Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy
David
Herrle. Time Being Books, $15.95 paperback (198p) ISBN: 978-1568092225
The
black and white photograph shows an elegantly dressed and coiffed blonde of
about thirty sitting at the wheel of a convertible with her head tilted slightly
back and a gaping wound where her left eye should be. A hand belonging to someone unseen is
applying lip gloss to her half-open mouth with a brush. There’s a disturbing contrast between the
subject’s composure and the gruesome condition of her face – or at least there
would be, if you didn’t recognize right away where the image came from: it’s a
production still from Chinatown, and
the woman is actress Faye Dunaway, in the role of the widow Evelyn Cross
Mulwray, in the final scene when she gets shot by the LAPD while fleeing with
the teenaged child of an incestuous union with her father, corrupt businessman Noah
Cross, played by John Huston – while private detective Jake Gittes, played by Jack
Nicholson, helplessly looks on, panicked and dismayed. It’s generally agreed that the film’s grim
conclusion captures a real sense of the spirit of Los Angeles – and not only in
1974 when it was released, but enduringly.
And that’s especially significant because Evelyn and her sister/daughter
escape and drive off to freedom in Robert Towne’s original draft screenplay, whereas
director Roman Polanski fought to give the ending its present pessimistic
finality, creating what would become an LA neo-noir classic, his first American
work after several years away from Hollywood and out of the country altogether.
The story is well known: Polanski
had left the US following the grisly 1969 murders of his wife, actress Sharon
Tate, and several of their friends at their home by members of the Manson “Family.” Returning five years later to make Chinatown the Polish auteur saw the city
clearly, exactly as those who reside there know it to be, a sun-blasted wasteland,
the place itself one enormous boulevard that evaporates into the atmosphere taking
people and dreams along with it. In a worldwide
marketplace of attention, the multinational corporations of the contemporary
global entertainment industry take the Hollywood of bygone days as a precondition
of present-day spectatorship, building upon the films of yore to produce images
that will have an archetypal blockbuster appeal for a new mass consumer
audience living anyplace at all where market research can reach. And one of those archetypes is a new Beauty
that must appeal to the modern moviegoer, concertgoer, magazine-reader, and so
on. Our preconscious association of
physical comeliness with goodness and innocence causes us to register a deep
shock, and to recoil in horror, when beautiful people are destroyed under any
circumstances, and that’s the dark side of the old Tinseltown glamor, just as
it will be the dark side of tomorrow’s dispensation too. This conflict in human nature is the subject
of a new poetry collection by David Herrle entitled Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy, an exceptionally ambitious
book whose theme is the relationship between poetry and popular culture in an
anxious Now that’s crammed with immediacy and alienation.
In Herrle’s interpretation of the facts
on record, the slaughter of those toney LA hippies at the Polanski home offers
us a recent and nearby analogy for the massacre of the ancien régime during the
Terror in the French Revolution and the murders of five Londoners in the late
nineteenth century by Jack the Ripper, among many other instances of a struggle
that’s instinct with humanity itself. The
poet’s perception of the singular timeless conflict embodied by such
occurrences is organized in this book according to his highly developed sense
of the differences among their contexts.
Herrle’s milieu is forensic, and when he writes about the past he’s obliquely
addressing his contemporaries, of course; so one of his own contexts is a
condition that’s peculiar to our present moment: the rediscovered simultaneity
of culture under globalization – an everyday experience, fraught with hi-res
intensity and disastrous, categorical omissions. The text of Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy images the poet as the
reluctant protagonist of a plot that unfolds in a visionary mode that’s endowed
with considerable insight and humor, encumbered though it is, quite
self-consciously, with the burdens of its time and place:
I look out on
the infinite spaces and tremble as Pascal trembled.
Doubt and
anxiety rise in me when I regard nature’s manifest denial
of I and Thou,
Shadow of Light, so save me from Darwin and Skinner,
from tooth and
nail, let me earn my stripes, don a cape, heroize!
Give me August 9, 1969.
Let me into the fin de Sixties.
Let this be restitution for Queen
Antoinette, for ripped Mary Jane Kelly.
That night:
Sharon stabbed sixteen times; Jay stabbed seven times
and shot once;
Gibby stabbed 28 times; Voytek shot twice, beaten
13 times and
stabbed 51 times. A week later, Aquarian
children
united in
universal love and peace at Woodstock.
Peeking through
the cavern’s narrow chinks has turned me into
the loneliest
man on the planet, a migraine for my wife, an insane
raver in an
airless, deaf wilderness. But look on I
must, or my madness
will be cured by
a madder Pollyanna madness, an ignorant bliss.
