Rooted horizon: Charles Tomlinson and American modernism

Two recently-published books by Charles Tomlinson Some Americans and The Flood* enhance his already considerable status as a writer. The first, a readable, short yet richly-detailed prose account of the contributions made by some modem American poets and a painter to the growth of his art, is invaluable for several reasons. Not only does the book throw much light on Tomlinson’s own debts to the legacy of Ezra Pound and other Americans influenced by il migliorfabbro, it gives readers over here fascinating vignettes of major figures in American art of this century. Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters, Marianne Moore, George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, the painter Georgia OKeeffe, and Ezra Pound himself all these heroes and heroines of American modernism are vividly and variously portrayed at first hand. They are shown in spirited struggle against artistic isolation (even in the United States) and philistinism (everywhere), involved in all-too-human misunderstanding, as well as suffering frcm the ills which come with old age. Tomlinson’s record of encounters with American art and artists shows too how one English poet found that he could make use of their discoveries without any threat to his own identity or, indeed, his Englishness. Confirmation of this comes in the second book, The Flood, Tomlinson’s latest volume of poems, which confidently achieves assimilation of some characteristics and qualities of American literary modernism to help shape a distinctively personal yet essentially English voice and vision. The opening chapter of Some Americans tells how a boy from the North Midlands, going up to Cambridge in 1945 to read English, found gradually that a few poems, stanzas and lines from modem American verse carried haunting messages for him. At that time not much more than anthology scraps of such poetry were available to English readers. Tomlinson’s academic studies and early poems were almost entirely ’Eng. Lit.’ in character. But lines from Ezra Pound in particular stayed in his mind, like Stephen Dedalus’s ’messengers from the secret morning’ or, as Tomlinson calls them, ‘talismanic fragments’. One quality which drew him to Pound’s work was ’a sense of cleanliness in the phrasing‘. Nobody else he knew of