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FOR US, WHAT MUSIC?

University of Iowa Press

Chapter One

Donald Justice believed in art as a vocation. In "Oblivion: Variations on a Theme," he expressed this belief "in a language bearing overtones of the spiritual": "The vows may not be codified and published, but they are secretly known and one does take them. I am perfectly serious about this" (1998a, 52). The idea of vocation also occurs in his short story "Death, Night, Etc.," in which Taylor Smith, having given up the serious pursuit of music, says, "It's as though I'd fled a monastery, broken vows" (1998b, 75). For Justice, the monastic vows of art signaled a calling and lifelong commitment.

Although raised a Southern Baptist, he stopped believing in God early, but he believed deeply in art throughout his adult years (Justice 2001, 18). While in his devotion to form he might be considered a classicist-albeit a "postmodern classicist" for his commitment to "innovation and experiment" as well as to form-he followed the Romantics in his applications of traditional religious language and categories to his poetry. He thus provides a latter-day example of the Romantics' "secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking" (Abrams 12). Although his comments on poetry do not bear the same grand overtones as the Romantics' desire to create a new world by the union of nature and the human mind (ibid., 21-29), his faith in art nevertheless constituted a way of finding meaning in human experience. Whereas the Romantics' language tended toward the prophetic, in the sense of divine disclosure and proclamation (see Rahner and Vorgrimler 383-84), Justice's tended toward the contemplative.

A somewhat more recent literary movement that provides a model for the transference of religious impulses and language to art is the French symbolism that Edmund Wilson (1-25) described as a further development of Romanticism. This style of devotion to literature had its effects on the English Pre-Raphaelites, but it remained very much a French movement, exemplified among Justice's influences by Rimbaud and Baudelaire. In describing the figures of this movement, Arthur Symons pointed out that for them literature "becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual" (10). Justice translated the language of these duties and responsibilities into a learned American vernacular. At the same time, he also realized that the metaphor of art as religious devotion had to be tempered. After his early formation, he did not mistake-at least not for long-art for life, or vice versa. "Art keeps long hours," as he put it in "On a Picture by Burchfield," but then so does life; both make their own demands, and much of Justice's early life was taken up with a struggle to synthesize the two. The devotion to art gave his life form and focus even as it brought complications.

In the opening poem of The Summer Anniversaries, the speaker announces, "Great Leo roared at my birth" ("Anniversaries," CP 5). Whether such a portent accompanied the birth of Donald Rodney Justice on August 12, 1925, the event was observed with due solemnity. As Jean Ross Justice recounts: "Donald's grandmother held him up to see the sunrise; this was reported later. It was a family with a sense of occasion" (1). Justice's parents, Mary Ethel (Cook) and Vasco Justice, had moved to Miami from south Georgia. His mother grew up in Boston, Georgia, and his father, though born in Pansy, Alabama (a hamlet that no longer exists), moved with his family to a farm near Tifton, Georgia. Their son recalled visiting this latter area as "a part of my summers growing up, not a part I really liked." From early on Justice was a denizen of the city, albeit the rather quiet city that was the Miami of his childhood.

When Vasco was in the army during World War I, he and Mary Ethel began to correspond. They had never met, but a mutual friend supplied her with the young man's name. Following the war, and after Vasco found work in Miami as a carpenter, they married. He was able to make a good living during the days of Miami's land boom, which lasted from 1915 to 1925. This period of sometimes frenzied land speculation and burgeoning construction ended after the hurricane of September 17-18, 1926. Florida's economy was slow to recover; as one study of this period puts it, "Depression came to Florida almost four years before it appeared in the national economy" (Frazer and Guthrie 153-54). When Donald was about four years old, he found his mother packing a suitcase and asked what she was doing. She explained that his father was going to Texas to look for work. As luck would have it, however, that very day Vasco came home and announced that he had found a job doing maintenance and repair work on Biscayne Bay. The job carried the family through the Depression.

Much later Justice said that he had come to think of his childhood as a happy one, though he had not always thought of it that way (2001, 20). Jean Justice conjectures that part of what made Donald's childhood seem to him an enchanted realm were the attentions of his mother, as exemplified in the many photographs that she took of her only child. For example, there is one of young Donald dressed as the groom in a "Tom Thumb Wedding," an event popular in the 1930s in which children played the roles of a wedding party. On some photographs she wrote captions from the boy's point of view: "Me and my birthday cake," "Me and my dog," and (on a photograph of Donald eating watermelon) "Guess what I'm eating." Of these early years, Justice recalled, "I was an only child, and as such I was spoiled, especially by my mother, who gave me the sense early on that what I did I could and should do well, the sense also that we were as good as anyone and ought never to forget that" (2001, 20).

