Part II Of The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You, A Conversation*
One late Friday afternoon in the South Bronx I walked the couple blocks from my apartment to my office, a rented room the size of a closet. The January air hung around thirty-something degrees, and a garbage truck rumbled idle on Canal Street. A light drizzle, what I’ve heard described as wisteria rain, started falling just a few steps before I opened the building’s front door. I walked up four flights of stairs to my office, closed the office door, and sat at my desk. I had a couple minutes to spare, before calling James McWilliams, a writer, professor living in Austin, Texas. He has started writing a biography about Frank Stanford (August 1, 1948-June 3, 1978), and I wanted to talk with him about The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You, a text that pours some light onto Stanford’s otherwise shady life. Raindrops rolled off rooftops, and McWilliams picked up on the third ring. We said our hellos and dove right into our second conversation about Frank Stanford’s epic poem.
James asked the first question. “What scene do you find to be particularly funny in The Battlefield?”
“Well, as far as humor goes, one thing I notice is, you know, we’ve got a kid telling us a story. There’s a lot of childish humor about things such as peeing and pooing.”
“Endlessly funny,” he chuckled.
“Things happen at the outhouse, you probably recall. These guys have what they call ‘pee wars.’ For example, if you look on page 130 in your book, it says [line 5167], ‘I’ve got to ask a question Jimmy I says shoot,’ and from that point there’s some dick humor,” I said.
“Classic. And the humor works.”
“This kind of humor is always next to some pretty highbrow stuff, I’d say.”
“Maybe that’s why it works,” James responded.
“What do you think about that?” I probed.
He took a breath then answered, “As you note, he likes to talk about peeing and then there’s that scene in the outhouse where Rufus is going to the bathroom for half an hour, with every fart narrated. Francis loves giving the details of that event. And it’s almost like it’s his way of rebelling against the expectations that are being set for him by the astronomer, or his more formal family of Southern aristocrats.
“And another way to possibly think about this is how Frank Stanford himself was expected to comport himself, you know, in different settings. If the family went to the Peabody Hotel for lunch, which they often did, he’d have to know how to behave. And when they went to the levee camps, he’d have to behave according to a different set of expectations.
“And I don’t get the sense that, in his actual life, Stanford was forced into a kind of upper class manner of behavior. But I do think that the Stanfords lived according to, and were expected to follow, a kind of standard set for Southern genteel values. And he certainly was a kid who was most likely expected to be able to handle himself in the ballroom of a fancy and privileged hotel. And so this, I think, is, in a lot of ways, Frank using Francis to let loose and allow himself to indulge in this more juvenile kind of humor, maybe the kind that was more familiar from the summer levee camps.”
“You know, James, we already talked about him, but I want to ask you more about the astronomer. Doesn’t it seem like the astronomer burdens Francis by, for example, thinking that he’s a mind reader, if I’m not mistaken? Francis is looked at as if he’s clairvoyant or has some special brainpower. Did you notice that, a sort of expectation for Francis to be like a genius when he’s with the astronomer?”
He replied, “I think, in some ways, the astronomer grates against Francis. At one point, he has Charlie B. call the astronomer an ‘egghead.’ But you’re right in that the astronomer seems to have some insight into Francis that maybe Francis does not have, that he has these powers and these skills and he can learn languages spoken and unspoken. I think it’s interesting that Francis, again, never outright rejects the astronomer. He keeps him in his orbit, so to speak. And, I think there is, on some level, an appreciation for the expectations that the astronomer sets for Francis, as much as a twelve year old can have for such an influence.
“I think if we want to transfer that set of expectations to Frank Stanford himself, well, as we know, he became a wildly prolific reader. The range of his curiosity was mind blowing. His ability to synthesize oceans of information from dozens of different fields of thought impressed everybody he met. The astronomer character was a real figure in Frank’s life, and he came to the house to talk to Frank and show him how to use a telescope. I wonder if that’s maybe the first person Frank met who really recognized his abilities, or set an example of what that kind of learning looked like.”
“Right.”
“So, I think, in actual life the astronomer was probably somebody who was just extremely well read and learned and, again, spent a little time with young Frank Stanford talking highbrow stuff. He spent some time at the house talking to Frank’s stepfather. On some level, Frank may have really admired this guy. You know how it is when you’re a kid. You internalize something that you don’t really know is important to you at the time,” he contended as it got a little darker outside.
“Right,” I echoed.
James proceeded. “But, later in life, you realize it was quite important. And you know, I remember being a little kid, maybe seven or eight years old, going over to a friend’s house. This friend of mine had a much older brother who was in, I think, graduate school. I remember this guy sitting at this desk with piles of books around him, and, I don’t know why, I just thought, ‘Oh, that looks really cool.’ You know?”
“Yes. That’s fantastic,” I answered.
“And, you know, it just so happens that made an impression on me. It shaped some of the decisions that I made to, you know, be somebody who could be around books.”
“Great, great, that’s amazing. Well, I have been able to find one place here to sort of support a reference that I mentioned. I know Jimmy does it a few times, when he says to Frank, basically, you’re a genius mind reader. If you turn to page 288…”
“Mm-hmm…”
“And on page 288, um, line 11,508, I think, around there.”
“Mm-hmm,” James repeated.
“Oh, by the way, the astronomer is up there at line 11,480-something,” I added as I looked at the book open before me.
“Got it.”
