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"Gerald Bruns, one of our most distinguished phllosophlcal critics, here turns his ~at
tentlon to the cutting-edge poetry and poetics of the past few decades, seen throug
the prism of su h theorists as Adorno, Blanchot, and Levinas. Bruns's readings are
everywher- animated by his profound learning and his knowledge of the larger po"':
etlc tr 'itlon. For anyone Interested In the avant-garde today, What Are Poets For?
ndlspensable book."-Marjorie Perloff, author, Unoriginal Genius

"Gerald Bruns's learning Is prodigious, and tie seems not only to have read but to
recall on command just about all of eveh mln5r.aesthetic,documents (and the basic
scholarship on them) since Kant. Yet he holds his learning lightly, bringing it to bea
only when It Is called for to Illuminate a point. Moreover, he writes elegantly, fluidly,
and lucidly on quite difficult material, and he has excellent taste. Most Important,
Bruns makes the strongest and richest statements I know of an aesthetic that driv~
the work of his authors."
-Charles Altieri, author, The Art of Modern American Poetry

. ~~rltf,(\..fl' n " Rli '[tr Is the WIiiiam P. and Hazel B. White Professor Emeritus of English
at the University of Notre Dame. A prolific author, ~ Is works Include Modern Poetry and the
Idea of Language, Inventions: Writing, Textuallty, and Understanding In Literary History,
H,irmeneutlcs Ancient and Modern, Tragic Thoughts at th• End of Philosophy: Languag•,
Literature, and Ethical Theory, The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Phllosopltlcol Poet-
ics, On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy, and On Ceasing to Be Human. In 1974 and
again In 1985 he received Guggenheim fellowships and has been a fellow at the Institute fo
Advanced Study at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1985-1986), the Center for Advanc
Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1993-1994), and the Stanford Humanities
Center (2007-2008). In 2008 he was elected to the American Academy qf Arts and Selene

ISBN-13: 978-1-60938- 080-9

ISBN -10: 1- 60938-080-0

II II 111 90000
Cover lmqe from A._mlc Magazine #2, 1, Is used
courtesy of David Dellaffora and Tim Gaze. 9 781609 380809 HIIIIIIII
 GERALD L. BRUNS

WHAT ARE POETS FOR?

····································· ··· ··················· ···· ··· ·· ···· ·· ····· ··········· ······· ··· ·
an anthropology
of contemporary poetry
and poetics
............................................................................. ............... ... ......
univettsity
of iowu press
iowa city

CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICAN POETRY SERIES

Series Editors Alan Golding, Lynn Keller, and Adalaide Morris

 For Steve Fredman

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242

Copyright © 2012 by the University of Iowa Press
www.uiowapress.org
Printed in the United States of America

Design by Omega Clay

No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or

by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright
holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be
pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has
not been possible to reach.

The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press

Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources.

Printed on acid-free paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bruns, Gerald L.
What are poets for?: an anthropology of contemporary poetry
and poetics / Gerald L. Bruns.
p. cm.-(Contemporary North American poetry series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-60938-080-9 (pbk)
ISBN-JO: 1-60938-080-0 (pbk)
1. American poetry-21st century-History and criticism.

2. Poetics. I. Title.
PS326. B78 2012
8n' .609 23 2ono39541
 contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Abbreviations xvii

1 What Are Poets For? 1

2 Should Poetry Be Ethical or Otherwise? 18

3 Voices of Construction I On Susan Howe's Poetry and Poetics
(A Citational Ghost Story) 35
4 A Poem about Laughter and Forgetting I Lyn Hejinian's A Border Comedy 56
5 Among the Pagans I The Polyvocal Poetry of Karen Mac Cormack 72
6 The Rogue Poet's Return I On John Matthias's Poetic Anecdotes 91
7 Adding Garbage to Language I On J. H. Prynne's "Not-You" 106
a Anomalies of Duration in Contemporary Poetry 123
9 Nomad Poetry I ALudie Miscellany from Steve Mccaffery 137
10 On the Conundrum of Form and Material I Adorno'sAestheticTheory 152

Notes 167
Bibliography 201
Index 219
preface

Literature is a concern for the reality of things, for their unknown, free
and silent existence; literature is their innocence and forbidden presence,
it is the being which protests against revelation, it is the defiance of what
does not want to take place. In this way, it sympathizes with darkness
(l'obscurite), with aimless passion, with lawless violence, with everything
in the world that seems to perpetuate the refusal to come into the world.
In this way, too, it allies itself with the reality oflanguage, it makes
language into matter without contour, content without form, a force that
is capricious and impersonal and says nothing, reveals nothing, simply
announces-through its refusal to say anything-that it comes from the
night and will return to the night.
-Maurice Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death"

One of my first attempts to write about poetry-more than half-a-century

ago-carried the title, "The Obscurity of Modern Poetry." My first book, Mod-
ern Poetry and the Idea of Language (1974), pursued some of the various ways in
which this topic emerged in literary history, from the ancient conception of
language as a "substantial medium," through Stephane Mallarme's poetry and