Jean also believes that another enchantment of Donald's childhood was the milieu of Miami in the 1920s and 1930s, when it was a much smaller city than now, taken up with a romantic notion of constructing ideal suburban spaces with arched entrances and other such accoutrements. Recall the ending of Justice's poem "Childhood":

And sometimes, Where the city halts, the cracked sidewalks Lead to a coral archway still spanning The entrance to some wilderness of palmetto-

Forlorn suburbs, but with golden names! (CP 191)

This poem, dedicated "to the poets of a mythical childhood: Wordsworth, Rimbaud, Rilke, Hart Crane, Alberti," presents a self-consciously mythic version of Justice's past. It calls attention to its gestures of idealization even as it questions them with details of "cracked sidewalks" and "Forlorn suburbs." One way that the poem signals its self-consciousness is by the theatrical opening, which stages the poem as a kind of play:

TIME: the thirties PLACE: Miami, Florida

Once more beneath my thumb the globe turns- And doomed republics pass in a blur of colors ... (CP 189)

The staging of time and location emphasizes that this is a work of artifice, a remaking of the past on the writer's terms. The "doomed republics" beneath the speaker's thumb signal a major preoccupation of Justice's work-the attempt to preserve a fading past; in this poem, the speaker's childhood is itself a doomed republic. The regime, the state of affairs of this childhood, was doomed from the start; the ellipsis at the end of the second line blends the colors of the present moment with those recollected from the past as the speaker recalls his childhood, along with its doom, not without a certain pleasure. The story that emerges is one that remains prominent through much of Justice's writing: the loss of an Edenic space, along with the sorrows and pleasures of such a loss, which is the very condition of realizing the past. One must have lost the past to know it in a way that was not possible when one was there. It is surely no accident that it was only in his later years that Justice came to think of his childhood as a happy one. The golden names shimmer only in retrospect. They also shimmer because they are set in the midst of forlorn suburbs. One can catch a glimpse of the world as idealized and somehow whole precisely because it is broken, like the cracked sidewalks, from the start. The fragment enables the imagination to build its myth.

The Justices did well in the less-than-ideal world. Although they were not wealthy, they could afford the piano lessons that Donald began at age five. He recalled in his brief memoir "Piano Lessons: Notes on a Provincial Culture": "A piano lesson in those days cost fifty cents and lasted for half an hour. At that price my parents, though far from well off, were able to afford a weekly lesson for me all through the depression years" (1987, 33). This student of the piano also proved to be a fine student of the general curriculum at Allapattah Elementary School, where he was double-promoted. Then in the summer of 1935, he was diagnosed with the osteomyelitis (an infectious bone disease) that caused him to miss a year of school. But the forced absence did not stop his informal education, for he read voraciously during his convalescence; Twain, Poe, Dreiser, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Brothers Karamazov were some of the "famous books" and authors that he thought "one ought to read" (2001, 19). When he was in eleventh grade, it was reading William Cullen Bryant's "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood" that "converted" him to a devotion to poetry (CS 172).

An anecdote from the time of Justice's convalescence recalls a moment of realization that could have come from one of his poems. He was lying in bed one evening when he realized that the hammering he had been hearing was his father building a house nearby, a job that the elder Justice accomplished almost single-handedly, after the hours of his regular job, to make money for his son's medical expenses (Justice 2001, 18). The anecdote calls to mind the ethic of hard work that formed an intimate part of Justice's early experience, as it also registers a sense of separation from the everyday world proceeding around him. In "Anniversaries" (CP 5) Justice captures something of this feeling of separation:

At ten there came an hour When, waking out of ether Into an autumn weather Inexpressibly dear, I was wheeled superb in a chair Past vacant lots in bloom With goldenrod and with broom, In secret proud of the scar Dividing me from life, Which I could admire like one Come down from Mars or the moon, Standing a little off.

In retrospect the scar becomes the sign, inscribed on the boy's body, of an artistic calling demanding that one stand "a little off," to be divided "from life" to the extent that allows him to view human experience, including his own, with what has traditionally been called aesthetic distance. The narrator of Justice's short story "Death, Night, Etc." says of Eugene Bestor (the fictitious composer who also figures in Justice's poem "The Sunset Maker"), "He seemed somehow to be standing just a little apart from those he was with, even from Florence and me; not consciously and meaning nothing by it, I am sure" (1998b, 64). It may be that in Justice's conception of an artistic life, it is necessary to stand a little apart this way-not with the kind of "haughtiness toward life" (ibid., 56) that Arthur Symons attributes to the symbolist poet Villiers, but rather with the kind of distance that T. S. Eliot described in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" as a "continual extinction of personality" (1960, 7). Because the "emotion of art is impersonal" (ibid., 11), one must stand a little apart even from oneself.