I quoted directly [lines 11,508–11,509], “‘You probably think it’s cool to read minds a getting hold of what people thinks/ about you and dirty thoughts and whatever kind of pitch you gone get.’”
“If being able to predict what a pitcher is going to throw isn’t a superpower, I don’t know what is,” James commented.
“Yes! So, I noticed examples in which a pretty heavy burden was put on Francis by the astronomer or Jimmy, for example, and the pee jokes countered them, nicely, as a way to get out of his heavy responsibility to use his super power wisely.”
“I love that.”
“You know,” I said, “not only does the astronomer think Francis should read all of these books, he says Francis is clairvoyant.”
“Right. And, perhaps, he has an obligation to honor the powers therein.”
“Right, right.”
“You know, just on an armchair psychological level, back to what we were saying earlier, this resort to kind of lowbrow humor may be a release of sorts. It’s this safety valve so he doesn’t get, you know, too wrapped up in pursuing total cultural competency or profound geekdom, and he can still shuck and jive with Charlie B. and those guys, and he can still tell poop jokes.”
“Right,” I drawled and looked out the window becoming fogged with condensation.
“The contrast with the burden of clairvoyance is clear when Francis breaks out of school. He and Charlie B. go and get catfish, and they get beer and play the radio, and Francis drives the car, and Francis doesn’t want to lose that to the astronomer’s pressure. The pressure from the astronomer is serious. It’s well intentioned. And, you know, like everything in The Battlefield, there are good guys and bad guys but nothing is ever drawn to an extreme. You never root against the astronomer, for example.”
“I’ve just come across something relevant to what you said before. This is with the astronomer on page 367. Like you said, he starts out with Charlie B. and then there is mention of the astronomer. If he’s not there, he’s at least in Francis’s mind. For example [line 14647], ‘Sometimes I thought the astronomer was a butler or a man who took ticket. [sic]/ You live in the mansions and you live in the shacks,’” I read.
James coughed. Outside, two seagulls flew by.
I talked more. “He goes on but, if you scroll down a little, you see this [starting at line 14656]: ‘Anyway, he said my saga was like a levee/ he said they’d find it one day when I was dead/ I stowed away in the ship of death on the river of no return.’
“The saga that the astronomer mentions is The Battlefield, which he champions as a kind of levee holding back waters of a treasured imagination yet to be discovered.”
James jumped in, “Yeah, exactly. I do think you are highlighting another way to think about reading this poem. The astronomer is almost like a magnet at the top of it, you know, like pulling Francis in one direction. But then — ”
“I never thought of it, but you’re totally right. Even when he’s hanging out with the astronomer, like you said, Charlie B is often in the scene. Those are two different halves of a person there,” I interrupted.
“Two different poles towards which Francis is drawn. Let’s just, actually, point out a couple of other scenes with the astronomer on page 167. And let’s look at line 6671.”
“Yeah, I see it,” I affirmed.
“The scene before it is where he’s just talking about goofing around and fighting with Jimmy, trading licks with him.”
“Exactly,” I clarified.
“Like, just being a kid. And then starting at line 6671: ‘the astronomer says these things must stop/ I must devote myself but he ain’t never gone fine me heah.’
“ Notice the shift to vernacular. It’s a form of rebellion. ‘He ain’t never gone fine me heah’. Okay. And then this [starting in line 6672]:
“‘I’m so far down the river/ now ain’t nobody can find shoot I don’t even know where I is but there’s one/ thang for sure if I pull through ain’t nobody gone have call to want me for/ no reason because I’ll just be a kid nothing else won’t have no power.’
“That’s it,” James joyfully exclaimed.
“That’s right.”
He then declared, “So, the astronomer is also a foil. When Francis needs a foil, when he needs to rebel, which he’s doing both in language and in action in this scene, the astronomer provides a nice contrast for him, even an excuse to do so.”
“That’s fantastic.”
“There was one other scene. It’s one where he talks about how the astronomer wants him to wear a tie to dinner. Do you know what I’m talking about?” James quizzed me.
“Yeah. Um…”
“It goes like this. So, Francis is hanging out in Snow Lake with his Black friends, probably having the time of his life. And he says [starting in line 1706 on page forty-three],” James continued by quoting, “‘you know that astronomer back in Memphis…he wants me to be well I don’t know what he wants me/ to be whatever it is I has to stay inside and read books and talk right and/ wear a tie to supper ain’t that a pile of shit you tell me if it ain’t.’
“I think we’ve probably said enough about the astronomer at this point. But, I do want to point out, before we move on, there’s a quote from line 1160 on page twenty-nine, where he talks about the astronomer leaving books at his father’s house: ‘He comes to the house to talk to Daddy about physics and floods he says I got the idea from my entry in the science fair from the astronomer’
“So, the guy is obviously not totally useless,” James jested.
“I think you’ve played out something that’s right under our noses. I just haven’t thought about it until you were mentioning it. You know how the astronomer functions in the text? If we think biographically, Stanford was wrestling with different sides of himself. You know, he was, as you pointed out earlier, sort of a highbrow Memphis guy living in a mansion,” I mentioned.
“Yeah.”
“Versus the other things that he sees and the other language he uses, as you pointed out.”
“The shacks, the levees, the catfish parlors, and Beale Street.”
I heard a garbage truck’s breaks squeal. I looked out the window. It looked colder outside.
“Yes. You hear it in Frank’s words, living in the mansions versus in the shacks. He’s comfortable with both of them,” I responded.
