James Tate and American Surrealism

James Tate is the perpetual enfant terrible of American poetry. For the past thirty years his strange, provocative, and often disturbing poems have fascinated critics and fellow-poets. Even now, in his mid-fifties, after having won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and most of the establishment's other awards, even now after having been appointed full professor at a major state university, Tate still seems like an outsider–a brilliant, troubled youth who has never settled down.

Tate came to prominence very early. In 1967 his first collection, The Lost Pilot, won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets competition. Now, in America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension. (I recently read one avant-garde anthology of "younger" poets in which the average age of the contributor was 61 & 1/2.) But James Tate was perhaps the youngest writer ever to win the Yale competition in the 8 decades of its existence. When the book appeared, he was only 23 and still a student in the University of Iowa's graduate writing program.

Tate's debut made an enormous impression–at least on other writers. The Yale Younger Poets series had not yet lost its editorial cachet. The Ivy League series was then still the most influential–and mainstream–introduction a new American poet could have. In the late Sixties American poetry was ostentatiously reinventing itself. Experimentalism was the sign of artistic authenticity, and ambitious writers were eagerly exploring new avenues of expression.

With The Lost Pilot Tate struck an unmistakably new and original note. He had, in fact, successfully accomplished something that many other poets had been trying–mostly without conspicuous success. Tate had domesticated surrealism. He had taken this foreign style, which had almost always seemed slightly alien in English–even among its most talented practitioners like Charles Simic and Donald Justice–and had made it sound not just native but utterly down-home.

One of the provocative ironies of twentieth century literature is that during the Thirties and Forties when surrealism was transforming the landscape of European and Latin American poetry, it never took root in the United States. Surrealism changed poetry from Sweden to Bolivia, from Greece to Costa Rica. It even found a foothold in England. But in America it initially created no significant body of work. Why did the self-proclaimed style of the future make such a minimal impression in the land of the modern?

There were, of course, many reasons why surrealism was so slow in coming to America–not the least of which was that the U.S. already had a thriving Modernist movement. With Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, and William Carlos Williams all active, who needed Andrè Breton to be modern? But there was, I suggest, another, more curious reason that no one ever mentions. My own guess for the main reason that American poetry–and painting and sculpture–did not initially pounce on surrealism was that Hollywood got there first. And not just Hollywood–it's worse than that–it was the animated cartoon.

America's first great surrealist artists were named Walt Disney, Max Fleischer, and Tex Avery. Their artistic medium was cartoon animation, though we must remember that cartoons of this era were seen not only by children but by a mixed audience, consisting mainly of adults. These men took–quite literally–the principles of surrealism and turned them into mass entertainment. As Fleischer's scantily clad Betty Boop ran through a phantasmagoric underground landscape to the driving beat of Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher," moviegoers of the Thirties saw surrealist dream-logic unfold more powerfully than in any experimental poem created in Greenwich Village. To this day the greatest moment of North American surrealism is probably Dumbo's drunken nightmare choreographed to the demonic oom-pah-pah of "Pink Elephants on Parade" from Walt Disney's 1941 movie. When the surrealist style was so quickly assimilated into mass-media comedy, what avant-garde poet could consider it sufficiently chic? No, American surrealism had to wait until the Fleischer studio had gone bankrupt, Tex Avery had died, and an older, safer Walt Disney began hosting a Sunday evening family TV hour.

American surrealism also had to wait for another generation–a generation that had grown up on cartoons and movies. It required writers who did not necessarily see high culture and popular culture in opposition. This shift in sensibility finally arrived in the Sixties. The new surrealism also reflected a growing internationalism in American poetry, an interest in modern poetry outside the English-speaking world. Sophisticated poets like James Wright, Robert Bly, and Donald Justice studied and translated foreign modernists. They explored surrealistic techniques as a way of broadening their own imaginative range. A generation younger, Tate (who was a student of Donald justice at Iowa) approached the new style in a less intellectual and scholarly way. Neither a translator nor a critic, he worked by instinct and obsession.

In The Lost Pilot Tate usually created a clear narrative line in his poems. Only as the details of the story and situation unfolded in an increasingly bizarre fashion, did one realize that the speaker inhabited some private landscape of dream or hallucination. Although Tate claimed he often wrote in a trance, his poems gave no hint of automatic writing. The poems were tightly constructed. The language clean and sharply chiseled. The style was not from the cafes of Paris or Barcelona but from the workshops of Iowa City. What Tate borrowed from surrealism was the use of dream logic and free association. Often he would incorporate these principles into something very similar to the standard confessional poem as in the title poem of his first collection, "The Lost Pilot." This poem was dedicated to Tate's father, an American pilot who was killed in the Second World War at the age of 22–the same age, significantly, that the poet was when the book had been accepted for publication.