ix
 x pref a ce xi preface
······· ········ ··· ····· ···· ··· ··············· ··· ········· ······ ················ ···· ····· ···· ··· ···· ·· ··· ········· ··· ··· ······ ·· ··· ······ ·· ·
poetics, to the writings of Joyce, Beckett, Wallace Stevens-and Maurice Blan- For this reason I have often found myself following, often against the ad-
chot, whom I began reading as an undergraduate at Marquette University in vice of mentors and friends, Walter Benjamin's program: "Good criticism is
the 1950s, thanks to my Francophile roommate, Dan Finlay, and to my Jesuit composed of at most two elements: the critical gloss and the quotation. Very
teachers, who were in those days deeply under the influence of French intel- good criticism can be made from both glosses and quotations. What must be
lectual culture. Later came a study of Blanchot's work, particularly his theory avoided like the plague is rehearsing the summary of the contents. In contrast,
of ecriture-the materialization of language in fragmentary writing of the kind a criticism consisting entirely of quotations should be developed ."5 Unfortu-
that we find in the poetry of Rene Char and Paul Celan, as well as in Blanchot's nately exorbitant permission fees occasionally prevent one from putting good
own work (for example, L'attente, /'oubli [1962]). More recently, in The Material of criticism into practice.
Poetry (2005), I attempted something like a traditional apology for recent ex- My first chapter tries to locate some ingredients that recur in the disparate
periments in sound poetry, visual poetry, and poetry as a form of conceptual essays that follow-displaced subjectivity, found texts and open forms, not to
art. And in The Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy (2006), I tried to clarify an argu- mention the many diversions of materialized language. The second chapter
ment about literary modernism that turns up in different forms in the writings is, basically, an argument against efforts (including my own) to ground po-
of many European thinkers, namely that the work of art (one of Duchamp's etry upon any philosophical justification that would efface the singularity of
readymades, for example) is something absolutely singular, that is, outside its forms and events-a kind of iconoclasm that both philosophy and literary
the alternatives of universal and particular, refractory to categories and dis- studies are prone to. As for subjectivity, a main point of interest in my chapter
tinctions, anarchic with respect to principles and rules: in a word, anomalous. on Susan Howe is her recuperation of Yeats's conception of the poetic subject
In Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard's words, modernism makes "pagans" of us all: "When as a receptacle for the voices of others, which is one of the forgotten features
I speak of paganism," Lyotard writes, "I am not using a concept. It is a name, of romantic poetics-recall Keats's "negative capability." "For something to
neither better nor worse than others, for the denomination of a situation in work I need to be another self," Howe says. Meanwhile she locates her "self"
which one judges without criteria. And one judges not only in matters of truth, within a "constructivist" context offound texts and para tactic arrangements of
but also in matters of beauty (of aesthetic efficacy) and in matters of justice, words within thewhitespaceoftheprinted page (asin The Midnight). Found texts
that is, of politics and ethics, and all without criteria."' and paratactic arrangements-but in very different renditions-characterize
The present volume of essays continues this nominalist line-and tries the work of Lyn Hejinian and Karen Mac Cormack. John Matthias's poetry, as
to cope with its consequences. For if there is no one thing that can be called Matthias himself notes, is composed of quotations and pastiche-and of an-
poetry-ifit is made of anomalies (a one-word poem, for example, or a collage ecdotes: a form to which very little thought has been given. Matthias, interest-
ofletters or letterlike scribbles)-then one's study ofit must proceed, like an ingly, is an American poet who seems most at home among the British: he is
anthropologist's progress through an alien culture, at ground level, from one a major scholar of the work of David Jones, and thinks of himself as being in
local practice or artifact to another, without subsuming things into a system. 2 perpetual transition back-and-forth between the United States and England,
Of course, at ground level pitfalls and double binds are waiting at every turn: neither here nor there. It seems right to place him alongside J. H. Prynne, the
remember the sculptor Donald Judd's famous remark: "If someone calls it art, recondite "Cambridge" poet whose work is influenced very much by Ameri-
it's art."3 Anything goes, even if not everything is possible at every moment: can poets like Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn, although Prynne's way of putting
hardly an intellectually defensible thesis, at least in respectable academic cir- words together (if "together" isn't exactly the wrong word) seems peculiarly
cles. As a dodge I take recourse to Wittgenstein's idea that things (games, for , his own. The chapter on "Arrhythmia" takes up George Kubler's challenge in
example, but also philosophy itself) have a history rather than an essence, and "The Shape of Time" to "imagine duration without any regular pattern." A
that history is made of family resemblances, so that as one proceeds along the good deal of poetry-Michael Palmer's, Tom Raworth's, among others stud-
ground one finds connections in which different forms of words and things ied here-is an exercise in just such an irregular imagination. The chapter on
shed their light on one another. 4 In this event the simple juxtaposition of cita- Theodor Adorno might at first seem out of place in this book, but much of it
tions often proves more fruitful than lengthy exegeses on behalf of some uni- takes up Adorno's essay on paratactic form in Holderlin's late hymns as well
fied field theory. as his essays on two experimental German poets seldom or never studied in
 xii pr eface
········· ························ ············ ··· ······· ····· ······ ·· ······ ·· ········· ·· ·· ······· ·· ··•,
this country, Rudolf Borchardt and Hans G. Helms. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory
is perhaps the most important work of philosophical aesthetics since Kant's
third critique and Hegel's lectures on aesthetics, but its major weakness is its
poverty of examples. Happily there is nothing impoverished about Adorno's
literary essays, which are remarkably in tune with the "nomadic" innovations
of the Yorkshire/Canadian/Buffalo poet Steve Mccaffery, who reminds us that
if contemporary poetry bears anything like a distinctive feature, it is that free-
dom from determinations of any kind is a condition of comedy-and a form
of the good life.

acknowledgments

I owe a great deal to a number of people for their help and encouragement on
this project, particularly Marjorie Perloff, Herman Rapaport, Charles Altieri,
Ralph Berry, Charles Bernstein, Dee Morris, Steve Tomasula, and John Wilkin-
son. I remember especially a course on experimental poetry that Romana Huk
and I taught together at Notre Dame several years ago, which made me realize
that, left to my own devices, I would never find my way through the complexi-
ties of contemporary poetry and poetics.
This book is for my friend Steve Fredman, in memory of our quarter-cen-
tury of conversations, the courses we taught together, the poetry readings we
organized-not to mention the perpetual round of administrative duties,
committee meetings, and visiting lecturers, none of which, to my amaze-
ment, ever seemed to defeat Steve's serenity and good humor. His writings
on American art and poetry-Poet's Prose (1983), The Grounding ofAmerican Poetry
(1993), A Menorah for Athena (2001), and Contextual Practice (2010), among many
others-have been and will remain the best of intellectual companions.
Meanwhile there is his own incomparable contribution to "California" poetry,
Seaslug (1973).

Xiii
xiv acknowledgments xv acknowledgments
········· ··· ······· ···· ····· ········· ······ ················· ···· ·· ·· ···· ········ ·· ··· ······· ···· ·····
Several of the chapters in this book were completed while I was a fellow ofthe Labadie Tract (New Directions, 2007); to Simon Jarvis for permission to re-
at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2007-2008. My thanks to John Bender, print passages from The Unconditional: A Lyric (Barque Press, 2005); to Eduardo
then director of the Center, and to the Center's marvelous staff, particularly Kac for permission to reproduce both his digital poem, "Letter" (1996), and
Robert Barrick, Nichole Coleman, Susan Sebard, and MatthewTiews. his holographic poem, "Adhuc" (1991); to Karen Mac Cormack for permission
Chapter 2 appeared in Substance: A Review ofTheory and Criticism, 38.3 (2009), to reprint poems from At Issue (Coach House Books, 2001), lmplexures (Chax
72-91. Chapter 3 appeared in Contemporary Literature, 50.1 (2009), 28-53. Chapter Press, 2003), Quill Driver (Nightwood Editions, 1989), Quirks and Qui/lets (Chax
4 appeared in Textual Practice, 23.3 (2009), 397-416. Chapter 5 appeared inAntiph- Press, 1991), and Vanity Release (Zasterle Press, 2003); to Steve Mccaffery for per-
onies: Essays on Women's Experimental Writing in Canada, ed. Nate Dorward (Toronto: mission to reprint poems from Seven Pages Missing, II: Previously Uncollected Texts,
The Gig, 2008), 194-213. Chapter 6 appeared in The Salt Companion to John Mat- 1968-2000 (Coach House Books, 2002), Slightly LeftofThinking (Chax Press, 2008),
thias, ed. Joe Francis Doerr (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2011), 12-29. Chapter The Cheat ofWords (ECW Press, 1996), and Theories ofSediment (Talon Books, 1991);
10 appeared as "The Conundrum of Form and Material in Adorno's Aesthetic to John Matthias for permission to reprint poems from Turns (Swallow Press,
Theory" in The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, 66.3 (2008), 225-35. 1975), Crossing (Swallow Press, 1979), Northern Summer: New and Selected Poems
I'm grateful to John Ashbery for permission to reprint the following: "Crazy (Swallow Press, 1984), AGathering ofWays (Swallow Press, 1991), Swimming at Mid-
Weather" and "Syringa," from Houseboat Days. Copyright© 1975, 1977 by John night: Selected Shorter Poems (Swallow Press, 1995), Beltane at Aphelion: Longer Poems,
Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the (Swallow Press, 1995), Pages: New Poems & Cuttings (Swallow Press, 2000 ), Working
author. "The System," from Three Poems. Copyright© 1972, 1985, 1997, 2008 by Progress, Working Title (Salt Publishing, 2002), New Selected Poems (Salt Publish-
John Ashbery. All rights reserved . Reprinted by permission of Georges Bor- ing, 2004), l<.edging (Salt Publishing, 2007); to Michael Palmer for permission
chardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. "Scheherazade" and "No Way of Know- to reprint poems from First Figure (North Point Press, 1984); to J. H. Prynne for
ing," from Self-Portrait in aConvex Mirror. Copyright© 1975, 1990 by John Ashbery permission to reprint "Not-You" from Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1999); to Tom
and Viking Penguin, Inc., reprinted by their permission. My thanks to Charles Raworth for permission to reprint lines from Ace (Edge Books, 2001); to Wes-
Bernstein for permission to reprint lines from his Dark City (Sun & Moon Press, leyan University Press for permission to reprint Jack Spicer's poem, "Sporting
1994), Rough Trades (Sun & Moon Press, 1991), "Poetic Justice," Republics of Real- Life," from My Vocabulary Did Th is to Me:TheCol/ected Poetryof}ackSpicer (2008).
ity, 1975-1995 (Sun & Moon Press, 2000 ), and With Strings (University of Chicago Every effort has been made to avoid errors or omissions in the above list.
Press, 2001 ); to Christian Bok and Coach House Books for permission to reprint Please advise if any corrections should be incorporated into any future edi-
some lines from Eunoia (2001); to Dal key Archive Press for permission to reprint tions of this book.
some lines from Shorter Poems (1993) by Gerald Burns; to Suhrkamp Verlag, for
permission to reprint several poems from Paul Celan's Gesammelte Werke (Frank-
furt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983); to Kenneth Goldsmith for permission to reprint
some passages from Soliloquy (2001); to Tim Gaze for permission to reproduce
the image of an "asemic poem," from Asemic, vol. 1 (KentTown Australia, n.d.);
to Lyn Hejinian for permission to reprint passages from ABorder Comedy (Grana-
ry Books, 2001) as well as lines from The Cold of Poetry (Sun & Moon Press, 1994),
The Fatalist (Omnidawn Press, 2003), My Life (Sun & Moon Press, 1987), My Life
in the Nineties (Shark Books, 2003), Slowly (Tuumba Press, 2002), and Writing ls
an Aid to Memory (Sun & Moon Press, 1996); to Susan Howe for permission to
reprint poems from The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (Sun & Moon Press, 1989),
Frame Structures: Early Poems, 1974-79 (New Directions, 1996), The Midnight (New Di-
rections, 2003), The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993), Pierce-Arrow
(New Directions, 1999), Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), and Souls
 abbreviations

