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Meaning a Life: an Autobiography
First published in 1978, Mary Oppen’s seminal Meaning a Life has been largely unavailable for decades. Written in her sixties, her first and only prose book recounts, with honesty, depth, and conviction, her fiercely independent life—“a twentieth-century American romance,” as Yang describes it in the new introduction, “of consciousness on the open road; a book of travel where the autobiographer is not the usual singular self at the center of the story but the union of two individuals.”
Oppen tells the story of growing up with three brothers in the frontier towns of Kalispell, Montana, and Grants Pass, Oregon, determined to escape the trap of “a meaningless life with birth and death in a biological repetition.” That escape happens in the fall of 1926, when she meets another student in her college poetry class, George Oppen. She is expelled for breaking curfew, and from then on the two face the world intertwined: living a life of conversation, hitchhiking across the US, sailing from the Great Lakes to New York City, meeting fellow poets and artists, starting a small press with Zukofsky and Pound, traveling by horse and cart through France, and fighting fascism through the Great Depression. Mary Oppen writes movingly of both her inner life and external events, of the inconsolable pain of suffering multiple stillbirths, of her husband fighting on the front lines during WWII while she struggled to care for their baby daughter, of fleeing to Mexico to avoid persecution for their political activities. This expanded edition includes a new section of prose and poetry that deepens Oppen’s radiantly incisive memoir with further memories, travels, and reflections.
Oppen tells the story of growing up with three brothers in the frontier towns of Kalispell, Montana, and Grants Pass, Oregon, determined to escape the trap of “a meaningless life with birth and death in a biological repetition.” That escape happens in the fall of 1926, when she meets another student in her college poetry class, George Oppen. She is expelled for breaking curfew, and from then on the two face the world intertwined: living a life of conversation, hitchhiking across the US, sailing from the Great Lakes to New York City, meeting fellow poets and artists, starting a small press with Zukofsky and Pound, traveling by horse and cart through France, and fighting fascism through the Great Depression. Mary Oppen writes movingly of both her inner life and external events, of the inconsolable pain of suffering multiple stillbirths, of her husband fighting on the front lines during WWII while she struggled to care for their baby daughter, of fleeing to Mexico to avoid persecution for their political activities. This expanded edition includes a new section of prose and poetry that deepens Oppen’s radiantly incisive memoir with further memories, travels, and reflections.
304 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1976
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August 11, 2020
I began reading this book laid out on a blanket alongside a lake during a backpacking trip in Desolation Wilderness, blissed out from a day of climbing on granite and swimming in glacial lakes. I opened the book half expecting to feel bad about opening a book with a gorgeous lake right in front of me only to find a life, beginning with a childhood on the Montana frontier, fully intertwined in all practicality with these great outdoors, and now seen through the lens of nostalgia--itself like the crystalline surface of a glacial lake. Oppen's depiction of her frontier childhood came to me as a daily recurrence of the embodiment I had achieved like some hard-won treasure after two days of hiking and backpacking and focusing only on the physical realities in front of me. The sensoriness of her memories merged with my own temporary dip into the material pleasure of my planet and offered me a palpable suggestion of a certain loss of the physicality and immediacy of a much different time. Oppen's conscientiousness in describing the "ancient rhythms" of her life on the frontier as carry-overs from the old world also offered the opportunity to glimpse not only her life but my own life as continuing from these old world origins and to consider how America as we know it today began, how much it has changed, how far off and also not so far off we are from those beginnings. In reading her, I feel I have benefitted from her constant intention to read her world.
The other gift I received from this book is Oppen's descriptions of the clear visions that she and George held for themselves and for their lives as artists. They were clear in what they wanted from the world and did not seem ashamed to declare that they wanted to read and write poetry, have conversations, and travel. In fact, making this declaration (whether to write or be activists) seemed to always be their map and bold impetus forward. To take in information, converse, converse, decide, and step forward. She calls it courageous and perhaps it is that courage that makes it all sound so simple and I am struck by the power of putting a stake in the ground of one's life.
This book reads of someone who was close to their life, who looked at their surroundings never just as scenery but as a story and as information from which to derive meaning. An embodied life, akin to George's poetics of remaining connected to and finding beauty in not just the form or impression of a thing but in how things actually work, in all grittiness, effort, and materiality.
Oppen's cause in writing this book seems to be to recollect and to share a life fully lived. A life spent to understand the present by searching it for the links to its past, and by being active in the present to clear a space within which to write. Through this book I have seen something of America and of the world and how it all can begin with a childhood, on a land. This book make me hungry to swim, build a boat, cover ground, construct where I am.
The other gift I received from this book is Oppen's descriptions of the clear visions that she and George held for themselves and for their lives as artists. They were clear in what they wanted from the world and did not seem ashamed to declare that they wanted to read and write poetry, have conversations, and travel. In fact, making this declaration (whether to write or be activists) seemed to always be their map and bold impetus forward. To take in information, converse, converse, decide, and step forward. She calls it courageous and perhaps it is that courage that makes it all sound so simple and I am struck by the power of putting a stake in the ground of one's life.
This book reads of someone who was close to their life, who looked at their surroundings never just as scenery but as a story and as information from which to derive meaning. An embodied life, akin to George's poetics of remaining connected to and finding beauty in not just the form or impression of a thing but in how things actually work, in all grittiness, effort, and materiality.
Oppen's cause in writing this book seems to be to recollect and to share a life fully lived. A life spent to understand the present by searching it for the links to its past, and by being active in the present to clear a space within which to write. Through this book I have seen something of America and of the world and how it all can begin with a childhood, on a land. This book make me hungry to swim, build a boat, cover ground, construct where I am.