“Your observation captures so much, and I think it highlights what you said about the inner struggle that Frank Stanford had. Thinking about mansions and shacks metaphorically for just high and low, he, obviously, was extremely well versed in high culture, whether it was the ancient Greeks, Renaissance painting, or Medieval French literature. He was just deeply well versed. But, he was also well versed in hanging out in the woods and drinking and hanging around the levee camps and riding bikes around and hanging out with a bunch of old country Black dudes in Fayetteville and drinking beer.
“In fact, he was probably much more comfortable in that kind of hillbilly role. He loved the idea of being a super literate hillbilly. And I think Frank feared being associated with a kind of fancy learning or certainly higher education or credentialed accomplishment. I think this is one reason why he ended up never graduating from college, why he dropped out in his third year. It just meant nothing to him. He was like an anti-intellectual intellectual in many ways. I think that was a tough struggle, and I find such people more interesting.
“He was just so gifted and maybe more gifted than anybody in the MFA program he was with in Arkansas. That might make people mad, people who are still alive, but many people there conceded that. He had no use for the degree. It’s like, ‘Why do I need this kind of formal institution to do anything for me? I can do this all on my own,’” insisted James.
“Which is why,” I chimed in, “I think Fayetteville is important, but Memphis is where we see a sharper juxtaposition between high and lowbrow language. Having grown up in the South, like you did, I know the saying ‘how you speak can open doors’ or ‘how you speak can get you into the country club.’ Especially during Frank’s life, how a person spoke meant something about status in society.”
“So true.”
“I think, in Memphis where he’s able to speak highbrow, he is able to go anywhere and talk with whomever, and that’s how he becomes a poet,” I alleged.
“On page 135 we get a really nice example of this kind of whiplash between high and low cultures. There are certain scenes in this poem where I do get the feeling that Frank Stanford himself was just having a hell of a good time writing it.”
“I agree with that,” I laughed.
“This is one of them. We can start on line 5370. I think we should pay attention to how he goes from whatever he’s doing with Mr. Rufus and Jimmy to what is, essentially, an art history lesson on Italian Renaissance paintings. You know the scene. I know you do. This:
‘the wolf howled and I heard hammer and nails/ like you do early in the morning when there is going to be an election or a circus/ or a picture show or a revival/ but it wasn’t none of that it was Mr. Rufus tacking up stuff on trees/ I thought it was money because he was unfolding them out of his billfold/ maybe they was pictures of naked women Jimmy says no I says I’ll tell you what/ they was they were the paintings of Jesus by the dead artists/ I knew some of them by name but most of them I had never seen before/ the ones I hadn’t ever seen before was the ones that sent chills through me/ there was for sure the Resurrection of Christ by Piero Della Francesco/ nailed up to a Chinaberry and there was/ Christ Healing The Blind Man with the Violin by Lodovico Carracci/ hung on a Shagbark Hickory…’
“This goes on, but notice a couple of things here. The transition to the lesson starts from Jimmy saying, ‘Hey, maybe we’re going to get some naked pictures that Mr. Rufus is nailing to a tree…,’” James specified.
“There’s the humor,” I smirked.
“… Immediately to some of the finest paintings from the Italian Renaissance, which I’m sure has some nudity.”
“ Fifteenth and sixteenth century,” I noted.
“Notice how he also keeps Arkansas centered in this scene. He’s talking about Italian Renaissance painting but it’s tacked to a Chinaberry tree and then it’s tacked to a shagbark hickory. It’s so subtle, and I think it’s important that, whenever there is an exegesis of something that we might consider high culture, Stanford always roots it in Southern Arkansas, Northwest Mississippi vernacular,” James nodded.
“What I love about these little bits is when I look up shagbark hickory, sure enough, doggone it, that’s common in the South East.”
“Stanford: poet, historian . . .arborist?” James joked.
I opened the window to let cool air into the room. In the hallway, I heard boots walking on the hardwood floor.
“Oftentimes, even the tree that he’s mentioned is a tree from where he was, actually. The precision in his references can be astounding,” I marveled.
“Amazing,” agreed James.
“It’s not just some made up thing. I think some writers search online and think, ‘Oh, that’s a pretty sounding name for a tree. I’ll use that in my poem.’ You know, he’s really cataloging things, which brings me to something I wanted to ask you. I know that you’re a writer and a historian,” I stated.
“Right…”
“I wanted to get your take as a historian,” I said, “Something that I have really enjoyed is coming across people and venues in The Battlefield that are no longer with us. For example, there’s a place in here that comes up a few times called the White Spot, and a person named Daisy Bates.”
“Oh, sure, you know who Daisy Bates was?” queried James.
“Daisy Bates, the activist, right?” I asked back.
“Yes, a Black woman who founded a Civil Rights newspaper in Arkansas.”
“She is someone who seems obscure to some folks today, but she is really pertinent to the part of the poem in which she appears.”
“Indeed,” James concurred.
“The White Spot, by the way, is a restaurant that was started in 1935 in Memphis, Tennessee.”
“That I did not know,” James admitted.
“5341 Poplar Pike, Memphis was the address. So, all I want to ask you is, what did you find about the historical accuracy going on in this poem?”