·· ··············· ·· ·· ·· ······················ ·············· ·· ··· ··· ·· ···· ·· ···· ··············· .... ... .
For full bibliographic information for these sources, see the bibliography.

Al At Issue. Karen Mac Cormack.

AP APoetics. Charles Bernstein.
AT AestheticTheory. Theodor Adorno.
B Breathturn. Paul Celan.
BC ABorder Comedy. Lyn Hejinian.
BM The Birth-mark. Susan Howe.
C Crossing. John Matthias.
CP Collected Prose. Paul Celan.
CPH The Cold of Poetry. Lyn Hejinian.
cw The Cheat ofWords. Steve Mccaffery.
D The Differend. Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard.
DC Dark City. Charles Bernstein.
ET The Europe of Trusts. Susan Howe.

XV ii
 xviii abbreviations xix abbreviations
····· ··· ························································································· · · ··· ······················· · ·················· · · ··········· · ····················· ························
F The Fatalist. Lyn Hejinian. SL Slightly LeftofThinking. Steve Mccaffery.
FB Fathomsuns and Benighted. Paul Celan. SLT SoulsoftheLabadieTract. Susan Howe.
FP Fit to Print. Alan Halsey and Karen Mac Cormack. SM Stanzas in Meditation . Gertrude Stein.
FS Frame Structures. Susan Howe. SMM Swimming at Midnight. John Matthias.
GW Gesammelte Werke, 1-111. Paul Celan. SP Self-Portrait in aConvex Mirror. John Ashbery.
HD Houseboat Days. JohnAshbery. SPM Seven Pages Missing, II. Steve Mccaffery.
I Imaginations. William Carlos Williams. SPP Selected Poetry and Prose. Paul Celan.
IC The Infinite Conversation . Maurice Blanchot. T Turns. John Matthias.
IM lmplexures. Karen Mac Cormack. TC Threadsuns. Paul Celan.
K Kedging. John Matthias. TP Three Poems. John Ashbery.
LI TheLanguageoflnquiry. Lyn Hejinian. TS Theories ofSediment. Steve Mccaffery.
LP Last Poems. Paul Celan. VR Vanity Release. Karen Mac Cormack.
M The Midnight. Susan Howe. WF The Work ofFire. Maurice Blanchot.
MED My Emily Dickinson . Susan Howe. WL Writings and Lectures. Gertrude Stein.
ML My Life. Lyn Hejinian. WP Working Progress, Working Title. John Matthias.
MLN My Life in the Nineties. Lyn Hejinian. ws With Strings. Charles Bernstein.
MM Minima Moralia . Theodor Adorno.
MW My Way. Charles Bernstein.
ND Negative Dialectics. Theodor Adorno.
NI North oflntention. Steve Mccaffery.
NL Notes to Literature. Theodor Adorno.
NM The Nonconformist's Memorial. Susan Howe.
P Poems. J. H. Prynne.
PJM Pages. John Matthias.
PM Prior to Meaning. Steve Mccaffery.
PNM Philosophy ofNew Music. Theodor Adorno.
PPC Poems of PaulCelan. Paul Celan.
QD Quill Driver. Karen Mac Cormack.
QF Quasi una Fantasia. Theodor Adorno.
QQ Quirks and Qui/lets. Karen Mac Cormack.
RR Republics ofReality. Charles Bernstein.
RT Rough Trades . Charles Bernstein.
S Singularities. Susan Howe.
SH Slowly. Lyn Hejinian.
 I

II

WHAT ARE POETS FOR? I

.II

I I
WHAT ARE POETS FOR?

To make things of which we do not know what they are.