If
horror is aestheticized atrocity, then a densely-packed array of perspectives, such
as Herrle’s limpid prosy lines afford us in rapid succession, testify to an
instrument that’s admirably suited to his subject matter: sensitive yet
self-possessed. The seriousness of this
poet’s immersion in his material is evident throughout, particularly in a running
historical parallelism among those lonely figures down the ages in whose
preoccupations he recognizes his own, or in whose predicaments he can make out
clues as to what our present moment might be made to mean. His sense of scale is fascinating, as for
example when he weighs the Terreur of savagely repressive Catholic France
against the LA murder of the Black Dahlia Elizabeth Short in a licentious age whose
authority is more securely centralized than ever before, and whose homiletic
cautionary tale is a pageant of vice played on an unbroken loop by lurid
tabloid media:
Blonde bombshell
Princess de Lamballe, former Superintendent of the royal household, bravely
returned from England in solidarity with the monarchy, ignoring friend
Antoinette’s warning against throwing herself “into the mouth of the tiger,”
only to throw herself into the mouth of the tiger — no, the rabid sewer rat —
and become one of thirteen hundred slaughtered: head cut off (tossed in Anna
Grosholz’ lap) and limbs hacked (“wrath in death and envy afterwards,” as
Shakespeare’s Brutus said), a pubic-hair mustache adding cherry-on-top shame
for this depetalled white dahlia.
The
key that unlocks all of this detail – as a reference to Julius Caesar indicates in the above excerpt – is the fact that among
all the other modes of inquiry available to us, only poetry possesses the
wherewithal to coordinate the bewildering diversity of human experience and
present it to the multitude in a form which feels complete yet isn’t
oversimplified: it’s only poetry that can hold reality and justice in a single
thought. This is evidenced by the
concept of Herrle’s project in Sharon
Tate and the Daughters of Joy, and by its execution for the most part as
well.
This book marks another crux in the
development of modernity with “Hail Snobbism!”, a poem about the
mid-twentieth-century political crises that saw the ominous buildup, the
world-altering calamity, and the tragic aftereffects of World War II. As Herrle stridently implies, sophisticated
democratic societies worldwide reacted to the ascendancy of totalitarianism in
Machiavellian fashion by absorbing its practices within their more
accommodating political systems, meanwhile disclaiming its doctrines as
outmoded, if not inhuman. For artists
living in the postwar socialist-capitalist Western nations during the ensuing
Cold War, a consequent leveling of distinction amongst competing aesthetics –
handed down from on high in the form of New Deal preferment and proto-EU
subsidy – resulted in conditions that still obtain today:
The First
World’s favorite dictator, FDR, democratized art
so that books,
films, plays and visual works could address
and edify the
common man (the U.S.’s “heart and soul”),
the ordinary
workaday world, rather than idle in snooty
galleries and
thrill the eyes and ears of only the uncommon.
“Everywhere
people are painting, building, writing poetry,
singing and
acting” is not from a speech written for FDR but
a boast by
true-believer Goebbels, foxy Magda’s trollmate.
Homeless bum and
art failure Hitler tramped the Vienna streets,
seeking purpose
and honor until recruited by one of the biggest
bunch of
activist optimists ever to have bruised history: Nazis,
who preached
that it takes a village to raise brave new men
and a
democratic, nature-sopped art to express “the beautiful
and lofty,” the
People’s “naïve and unbroken joyousness” when
dazzled by the kitschy ideal of saccharine landscapes,
florals,
wildlife, Spartan
men, plain-vanilla and ungussied-up females —
and literally
and spiritually lame Goebbels’ favorite: Farmer
Venus.
Poppycock and
puritanism!
Art must shine
through a cultured prism.
Debbie Harrys
must walk angelically among pig-pen punks!
Vogue, voguer,
voguest: Save the haute from the
Folk.
How
has this leveling tendency in modern life conditioned us to recognize art? Or, to put it another way: what kinds of art can
take our measure “through a cultured prism” that refracts not only beauty, but
also the full spectrum of human behavior, including homicide? Herrle’s reply to this unasked question
reveals an imagination that revels in creating a web out of interconnection and
coincidence. Plus he loves pop, which is
great:
Nine Inch Nails
founder Trent Reznor lived in the Polanski house and named his recording studio
Pig, after the bloody word Atkins left on the door (the door he later relocated
to his new Nothing Studios), and a sign on the door read “COME IN HERE AND BE
KILLED” the night of his housewarming party, which was attended by Butthole
Surfers’ lead singer, Gibby Haynes, whose first name is eerily the same as
murder victim Abigial “Gibby” Folger.
