Bert Meyers, Lyric Poet: an Homage with Some Caveats
by Sam Bluefarb (September 2013)
—Bert Meyers, under duress
This is not the first word on poet Bert Meyers (1928-1979), nor will it likely be the last. And though much–mostly posthumous–commentary is adulatory, there was a side to him that was not always so deserving—and perhaps even a little zany. At the time of his death at age 51, he was as naïve and innocent and credulous about the dark side of the ideological world as he was in his early twenties when he nursed a touching belief in the good intensions of the post-war Soviet Union. However, in that respect, he was no different from many well-intentioned Americans during that period, the early days of the Cold War (1946-1956). Even long after the Khrushchev revelations[i] in 1956, many true believers in Stalin’s stature as a wise, all-knowing, courageous leader, found it difficult to accept the truth about his monstrous crimes.
Rabbi of Condiments
whose breath is a verb,
wearing a thin beard
and a white robe:
You who are pale and small
and shaped like a fist,
a synagogue,
bless our bitterness,
transcend the kitchen
to sweeten death—
our wax in the flame
and our seed in the bread
Now my parents pray
my grandfather sits
my uncles fill
my mouth with ashes.
From: Sunlight on the Wall
Thus a prank collapsed into slapstick.
* * *
As we have already touched on, Walt Whitman was one of Bert’s early influences, along with William Blake and Hart Crane. That early, crude, “barbaric yawp,” would hardly have been recognizable as coming from the same person as the mature poet who years later produced lines like these:
Picture Framing
My fingers feed in the fields of wood
I sand pine, walnut, oak
And sweat to raise their grain.
Paints, powder, and brush
Are the seasons of my trade.
At the end of the day
I drive home
The proud cattle of my hands.[vi]
Another:
By the Sea
Across the loud scroll of water
fishermen still sail out
to earn a living.
a boat leaves for Peru.
And always a multitude
unpacks a paradise
of Sundays on the sand
to celebrate the passage of its blood.[vii]
And again (in part):
L.A.
The world’s largest ash-tray,
the latest in concrete
capital of the absurd;
one huge studio
where people drive
from set to set and everyone’s
from a different planet
This is the desert
that lost its mind,
the place that boredom
built.
Freeways, condominiums, malls
where cartons of trash and
and ideologies and diamonds
are opened, used, dumped
near the sea.[viii]
* * *
* * *
What has indelibly stayed with me from that visit was an endearing little demonstration of his love for his kids. How filled with joy he was when he took little Anat into his arms, lifted her up onto his shoulders, and spoke to her in bouts of baby talk. He was a happy man back then.
* * *
* * *
On the steps of the Los Angeles Public Library
* * *
One day in August 1979, the phone rang. Daniel Meyers, Bert’s now-grown son, was on the line. He gave me the sad news: Bert had died only days earlier, and since I was an old friend going back decades, would I do his father’s memory the honor of participating in a memorial, together with a number of other old friends and colleagues. Of course I would.
Except for a brief, 1930-31, connection with the communist movement, and after a two-year stay in the Soviet Union where he conducted research at the Marx-Engels Institute, Hook came away with fewer illusions than when he had gone over to the Soviet Union. Except for that temporary anomaly, Hook was a lifelong socialist. He was also a Marxist scholar and one of the leading authorities on Marx. But during the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, when most of the Old Bolsheviks were falsely accused—Trotzky in absentia–of collaborating with the Nazis and the Japanese, Hook persuaded his old mentor and teacher, John Dewey (1859-1952), to form a Special Commission of Inquiry, which was to be headed by Dewey, and which was to investigate the charges against Trotsky. The members of the Commission went down to Mexico, where Leon Trotzky was spending what turned out to be his last years, and where the hearings were held. They concluded—and published their findings–that Trotzky was not guilty of the charge of conspiracy, and that such charges were trumped up.[xi] Findings later supported by George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Arthur Koestler, Suzanne La Follette, Reinhold Neibuhr, George Novack, and of course Hook.