May 30, 2017
A book that informs much of life today as well as history.
Mama had had enough of farms, and animals, and outdoor work. She had spent her childhood, one of 14 children, living in a log cabin. Below my mother's surface exuberance, I know she felt deprived, and she wanted to make up for the deprivations. I think she felt compelled to be busy, and did not know how to slacken her pace, to reflect and to think.
Papa lived his life at a different pace than did Mama; he went more slowly, and liked to walk, to talk, to read. Papa spent long hours at work, but he seemed to enjoy being wherever he was at the time that he was there. I felt that he was really with me when we were together, and whatever we did, he seemed to prefer doing it at that moment more than any other activity. I am convinced that he loved me entirely, and my brothers feel the same way about his love for them.
Montana was so newly settled that children and Indians were the only natives. My teachers talked of back east just as my parents did; they came from the midwest, but for them as for my parents, "back east" was the center of the continent.
Mama would say: "Mary doesn't pay much attention to my friends, but she talks to every dog she sees."
From a catalog, Mama ordered long-sleeved and long-legged underwear for winter, which we put on as soon as it arrived. I always longed for the freedom and lightness of summer underwear and short socks, for slippers instead of buttoned or high-laced shoes. Part of the freedom of spring was the light feeling in my feet as I ran, as though I skimmed the earth.
[My brother] Noel talked to me in the idle hours when we were together in the shoe department, where I worked after school and on weekends. He had the most influence with me, and I can trace some of my attitudes directly to those he had worked out for himself. I remember his philosophy of self-love most distinctly, and I made it my own: that one must love oneself the most in order to love others and in order to survive.
There was no birth control; pregnancy meant marriage, probably to the first boy a girl had ever gone out with, or it meant abortion. Abortions were available in all categories, from low-cost up to legal abortions with doctors conferring and performing the abortion "for the sake of the woman's health." This latter was for rich married women only. Still, I decided in favor of sex for myself, but only sex which was not a trap. I felt appreciated by very few, really only by Noel. I suppose he discussed me with Emma and that she took care of me and advised me with his full consent. Noel assumed, I think, that any healthy young person would enjoy sex, but he did worry that I might marry badly and ruin the rest of my life.
I had lived in the trust and confidence of two men, my father and my brother, Noel; I was not open to love that was less than theirs.
I saw in Grants Pass that sexual relationships were for the most part made and lived with diffidence. And I too entered into relationships with no ties and no expectations that they would solve anything. I have heard this small-town sex life described as circular sex.
1926-7
Love & Escape
After I am dead
and you wonder
where I am and you see
the dark blue wood-smoke
in dark green evergreens
climbing over their tops
and disappearing perhaps you will know
where I am
but I think not
The time and the urge to write did not come again to me until I was working on translations of St John of the Cross in 1971 or 1972.
I wasn't aware of all I remembered until I tapped at the door and memories came flooding in. I think I have reached a safe age from which to release these memories which have troubled me over the years. Perhaps they would not have been released for the asking when I was younger.
We were constantly searching -- We were searching for a way to avoid the trap that our class backgrounds held for us if we relented in our attempts to escape from them.
Young George and Mary, or George and Mary now - so long as it is George and Mary it is life as I have known & lived it, as we have known & lived it. The young people now come to visit, to talk, & they seem happy just to look at us, survivors. Perhaps they are strengthened by a view of us which represents 50 years together in a fully lived life. This achievement, be it luck or choice, has been inevitable.
1928-9
First Travels
The Midwest meant to us not only the geographical center of our country, but a center for the poetry which was being written everywhere, which meant that a literature was being written out of our times. We arrived at Detroit, on wide and lovely Lake St. Clair. The wind was free & George could sail, and when we examined our road map, we saw that we could sail to New York. Lake Erie is 570 feet above the sea, & the system of locks took us daily nearer to the Hudson River.
We reached the end of the Erie Canal at Albany, which is on the Hudson River, and across the river in Rensselaer we found a small boat yard where we had our boat hauled out for a paint job. We left the canal at Albany to go down the Hudson River to New York City. The lovely Hudson River, held between its high cliffs, is a clear, fast-flowing deep river, widening in only a few spots. As we neared the city (at that time there was no George Washington Bridge) we found we had gone faster than we had reckoned, probably because the tide was stronger nearer to the sea. We were in New York City, & the white walls at the tops of the cliffs were the apartment houses of the Bronx & upper Manhattan.
Fruit stands and vegetable stands and wagons drawn by horses were piled with heaps of color created by oranges, lettuce, tomatoes and watermelons. At Coney Island, we went into the hall of mirrors and laughed at ourselves. I was reading Marcel Proust, sinking deep into his memories and awakening to intuitive knowledge of my own; more than I had known before I read him and learned to trust my intuitions.
I also discovered Virginia Woolf's novels, just appearing in 1928; her writing meant to me the flash of insight while a leaf falls, the knowledge of complex relations that comes in a moment of understanding.
One, invited to a party to which we had to walk the length of Manhattan b/c we had no money, we paused at a bookshop and leafed through more books of poetry than we had ever found in one place before. This was the Gotham Book Mart.
George and I were western kids. Although there was much that New Yorkers knew which we did not know of the arts, the theater, Europe, and the ins and outs of their city, they did not know the forests of Montana or of Oregon, the swift flowing rivers and the mountains. Nor did they know the life of hitchhiking and of sailing across half the country with almost no money. We had our own strengths and knowledge, and I think in our friendships the differences were part of our fascination for each other.