What was recorded at the Pig studio?
Marilyn Manson’s (ahem!) Portrait
of an American Family and Nine Inch Nails’ Downward Spiral albums.
Handled
with due gravity, albeit in a spirit of fun, these citations from the low
culture canons bring us just about up to date, by breezily pointing out that
the Sharon’s theme flows through the
very stuff of our recent lives.
Herrle’s historical parallelism
climbs aloft in an analysis of two philosophers: Edmund Burke, the Irish MP,
aesthetic theorist (author of Reflections
on the French Revolution and On the
Sublime and Beautiful) and French monarchy sympathizer; and B.F. Skinner,
American academic and apologist for an administrated existence devoid of that
unnecessary illusion, free will. An
implicit contrast between these two thinkers urges into the reader’s
consciousness a devastating critique of the present American moment, with its callous
domestic enforcement of brutal imperialist policies, sweetened into the craven
middlebrow platitudes that embalm the tongue of every cruise missile liberal on
the block. Here is Herrle’s nod to
Burke, in “Unchained Malady 2”:
Oracular Edmund
Burke warned of France’s folly in his Reflections
(which was
really a prediction, not a looking back), prompting Tom
Paine to rant The Rights of Man: Paine who almost fell
under Saint
Guillotine but
for the fantastic grace of his unmiraculous God.
Aside from his
political works, Burke spieled on the nature of Beauty,
rejecting the
notion that it relied on proper proportions of parts,
mensuation,
utility or fitness — for there are countless examples of
irregular, idle,
unfit hotties who may be hotter because subpar.
When Apollo’s
away, Dionysos must play, so France danced in frenzy
to Rousseau’s
blind melody while Burke preferred the Versailles glide,
claiming that
chivalry had died on the day that ten thousand swords
slept in their
scabbards instead of leaping out to defend the Queen.
He found beauty
in littleness, smoothness, unangularity, delicacy and
fair color, so
no wonder he thought the Queen a “delightful vision.”
It’s
also to Herrle’s credit that this poem is a sonnet – its fulsome lines
reminiscent of an English poet’s homage to the French Alexandrine, perhaps – especially
when one reads it alongside “Skinnered Alive,” whose clipped directness, by comparison,
strikes one as an evocation of midcentury urban postmodern American poetic
speech:
Beyond freedom
and dignity: no
freedom and
dignity.
“Good
rioddance”
to man
qua
man?
“Like gods!”
Hamlet marvels.
Pavlov gasps,
“Like dogs!”
B.F. Skinner drowns
Thoreau in Walden Two.
It’s
clear that to Herrle a falling-off has occurred, or at least, that a cost must
be counted when societal progress secures individual liberty at the expense of
cultural refinement. The poet has made
it his task to produce such a reckoning, and when we consider how unpopular
that task is, his choice strikes us as a mark of his courage – a quality he
admires, as we notice when he proceeds from assessing philosophers’ positions
to considering how artists of the past have moved through their times and
places. Here is Herrle on the painter
David, in “Artist / Bonapartist”:
Painter
Jacques-Louis David
rubbed Max
Robespierre’s elbows,
apocryphalized
proto-Che Marat
and won
accolades for his uncool
neoclassicist
portraiture and singular
commitment to
manifest (perfectly)
dogmatic,
political thought.
He served as
resident Romanophile
and the Terror’s
propaganda party
planner, then
the Emperor’s First Painter
(Napoleon’s own
interior-decorating Albert Speer).
I can’t forgive
his deliberately crappy
sketch of
condemned Queen Antoinette
awaiting Saint
Guillotine’s karate chop,
so I imagine
Charlotte Corday’s ghost
steering the
carriage that killed him.
But perhaps his
final work was a heart
change, a clue
to realizing that art
mustn’t march in
army uniforms or sport
Caesar’s laurel
crown, that feminine nudity
should soften
all armor: Mars Being Disarmed
by Venus and the Three Graces.
Changed or not,
his heart wasn’t buried with his body.
In
this poem, the painter’s instinct for self-preservation (or else his earnest engagé political commitment) backfires,
as is so often the case, and he is exiled when the Bourbons return to power, ending
his life in Brussels, hit by a carriage in the street and killed, his heart buried
in Paris. The poet informs, instructs:
we recognize that an artist’s relationship with the times is nuanced, unfixed,
troubled. And again, there is the
twentieth-century version as well, as the unwitting agents of a propagandistic
age bring the repressive violence of a belligerent General Will to bear upon Beauty
by bringing death right to the artist’s door:
Born-hack artist
Valerie Solanas shot through Warhol’s
spleen, liver,
lungs, stomach and esophagus with a
.38 snub-nosed
revolver.