“When there is a specific name or place, it is almost always historically accurate. Now, that’s not to say that this is thoroughly autobiographical. I think this is a work of autobiographical revisionism. I think, in a lot of ways, Francis is living a life that Frank Stanford almost led, that Frank Stanford could have led, had circumstances been a little different. You could say, as a kid, he was on the brink of, let’s say, going to watch the, um, Memphis Red Sox play, the professional team in Memphis that was part of the Negro Leagues. As far as we know, he never did. I can’t see the Stanfords setting foot in a Negro League game. But in The Battlefield, if you remember, Sylvester picks him up and takes him to a ‘Sunday baseball game’ [p. 176]. That’s almost assuredly a reference to the Memphis Red Sox.
“And those games were huge. Ten thousand, fifteen thousand people would go to those games. And, you know, Francis talks about the Cotton Carnival. But, you know, there was a competing carnival…”
I butted in, “That’s exactly what I was going to mention, too. The Cotton Carnival and the Mid South Fair. That’s on Page 146, where both of them are mentioned.”
“Yeah, so, we know for a fact that Frank went to Cotton Carnival. CD Wright verified it. His niece and nephew verified it. It was a very common thing for them to do. In the scene, however, with Five Spoke, he talks about — let’s actually look at this. This is a really good example, I think, of this kind of autobiographical revisionism that Stanford practices. He allows Francis to kind of go one step further than Frank Stanford himself went when he was young. And so …”
“Where are you?”
“… Page 147, let’s say, line 5867 or so. He arrived in Memphis. We’re talking about Five Spot, I mean Five Spoke,” he answered.
“Oh, yeah. I’m with you. Even Melrose High, you know, is a real high school. Yeah, now I’m with you.”
“All right. So, Melrose High is a 96% Black high school in Memphis right now. It was, certainly, 100% Black then. Let’s read the scene.”
I cut in politely, “Melrose High in Memphis opened its doors in 1894, by the way, and in 1939 a new Melrose High opened. In 1972, the school moved again and reopened.”
“Yeah, yeah,” James went on. “So, this scene goes like this. Five Spoke arrived in Memphis in high style. He said to himself — Five Spoke is Black, by the way — he said to himself, ‘Now this is what I call a city,’ because, you see, it was the first night of the Cotton Carnival. The first thing he saw was the all Black drill and precision team from Melrose High marching down the street. Stanford writes, ‘and I can tell you he wore out some soles high stepping/ along with them on the side of the street’ [lines 5869–5870]. Now, my reading of this is Frank is using that term Cotton Carnival. But starting in 1938, the Cotton Carnival had a competing carnival of all African Americans. It was called the Cotton Jubilee. And Black people were not allowed to go to the Cotton Carnival unless they played these horrifically stereotyped Mammy-like roles. In fact, the only Black people allowed to go to the Cotton Carnival, from my research into it, were women who would dress up as Mammies and men who would, literally, act as mules and pull the floats. So, if you wanted to see an all Black drill and precision team from Melrose High, you didn’t go to the Cotton Carnival, you went to the Cotton Jubilee. That’s really what Frank is referring to here. Notice how he draws a distinction between the white carnival. He actually notes the white carnival in the next part of this scene.”
“A little farther down,” I signaled.
“Um, starting at line 5870, ‘he went up to the top of some/ building and looked out the window and seen the white carnival going on at/ the bank of the river.’ You see, he’s looking at a different carnival than the one he was just in. And he saw the queen and king float on a barge and all the fireworks and the double Ferris wheels that dip you out over the Mississippi [lines 5872–5873]. That’s a great image, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I confirmed.
“So what you’re getting there is, and I don’t want this to sound too convoluted, mention of the Cotton Carnival, as Frank Stanford knew about the Cotton Carnival, and he went to the Cotton Carnival as a kid. But, when he writes it up here in The Battlefield, he’s actually referring to the carnival that he kind of wishes he had gone to, and that would be the Cotton Jubilee.”
“Well, let me ask you something about this, and I might be just shooting in the dark here. But, the way the world is today, we’ve got the Internet. So, even deep southern culture is aware of what’s going on with pop culture. A lot of these places that he’s noting, even these carnivals, like the Mid-South Fair started in 1856, have changed. Things have changed. The same buildings don’t exist. An old world is frozen in The Battlefield. Do you think this text is unique because of the particular history it seems to catalog?” I questioned.
“Oh, absolutely. I constantly make references from Stanford’s text to James Joyce’s Ulysses. One of the things that Joyce said about Ulysses is that, if Dublin got erased from the world, you could recreate it through his novel, and I do feel this way about Memphis. Granted, Memphis doesn’t appear very often in The Battlefield, but when it does it’s presented with a tremendous amount of historical accuracy. I think there is a kind of capturing of a time period that we have lost happening in the text.
“I mean, I make the argument in the book that I’m writing, albeit briefly, that Stanford was a really creative, talented, intuitive historian. He never would agree with that assessment, but he was practicing a kind of philosophy of history that was remarkably subtle and sophisticated. He has these commentaries on history, and I think he’s doing something really effective and powerful in a way that no historian could ever accomplish.”
“He’s born in 1948, so the first 10 years of his life, from 1948 to 1958, he is mostly in Memphis. Whether or not he’s there the entire time, I can’t say offhand,” I acknowledged.
“He moved to Memphis in 1952,” retorted James.
“So, 1952 is when Holiday Inn, the hotel chain was founded in Memphis, for example. There is a lot of business happening there on the Mississippi, in Memphis, particularly. It was really a booming American city,” I declared.
