Creeley are two of Ark's champions. They both point out that this is an aesthetic work, not a didactic one, and there is much pleasure to be gained. William Blake is there; the Land of Oz is there; the Bible is there; Simon Rodia's Watts Towers are there. An edition of Ark was published in 1996 by the Living Batch Press of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is distributed through the University of New Mexico Press, 1720 Lomas Boulevard NE, Albuquerque, NM87131-1591, USA. Copies are $25.00, plus packing & postage. The UNMP fax number is 505-277-9270.
Here, at the end, I want to bring your attention back to Ronald Johnson's The Book of the Green Man. Christopher Middleton instigated the book's publication and on the front flap said: "The is the work of a young poet from Kansas who spent a year in England during 1962-63. It is a remarkable piece of work. The surprise is this: he presents an image of England, or, to be precise, of sundry English scenes, with a vividness and strangeness beyond the reach of any English poet, and unknown, I venture to say, since the days of Blake, Calvert and Palmer. Ronald Johnson has unearthed an England which most people have forgotten."
At the end of the Autumn section, the four seasons are over. The poet is at Samuel Palmer's Shoreham in Kent. The composer Wilfrid Mellers wrote a beautiful multi-voiced canticle based on the ecstatic reverie with which The Book of the Green Man concludes:
I walked up to the CLOUD,
'a country
where there is no
night'
but of moons
& with heads of fish
in the furrow
& on each
ear, beneath a husk
of twilight
were as many suns as
kernels,
& fields were far
as the eye
could reach.
Then dipping their silver oars,
the eyes
shed characters of fire
in the grain,
its sheaves as if mackerel
shone on the waves
of air.
I walked up to the CLOUD
& the white light
opened
like flowers--
dog violets,
& asphodel, celandine,
red clover.
I walked up to the CLOUD
& peal after peal
rang out of earth.
First, stones
underfoot
in a sound like muffled
sheep-bells.
Then the roots of the trees
clanged:
rooks, rooks, blackbirds. Cuckoos awoke
in the tubers
-- earth-worm & mole & turtle--
all danced to the thunder,
the peal & thunder.
A bellow & clamor
came out
of the hills:
in diapason-- a dissonance
& musical order.
ROOKS, ROOKS, BLACK-
BIRDS, CUCKOOS.
EARTH-WORM & MOLE
& TURTLE.
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