After he blew
off the script she gave him, how did she
avenge her
bruised (sh)ego? Fed his oeuvre: awarded
him a motif for
his popular gun screenprints.
This
balancing of times and places against each other has a demonstrative propulsion
and a polemical vehemence that lend a new impetus of epic grandeur to writing
in English; these aren’t characteristics one finds elsewhere at present.
Herrle portrays the author of Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy as
an artist whose engagement in the endeavor has brought a predicament of his own
down upon him. Not the remote,
Apollonian maker, this poet, but an anguished practitioner:
Shadow of Light,
you know my private
dirges: you are
the cantilever that holds
me safely over
Apocalypse, you are
the Frank Lloyd
Wright of my spiritual
estate, a
Philippe Petit guiding me from
tower to tower,
the Shadow-caster
in agon with
Gomorrah’s false sun.
Since
in our world there ought never to be a person to whom the poet cannot speak,
this fictive author addresses even the cowed, the sedated, the dupes of these wretched
days, invoking the spirit of confrontation by way of a challenge to candor:
Do me a favor
and close your scriptures, fold your pamphlets,
turn off Mister Rogers, mute “kumbaya, my Lord”
and face me
face to face,
bare wire to bare wire: confess that you’ve faced
the Abyss and
saw nothing look back, that when you called into
it you heard no
echo or reply — only sound vanishing into airless
space, that your
prayers seem to die in mid-air, that you feel
the presence of
absence in “intimate” exchanges.
One
disarming and often debilitating upshot of the leveling of distinctions in a
global bourgeois landscape is the lack of response which all but the most
widely publicized artists experience. And
artists reckon with this, as with all else, by fictions – that is, by
conventions. And the handling of those
conventions is the measure of craftsmanship.
Herrle’s awareness of these facts comes across in his constant citation
of touchstones chosen from among the galleries in his imaginary museum. These high points possess an Existentialist /
Romantic bent and direction. For
example:
The Cool comes:
the wintry summer, the sub-zero fire.
My half-empty
cup runs over with Keats’ Negative Capability:
juggling
contradictions without forcing wholeness,
without stuffing
the world into a proper box.
We
witness the poet’s representation of an experiential progress through his
provisional trying-out of ideas, the development of a sensibility through its
stations, upon a stage that privileges poetry as a motive force of peoples, a
governing, organizing position, sanctioned and mandated:
Kierkegaard
wrote that poets are necessary to sing
praises to
crucial heroes and transform the sounds
of sorrow and
pain into beautiful music with their
verse despite
inherent unhappiness.
I take that a
step farther: the poet as hero, for
without
romantic heroes
we’re doomed to despair and anti-life.
The
conception is bardic – the poet a statesman of the spirit – and the aesthetic
is cosmic in its scope. The implications
are to be followed all the way, even unto their logical ends:
In The Grand Design Stephen Hawking and
Leonard Mlodinow
estimate the
existence of 10ˆ500th universes, so I march forth
in defiant
denial of time’s restraints and forward-onlyness, taking
a sideways leap
of fate, intent on iterating the infamous Tate
event in another
dimension with a Herrlean plot rather than
the only one we
know, the one in which banal devils win.
It’s
here, in the poet’s squarely facing of the conclusions of his exploration,
answering its challenge by the creation of a character – David Herrle, poet,
author of Sharon Tate and the Daughers of
Joy – that one finds simultaneously this writer’s breathtaking ambition and
the limitation of his effort.
A poet’s heroism, necessary in defiance
of his time and place, results for Herrle in a plot twist that overreaches its
mark in the closing pages and causes the book to descend into bathos. But before that can happen, Sharon herself
must appear, of course; and yet, pitiable pretext that she is – although somewhat
sympathetic, and certainly blameless, if not innocent – it’s beyond even
Herrle’s skill to make her come to life, as the shallow stream of her half-bored
consciousness dwells one-dimensionally on her unborn child, her friends, her
husband, her surroundings. Then there
are some wonderful diaristic interior monologues, for example Gibby Folger’s,
as the tragic events begin to unfold:
I bought a
yellow bicycle this morning. Earlier
this evening
I told the
shrink that I’m sick of Voytek’s shit and I want out.
Phoned Mom while
stoned (I still can’t hide it from her)
and snuggled up
with a book in bed, under that tacky
stuffed rabbit
mounted on the wall.
Then, after
midnight, I wave to familiar mousy hippie girl
who passes by my
bedroom door. She returns with a knife
and forces me
into the living room where a handsome but
beastly man and
a girl who looks like Peppermint Patty are.