“You’re so right,” he said back to me. “And it was also an interesting place in terms of race. Memphis was really the only major city in the south where you did not have chronically and violently explosive racial relations. Now, that might not be saying much, but you actually had a conversation going on between Blacks and whites, mostly through music. Of course, you know, whites had the vast majority of the power on a civic level. But, historians have kind of looked at Memphis as a place where the dialogue over race was far more civilized than it was in other parts of the south. And so, I do wonder to what extent, you know, young Frank Stanford had an ear cocked in that direction. The older Frank Stanford, when he was in his 20s, certainly, knew about it and learned about it somehow.”
I looked over my laptop. It was dark and the street lights had come on.
“We’ve actually got several things we didn’t talk about and time is flying,” I grumbled.
“Time is so annoying.”
“Back to Jimmy, cousin Jimmy. I want to go back to something you said about the mansion and the shacks. If I’m not mistaken, Jimmy either went to college or dropped out of college. We get that information in the poem,” I recounted.
“That could be,” James reasoned.
“Page 137, let’s see. I just had that page here. There you go, first line on page 137.”
James hummed, “Mhmm, you’re right. There is clear reference to Jimmy going to college. Jimmy is, what, six years older than Francis? So, eighteen. Makes sense.”
“Yeah, he’s a senior in high school. He’s heading off to college.”
“But, typical Frank Stanford, he isn’t going to kowtow to a romantic view of anything. I’ll read the scene [starting at line 5441]:
‘I bet when you go to that college you’re going to knock up some girl/ and get married the first thing/ no I won’t he said I’m going to get my degree and sipping whiskey and pussy/ well you already done got PhD. in that I says.’”
“Jimmy was a real character in Frank’s life,” I stated, meaning to ask a question.
“Indeed. I, actually, have not been able to interview the real Jimmy Lee, who is alive-and-well but has been hard to pin down for an interview. He’s eighty. I don’t know that he’s terribly pleased with the way he’s portrayed in the poem. I’ve spoken to his wife on the phone, and Jimmy and his wife are very church going people. He is retired, lives in Greenville, and works part time at a liquor store. I mean, he’s a real dude. And he’s really, really country.”
“I was wondering, as we see the boy in the book kind of following Jimmy’s footsteps, if that mirrored Stanford’s actual life.How biographical is The Battlefield?” I thought.
“Yeah. I have not turned up much information that Jimmy Lee himself was a big influence on Frank. I do know that the family, Dorothy [Frank’s mother] and the kids, would see them in Greenville periodically. Frank also worked on the Lee’s farm over summers in college. My impression of the people who influenced Frank when he was young is that they were mostly adults. He looked up to the novelist Joan Williams, a close friend of his mother’s, and he looked up to Joan Williams’s husband, who was a Sports Illustrated writer. As you know, he really looked up to Father Fuhrmann [Leenus Orth] and the monks at Subiaco. I don’t really see a lot in Frank where he’s looking to his peers, or those a little older than him, with a tremendous amount of desire to emulate or even learn from them.”
“Stanford tells us these things in the text, right? I love the way Frank, as confusing as this text appears upon first read, does seem to guide us a lot in this book. For example, back to page 137, towards the bottom of the page, it mirrors where Jimmy is crying on Page 136, just before it. Jimmy was crying while watching the film the Diary of Anne Frank (line 5430). Then this comes: ‘and the battlefield was silent and rotten and floating in the abyss/ and I made myself a home in my soul’ [lines 5475–5476]. He’s always giving us the answers in this book, isn’t he?”
“Yeah. And look at the next line, you know, ‘I the wonderer I am alone’ [line 5477]. He’s guiding us in an incredibly intimate way. He’s saying something about himself that he’s, you know, on some level, ultimately, alone. The trajectory of his life confirms that.
“Everybody he met deeply admired him. He was handsome and charismatic, and he was a great conversationalist, and he was very funny, but he never actually formed a deep and trusting relationship with anybody. The people who I have talked to have said consistently they don’t think he was really capable of forming a deep relationship with anyone.
“So there is something obviously very sad about that, but it’s just interesting how aware he is of that about himself in this text.”
“That’s fantastic. So, what about the person who wants to read this book for the first time. What should they be looking for?” I asked.
“I think that this is the kind of text that, while not raging out of control, is definitely moving in a single, even determined, direction, and it moves very quickly. The text bounces you around a lot. The minute you try to swim against it, the minute you try to fight it or fit it into some kind of pre-existing notion you have about what a poem should be or do, you’re going to be in trouble of drowning. But, if you just trust it, you know, if you just trust it to kind of bounce you around for a while, what happens is you start to get comfortable, actually, with the rhythm. Then, as we said, Frank helps you; like a really good teacher or instructor, he knows exactly when to step in and give you hand, letting you know you’re doing this the right way. I can’t really think of any text that does that in such a fashion. Frank holds your hand a bit in this text.”
I agreed.
“I think also, when you realize that, you have to add your own punctuation. There’s a kind of intimacy that forms, because you feel very involved. You’re creating meaning along with Stanford. I have never read a text where I have felt that way. I always feel I’m sort of following the lead of a great writer when I read great literature, and this is great literature. When reading The Battlefield, I feel involved more intimately, like I have a role in it.”
“That’s wonderful,” I remarked.
“Do you feel that way when you read it? Like he’s actually inviting you to participate?” asked James.