-Theodor Adorno, AesrhericTheory

In his Prologue to Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920) , William Carlos Williams re-
calls his conversation one day with Walter Arens berg in which he asked Arens-
berg (one of the earliest collectors of modern art) what painters like Charles
Demuth and Marcel Duchamp were up to . As an answer Arens berg mentioned
Duchamp's idea that "a stained-glass window that had fallen out and lay more
or less together on the ground" was more likely to be ofinterest than anything
an artist might produce in a studio.' Williams then goes on to mention the
controversy over Duchamp's Fountain, "the porcelain urinal [submitted] to the
Palace Exhibition of 1917 as a representative of American sculpture."2 A ready-
niade anecdote follows: "One day Duchamp decided that his composition for
that day would be the first thing that struck his eye in the first hardware store
he should enter. It turned out to be a pickax which he bought and set up in his
studio" (I, 10).
As we know, one implication of readymade aesthetics is that what defines
the work of art is the displacement of intentionality, as if the work were less
a work than an event or discovery- something whose arrival is unpremedi-
2 chapter one 3 what are poets f or?
·········· ························ ···················· ··· ················ ··· ···· ···· ···· ······ ···
tated, contingent, and anomalous. Thus an improvisation, being unplanned Not that "anything goes," exactly. What doesn't go for Williams is the hov-
and unrevised, is, formally, a fragmentary arrangement of materials: things al- ering ofantecedents. "Our prize poems are especially to be damned," Wil-
lowed to stand where they happen to fall. 3 Williams refers atone point to "the liams says, "not because of superficial bad workmanship'. but because they
brokenness of his composition" (I, 16), of which the following gives us but one are rehash, repetition-just as Eliot's more exquisite work is rehash, rep-
example among others assembled differently: "When beldams dig clams their etition in another way of Verlaine, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck-conscious or
fat hams (it's always beldams) balanced nearTellus's hide, this rhinoceros pelt, unconscious-just as there were Pound's early paraphrases from Yeats and his
these lumped stones-buffoonery of midges on a bull's thigh-invoke,- later cribbing from the Renaissance, Provence, and the modern French: Men
what you will: birth's glut, awe at God's craft, youth's poverty, evolution of content with the connotations of their masters" (I, 24). Instead of literary lan-
a child's caper, man's poor inconsequence. Eclipse of all things; sun's self guage Williams proposes "a language of the day":
turned hen's rump" (I, 51: a "beldam" is an old woman; "Tellus" was a Roman
That which is heard from the lips of those to whom we are talking in our days' -
goddess of the earth).
affairs mingles with whatever we see in the streets and everywhere about us as it
What is broken here, given "what you will," are the rules of a schoolmaster.
mingles also with our imaginations. By this chemistry is fabricated a language of
Outside the classroom words have their own chemistry, "a kind of alchemy of the day which shifts and reveals its meaning as clouds shift and turn in the sky and
form" (I, 75) for which the attendant poet provides the laboratory space of a sometimes send down rain or snow or hail. This is the language to which few ears
white page. Imagine a poetics that figures the poet as less an agent of the work are tuned so that it is said by poets that few men are ever in their full senses since
than someone who underwrites it, say by attaching a signature or a title that they have no way to use their imaginations. Thus to say that a man has no imagi-
gives the work, not a definition, but a place in or against an art-context. For nation is to say nearly that he is blind or deaf. But of old poets would translate th is
the philosopher Theodor Adorno, this sort of thinking reveals the distinctive hidden language into a kind of replica of the speech of the world with certain dis-
antinomy, or performative contradiction, of modernism, where the aim is to tinctions of rhyme and meter to show that it was not really that speech. Nowadays
produce an artwork that is absolutely singular, refractory to categories and dis- the elements of that language are set down as heard and the imagination of the
tinctions, irreducible to models or to any rule of identity-a kind of monad .4 listener and the poet are left free to mingle in the dance. (1, 59)
In Williams's words, "The true value is that peculiarity that gives an object a Two things are worth noticing about this passage. The first is that Williams's
character by itself" (1, 14) . This "aesthetic nominalism" marks the end of art as imagination is not Wordsworth's "awful Power" rising from "the mind's
such, that is, of any notion of an ideal work reflected in its particular approxi- abyss" (The Prelude, VI .594); it is simply a perceptual keenness toward everyday
mations (no more concrete universals). 5 There is no longer any one thing that sights and sounds. The second is that "the language of the day" is structured
can be called art or poetry, which henceforward must draw its concepts from like the weather ("clouds shift and turn in the sky and sometimes send down
a history of local practices-as the poet Charles Bernstein says, "poetic posi- rain or snow or hail"); it is, like an improvisation, turbulent and unpredict-
tions . .. have to be understood within the context of other poetic positions able ("brokenness" of composition)-but not just nonsense. Chaos theo-
that are articulated by other poets, or non poets, at the moment but also in the rists would call it a "complex entity." 7 Poets "of old" tried to introduce some
past" (AP, 156). Hence the modernist proliferation of prefaces and manifestos measure of order into this complexity, but now the task is not to organize this
whereby art tries to work through its antinomies, not at the level of universals, language poetically but simply to "set [it] down as heard ." And so what we get
but on the ground where controversies arise among conflicting notions as to from Williams-as, in a slightly different turn, from his contemporary Mari-
what counts as art ("Here I clash with Wallace Stevens" [I, 14]). In this respect anne Moore-are plain words whose order is not metrical, nor perhaps even
Kora in Hell is, like one of Duchamp's readymades, a piece of "conceptual art" syntactical, but open-ended, as in a run of anomalies.
that carries with it its own distinctive "support language," not only in its pro- Here are some lines from Marianne Moore's "Poetry," which begins (fa-
logue but in the intervening "interpretations" that Williams added later-and mously), "I too dislike it":
above all in its reigning statement of principle: "A poem can be made of any-
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
thing" (I, 70).6
do not admire what
 4 chapter one 5 what are poets for?
············· ········· ··· ········ ··· ··········· ············ ···· ·· ·· ·························· ··· ···· .... ··· ····· ··········· ····· ········· ···· ··········· ············· ····· ············ ····· ········ ·······
we cannot understand: the bat In his "Robert Frost Medal Address" (1995), Ashbery recalls that while living in
holding on upside down or in quest of something to France during the 1950s he "began to realize how much the spoken American
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless language . .. had entered into my writing" :
wolf under For the next two or three years, I lived in a state of restless experimenting. Of-
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse ten I'd visit the American Library and leaf through popular magazines, look-
that feels a flea, the base- ing for the tone of voice I felt was lacking. Or I'd buy magazines like Esquire and
ball fan, the statistician- look through them, copying down random bits of phrases in a sort of collage
nor is it valid technique-unaware that about the same time Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and
to discriminate "against business documents and Gregory Corso were practicing doing "cut-ups" elsewhere in Paris. It's an odd co-
incidence that we all happened on this way of writing at that particular time and
school books": all these phenomena are important. 8 place. (Selected Prose, 250)
In an essay on Marianne Moore, Williams wrote : "The only help I ever got Found texts, assemblage, collage: Ashbery's Houseboat Days (1977) contains the
from Miss Moore toward the understanding of her verse was that she despised following poem that begins with an American catchphrase, "crazy weather":
connectives" (I, 313)-a point later amplified by John Ashbery in a review of
It's this crazy weather we've been having:
Moore's Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and OtherTopics (1964) :
Falling forward one minute, lying down the next
Some of us will regret the kaleidoscopic collage effects of the early poems, and Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers.
with reason for they were also a necessary lesson in how to live in our world of People have been making a garment out of it,
"media," how to deal with the unwanted information that constantly accumu-
Stitching the white of lilacs together with lightning
lates around us. What can we do about those stacks of National Geographies, leaflets
At some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls
from the Bell Telephone Company, the Illustrated London News, the NewYorkTimesMag-
To the deaf earth. The proverbial disarray
azine, business letters, overheard remarks, and also the habits of jungle flora and
fauna, which we shall probably never see and which in any case can never concern Of morning corrects itself as you stand up.
us? Well, live with them is Miss Moore's answer, recognizing them as part of the You are wearing a text. The lines
rhythm of growth, as details oflife possibly helpful in deducing the whole, in any Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need
case important, in any case important as details.9 Any other literature than this poetry of mud
And ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily
Here is the basic question of complexity: "how to deal with the unwanted in-
· Through the then woods and ploughed fields and had
formation that constantly accumulates around us"? The problem is not non-
Asimple unconscious dignity we can never hope to
sense but too much sense, the philosophical solution to which is to reduce things
Approximate now except in narrow ravines nobody
to their basic types, categories, or essentials: integration of elements into a
Will inspect where some late sample of the rare,
unity is the standard received definition of intelligibility (the "hermeneutical
Uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots,
circle"). Marianne Moore's procedure by contrast is nonreductive: within or
for all we know. (HD, 21)
among the scatter of category mistakes (bats, elephants, critics, baseball fans),
even "business documents" and "school books" matter. Imagine nonexclu- Weather is a major preoccupation of chaos theory, which celebrates the ratio-
sion as a principle of poetic diction: such a principle defeats the very idea of nality of turbulence, as does Ashbery's poem, whose first line answers (at least
a poetical diction, which historically is a closed system that rules out ducks and formally) a request for a reason : What is causing this anomaly?The poem itself
toads as ingredients of a true poem. But for Marianne Moore, as for Williams, is an anomaly-machine, producing things of which we do not know what they
"A poem can be made of anything." are. "Falling forward" and "lying down," for example, are a bit like "It is rain-
ing," where "it" is a phantom subject, a purely functional occupant of what
• • •
Other documents randomly have
different content
then over seventy years old and very frail, to brave a blizzard, even
for the purpose of administering a Presidential oath. However, he
decided to wait until the weather had given its ultimate indication
before changing the programme. He said afterward that as he drove
to the Capitol there were many brave citizens in the streets who gave
voice to as hearty cheers as could possibly be expected under the
circumstances.
I was being taken care of by Captain Archibald Butt, so I had
nothing except the weather to worry about. With a last hopeless look
out of doors I proceeded to don my Inauguration finery, feeling duly
thankful that it was not too springlike in its character. The
newspapers say I wore a purple satin suit, and a small hat trimmed
with gold lace and a high white aigrette. This is as good a description
as any, though it might have been more flattering, considering the
importance I attached to the subject. I remember the hat perfectly.
The aigrette was not quite as high as it started out to be. It had nearly
met an untimely end at a reception the day before where it collided
with a lighted gas-jet. Fortunately it was put out before it was greatly
damaged, but it had to be trimmed down some, and I imagined that
it exuded a faint odour of burning feathers.
At least two years before the election, when no one could
anticipate who would be the next President, President Roosevelt had
announced at a Cabinet meeting that he did not intend to ride back
to the White House with his successor. It was a precedent which he
did not like and which he desired to break. Mrs. Roosevelt went, with
her family and friends, directly from the White House to the station
to wait for her husband to join her after the Inauguration. It was
about half past eleven when Captain Butt and I started in a limousine
for the Capitol where we arrived to find the “scene set” for the
ceremonies in the Senate Chamber.
Our children were already in the gallery, waiting eagerly. It was an
event in their young lives never to be forgotten, and I believe that
Robert and Helen were in properly receptive moods. My son Charlie,
however, seems not to have been so confident. Charlie is a great lover
of adventure stories and it is a favourite tradition in the family now
that he carried with him to the Senate Chamber a copy of “Treasure
Island” with which to while away the time in case the Inaugural
address should prove too long. Charlie was only eleven years old and
I consider it a great tribute to his father’s eloquence that “Treasure
Island” was not opened that day.
This Inauguration was said to be, by persons who had seen many,
one of the most impressive ceremonies that ever opened the
administration of a President. The oath of office is usually
administered and the Inaugural address delivered from a large
platform erected in front of the Capitol before which ten thousand
people can assemble. But the ten thousand people are sure to have
been waiting in a massed crowd for an hour or more; they are always
tired and uncomfortable, so when they finally discover that few of
them can really hear anything, and that they have seen all there is to
be seen, they begin to move about and talk, the noise and agitation
greatly detracting from the impressiveness of the ceremony. Because
my husband’s Inauguration took place in the Senate Chamber it was
no less “in the sight of all the people.” There was room on the floor of
the Chamber for the whole official personnel of the Government of
the United States, resident in Washington. There were the retiring
President and his Cabinet, the Justices of the Supreme Court in their
robes of office, the Senate and the House of Representatives, besides
the foreign Ambassadors and the whole Diplomatic Corps in their
brilliant uniforms, while the galleries were crowded with official
families and a substantial number of unofficial auditors.
 MR. AND MRS. TAFT RETURNING TO THE WHITE HOUSE
MR. TAFT’S INAUGURATION