The hundreds of articles that Hook produced during the time of the student campus rebellions of the 1960’s were medicines of clarity for me. One could be anti–communist—as many of Partisan Review[xii] editors were, themselves on the non-Stalinist Left—and still remain socialists without necessarily supporting the McCarthy House Un-American Activities Hearings. Hook himself, for some years, served on Partisan Review’s editorial board. Tangentially, in an article in Partisan Review of some ten years ago, Professor David Sidorsky summed up the various periods of Hook’s life which made him the object of heated controversy:
He was, to a degree probably unparalleled by any other philosopher of his generation, actively involved in the cultural and political conflicts of his time.[xiii]
Much in Hook’s writings sifted demagogic anti-communism from the reality of Soviet expansionism and domestic communist conspiracy. In an article in PR, in 2003, its final issue, Professor Sidorsky, succinctly summed up in a précis-like paraphrase the essence of Sidney Hook’s anti-communism and his view of the innocent fellow travelers and “progressives” who were drawn to networks of seemingly innocent communist fronts:
[I]n Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No! (1953) [Hook maintained] that [to] the extent that Communist Party activities in democratic countries represented the expression or even the advocacy of heretical ideas and competing points of view, their rights ought not to be abridged on pain of violation of democratic principles, yet, to the extent that these activities represented a conspiratorial organization against the proceedings and methods of democracy, it would be legitimate for a democracy to pass legislation that would restrain the freedom of action of the conspiracy.
Hook further believed that the fight against communism had to diligently and completely dissociate itself from the most egregious aspects of the McCarthy hearings, and not just for prudent, but for moral reasons.
Suddenly, seemingly from out of nowhere, our elderly host’s much younger wife burst in upon us, and exploded, “There’ll be no more talk of Sidney Hook in this house!” I was taken off balance. Hard to believe that Hook could still stir up such anger after the bitter factional wars of the 1930s when any mention of his name would set off epithets like “Trotzkyite!” “social fascist!” ”sell-out!” Obviously, the people there that evening were no strangers to the factional conflicts on the left. Even among the later generation of the New Left, Hook was regarded not only as a renegade, but, most damning, a “cold war liberal,” occasionally a “cold warrior.”
In a letter to him sometime in 1972, about the time he had joined the conservative think tank, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, I offered him a friendly challenge: “Since you’ve come so far in moderating your earlier socialism, and even embraced some conservative ideas, why not call yourself a conservative?” This was his answer:
Just as I hate to surrender the old, brave words like ‘”liberal” “democrat” “freedom” “tolerance” to the enemies of what they used to represent, so I hesitate to let the totalitarians become the only public exponents of “socialism”. (He was alluding to the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society).
* * *
I cannot see Bert Meyers as any kind of political thinker or even an ideological advocate. He was too much the pure lyric poet. It wasn’t that he was divorced from workaday reality. After all, he’d been a frame maker, worked with his hands, “sweated,” as he put it in one of the poems, had a family, reared good kids, struggled up from an incoherent youth whose mom worried about “where will my Bertram go? What’s going to happen to him?” That he drew acolytes and followers, and not only admirers, but sycophants, friends out of the Old Left, who if they were no longer Stalinists, still hated the old socialist Hook with a passion—these were a part of his life, but not the most important part. Meyers did not need the rationale of the “progressive” crowd to negotiate history’s “many cunning passages,” though he would have identified himself with them. Yet it was paradoxically that very naiveté, that innocence, that, in part, made him a great poet. Thus, that one can be a superb and compassionate poet, does not insure against lending moral support to murderous regimes. I feel honored to have known him, and treasure his memory—in spite of his lifelong dedication to the gods that failed.
[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cult_of_Personality_and_Its_Consequences
[ii] http://lifestream.aol.com/?icid=96_tbar_people
[iii] http://forward.com/articles/11533/the-cantakerous-compelling-musings-of-poet-bert-m-/
[iv] Jewish Voice, April 22, 1979..
[vi] From The Dark Birds, Eds, in Dybbuk’s Raincoat , p. 59.: Martin Marcus, Daniel Meyers, forward by Denise Levertov., http://www.kilibro.com/en/book/preview/1099948/in-a-dybbuks-raincoat
[vii] From Sunlight on the Wall,, in a Dybbuk’s Raicoat, p. 70 http://www.kilibro.com/en/book/preview/1099948/in-a-dybbuks-raincoat
[viii] From Sunlight on the Wall, in a Dybbuk’s Raincoat, p. 71, http://www.kilibro.com/en/book/preview/1099948/in-a-dy
[ix] 1934-2001
[x] Leslie A. Fiedler, “The Breakthrough: The American Jewish Novelist and the Fictional Image of the Jew,” Midstream , IV (Winter, 1958), 15-35.
[xi] http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/dewey/session09.htm
[xii] After almost seventy years, the magazine ceased publication in 2003. Many of the last century’s literary luminaries—George Orwell, Ignacio Silone, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, et al, appeared in its pages at one time or another. Its demise has turned out to be a great loss to the literary world.
[xiii] David Sidorsky,, “Charting the Intellectual Career of Sidney Hook: Five Major Steps,“ Partisan Review, Spring, 2003, vol. LXX, Number 2, p. 325.”
[xiv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project
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Sam Bluefarb is Prof. Emeritus, Los Angeles Harbor College.
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