“I totally empathize with what you’re saying. I think it’s a good way to describe the reading experience. Speaking of that, let me see if I can dovetail with you there. On page 306, he mentions Thomas Chatterton. This is a different kind of guidance. When I looked up Chatterton’s biography, he had written, according to, let’s say, Wikipedia’s entry, his most mature work, I think, by the time he was eleven or twelve years old. On page 306, Francis says, ‘I kept dying like Chatterton’ [line 12220], who killed himself at seventeen and who influenced people like Keats and Shelley, you know, the romantics.”
The conversation kept going as the minutes lined up behind the hour. My stomach growled.
“You know what’s amazing?” James wondered, “it’s just stunning to think that Frank Stanford didn’t have Wikipedia, you know. He’s not cherry picking from Wikipedia. These are people, often obscure people, who he has read and known about. These are people who are lodged in his brain. Every time I go back to this text, and I’ve been reading it a lot lately, I’m just blown away by his fluency in so many different intellectual, philosophical, artistic traditions.”
“Me too. I can’t believe it. Exactly what you said. He had no Internet. To move on, though, you mentioned something about pondering time. What about the rebus?” I had to ask.
“I have to say I’m still trying to figure out the rebus, which makes perfect sense, since it’s a puzzle. I am still unsure about the rebus’s role in this text. What are your thoughts on it?” he inquired.
“I think it’s like he’s talking about the language or the code. You know, kind of when a baby begins to crack the code and becomes even more linked to the world through language. I think he’s trying to go back to sort of the first people speaking, you know, creating this code with sounds and stuff.”
“Fascinating. I’m really going to have to pay more attention to the rebus, but you’re suggesting that it might be a kind of origin of communication and the evolution of language.”
“Yeah, like from the archetypes. On Page 281, there is a good example of what I think I’m trying to say [line 11208] — ‘to utter a yod in a triangle/ sholy that there sounds like a rebus to me.’ A ‘yod’ is an astrological formation. It’s also a letter in the Hebrew alphabet. The image of an astrological formation in the middle of a triangle sounds like a rebus to me,” I observed.
“Some hidden meaning to find,” he offered.
“I think so. I think it’s primal or archetypal. It’s the archetypal stuff of language. Let me see if I can find a better example. Here we go. Line 6129 on page 154, ‘Do you remember me telling you what a rebus is Jimmy/ yea I kind of recall what one is but why don’t you put that cave man story on me…’ It’s like Francis’s version of Plato’s cave, but with language.”
“Yeah. And then he brings in that guy who never goes away, the astronomer. The rebus evolves [starting at line 6133] — ‘what the astronomer told me and what I have picked up from my eleven/ girl friends and twenty-two pen pals all over this world/ let it be known that I Francis will explain to you however I will not violate/ the secrets of the rebus…’
“And then, he goes on to point this out, ‘before men could speak they enjoyed confounding one another with signs/ they enjoyed this as much as a mirror enjoys an image/ as much as the evening like a ship enjoys its sapphire grave…’”
I mused, “I think the rebus is like writing. It comes with that extension of spoken language, if that makes sense.”
“It totally does. The only way we can connect to an archetype, or feel the power of an archetype, is through not just language but tapping language at its deepest roots. I think Frank sat around and wondered about something like who spoke the first actual word and how was it understood.”
“If you scroll down a little more to what you just said, line 6149, ‘he forgot about fish between his legs and the fog in his head/ he embarked on the water of his soul.’”
“Yeah, it goes on … ‘alone he went out among the sharks’ [ line 6150]. This is good. Maybe what we’re seeing here is a kind of statement on the origination of Frank’s own poetic impulse, the origins of his own poetry.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I repeated.
James read the passage [starting at line 6149], “‘He forgot about the fish between his legs and the fog in his head/ he embarked on the water of his soul alone he went out among sharks/ bringing things into his bosom and making them one/ he walked around at night pointing at things/ he allowed himself to be ravaged by wild beasts/ and the beasts allowed him to mount them…’
“And then [starting at line 6155] — ‘Say they started that stump breaking away back uh boy he says/ I wasn’t talking about putting their heads over the mantle/ he began to wail out his dreams from the rocky crags/ he began to dance them out in the afternoon while the others were hunting/ he began to bring home more game than the rest and thus gained respect/ he began to be thought of as a devil by some and a god by others.’
“I can’t help but think that this sounds a lot like Frank Stanford between 1970 and 1973, writing poems and, um, you know, gaining the respect of his peers but also being thought of as a devil by some, who were quite jealous of his success.
“While others were looking for game, he was bringing it home.”
“Damn right!” I exclaimed.
“And he had this very side to him. I mean, we talked about this last time. I mean, in the text, doesn’t Francis knock out Byron at some point?”
“Yeah.”
“As in, floors him?”
“He says he will ‘take [Lord Byron] out in the third round with a cross to the jaw’ [starting at line 5482],” I reported.
“He says he will. Stanford, in his own life, had these moments of exuberant declaration about his own superiority. I have about three cases where he just would blurt out, ‘I am better. I’m the best. I’m superior. Nobody can match me.’ They were extremely Dionysian, as you said, a kind of honest awareness of the power within him to write this kind of poetry.”
“Wow,” I trilled.
“I think when he started to get affirmation from the really elite, little magazines, starting in the early 1970s, which really led to a tremendous sense of confidence for him. But also during that time he wound up in the mental hospital. So, it’s a very difficult psychological moment in his life to make sense of.”