Aunt Elsie took me to lunch one day to ask me if we intended to have children. I thought it was none of her affair and said no, but I did not have any kind of birth control and we had gotten no advice from doctors we had asked. She took me to the birth control clinic the next day, and I never had to have another abortion. I wrote to Nellie and to my sister-in-law Julia, who had so many children, and told them they must find birth control clinics at once. Nellie replied in high glee, with cartoons, but Julia could not arrange getting from Oregon wilderness to a San Francisco birth control clinic, and she had one more child. At that time there were only 11 states that allowed even doctors to give birth control information.
When I walked in neighborhoods near our hotel on 24 St in Manhattan, each direction took me to a neighborhood intact in its national origins, with corner stores and markets reflecting the culture of the people and the country from which they came. Most of these people did not know the United States beyond the subway system.
One of Libby's poems: Come into my Parlor/ I live on a sheet of glass.
Her love for her brother and for her father was faithful and childlike, but Libby never achieved self-love, and so her love for anyone else was also wanting. No man loved her with a love that nurtured her, and no woman really loved Libby except her daughter, Andy.
I entered this family when I was 18. Libby would have liked to be my friend -- I know it now, but at the time I was a stranger, a newcomer, a new young wife.
I sometimes saw Libby standing in our doorway looking on, her clothes too provocative, her bathing suit too daring. She wondered at our youthful spirits, she who had no experience of exuberant living.
1929-32
France
We were eager to travel, to have a view of our own country from a distance and from another culture. Many American writers, poets and artists were living in Europe, and we wanted to visit those who especially interested us. In 1929 Europe was already full of American students, and it was very late in that hejira [flight or journey to a more desirable place].
While British artists at the same or at a slightly earlier time were drawn to Germany, our antipathy to Germans and things German, even before Hitler, governed our travels; we chose France, and briefly Italy. We were in a narrow stream influenced by Pound, by Eliot, and by the Impressionist painters.
With our dog Zee-wag, we embarked on a small French freighter from San Francisco, destination Le Havre, a 30-day trip.
George wrote me a Valentine:
he de dark
handsome
young man has
for her
de fair
maiden Uh
present,
de darling
We had planned this time in France to be for as long as we liked, in order to paint, write and continue the conversation we had been seeking before we met and now were pursuing together. We wanted time to "look, gape, gawk to dawdle" -- to try to comprehend what was before our eyes.
We and Zee-wag started back to the city, driving our horse, Pom-Pon, and cart.
We were searching for something more than a life of "making a killing," as my mother said. The United States we had just left was rich, with an affluence of new cars and talk of the stock market. We wanted a way of life that allowed us to paint, write, think and converse in friendship with those who were on our same path.
We traveled 30 or 40 km a day, stopping over a day and a night after every five days of travel, for Pom-Pon needed to rest and to eat more than he had time for while traveling. The slow progress suited us, and we found the long stop-overs a time for talking to people, wandering and observing.
Mme Sicard came every day to care for us in Marseilles - in the vineyards of Le Beausset. She asked for an 'osaydar" & we didn't understand until one day in a hardware store in Toulon I saw an O'Cedar mop. "Osaydar!"
We had a toilet put in the centuries-old farmhouse before we knew that the water supply was seasonal. "Ça va?" Mme Sicard prescribed and brewed tea for stomach aches and back aches and to relieve muscular pain. Cupping was also a common remedy. One Sunday we went into the country with Eva & Dan and stopped at the country house of some of her Russian friends. We were admitted by a servant and shown into a parlor to wait; it was a damp, cold, cheerless habitation. Eva sniffed & said, "Smells like goldfish pee."
Before returned to the United States, we made a trip to Venice and to Florence to visit museums and to see a little of the country other than France. We were pinned against the monument at the center of the Piazza by a press of the crowd crying, "Il Duce -- pericolo del morte." (in danger of death) Mussolini's life had been threatened, and we were trapped in this sudden, impressive demonstration. We saw no differences of expression on the faces of the young men, only a blind fanaticism, in ecstasy and worship of Il Duce.
Roosevelt had been elected President of the USA in Nov 1932, and in that winter the Blue Eagle was introduced in the States. Blue Eagle posters were pictured on the front pages of Parisian newspapers, and the military-looking symbol frightened us. We were afraid it meant that fascism was rising in the USA, too. Germans in Venice, military men, had said to me as they passed, "Guten morgen mein Taube." (good morning, my dove)
In was 1933, and the next war was ominously looming. We could feel more than we could understand of the threat to Jews, to artists, to all freedoms. I was determined that fascism was not going to strike this pigeon!
1933-7
New York City
The people I see and talk to, the ways they earn their livings, the children I watch, the courting customs, the ways of parents with their children are all to me learning, and I re-evaluate my own ways and my country's ways every time I travel. It is not comfort, ease, or previous knowledge that takes me traveling; traveling is never as comfortable as being at home, and I am thrown out of my accustomed style and habits on meeting situations and people for whom I have no preparation. I go traveling in order to be jostled and jolted and confronted with the necessity of thinking faster to meet fast-changing occurrences. Happiness comes in the conversation and the learning that I have to master, even in the barest knowledge of how to get form here to there.
I think I travel to ask the questions which are hard to formulate about one's own times because one is in the midst, at home, of all that one has seen so often that one does not receive the jolt that might confront one with the uncomfortable, but important question. Not with answers -- answers are not possible for one's own times and in one's own place. The answer only becomes obvious after time has passed, and we can see, if we have survived it, the predicament that we have passed through.