(Have they
partied here, swum in the pool, sold us speed?)
And
soon, there is a tete-à-tete, as the poet enters the scene to put things
right. Intervening into the course of
events as a time-traveler, he breaks it down – not for Charles Manson himself,
but for one of the madman’s followers:
“Simply put,
your dear leader is a Beatle wannabe.
Everywhere Charlie turned in his desperate quest for fame and rivalry
with the pop-culturally well-hung Beatles a door slammed in his face, not by
cold and intolerant bigwigs, but by himself.
Though the music industry and even Hollywood courted him, his dupes
eventually realized his banal flaw, and he spit in the very eyes of the people
who were willingly blind to his crimes and bullshit. No matter how far from his wretched origins
he ran, he was tracked down and beaten by self-hatred. Like young Hitler, he tramped the streets,
waiting for a miracle rather than refining himself. Assaults and battery don’t train such losers
to bob and wave, they just build calluses around their hearts, and then the
bums mistake the calluses for armor and reckon themselves righteous knights on
singular quests for fate-ordained success.
They find other crustaceans who long to coup against Atlantis, who are
tired of the status quo and need an illusory reboot. But these losers are losers despite the cults
or wars they start. Behind callus-armor
quiver thin-skinned runts who covet actual attractants, envy genuine
progenitors, effectual creators and Perfect Ten beauties.
“You saw Charlie
kiss Beach Boy Dennis Wilson’s feet at their initial meeting, and temporarily
bewitched Wilson let you bums shack up at his pad until your bullshit and STDs
made him kick you out. But were you in
the studio when Charlie made a fool of himself and proved to not be the
promising star he thought he deserved to be?
Were you there when he bugged the shit out of Rudi Altobelli and Terry
Melcher even after it was evident that they wanted nothing to do with him? How about when he thought he’d murdered
Lotsapoppa, who’d been mistaken as a Black Panther, and shat his pants with worry
over imaginary Panther retaliation, so he used the Helter Skelter mumbo-jumbo
to prime the Family for violence? You
surely were at the ranch when his eyes finally looked down the path of no
return, when a lifetime of degradation compelled him to lash out as the wild
animal he claimed society turned him into . . . . ”
Magnificent
though this is as writing, brimming with psychological insight, the
poet-character’s appeal to the cultist-character’s faculty of reason is where
things begin to ring false for the critical reader. A poet’s agency simply occurs otherwise than
this, one feels – and that nagging suspicion prevails through this crucial
scene’s conclusion, wherein the bard frees the captive beautiful people while
holding their now-would-be-murderers at bay:
I wave the sword from left to right as
if squirting them with a hose.
And
who arrives to join forces with him at the conclusion but Marie Antoinette
herself:
“Let us make
haste. Poor Elizabeth Short, the Black
Dahlia, needs our aid not very far but quite a few years from here. Then we must be off to that scared communist
town in the Guyana jungle. Then to the
New Reich Chancellery and then to — ”
It’s
hard to account for this drastic slippage in tone except as being part and
parcel of the very conception of the book, and therefore to write the whole
thing off; and yet there is the sense here too – as one sometimes feels while
reading grand works that but for a single (albeit rather damning) flaw strike
one as altogether wonderful – that what we have in Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy is the groundwork for a truly
comprehensive and fully accomplished work still to come: one which will perhaps
build upon these foundations and rise into the epideictic air, addressing us as
we live, here and now.
No poem will deserve a reader’s
attention that does not acknowledge the human condition in all of its breadth
and depth, in the molecular structure, the tone and energy of the work, if not
in the subject or the theme. There’s no
such thing as “good” or “bad” poetry.
And yet it is rare to read work which issues from such an acknowledgement. David Herrle asks all the right questions:
“Is the kiss the indubitable answer to Inquisitors?” It doesn’t matter what answer he comes up
with, or even if he comes up with one at all.
It’s curious to note that, post-High-Romantic though this poet is in his
inclinations, his instinct for (genre-bending) plot resolution manifests itself
as a reaching after fact and reason, certainly, very much in contradiction to
Negative Capability – not irritably, but affably, however. And that warmth of his is redemptive finally
– for, as the poet notes:
Whatever its
nature or supernature, art and Beauty are melancholy:
we can’t
separate them from That Empty Feeling, from shortfallenness.
In
Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy,
David Herrle has done that rarest of things: supplied us with a work of the
imagination which meets a real need. (January 2014)
Purchase
Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Erik Noonan is the author of the
poetry collections Stances (Bird & Beckett, 2012) and Haiku
d’Etat (Omerta, 2013). He lives in San Francisco with his wife
Mireille.
