Walker Evans, Pt. 6
I got a couple more sources to draw from, regarding Walker Evans today. There is some great information, which scares me somewhat. It's one of those deep personal things.
Though Evans claims that he wasn't really all that influenced by Baudelaire, Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology presents some of Evan's translations of Baudelaire's prose poems, as well as several Evans short stories. What's weirding me out is that Baudelaire is the person who drove me back to school after a twenty year absence. It's a long story that I think I've told before.
I am really quite taken by Evan's short story "Brooms." It really says quite eloquently some of the stuff that I've been skirting about, as I approach the really formative years in his art. It was written in 1929, and I have typed it in from the facsimile manuscript in the book, complete with the spelling idiosyncrasies. Don't bother commenting about corrections. It's the lit-scholar habit. What you see is what was there.
It's short and sweet. It also connects oddly with the post I wrote earlier in the evening as well. Notice that one of speakers "imperative needs" was a novel. I don't find this coincidental at all. Some people consume such things, myself included.
A change in policy. Journal won't do. Have decided to continue but to omit dramas, crises, eruptions, explosions, simmerings, boilings, and all manifestations of the chaos of my inner life. Review before leavetaking: I am full of hate; have wanderlust not only in Spring; am firmly intrenched in physical life, and love it; am alone; have soul, to which I hereby bid farewell.
When I took this place I simply couldn't buy a broom. couldn't buy anything. Sold, in fact, books, cameras; pawned watch. There was no broom until I found one in the alley back of the abandoned factory. It had a triangular shape. (I didn't know anything about brooms.) I carried it home and swept bitterly.
I forgot to say that I shall eliminate dates. But I shall go on writing. Every night I shall sit down and write something that hasn't anything to do with my inner life.
Haaga the grocer has a sale of brooms, 39c.
I don't mind the cold. I don't mind anything. I am detached. I walk along the street in the sunlight, with something to do; something connected with my inner life, and therefore unmentionable. Divine power of thought. I forget what it is I have to do. Left stranded on upper Bway in this condition.
I know I ought to buy a broom. There are times when I actually could buy a broom, financially. But nothing has ever come of it morally.
Ena Douglass was born in Singapore. She now pays $12 a month for a room on 14th ST. Has a long green dress and a long cigarette holder which I sat on and broke in three (REPLACE), and long vocabulary. All this means nothing to me.
Upon one of the main thoroughfares of the city, in a commercial district, I found a cluster of super-booms. Examined them carefully. The handle of each was of ash, machine-turned ash, I should say. This part of the implements had been dipped in robin's egg blue for youth and happiness. The sweeping part was long and green, like Ena's vocabulary. The sweetsmelling reeds were bound together with ochre twine. Groups of these brooms stood swaying in the breeze, gladdening the hearts of the passers-by. But I was sick of an old passion.
I am going to change my nourishment. I am weary of staple commodities. I think I am in the frame of mind a man gets into when he eats caviare for breakfast, as in Strindberg.
IMPERITIVE NEEDS:
suspendersdrawers
collar pin
bath slippers
Crime and Punishment
rubber cement
Words: the bottom of my life is a shadowy pattern of unreality, imposing in its own private way. I look into it coming out of deleria or even out of sleep on summer mornings before dawn, having set my will to go off at 4:30. Moi intime. My happy hunting-ground. My little core of humanity. Later it is shot through with cold sparks of intellect, or words to that effect.
Soon after I left the house, before I even turned the corner, I saw a worn-out broom lying in the gutter. It is nothing I said; it will pass. But I saw another, and yet another. All had that horrible, suggestive triangular shape. It was too much. Today, this dateless day, I walked into Macy's and bought a vacuum cleaner.
Now I shall suck the dust out of chaos.
—Walker Evans, 1929
It almost has a certain "blog" attitude. Just the facts, maam. But then, so does Defoe.