Apprehension mixed with elation as we disembarked at Baltimore and began the drive to New York City. As we approached the first stoplight, grown men, respectable men - our fathers - stepped forward to ask for a nickel, rag in hand to wipe our windshield. This ritual was repeated every time we paused, until we felt we were in a nightmare, our fathers impoverished.
Many people in the USA were beginning to think about politics. We had seen the beginnings of fascism in Europe, and now we tried to understand the reasons for the collapse of the economic systems of the western world.
Men felt guilty when they became unemployed and could no longer support their families, and many left their homes in despair. Young men roamed the country.
In the last days of February and first days of March 1933, when we returned to the USA, President Roosevelt's first act as President was to declare a bank holiday. In effect, the US Treasury was empty as President Hoover went out of office. Depositors had lined up in front of banks to remove their money. Some banks went bankrupt, and the depositors' savings were lost; with no insurance of depositors' funds, they quickly ran out of money and closed their doors. Some banks had speculated with depositors' money, and Wall Street had sold them out; but most of them re-opened with the assurance that government would pass legislation as soon as possible to protect deposits in the banks.
To Italians, Mussolini was a hero because he was winning the war against Ethiopia, and he was unifying Italy, where the trains did run on time.
The Socialist Party had organized the Workers Alliance, and the Communists had organized the Unemployment Councils -- these two organizations merge to form one organization, called the Workers Alliance.
When no one in the family work the rent could not be paid, and if a family could not get 'the relief' (as it was called), the landlord gave them an eviction notice and called the city marshall, who with several assistants put the furniture in the street and put a lock on the door. If the furniture was not soon taken from the street, the sanitation department hauled it away to the city dump.
The purpose of the Workers Alliance was to relieve starvation and to guide people to a realization that government could solve these problems - not with fascism, but with a liberal solution.
We 'sat-in.' I asked George to bring the membership of his Borough-Hall Workers Alliance to picket the sit-in at the Nostrand Avenue relief bureau. We had learned this technique from the auto workers in Detroit; we sat in for a day and a night, holding the relief bureau so that the day's business could not go on. The administration of the bureau decided on the second day to smash the demonstration, and the police came through the big front doors with clubs swinging as our women screamed. We were arrested. At trial, after deliberating for many hours, the jury returned at 10 o'clock at night with a not-guilty verdict. We went out free to the street, and there, waiting for us, were our Workers Alliance members.
George and I were 29 years old. The war in Spain had been going on for a year, and George wanted to go, but I would not agree unless I went to.
Pop Mindel: There are times in your life in which you might choose to be a revolutionary, but there are also times, as when you marry or when you have children, that this is impossible.
George and I had been unaware of our being a special kind of couple until Hitler and fascism made being Jewish a pointed issue of survival. Our interest had been to understand a class not our own and to be part of sweeping changes in the USA. If there had not been a clear need for people like us to defeat fascism, we would probably have resumed a life in the arts and dropped the politics as the depression eased. Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain became fascist; France had a People's Front government, Russia was socialist, and the USA had embarked on a more liberal form of republicanism with the election of Roosevelt and his cabinet of Keynesian economists and politicians. Communists were still, at the end of the Depression, the ones who warned most consistently against this danger.
Friends found friends at these meetings, and there was an awakening. All the people endangered their livelihoods by their interest in the left, but nevertheless they were interested in defeating fascism. Intellectuals joined the League of Women Voters or the League against War and Fascism, or one of the many groups in the more liberal churches. The election of Roosevelt and the work done to alleviate the Depression had stirred people, and a strong liberal tendency was growing throughout the country, due not only to Roosevelt but to all of us who were opposed to fascism.
Usually the vote is more radical in the United States than the apparent opinion of the people, and we met surprises when we went door-to-door selling the Communist Sunday paper. People were not afraid of us in their own homes -- the fear was for loss of jobs. These people knew at first hand the long and frustrating struggle for trade unions and the continuing struggle to keep those unions honest.
1938-41
Transition
I was 30 years old and I wanted a child. George was surprised to learn that giving birth was a peak emotional experience and so entirely my own that I never tried to express it.
1942-5
Wartime
George wanted to go to the war. The enemy was fascism, and we agreed that the war must be fought.
1946-58
California and Exile [9 yrs in Mexico]
In Apr 1950 the FBI began its visits. With the war declared in Korea it was clear to us that Joseph McCarthy & Gen MacArthur, representing the policy of the Pentagon, sought to silence opposition to this war.
Carmen, our lawyer, walked directly up to one of the men. "My clients tell me you are bothering them. That is very ugly [Es muy feo]. I want you to stop at once. I want you to promise you will not do it anymore." We never saw the men again.
Mama had had enough of farms, and animals, and outdoor work. She had spent her childhood, one of 14 children, living in a log cabin. Below my mother's surface exuberance, I know she felt deprived, and she wanted to make up for the deprivations. I think she felt compelled to be busy, and did not know how to slacken her pace, to reflect and to think.
Papa lived his life at a different pace than did Mama; he went more slowly, and liked to walk, to talk, to read. Papa spent long hours at work, but he seemed to enjoy being wherever he was at the time that he was there. I felt that he was really with me when we were together, and whatever we did, he seemed to prefer doing it at that moment more than any other activity. I am convinced that he loved me entirely, and my brothers feel the same way about his love for them.
Montana was so newly settled that children and Indians were the only natives. My teachers talked of back east just as my parents did; they came from the midwest, but for them as for my parents, "back east" was the center of the continent.
Mama would say: "Mary doesn't pay much attention to my friends, but she talks to every dog she sees."
From a catalog, Mama ordered long-sleeved and long-legged underwear for winter, which we put on as soon as it arrived. I always longed for the freedom and lightness of summer underwear and short socks, for slippers instead of buttoned or high-laced shoes. Part of the freedom of spring was the light feeling in my feet as I ran, as though I skimmed the earth.