It was a great presence; and the taking of the oath and the
delivering of the Inaugural address before assembled national
authority and the world’s representatives, in a solemn silence in
which every word could be heard, left a deep impression.
As soon as Mr. Taft had finished speaking Mr. Roosevelt walked
rapidly up, and giving his hand a mighty grasp, said something which
sounded like “Bully speech, old man!” and hurried out of the
Chamber accompanied by members of his Cabinet who were to see
him off at the station. My husband told me afterward that what he
really said was: “God bless you, old man. It is a great state
document.”
Since the ex-President was not going to ride back to the White
House with his successor, I decided that I would. No President’s wife
had ever done it before, but as long as precedents were being
disregarded I thought it might not be too great a risk for me to
disregard this one. Of course, there was objection. Some of the
Inaugural Committee expressed their disapproval, but I had my way
and in spite of protests took my place at my husband’s side.
By the time the Inauguration ceremonies were concluded the skies
had cleared and the sun had come out. Mr. Taft left the Senate
Chamber with the Committee, followed by the assembled dignitaries
in the order of precedence. With Captain Butt I hurried from the
gallery and joined him in the great hall under the Dome, on his way
to the platform on the North Side where the Inauguration would
have taken place but for the weather. In front of the temporary
structure many people had gathered, and as we descended to the
front they called for the new President. In response he stepped to the
platform where the Inaugural oath was to have been administered,
and bowed repeatedly.
A platoon of mounted Police and our escort, the Cleveland City
Troop, with their elaborate and beautiful uniforms somewhat
bedraggled by the morning’s sleet and mud, met us at the steps
leading down from the platform. We entered the official coach and
four and were slowly driven down through the Capitol grounds to
Pennsylvania Avenue, and thence to the White House. As I have said,
the clouds had rolled by; the day was cold but bright; the expected
and expectant crowds were thronging the sidewalks and filling the
stands, and our greeting from them was all that my fancy had
pictured it.
For me that drive was the proudest and happiest event of
Inauguration Day. Perhaps I had a little secret elation in thinking
that I was doing something which no woman had ever done before. I
forgot the anxieties of the preceding night; the consternation caused
by the fearful weather; and every trouble seemed swept aside. My
responsibilities had not yet begun to worry me, and I was able to
enjoy, almost to the full, the realisation that my husband was actually
President of the United States and that it was this fact which the
cheering crowds were acclaiming.
There was nobody at the White House to bid us welcome except
the official staff and some of our own guests. But it didn’t matter.
There is never any ceremony about moving into the White House.
You just drive up and walk in,—and there you are. The aides and
ushers who greeted us at the entrance, treated our occupation of our
new residence so much as a matter of course that I could not help but
feel something as Cinderella must have felt when her mice footmen
bowed her into her coach and four and behaved just as if they had
conducted her to a Court Ball every night of her life. I stood for a
moment over the great brass seal, bearing the national coat-of-arms,
which is sunk in the floor in the middle of the entrance hall. “The
Seal of the President of the United States,” I read around the border,
and now—that meant my husband!
But I could not linger long because my duties as a hostess began at
once. I was not unused to the accepted regulations of official life, so,
in spite of a slight feeling that the whole thing was unreal, I was not
embarrassed as I walked into the great dining-room and took my
place by the door to receive guests for the first time as mistress of the
White House.
I had left to the efficient management of Captain Archibald Butt as
many of the details of the day’s programme as was possible. Some
time before I had carefully gone over the plans with him, we had
provided for any reasonable emergency, and I knew my instructions
would be carried out. Captain Butt—later Major Butt—had been
military aide to President Roosevelt; we had known him well, both in
the Philippines and in Washington, and we were glad to have the
opportunity of continuing him in that capacity. Whatever Major Butt
did was done faultlessly—always. During the three years he was with
us—day in and day out, upon every possible occasion, in the closest
intimacy—I never ceased to wonder at his genius for work, his
comprehensive grasp of important matters and of small details, his
extraordinary accuracy. His very presence inspired the utmost
confidence. Archie Butt, as everybody called him, became our close
and dearly loved friend. Indeed, we felt that he belonged to us, and
nothing in all our experience ever touched us as deeply as the tragedy
of his death. Returning from a short vacation abroad, he went down
on the Titanic, facing death like a soldier, after the lives of nearly all
the women and children had been saved.
We had invited a large number of people to the usual Inaugural
luncheon. The cook and several of the staff of servants were to
accompany Mrs. Roosevelt to Oyster Bay, but they remained until
the afternoon of the Fourth when the staff I had engaged were
installed. There are a few old, official servants who remain in the
house from one administration to another, keeping in operation an
uninterrupted household routine, so there was no reason why the
Inaugural luncheon should not be carried through with the same
smoothness and despatch to be expected on ordinary occasions. But
again we reckoned without the weather. The difficulties of traffic,
added to the crush on the avenues, made it impossible for our guests
to arrive on time and they continued to straggle in throughout the
whole afternoon, each one wishing to apologise in person and make
special explanation. This, of course, made anything like systematic
reception out of the question and the result was that the luncheon
really ran into and became a part of the tea for my husband’s
classmates of Yale, which was scheduled for five o’clock. There was
some confusion, but much goodwill and frank enjoyment and the fact
that the President was not there to receive his classmates caused
nothing more than a few repetitions of, by that time, familiar
comments on the elements.
Mr. Taft was reviewing the Inaugural Parade and the last of it did
not pass the reviewing stand until after nightfall. He came in,
however, in time to exchange greetings with old-time, enthusiastic
friends, the members of the Yale class of ‘78, and to hold them longer
than they had intended to remain. When the last of them had wished
us Godspeed and said good-bye, we stood, the five of us,—my
husband, my three children and I,—alone in the big state dining-
room, and tried to realise that, for the first time, the White House
was really our Home. The great walnut-panelled room, with its
silvered chandeliers and big moose heads, seemed very empty with
only the Taft family in it, after all the clatter and chatter that had
been sounding there all day. We gazed at each other for a moment,
with slightly lost expressions on our faces, and then nature asserted
herself in the new President.
 © Harris & Ewing.