Justice attended Andrew Jackson High School in Miami, playing clarinet in the school band and the orchestra. In the fall of 1941, he moved to Miami Senior High, where he graduated in spring 1942. His friend Laurence Donovan recalled meeting him "through mutual friends, some time in my high-school days" (CS 103). Donovan also recalled John Lenox, whom Justice met in middle school and whose dedication to music he fondly recalled. The Miami Herald dated May 1, 1943, carries a story about Lenox, "one of the Herald's carrier boys," taking "musical honors." Having graduated from Miami Senior High at age sixteen, Lenox won a full scholarship to study bassoon at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. The story explains that the "young musician will earn the rest of his expenses during the summer with his carrier route. He distributes 400 papers daily." Lenox also bought his bassoon, which cost five hundred dollars, with money that he earned as a newspaper carrier. Donovan paid tribute to Lenox as a "type of American now disappearing from the scene" (CS 109). In his poem "In Memory of My Friend, the Bassoonist, John Lenox" (CP 211-12), Justice also described the musician, in affectionately ironic terms, as

the best Contrabassoonist south Of Washington, D.C.- The only one.

He goes on to describe Lenox sitting "Lonely / / In eminence" like "some lost island king." Perhaps something that these two notes of tribute hold in common, and which also may explain what Donovan meant by a "type of American now disappearing from the scene," is a conviction that a singular devotion to one's art, regardless of worldly success, is what leads to authentic eminence. Similar is Justice's tribute to Donovan himself, in his foreword to the latter's Dog Island and Other Florida Poems (2003), where he describes Donovan's "preferences and leanings" set against the "trends and fashions of the time and place," accounting for the "solitariness of his fame" (9). I suspect that by the latter phrase Justice means a fame limited to the few who shared his tastes and preferences. Although critical recognition caught up with Justice, he stayed true to his tastes and preferences as well.

Donovan also remembered Robert Boardman Vaughn-a rather elegant if self-destructive bohemian figure. As Donovan wrote, Vaughn, "whose gaunt, wild-eyed, apparitional figure I encountered first in my high-school days, and to whom among his teachers Don dedicated his book The Sunset Maker, was a dreamer and poet who followed his elusive muse through the Caribbean, producing little poetry but, as Don writes in 'Portrait with One Eye,' making his life a poem" (CS 106). Vaughn was never Justice's teacher in any formal sense, but Justice admired his fierce devotion to poetry and his taste in literature generally. They were friends until Vaughn's disappearance, despite what Donovan calls "Vaughn's frequent affronts" (ibid.) to Justice. Years later, Justice managed to procure some funding for Vaughn to attend the University of Iowa. Having sat through a presentation by Justice on Emily Dickinson, Vaughn approached his friend to tell him that it was the worst lecture he had ever heard. As Justice recalled decades later, "It was not a bad lecture." Vaughn left town and the university without telling his friend. Nevertheless, Justice wrote many poems paying fond tribute to this fellow devotee of poetry.

In fall 1942 Justice enrolled at the University of Miami, which he attended on a band scholarship. During his freshman year, he was invited to join the university writers' club, the Snarks, an "unprecedented honor for a freshman" (Jean Justice 7). He gained a reputation as the group aesthete, noted for his "modernist" or "obscure" writing style (Justice 2001, 27). One year the campus newspaper reported that he had "caused recent campus bewilderment by his play Surrealist Police" (quoted in Jean Justice 7). He also carried on a correspondence with George Marion O'Donnel, a "second-generation fugitive Agrarian from Vanderbilt" (Justice 2001, 26), who was teaching at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute. One of Justice's high school friends, a student in O'Donnel's freshman course, had shown his teacher some of Justice's poems, and O'Donnel invited the University of Miami freshman for a visit. Justice recalled, "I took the train up from Miami and there I was treated to talk about poems such as I had never heard before-Hardy, Blake, Dante, I remember-and in general treated like an adult" (ibid., 26). O'Donnel read and commented on the young poet's work, with an eye toward "what was lacking and what perhaps wasn't" (CS 175). As Justice also recalled of this visit, "Encouragement meant a great deal to me" (ibid., 175). Through O'Donnel's intervention Justice had his first national publication, in the February 1943 issue of Mademoiselle. The poem, titled "The Scarred Men, She," begins

On what faint land on what sea Riding the cloud or riding the sun Beneath what tree under what shroud Sleeping on sand or sleeping on gun O where are they lurking for me.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from FOR US, WHAT MUSIC? by Jerry Harp Copyright © 2010 by University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission.
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