“Well,” I said, “I want to point out a few quotes. I think what you mentioned about the rebus is astounding. On page 156, starting at line 6229, it said, ‘He split the rebus/ and made a rebus for each thought.’ Then, if you look on page 157 at line 6265, ‘To tell the child of the rebus/ the rebus would lead to all rebuses.’ And, finally, if you turn the page to line 6301, this is where he’s giving you the last rebus image. It goes like this [line 6301], ‘And the last image of the last rebus which was the first rebus of the son/ was made known to me.’
“Those three quotes as examples, I think, add to what you were saying about the progeny of his own creative writing; they’re some kind of philosophical or archetypal explanations.”
“And, it’s worth remembering that Frank, by his own admission, and as was witnessed by Father Nick [Furhmann], often entered a kind of self-induced trance when he wrote. Frank said, at some point later in life, that if he actually felt like he was writing poetry, it wouldn’t be any good. But if he was able to enter a kind of trance, and I have a lot of references to people noting this about him, that’s when the real work happened.”
“And he goes into trances in this book as well,” I pointed out.
“Yeah. Francis does for sure. And, so, you know, that makes sense to me in terms of being in a frame of mind to connect with an archetype through language that attempts to unpack the mysteries of a rebus. Being in a trance just seems the only way to possibly do something like that.”
“That’s interesting,” I reckoned. “And he mentioned Byron. Do you feel as if Frank sees himself as kind of the next “big” poet in here? I ask that because we’ve seen, towards the end of the book, Sonny Liston, the boxer from Arkansas, heavyweight champ of the world; he appears and he’s not in good shape when we see him. He has fallen, like Byron will after feeling Frank’s punch.”
“Yes, Sonny Liston. He just had a workout. Didn’t he just go for a run, and he’s sitting in the diner, drinking beer, feeling dejected?”
“On page 340,” I clarified, “a little past the middle of the page, he says [line 13583], ‘I had liniment on my arms like Cassius Clay.’ Clay knocked out Sonny Liston in 1964. It feels like the old and the new, right? A passing of the torch, fulfilling the prophesy of the rebus; so, we have this epic poetry, The Battlefield.”
“And the identification with Cassius Clay makes sense because Frank was a big Muhammad Ali fan. A couple of people think he might have met Ali. And, as for that liniment Stanford mentions, well, Liston was in fact suspected of putting an eye irritant on his gloves to get it in Ali’s eyes. And it worked. You can see him shaking his head because his eyes are on fire. Ali was kind of blinded, but he still won the fight, a seventh round knockout.
“And, of course, Muhammad Ali had an ingenious ability to manipulate language to evoke certain moods in himself and others. He wasn’t called the ‘Louisville Lip’ for nothing. It would make sense that Stanford would appreciate the power that Ali had over somebody like Sonny Liston, who didn’t have anything remotely like that kind of verbal acuity that Muhammad Ali had. So, we do see a bit of Frank Stanford in this scene, the one where a dejected Liston sits after losing to Clay/Ali.
“How this relates to Stanford’s understanding or assessment of himself? I really think that most of this poem was written before he started to have big success with his shorter verse in the elite, little magazines. I don’t know when he started writing this if, indeed, he had much of a sense of where it would go or what it would do or if he would become the next Lord Byron. I tend to think not. I tend to think Stanford didn’t hit the big time until Alan Dugan wrote him, after reading a draft of The Battlefield in, I believe, 1971 or 1972, saying to him this thing is going to explode.
“And Dugan was not exactly correct. It has exploded for you, and for me, but The Battlefield is not Leaves of Grass, although I think it should be.”
“He applied for the Walt Whitman Award, submitting a copy of The Battlefield,” I remembered.
“Oh, he tried to do everything with The Battlefield. He tried to get it published everywhere. He spent six years trying to get it published and was never able to do so. Now, you know, for the Walt Whitman Award he submitted a manuscript that was five times the required length, so that was a bit of self-sabotage on Stanford’s part. But I think that he, towards the end of his life, was extremely frustrated that he was the one who had to end up publishing The Battlefield, jointly with Mill Mountain Press. I mean, it wasn’t what he envisioned.
“Also, I think there was, and we don’t have to get into it too much, a whole other issue. I think if you write a poem like this and expect to break into any sort of commercial publishing world, you’ve got to be a little bit naïve. I think as wildly intelligent as Frank was, he didn’t have a sophisticated understanding about the publishing world.”
“Interesting,” I mumbled.
“And so, as appealing and effective and talented as he was on the small magazine level, when it came to actually trying to find a commercial publisher, or even a university press, there were some letters that Frank wrote to Michael Cuddihy that indicated that he was naïve. He didn’t spend a lot of time outside of Arkansas as an adult. He went to New York only one time. He visited New Orleans a couple of times, but the scene there was kind of small the way it was in Fayetteville. When he died, CD Wright took up the challenge of trying to get this thing [The Battlefield] into the light of day. I mean, very few people know how hard she worked to get Frank’s work noticed.”
“She did an amazing job.”
“Oh, she worked harder than anybody to try to get this poem into a mainstream channel. But, of course, she ended up publishing it herself, really, through Lost Roads Press in 2000. And that’s the edition that we’re working with now.
“So, the history of the poem itself is, in some ways, a sad one, in my opinion, in that it hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. And I tuned in, a couple of weeks ago to a Frank Stanford conference on Zoom. I was amazed that The Battlefield was not discussed. Participants were much more grounded in his short verse. Part of what I’m trying to do with the literary biography that I’m writing is to really make it clear that reading Stanford and not reading The Battlefield is like reading Tolstoy and not reading War and Peace.”