THE PRIVATE DINING-ROOM OF THE

WHITE HOUSE, AND THE FAMILY
SITTING-ROOM AT THE END OF THE
LONG UPSTAIRS CORRIDOR

“Let’s go up stairs, my dears, and sit down!” said he.

Poor man, he had not experienced the blissful sensation of sitting
down since early that morning; so we proceeded out to the elevator,
which Charlie, true to his boy nature, had, of course, already learned
to operate. For once, I am glad to say, it did not stick between floors.
This was a habit to which it became addicted in later days, a habit it
was sure to indulge on occasions when the President proudly used it
for taking a large party of men upstairs after dinner. But this time he
was able, without delay, to reach the best easy-chair in the sitting-
room where he remained until I prodded him once more into activity
by reminding him that he must get into evening clothes else the
Inaugural Ball could not take place.
Not having been taxed so greatly, I was not yet ready to succumb
to fatigue; besides I was now eager to roam around the house, to
familiarise myself with the mysteries of my new home and to plan
the assignment of rooms among various members of the family who
were to come to us that very night.
The second story of the White House, where all the family living
rooms are, corresponds in spaciousness with the floor below, which,
with its broad hall, its great East Room, its large reception rooms and
state dining room, is familiar to the public. Upstairs there is a very
wide hall running the entire length of the building. The rooms
occupied by the President and his wife are in the southwest corner
and at that end of the house the hall is partially partitioned and
screened off and pleasantly furnished with desks, sofas and easy-
chairs to make a fairly large and very private family sitting-room. It
was here that I left my tired husband while I went on my first tour of
exploration.
At each of the four corners of the house there is a suite; all
arranged on the same plan, exactly alike, except as to decoration.
Each consists of an exceedingly large bedroom with a spacious bath,
and a smaller room adjoining which may be used as a bedroom or
dressing-room. I went first into the large bedroom which my
husband and I expected to occupy. The windows of this room look
out on the White House gardens where the large fountain plays, and,
beyond, on the Washington Monument, the Potomac River and the
distant Virginia hills. This, I think, is the most glorious vista in
Washington, which is a city of splendid vistas, and seeing it that
March night by the long line of lights which stretch across the
Potomac bridge and meet the lights of Arlington, it was, indeed,
inspiring.
The room was the room where Lincoln slept, indeed, where every
President since Jackson has slept. A tablet under the mantel states
this fact. It is the room which must necessarily have more intimate
and personal association with the men who have occupied the White
House than any other. Other parts of the house have been the scenes
of great historic events and of magnificent hospitality, but here, one
after another, the Presidents of the United States have really lived
and been at home.
Its furnishings have, undoubtedly, been changed many times and
yet I found it to contain many old and interesting pieces. The most
striking object in the room was an enormous four-poster bed with a
great curved canopy of wood, decorated with carved and gilded
eagles and upholding heavy draperies of blue and white brocade. In
this bed, we had been told, the Prince of Wales slept when he visited
this country in 1860, but on the first night I discovered that,
whatever its historic interest, I did not like it as a bed to sleep in. I
soon replaced it with two smaller mahogany beds and I dispensed
altogether with the draperies. There were canopies of the same
gilded eagles over the windows, and the curtains suspended from
them, as well as the upholstery of the sofa and chairs, were of the
same blue and white brocade. Some of the furniture was colonial,
some Victorian. The colonial furniture in the White House is very
good and there is quite a lot of it in all the bedrooms, but many of the
bureaus and wardrobes are of the scarcely-to-be-called beautiful
style of the Victorian era. I secured for our room, later on, the beds, a
dressing-table and some chairs, all colonial. These were about the
only pieces of furniture I bought for the White House. I also
substituted heavy chintz for the brocade draperies and upholstery,
and did away with the canopies entirely, as they seemed to me to be
too heavy for a sleeping room. The small room in the corner of our
suite Mr. Taft used for a dressing-room.
The corresponding suite across the hall I gave to Helen, my
daughter. It had been occupied by both of the Misses Roosevelt and
before them, I believe, by Mrs. McKinley. It had been fitted up in
pretty flowered chintz for Miss Ethel Roosevelt, after Miss Alice had
married, and we left it unchanged.
I strolled down the hall, which contains only a large table and a
few portraits of Presidents for which there is no wall space down
stairs, and looked into the Library which is exactly in the center of
the house on the south side. It is oval like the Blue Drawing Room
beneath it and it is a little dark in the daytime, being shaded by the
roof of the south portico. This was Mrs. Roosevelt’s favourite room
and it had been fitted most charmingly with many of her own
belongings, but as they were now gone and my own had not yet been
moved in, it looked rather bare. The furniture had not been
upholstered for many years and it was a little shabby. Later on I had
it all recovered and the walls of the room retinted, and when I had
put in some of the Oriental tapestries and handsome pieces of
furniture which I had brought with me from the Far East it made a
very beautiful and livable room. We used it a great deal, especially
when there were guests, but for the family the sitting-room at the
end of the hall was always the favourite gathering place.
Opposite the Library a short corridor extends to the window under
the roof of the front portico and on each side of this doors open into
smaller bedrooms; smaller, that is, in comparison with the four large
ones. Even these would be considered large in an ordinary house.
One of them I assigned to the housekeeper and the other to my two
sons. The boys’ room was rather dark, with its windows directly
under the roof of the portico; and it was furnished, moreover, in dark
red, a colour which does not add light to gloominess, but the boys got
it because they were the members of the family who would care the
least and who would be the most away.
The great staircase descends from the central hall just beyond
these rooms and facing the staircase is the President’s Study. The
eastern end of the building was all used as offices until the new
offices were built and the house restored in accordance with the
original plan. The Presidents with large families must, indeed, have
been in an uncomfortable situation when they had to confine
themselves to the rooms in the west end, the only rooms then
available for living purposes. The facts are that such families found
the house to be less commodious than a “five-room flat,” as the wife
of one President expressed it. I believe the Roosevelts, until the
house was remodelled, were unable to accommodate one guest.
 © Harris & Ewing.