[My brother] Noel talked to me in the idle hours when we were together in the shoe department, where I worked after school and on weekends. He had the most influence with me, and I can trace some of my attitudes directly to those he had worked out for himself. I remember his philosophy of self-love most distinctly, and I made it my own: that one must love oneself the most in order to love others and in order to survive.
There was no birth control; pregnancy meant marriage, probably to the first boy a girl had ever gone out with, or it meant abortion. Abortions were available in all categories, from low-cost up to legal abortions with doctors conferring and performing the abortion "for the sake of the woman's health." This latter was for rich married women only. Still, I decided in favor of sex for myself, but only sex which was not a trap. I felt appreciated by very few, really only by Noel. I suppose he discussed me with Emma and that she took care of me and advised me with his full consent. Noel assumed, I think, that any healthy young person would enjoy sex, but he did worry that I might marry badly and ruin the rest of my life.
I had lived in the trust and confidence of two men, my father and my brother, Noel; I was not open to love that was less than theirs.
I saw in Grants Pass that sexual relationships were for the most part made and lived with diffidence. And I too entered into relationships with no ties and no expectations that they would solve anything. I have heard this small-town sex life described as circular sex.
1926-7
Love & Escape
After I am dead
and you wonder
where I am and you see
the dark blue wood-smoke
in dark green evergreens
climbing over their tops
and disappearing perhaps you will know
where I am
but I think not
The time and the urge to write did not come again to me until I was working on translations of St John of the Cross in 1971 or 1972.
I wasn't aware of all I remembered until I tapped at the door and memories came flooding in. I think I have reached a safe age from which to release these memories which have troubled me over the years. Perhaps they would not have been released for the asking when I was younger.
We were constantly searching -- We were searching for a way to avoid the trap that our class backgrounds held for us if we relented in our attempts to escape from them.
Young George and Mary, or George and Mary now - so long as it is George and Mary it is life as I have known & lived it, as we have known & lived it. The young people now come to visit, to talk, & they seem happy just to look at us, survivors. Perhaps they are strengthened by a view of us which represents 50 years together in a fully lived life. This achievement, be it luck or choice, has been inevitable.
1928-9
First Travels
The Midwest meant to us not only the geographical center of our country, but a center for the poetry which was being written everywhere, which meant that a literature was being written out of our times. We arrived at Detroit, on wide and lovely Lake St. Clair. The wind was free & George could sail, and when we examined our road map, we saw that we could sail to New York. Lake Erie is 570 feet above the sea, & the system of locks took us daily nearer to the Hudson River.
We reached the end of the Erie Canal at Albany, which is on the Hudson River, and across the river in Rensselaer we found a small boat yard where we had our boat hauled out for a paint job. We left the canal at Albany to go down the Hudson River to New York City. The lovely Hudson River, held between its high cliffs, is a clear, fast-flowing deep river, widening in only a few spots. As we neared the city (at that time there was no George Washington Bridge) we found we had gone faster than we had reckoned, probably because the tide was stronger nearer to the sea. We were in New York City, & the white walls at the tops of the cliffs were the apartment houses of the Bronx & upper Manhattan.
Fruit stands and vegetable stands and wagons drawn by horses were piled with heaps of color created by oranges, lettuce, tomatoes and watermelons. At Coney Island, we went into the hall of mirrors and laughed at ourselves. I was reading Marcel Proust, sinking deep into his memories and awakening to intuitive knowledge of my own; more than I had known before I read him and learned to trust my intuitions.
I also discovered Virginia Woolf's novels, just appearing in 1928; her writing meant to me the flash of insight while a leaf falls, the knowledge of complex relations that comes in a moment of understanding.
One, invited to a party to which we had to walk the length of Manhattan b/c we had no money, we paused at a bookshop and leafed through more books of poetry than we had ever found in one place before. This was the Gotham Book Mart.
George and I were western kids. Although there was much that New Yorkers knew which we did not know of the arts, the theater, Europe, and the ins and outs of their city, they did not know the forests of Montana or of Oregon, the swift flowing rivers and the mountains. Nor did they know the life of hitchhiking and of sailing across half the country with almost no money. We had our own strengths and knowledge, and I think in our friendships the differences were part of our fascination for each other.
Aunt Elsie took me to lunch one day to ask me if we intended to have children. I thought it was none of her affair and said no, but I did not have any kind of birth control and we had gotten no advice from doctors we had asked. She took me to the birth control clinic the next day, and I never had to have another abortion. I wrote to Nellie and to my sister-in-law Julia, who had so many children, and told them they must find birth control clinics at once. Nellie replied in high glee, with cartoons, but Julia could not arrange getting from Oregon wilderness to a San Francisco birth control clinic, and she had one more child. At that time there were only 11 states that allowed even doctors to give birth control information.
When I walked in neighborhoods near our hotel on 24 St in Manhattan, each direction took me to a neighborhood intact in its national origins, with corner stores and markets reflecting the culture of the people and the country from which they came. Most of these people did not know the United States beyond the subway system.
One of Libby's poems: Come into my Parlor/ I live on a sheet of glass.
Her love for her brother and for her father was faithful and childlike, but Libby never achieved self-love, and so her love for anyone else was also wanting. No man loved her with a love that nurtured her, and no woman really loved Libby except her daughter, Andy.
I entered this family when I was 18. Libby would have liked to be my friend -- I know it now, but at the time I was a stranger, a newcomer, a new young wife.