“Right…”
“Or you’re a fan of James Joyce who never read Ulysses. And so, I think, this poem has languished in obscurity for decades. I don’t think Stanford wanted it that way. I think he wanted this to explode, as Dugan said.”
“On Page 234 [lines 9341–9342],” I mentioned, “the astronomer says, ‘You will do battle/ with the notion of time.’”
“Perfect.”
“So, what about the Freedom Ride later in the poem? I think it is important because it helps locate the story in time and place. The Freedom Rides of 1961,” I implored.
“Mound Bayou was where Francis, and his bus of Freedom Riders, were heading. Mound Bayou, in actual American history, was the first independent African American community during the Jim Crow era, when Black people lived in relative independence. They had their own banks and their own schools, and a kind of complete independence from white society. It’s interesting that the Freedom bus ends up going to Mound Bayou. It’s also on the Freedom bus where Frank meets Vico, who we didn’t talk about last time.”
“He was the Greek guy you reminded me about the last time we spoke, right, Vico?”
“Yeah. Vico is Greek,” replied James.
“And he uses sign language, doesn’t he?”
“Yes. He’s supposedly ‘deaf and dumb,’ to quote from line 9445, and uses sign language. Remember, it’s a remarkable scene where Vico realizes Francis speaks his language. Somehow, Francis, maybe by solving a rebus, learned Vico’s secret sign language, and that’s how they communicate.”
“You mentioned something interesting, though. While he may appear ‘deaf and dumb,’ wasn’t Vico, at one point, a world famous opera singer as a kid?”
“Yeah. Remember, he’s castrated by the priests and then turned into an incredibly talented opera singer.”
“He’s a super interesting character, Vico, and he teaches Francis a lot about the world outside of the South,” I suggested.
“I have a kind of hunch about that. So, that scene with Vico is interesting on a number of levels. Yes, you have extremely informed discussions about European culture and the Catholic church. There is a lot of discussion of monks. Vico, himself, has a kind of worldliness to him that I think Francis finds very stimulating. But the discussions with Vico never have anything to do really with the Freedom Ride itself, or why they’re on this Freedom Ride.
“And my hunch is that Frank wrote St. Francis and the Wolf, the basis for The Battlefield, probably when he was in high school, and, as I’m reading about Vico and the scenes with Vico, I’m thinking, he wrote this in high school because of the references to the priests. You get the sense that he’s having Vico be knowledgeable on the very things he’s learning about at Subiaco at that time. Except race, they never discuss a thing about race. And, they are on a Freedom Bus. So, it’s odd, unless you hypothesize that he wrote a newer Freedom Ride scene around an older scene with Vico, doing so after he had moved to Fayetteville, and his views on race became more enlightened.”
“Fascinating stuff, can you say more?” I requested.
“Well, he’s sort of rescuing that from the St. Francis manuscript and then including it in The Battlefield,” James pondered, “The Battlefield is unique for its attention to race, which I don’t think St. Francis and the Wolf was attentive to. I don’t think, as a high school student, Frank was purely concerned about it. And so, when I read the scene with Vico, I got some insight into how I think this poem was put together, and the timeline of those decisions that Stanford made to incorporate scenes from St. Francis and the Wolf. I think all the rebus stuff comes from St. Francis and the Wolf as well.
“I’ve been reading enough of his own work, and learning about his life, where I get this sense that, yes, I think a Frank Stanford could have written this earlier in his life. I just think all the race-based themes came later, after 1968, when he started college.”
“I know there’s more to say about those themes, but could you say a little more about Vico? Was he a real person in Frank’s life?” I asked.
“You know, unlike the astronomer, I think Vico is a little harder to pin down, in terms of what he does for Francis, other than provide a tremendous conversational partner on this bus ride. I think Murray Shugars, in his dissertation, suggests he might be a reference to the 17th/18th century Italian philosopher and historian Giambattista Vico.”
I enquired, “Does Francis see himself in Vico? Vico talks with his hands in his sleep, you know, like Jimmy says Francis does. Vico might look a little crazy to some people. Also on page 240, starting at line 9586, we learn that he was descended from ‘an African and a Greek.’”
“Oh. So, he was mixed in a way that Francis constantly alludes to; that is, how he might have been mixed race as well. Francis makes a number of suggestions that he might be mixed race, which could explain, back to your point, his attraction to Vico, who is also mixed race,” James said.
“Frank and Francis, pretty wild,” I emphasized.
Noticing the time, we wrapped our conversation and let it be. The call ended, I packed my belongings into my book bag, and I walked downstairs.
Outside, the light rain had turned to light snow. A plow truck scraped by. I stared at the piffle of snow under a streetlight. I thought about Frank Stanford and how he portrayed his colorful life in The Battlefield. I watched a single gull rowing overhead, becoming smaller and smaller as it disappeared into the evening.
* a conversation between James McWilliams and Ata Moharreri, January 2021 (Part II of II)
Related Links:
- Part I of The Battlefield Conversation
- Frank Stanford’s The Battle Field Where The Moon Says I Love You Pt. 1
- Frank Stanford’s The Battle Field Where The Moon Says I Love You Pt. 2
- Frank Stanford: In His Own Words
- Frank Stanford: In Leenus Orth’s Words
- The Art Of Imitation In Poetry Between Pablo Neruda & Frank Stanford
- Frank Stanford Chapbook Assignment