TWO WHITE HOUSE BEDROOMS

SHOWING FINE OLD COLONIAL BEDS

There is a story that when Prince Henry of Prussia was in

Washington, President Roosevelt invited him to ride. The Prince
accepted and just before the appointed hour appeared at the White
House in his street clothes, accompanied by a valet bearing his riding
clothes. He had very naturally expected to change at the White
House, but it happened that on that day there was not one room that
could even be prepared for a Royal dressing-room, so the President
was compelled to request His Highness to return to the German
Embassy to change. I believe this incident had the effect of hastening
the deliberations of the members of the Appropriations Committee
of the House who were then leisurely figuring on the amount
necessary for the restoration.
Senator McMillan, who was at the head of the District Committee
in the Senate, and who, in his lifetime was the leading spirit in the
improvement of Washington, in the revival of the L’Enfant plan, and
in the creation of a Commission of Fine Arts to pass upon
contemplated structures and changes, conferred with Mr. and Mrs.
Roosevelt and with Senator Allison of the Appropriations
Committee, and by an amendment in the Senate, in the spring of
1902, to which Speaker Cannon and the House Appropriations
Committee assented, the necessary funds for this restoration were
eventually provided and, most fortunately, the whole work was
committed to Mr. James McKim, of McKim, Meade and White, who,
among all the architectural monuments to his genius which he left,
left no greater evidence of his mastery of his art than this. He added
the gracefully beautiful terraces on either side, equipped with electric
light standards, and in accord, really, with the original plan of the
house, and utilised them in a most ingenious way. He made of the
one on the west a very dignified and convenient approach, through
the basement, for large companies attending state entertainments.
Cloak stands for the accommodation of thousands were fitted into
each side of this passageway and guests now are able to dispose of
their wraps and proceed to the staircase leading up to the main hall
on the first floor without the slightest interruption or discomfort.
The ample and airy space beneath the high portico on the south
side was used for domestic offices and servants’ quarters, thus
greatly increasing the capacity of the house, and the construction of
the very convenient executive office building, reached by a covered,
or cloistered passage from the White House basement, was carried
out on lines so like in style and appearance to the north portico, so
low and classically simple, that it detracts nothing from the general
effect and interferes in no way with the dignified outlines of the
home of the Nation’s Chief Magistrate.
During the reconstruction the President and Mrs. Roosevelt lived
either at Oyster Bay or in a house a few steps from the White House
on Lafayette Square. Mr. McKim frequently consulted Mrs.
Roosevelt as to interior changes and many of her views were
adopted, so that the woman’s side of the new White House was well
looked after.
The work took longer and cost more than was expected and this
elicited much criticism of the architect as well as of the architectural
result. His aim had been to make as little outward change in the
main lines as possible and yet to make as great a change as space
would permit in interior accommodation. Considering what he had
to accomplish his success was remarkable. But the Philistines among
the Congressmen and Senators, who don’t like architects anyway,
found much to complain of. In their daily visits to the President they
did not, by Mr. McKim’s plan, reach him through the historic front
entrance, supported by the great, white pillars, but they were
relegated to a business office, simply and conveniently equipped, and
it offended the sense of due proportion of some of them as to who
were the real power in the government, the legislative
representatives calling on business or the social guests of the
President.
But now, after all the ignorance, ill-feeling and prejudice displayed
in the most unjust attacks upon Mr. McKim, those whose judgment
is worth anything, and that includes the whole body of the people of
the United States, rejoice in their hearts that the greatest of
American architects was given a free hand to adapt to modern needs,
but also to preserve in its dignity and beauty, this most appropriate
official home of the Head of the Republic.
These observations may not be in place just here, but they
occurred to me on the first evening of my occupancy of the White
House, and I congratulated myself that I was to enjoy the results of
that successful reconstruction of what had been a most
uncomfortable mansion.
The President’s Study, as it is now called, is the only room of the
old Executive offices which has not been changed into a sleeping
room. It is now the President’s more personal office where he can
receive callers more privately than in the new office building. A small
bronze tablet under the mantel tells, in simple words, the history of
the room. Here all the Presidents since Johnson held their Cabinet
meetings, and here the Protocol suspending hostilities with Spain
was signed in McKinley’s administration. A picture of that event,
painted by Chartran, hangs in the room and conveys a remarkably
vivid impression of the men who had a part in it. The faces of
President McKinley, of Justice Day, who was then Secretary of State,
and of M. Cambon, the French Ambassador, are especially striking.
This room, in which there had been a great many personal mementos
gathered by Mr. Roosevelt in his interesting career, also looked, after
their removal, rather bare on that evening of my first inspection and,
save for the pictures and the tablet, had little in its character to make
real in one’s mind the great events that it had witnessed. Yet, as I
roamed around that evening, the whole house was haunted for me by
memories of the great men and the charming women whose most
thrilling moments, perhaps, had been spent under its roof, and I was
unable to feel that such a commonplace person as I had any real
place there. This feeling passed, however, for though I was always
conscious of the character which a century of history had impressed
upon the White House, it came, nevertheless, to feel as much like
home as any house I have ever occupied. That Study, which seemed
at the moment so much a part of American history and so little even
a temporary possession of the Taft family, was later hung with
amusing cartoons illustrative of events in Mr. Taft’s career, with
photographs of his friends, and with what are called at Yale
“memorabilia” of his varied experiences, and it became, in time, for
us all, peculiarly his room.
The Blue Bedroom, where we had slept the night before as guests
of the Roosevelts, belongs to one of the four corner suites and I
planned to give it to my sister Eleanor, Mrs. Louis More, and her
husband, while the smaller room in the same suite I assigned to Miss
Torrey, our Aunt Delia—and during our administration apparently
the country’s “Aunt Delia.” She had been staying with us at the
Boardmans’ and was probably enjoying the Inauguration of her
nephew more than anyone in Washington. The last of the suites,
which was exactly like the blue suite except that it was hung in pink
brocade, I gave to my husband’s sister and brother-in-law, Dr. and
Mrs. Edwards of San Diego.
When I had finished my explorations and arrangements I glanced
at the clock in the Pink Room and discovered that I had no time to
lose before beginning that important toilet which would make me
ready for the Inaugural Ball, the last, but not the least of the
Inaugural functions.
 I hurried to my room and found the hairdresser waiting for me. I
sat down with a feeling of great comfort and submitted myself with
hopeful patience to her ministrations. But she was so overcome by
the greatness of the occasion that, although she was quite
accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of my hair, she was not able to
make it “go right” until she had put it up and taken it down twice,
and even then it was not as perfectly done as I had fondly hoped it
would be. I believe this hairdressing process made me more nervous
than anything else in the whole course of the day.
While it was going on, my new gown lay glittering on the bed,
where the maid had placed it, and I was very anxious to get into it. It
had given me several days of awful worry. It was made in New York
and the dressmaker had promised that I should have it at least a
week before it was needed so that any necessary changes could easily
be made. But day after day went by and no dress,—the third of March
arrived and then I began, frantically, to telegraph. I finally received
the reassuring advice that the dress was on its way in the hands of a
special messenger, but the special messenger was, with many other
people, held up for hours by the blizzard and did not arrive at the
Boardmans’ until after I had left for the White House, wondering,
disconsolately, what on earth I should wear to the Inaugural Ball if it
happened that the messenger couldn’t get there at all. The suspense
had been fearful and it was a comfortable relief to see the gown all
spread out and waiting for me.
It was made of heavy white satin which I had sent to Tokyo to have
embroidered, and the people who did the work surely knew their art.
A pattern of golden-rod was outlined by a silver thread and cleverly
fitted into the long lines of the gown, and no other trimming had
been used except some lace with which the low-cut bodice was
finished. It fitted me admirably and I hoped that, in spite of all the
mishaps in my preparations, I looked my best as I descended from
the White House automobile at the entrance of the Pension Office.
The Pension Office was not built for balls, Inaugural or otherwise,
and on the evening of March Fourth, 1909, after a day of melting
sleet and snow, the entrance was not especially inviting. Neither was
the dressing-room which had been assigned to me. I suppose that for
years it had rung with the ceaseless click of scores of typewriters and
that its walls had beheld no more elaborate costume than a business
blouse and skirt since the occasion of the last Inaugural Ball which
had marked the beginning of the second Roosevelt administration
four years before. But as I needed to do very little “prinking” it really
didn’t matter and I quickly rejoined the President and proceeded, on
his arm, to the Presidential Box, this being a small round gallery
above the main entrance of the great ballroom which is itself, in
everyday life, the principal workroom of the Pension Office.
A brilliant, an almost kaleidoscopic scene spread before us. The
hall is of tremendous proportions, pillared with red marble and with
walls tinted in the same colour. Every inch of floor space seemed to
be occupied. The bright colours and the gleam of women’s gowns
met and clashed, or harmonised with the brighter colours of
diplomatic uniforms. Officers of the Army and Navy, in full regalia,
mingled with the hundreds of men in the plain black of formal
evening dress. It was a wonderful glittering throng, more
magnificent than any I have ever seen. It was not possible to
distinguish individuals except in the space directly below the box, but
there, as I looked down, I saw a great semi-circle of faces—
thousands, it seemed to me—smilingly upturned toward us. The din
of human voices was terrific; even the loudest band procurable had
difficulty in making itself heard. But the scene was so gay in colour,
and the faces that gazed up at us were so friendly and happy that I
felt elated and not at all overwhelmed.
The first person whom my eyes rested upon in the box was Aunt
Delia, already installed in a chair near the back and drinking in the
scene with visible pleasure. Aunt Delia, at that time, was eighty-three
years old, but not for anything would she have missed one feature of
this crowning day of her life. Having no children of her own, she had
for many years given the greater part of her thought and interest to
her nephews and nieces, and she followed every step in my
husband’s career with an absorption, not to say an excitement, as
great as my own. All day long she had travelled from ceremony to
ceremony, conducted by Lieutenant Reed, one of the Naval aides.
She would arrive, leaning on his arm, among the first at each
appointed place, ready and eager for any new event. She didn’t miss
even the late supper of birds, salads and ices which was served to us
later that night, before we left the Ball. And now she sat in the
President’s Box, her soft, white hair arranged by the best hairdresser,
gowned in rich, old-fashioned, black velvet, adorned with all the
good old lace which she had been treasuring for years for an occasion
justifying its display.
The Vice-President and Mrs. Sherman arrived shortly after we did
and shared the box with us. They also had with them a large family
party and were both so jolly and so much in the festive spirit that
formality disappeared. Many friends and officials of distinction
came, in the course of the evening, to pay their respects; and
members of our own family came and went at intervals as they were
inclined.
I may as well say here that my husband and I both came from such
large families that all Washington, at the time of the Inauguration,
seemed filled with our near and dear relatives. Mr. and Mrs. Charles
P. Taft took a comfortable house for ten days, while Mr. and Mrs.
Henry Taft and Mr. Horace Taft were at the New Willard.
About eleven o’clock the President and I descended to the
ballroom floor, followed by Vice-President and Mrs. Sherman and, as
is the custom, proceeded slowly down the length of the hall and back
between the closely packed rows of people who stood aside to make
room for our promenade. This ceremonious parade was not as trying
for me as it may sound, for not only did I have the reassurance of my
husband’s arm, but the crowd was too large to seem very personal.
So I was quite serene, except for frequent spasms of anxiety lest my
gorgeous length of train be stepped on.
Except for this ceremony, and for a short supper which was served
to us and a few invited guests in a private room, the President and I
remained in the box until shortly after one o’clock when we once
more descended and made our way to a waiting automobile which
very quickly whisked us away to much needed rest.
However, I must still have had energy enough left to worry over
domestic arrangements since the last thing I remember of that
eventful day was a hearty laugh from my husband when I exclaimed
in sleepy tones: “I wonder where we had all better have breakfast in
the morning!”
 CHAPTER XVII
THE WHITE HOUSE