I sometimes saw Libby standing in our doorway looking on, her clothes too provocative, her bathing suit too daring. She wondered at our youthful spirits, she who had no experience of exuberant living.
1929-32
France
We were eager to travel, to have a view of our own country from a distance and from another culture. Many American writers, poets and artists were living in Europe, and we wanted to visit those who especially interested us. In 1929 Europe was already full of American students, and it was very late in that hejira [flight or journey to a more desirable place].
While British artists at the same or at a slightly earlier time were drawn to Germany, our antipathy to Germans and things German, even before Hitler, governed our travels; we chose France, and briefly Italy. We were in a narrow stream influenced by Pound, by Eliot, and by the Impressionist painters.
With our dog Zee-wag, we embarked on a small French freighter from San Francisco, destination Le Havre, a 30-day trip.
George wrote me a Valentine:
he de dark
handsome
young man has
for her
de fair
maiden Uh
present,
de darling
We had planned this time in France to be for as long as we liked, in order to paint, write and continue the conversation we had been seeking before we met and now were pursuing together. We wanted time to "look, gape, gawk to dawdle" -- to try to comprehend what was before our eyes.
We and Zee-wag started back to the city, driving our horse, Pom-Pon, and cart.
We were searching for something more than a life of "making a killing," as my mother said. The United States we had just left was rich, with an affluence of new cars and talk of the stock market. We wanted a way of life that allowed us to paint, write, think and converse in friendship with those who were on our same path.
We traveled 30 or 40 km a day, stopping over a day and a night after every five days of travel, for Pom-Pon needed to rest and to eat more than he had time for while traveling. The slow progress suited us, and we found the long stop-overs a time for talking to people, wandering and observing.
Mme Sicard came every day to care for us in Marseilles - in the vineyards of Le Beausset. She asked for an 'osaydar" & we didn't understand until one day in a hardware store in Toulon I saw an O'Cedar mop. "Osaydar!"
We had a toilet put in the centuries-old farmhouse before we knew that the water supply was seasonal. "Ça va?" Mme Sicard prescribed and brewed tea for stomach aches and back aches and to relieve muscular pain. Cupping was also a common remedy. One Sunday we went into the country with Eva & Dan and stopped at the country house of some of her Russian friends. We were admitted by a servant and shown into a parlor to wait; it was a damp, cold, cheerless habitation. Eva sniffed & said, "Smells like goldfish pee."
Before returned to the United States, we made a trip to Venice and to Florence to visit museums and to see a little of the country other than France. We were pinned against the monument at the center of the Piazza by a press of the crowd crying, "Il Duce -- pericolo del morte." (in danger of death) Mussolini's life had been threatened, and we were trapped in this sudden, impressive demonstration. We saw no differences of expression on the faces of the young men, only a blind fanaticism, in ecstasy and worship of Il Duce.
Roosevelt had been elected President of the USA in Nov 1932, and in that winter the Blue Eagle was introduced in the States. Blue Eagle posters were pictured on the front pages of Parisian newspapers, and the military-looking symbol frightened us. We were afraid it meant that fascism was rising in the USA, too. Germans in Venice, military men, had said to me as they passed, "Guten morgen mein Taube." (good morning, my dove)
In was 1933, and the next war was ominously looming. We could feel more than we could understand of the threat to Jews, to artists, to all freedoms. I was determined that fascism was not going to strike this pigeon!
1933-7
New York City
The people I see and talk to, the ways they earn their livings, the children I watch, the courting customs, the ways of parents with their children are all to me learning, and I re-evaluate my own ways and my country's ways every time I travel. It is not comfort, ease, or previous knowledge that takes me traveling; traveling is never as comfortable as being at home, and I am thrown out of my accustomed style and habits on meeting situations and people for whom I have no preparation. I go traveling in order to be jostled and jolted and confronted with the necessity of thinking faster to meet fast-changing occurrences. Happiness comes in the conversation and the learning that I have to master, even in the barest knowledge of how to get form here to there.
I think I travel to ask the questions which are hard to formulate about one's own times because one is in the midst, at home, of all that one has seen so often that one does not receive the jolt that might confront one with the uncomfortable, but important question. Not with answers -- answers are not possible for one's own times and in one's own place. The answer only becomes obvious after time has passed, and we can see, if we have survived it, the predicament that we have passed through.
Apprehension mixed with elation as we disembarked at Baltimore and began the drive to New York City. As we approached the first stoplight, grown men, respectable men - our fathers - stepped forward to ask for a nickel, rag in hand to wipe our windshield. This ritual was repeated every time we paused, until we felt we were in a nightmare, our fathers impoverished.
Many people in the USA were beginning to think about politics. We had seen the beginnings of fascism in Europe, and now we tried to understand the reasons for the collapse of the economic systems of the western world.
Men felt guilty when they became unemployed and could no longer support their families, and many left their homes in despair. Young men roamed the country.
In the last days of February and first days of March 1933, when we returned to the USA, President Roosevelt's first act as President was to declare a bank holiday. In effect, the US Treasury was empty as President Hoover went out of office. Depositors had lined up in front of banks to remove their money. Some banks went bankrupt, and the depositors' savings were lost; with no insurance of depositors' funds, they quickly ran out of money and closed their doors. Some banks had speculated with depositors' money, and Wall Street had sold them out; but most of them re-opened with the assurance that government would pass legislation as soon as possible to protect deposits in the banks.
To Italians, Mussolini was a hero because he was winning the war against Ethiopia, and he was unifying Italy, where the trains did run on time.
The Socialist Party had organized the Workers Alliance, and the Communists had organized the Unemployment Councils -- these two organizations merge to form one organization, called the Workers Alliance.
When no one in the family work the rent could not be paid, and if a family could not get 'the relief' (as it was called), the landlord gave them an eviction notice and called the city marshall, who with several assistants put the furniture in the street and put a lock on the door. If the furniture was not soon taken from the street, the sanitation department hauled it away to the city dump.
The purpose of the Workers Alliance was to relieve starvation and to guide people to a realization that government could solve these problems - not with fascism, but with a liberal solution.
We 'sat-in.' I asked George to bring the membership of his Borough-Hall Workers Alliance to picket the sit-in at the Nostrand Avenue relief bureau. We had learned this technique from the auto workers in Detroit; we sat in for a day and a night, holding the relief bureau so that the day's business could not go on. The administration of the bureau decided on the second day to smash the demonstration, and the police came through the big front doors with clubs swinging as our women screamed. We were arrested. At trial, after deliberating for many hours, the jury returned at 10 o'clock at night with a not-guilty verdict. We went out free to the street, and there, waiting for us, were our Workers Alliance members.
George and I were 29 years old. The war in Spain had been going on for a year, and George wanted to go, but I would not agree unless I went to.
Pop Mindel: There are times in your life in which you might choose to be a revolutionary, but there are also times, as when you marry or when you have children, that this is impossible.
George and I had been unaware of our being a special kind of couple until Hitler and fascism made being Jewish a pointed issue of survival. Our interest had been to understand a class not our own and to be part of sweeping changes in the USA. If there had not been a clear need for people like us to defeat fascism, we would probably have resumed a life in the arts and dropped the politics as the depression eased. Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain became fascist; France had a People's Front government, Russia was socialist, and the USA had embarked on a more liberal form of republicanism with the election of Roosevelt and his cabinet of Keynesian economists and politicians. Communists were still, at the end of the Depression, the ones who warned most consistently against this danger.
Friends found friends at these meetings, and there was an awakening. All the people endangered their livelihoods by their interest in the left, but nevertheless they were interested in defeating fascism. Intellectuals joined the League of Women Voters or the League against War and Fascism, or one of the many groups in the more liberal churches. The election of Roosevelt and the work done to alleviate the Depression had stirred people, and a strong liberal tendency was growing throughout the country, due not only to Roosevelt but to all of us who were opposed to fascism.
Usually the vote is more radical in the United States than the apparent opinion of the people, and we met surprises when we went door-to-door selling the Communist Sunday paper. People were not afraid of us in their own homes -- the fear was for loss of jobs. These people knew at first hand the long and frustrating struggle for trade unions and the continuing struggle to keep those unions honest.
1938-41
Transition
I was 30 years old and I wanted a child. George was surprised to learn that giving birth was a peak emotional experience and so entirely my own that I never tried to express it.
1942-5
Wartime
George wanted to go to the war. The enemy was fascism, and we agreed that the war must be fought.
1946-58
California and Exile [9 yrs in Mexico]
In Apr 1950 the FBI began its visits. With the war declared in Korea it was clear to us that Joseph McCarthy & Gen MacArthur, representing the policy of the Pentagon, sought to silence opposition to this war.
Carmen, our lawyer, walked directly up to one of the men. "My clients tell me you are bothering them. That is very ugly [Es muy feo]. I want you to stop at once. I want you to promise you will not do it anymore." We never saw the men again.
February 28, 2025
I bought this book years ago, along with the ‘Collected Poems’ of George Oppen, her husband. I buy a lot of fancy books. I fancy myself an intellectual. The books sit on my shelf and I don’t read them. It’s embarrassing. Finally this month I decided, "All right. If this is February, these must be the Oppens.” (I do so like to have a theme.)
I read obsessively. I tell people, "I dropped out of society to read more." But I haven’t read anything in many months that rivals this book : Mary Oppen’s MEANING A LIFE. I love the prose -- it’s said to be the only work of “objectivist prose”. A distinction that means nothing to anyone, unless you’re a grad student or a weirdo. I loved the stories of poetry in the early 20th century -- Zukofsky, Pound, and Niedecker. I loved hearing about rural France a century ago. I was just barreling along in the book, with great joy.
Now I discover the second half of the book is about -- how Mary and George Oppen gave up art and poetry. For decades. To fight fascism. To fight so that people could have decent work and not starve to death. I read now -- with the breath knocked out of me. Spooked. As if Mary had walked into the room and begun to speak to me. She'll speak to you too.
I read a lot of odd books. Experimental poetry and devotional texts. It is the joy of my life. It is a privilege. But this is not one of those books. This book is for everyone. If I had Oprah’s home number, I’d explain why this is an obvious choice for her Book Club.
Read this book! If nothing else, it will accompany you with beauty and sanity and courage, amid the cruelty and stupidity into which we are plunged.
I read obsessively. I tell people, "I dropped out of society to read more." But I haven’t read anything in many months that rivals this book : Mary Oppen’s MEANING A LIFE. I love the prose -- it’s said to be the only work of “objectivist prose”. A distinction that means nothing to anyone, unless you’re a grad student or a weirdo. I loved the stories of poetry in the early 20th century -- Zukofsky, Pound, and Niedecker. I loved hearing about rural France a century ago. I was just barreling along in the book, with great joy.
Now I discover the second half of the book is about -- how Mary and George Oppen gave up art and poetry. For decades. To fight fascism. To fight so that people could have decent work and not starve to death. I read now -- with the breath knocked out of me. Spooked. As if Mary had walked into the room and begun to speak to me. She'll speak to you too.