The members of my family, and especially my children, are prone

to indulgence in good-natured personalities and they like to make
the most of my serious attitude toward my domestic responsibilities,
saying that I make them three times as difficult as they need be by a
too positive insistence on my own methods.
Perhaps I did make the process of adjusting the White House
routine to my own conceptions a shade too strenuous, but I could not
feel that I was mistress of any house if I did not take an active
interest in all the details of running it.
The management of the White House is, of course, a larger task
than many women are ever called upon to perform, and, incidentally,
the same “white light that beats upon a throne” sheds its sometimes
uncomfortable radiance upon the usually unprepared heads of
America’s Chief Executive and his family. Accustomed as I had been
for years to publicity, yet it came as a sort of shock to me that nearly
everything I did, and especially my slightest innovation, had what the
reporters call “news value.”
I have lived too much in other countries ever to underestimate the
importance of outward form, yet I think I may claim a wholesome
regard for and a constant acquiescence in the principles of
democratic simplicity, though not the kind of “democratic simplicity”
which is usually written in quotation marks.
I made very few changes, really. As a matter of fact no President’s
wife ever needs to unless she so desires, because the White House is
a governmental institution thoroughly equipped and always in good
running order. Each new mistress of the house has absolute
authority, of course, and can do exactly as she pleases, just as she
would in any other home, but in the beginning I confined my efforts
largely to minor matters connected with the house service itself. I
wished to install certain members of the house personnel of my own
choosing, and this I did. Later I made some changes in a few
important social usages.
There are certain duties connected with the White House routine
which have been performed by the same employés throughout one
Administration after another and each new President’s wife finds
these men invaluable and wonders, I am sure, how the White House
could ever be run without them. For instance, there are Mr. Warren
S. Young, who has been for thirty years the Social Executive Officer,
and Colonel W. H. Crook, who became Chief Custodian under
Lincoln in 1865 and is holding the same office to-day. The duties of
each of these men are delicate in the extreme, but they know their
work down to the minutest detail and it would be difficult to measure
their value to the woman who, in public opinion, is wholly
responsible for the White House.
As to my own innovations, I decided in the first place to have, at all
hours, footmen in livery at the White House door to receive visitors
and give instructions to sightseers. Before my time there had been
only “gentlemen ushers” who were in no way distinguishable from
any other citizen and many a time I have seen strangers wander up to
the door looking in vain for someone to whom it seemed right and
proper to address a question or to hand a visiting card. The
gentlemen ushers I retained, the head usher, Mr. Hoover, having
become invaluable through similar service under every
Administration since Cleveland’s first, but I put six coloured men in
blue livery at the door, two at a time, relieving each other at intervals,
and I think many a timid visitor has had reason to be thankful for the
change. Incidentally they lend a certain air of formal dignity to the
entrance which, in my opinion, it has always lacked.
These footmen received everybody who sought to enter the White
House. If it happened to be a party of tourists they were directed to
such parts of the building as are open to the public at stated hours; if
it were a caller, either social or official, he or she was conducted to
one of the drawing rooms. But sensible as this innovation seemed to
me, it met a varied criticism from the adherents, sincere and
otherwise, of our too widely vaunted “democratic simplicity.”
 Another change I made was the substitution of a housekeeper for a
steward. I wanted a woman who could relieve me of the supervision
of such details as no man, expert steward though he might be, would
ever recognise. The White House requires such ordinary attention as
is given by a good housekeeper to any house, except, perhaps, that it
has to be more vigilantly watched. Dust accumulates in corners;
mirrors and picture glasses get dim with dampness; curtains sag or
lose their crispness; floors lose their gloss; rugs turn up at corners or
fray at the ends; chair covers get crumpled; cushions get crushed and
untidy; things get out of order generally; and it is a very large house.
Kitchen helpers grow careless and neglect their shining copper pots
and pans and kettles; pantry boys forget and send in plates or glasses
not polished to perfection; maids forget to be immaculate and linen
is not properly handled; they are just like employés in other homes
and they need a woman’s guidance and control. I engaged my
housekeeper before my husband’s Inauguration and she reported for
duty on the morning of March fifth.
If I could remember how many turkeys the President gives away
every Christmas I could tell just how many persons there are in the
White House service. I know it is something like one hundred, but
they go to employés of all kinds, to important house officials, to
minor officials, to servants of high and low degree, to gardeners,
stable boys, chauffeurs and all.
The staff of the White House proper is not so numerous, eighteen
or twenty perhaps, including cooks, kitchen maids, butlers, boys,
housemaids and laundresses. There was one coloured cook, Alice,
who prepared the meals for the servants’ dining-room and who had
been in the White House twenty years.
My head cook, whom I engaged, was Swedish. She was a miracle of
a cook, but she displayed a romantic tendency as well. She must have
been about forty, apparently quite staid, when she acquired a
husband, a policeman on duty at the White House, and, in due
course, a baby. She had been married only a little over a year when
her husband contracted tuberculosis. We had always been very much
interested in her, deploring the home-making tendency which took
her away from us, so when we learned of her misfortune Mr. Taft
immediately took steps to have her husband sent to Ft. Bayard, the
Military Tuberculosis Sanatorium in New Mexico. The cook, who