I read a lot of odd books. Experimental poetry and devotional texts. It is the joy of my life. It is a privilege. But this is not one of those books. This book is for everyone. If I had Oprah’s home number, I’d explain why this is an obvious choice for her Book Club.
Read this book! If nothing else, it will accompany you with beauty and sanity and courage, amid the cruelty and stupidity into which we are plunged.
December 28, 2007
Hard to find but an interesting memoir.
August 23, 2020
A well-written account of an interesting life. My favourite part is her account of living for a time in the French countryside.
July 29, 2020
Mary & her husband George were ahead of their times. They chose to learn about the world on their own terms through travel & unconventional living.
April 28, 2017
A lovely telling of the life shared by Mary and George Oppen.
March 24, 2021
Oppen's talent in this autobiography is observational – assembling her own 'discrete series' of incidents, anecdotes, and sketches, weighted heavily to the early pre-war phases of her life with partner George Oppen. The writing is most attentive and careful, but also the most flowing and effortless, when she's recollecting prairie life, travel and, specifically, sailing – which seemed to have a favored and recurrent place in the couple's half-century together.
The book is much less forthcoming on the phases in which many poet-readers, activists and scholars are likely to be interested when researching the Oppens: their community organizing in NYC, their time under federal surveillance in California, and especially their period in exile in Mexico City. These periods aren't entirely neglected, but there is circumspection in the accounts, a tendency to avoid political analysis or synthesis, and much more concern with their mutual careers as 'artists' in a very categorical and ingenuously romantic sense.
Inadvertent or no, there's a bit of mythbusting that happens over the course of the book. One learns how much of the Oppens' itinerant lifestyle was funded through inheritance and subsidy from George's wealthy San Francisco family. Any time they find themselves in a bit of trouble, they're buying themselves cars, horses, boats, land, houses, hotel rooms, travel tickets. Their modest budgeting was more by choice than contingency – something reinforced by Mary's repeated musings over 'luck' vs 'choice'. She also has an outright, and surprising, disdain for typical occupational work, and sidebars on the indignity of folks like Williams, Zukofsky and Reznikoff having to be, gads, doctors and clerks. On the other hand, there's a romance of the homesteader she frequently returns to, as a holdover from growing up in frontier Montana in the early 20th c.
This is a new edition that I'm not sure is much enhanced by the additional archival materials or the introduction, which seemed a little redundant in summarizing the biography the book already reveals, while appending some misplaced and peripheral lists, stats and summaries of other autobiographies, toward, I dunno, a definition of autobiography that wasn't exactly in question? There are also some fragments in the "Other Writings" section that seem unnecessarily revealing of uncomfortable exchanges with her father-in-law and a young poet who made a wounding offhand remark about her autobiography. The best part of the latter section is a small selection of Mary's poems and a very nice translation of Saint John of the Cross – which give a fuller sense of her thoughtful career as a writer, beyond memoir.
The book is much less forthcoming on the phases in which many poet-readers, activists and scholars are likely to be interested when researching the Oppens: their community organizing in NYC, their time under federal surveillance in California, and especially their period in exile in Mexico City. These periods aren't entirely neglected, but there is circumspection in the accounts, a tendency to avoid political analysis or synthesis, and much more concern with their mutual careers as 'artists' in a very categorical and ingenuously romantic sense.
Inadvertent or no, there's a bit of mythbusting that happens over the course of the book. One learns how much of the Oppens' itinerant lifestyle was funded through inheritance and subsidy from George's wealthy San Francisco family. Any time they find themselves in a bit of trouble, they're buying themselves cars, horses, boats, land, houses, hotel rooms, travel tickets. Their modest budgeting was more by choice than contingency – something reinforced by Mary's repeated musings over 'luck' vs 'choice'. She also has an outright, and surprising, disdain for typical occupational work, and sidebars on the indignity of folks like Williams, Zukofsky and Reznikoff having to be, gads, doctors and clerks. On the other hand, there's a romance of the homesteader she frequently returns to, as a holdover from growing up in frontier Montana in the early 20th c.
This is a new edition that I'm not sure is much enhanced by the additional archival materials or the introduction, which seemed a little redundant in summarizing the biography the book already reveals, while appending some misplaced and peripheral lists, stats and summaries of other autobiographies, toward, I dunno, a definition of autobiography that wasn't exactly in question? There are also some fragments in the "Other Writings" section that seem unnecessarily revealing of uncomfortable exchanges with her father-in-law and a young poet who made a wounding offhand remark about her autobiography. The best part of the latter section is a small selection of Mary's poems and a very nice translation of Saint John of the Cross – which give a fuller sense of her thoughtful career as a writer, beyond memoir.
January 25, 2021
I wrote this review of the New Directions reprint
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a...
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a...
February 28, 2021
Dedication of husband and wife
To define what to do with their life.
To define what to do with their life.
May 20, 2023
Mary Oppen reminds me of my grandmother.
Also, I just have to agree with her re:Zukofsky.
Also, I just have to agree with her re:Zukofsky.
December 29, 2025
One of my favourite books. I will come back to this one again and again I think.
December 31, 2025
3.5. Interesting, but I wanted more
Read
May 20, 2025From Anniversary Poem : “Time and depth before us, paradise of the real, we/ know what it is/ To find now depth, not time, since we cannot, but depth/ To come out safe,/ to end well/ We have begun to say good bye/ To each other/ And cannot say it” (1)
“Part of the freedom of spring was the light feeling in my feet as I ran, as thought I skimmed the earth” (33)
“Part of the freedom of spring was the light feeling in my feet as I ran, as thought I skimmed the earth” (33)
January 3, 2021
Finished 2nd reading January 3, 2021
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews