Late in 1935, the artist Mary Oppen and her husband, George, a poet, made a decision. The young couple had recently returned to New York after several years abroad. In Europe, they had read the signs. Jews were fleeing Germany; in Italy, Mussolini was an object of worship. Back in the United States, which they had left in 1929, they were startled by the changes wrought by the Depression. At stoplights, “grown men, respectable men—our fathers—stepped forward to ask for a nickel, rag in hand to wipe our windshield,” Mary recalls in her memoir, “Meaning a Life,” which was published in 1978. Though they had always been leftists, Mary and George now wanted to find an organization with which they could ally themselves. They spoke with the son of the founder of the Socialist Labor Party. They listened to Trotskyites. And then, at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, the Communist Party proclaimed a Popular Front against Fascism. This, for George and Mary, was a turning point. “We said to each other, ‘Let’s work with the unemployed and leave our interest in the arts for a later time,’ ” Mary writes.
Their “interest in the arts,” as Mary calls it, was not negligible. Mary painted, and George had recently published his first collection of poetry, “Discrete Series,” with a preface by Ezra Pound. And yet set it aside they did. They joined the Communist Party and became members of the Workers Alliance. They occupied the apartments of those threatened with eviction; they secured rent and food aid from the relief bureau for those who were eligible. In New York’s Oneida County, the Oppens helped organize dairy farmers in a milk strike. “In a short time, we were no longer thinking . . . of poetry or of painting,” Mary recalls. Between 1934 and 1958, George did not write. “He did not write letters, he didn’t even sign checks. I mean, he did not write,” his daughter, Linda, said at a panel discussion several years ago. He did not publish again until 1962. In 1969, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection “Of Being Numerous.”
By all accounts, the decision that the Oppens made in the winter of 1935 was not one they ever regretted. Regret seems not to have been an element of their emotional lives at all. Over the phone, not long ago, Linda, who is the couple’s only child, described the long conversations between her parents that would precede any decision. Once the decision was made, she said, there was no question of turning back. “If there were grounds for regret, they would simply have sailed past it . . . one of the decisions was to not regret, not go back into the past.”
“We were in search of an esthetic within which to live,” Mary writes near the beginning of “Meaning a Life,” recounting the time just before she and George set off on a cross-country hitchhiking trip—one of a few that they took together in the nineteen-twenties—“and we were looking for it in our own American roots, in our country.” They were not looking, in other words, to convention, or to family, or even, necessarily, to art. Recently, I asked Rachel Blau DuPlessis, a poet and critic who edited “The Selected Letters of George Oppen” and knew the couple personally, to describe this aesthetic. “I think that they did not want to lie,” she said.
This had both moral and artistic implications. “The ethics had kind of an aesthetic turn, and the aesthetics had an ethical turn,” DuPlessis told me. If the action of “Meaning a Life” foregrounds the moral question, Mary’s narrative style illuminates its aesthetic dimension. Her descriptions are unrelentingly clear and honest. It’s not that she reveals secrets; the book is hardly gossipy. It’s that, even as she resists unnecessary exposition, Mary refuses to be anything but frank. Of her three older brothers she writes, “They were not rooted in themselves as my father had been, and I think they have not been happy men.” She describes the decision that she and George made to become Communists without any self-aggrandizement or romanticism. “If George and I had come from the working class,” she admits, “we would probably never have joined the Communist Party—that was nearly the unanimous decision of the United States’ working class.” While Mary’s family was not especially well off, George’s was quite wealthy. The couple were able to live for years, if humbly, on his inheritance.
About halfway through “Meaning a Life,” Mary quotes a remark that her husband made, in a 1969 interview, about the objectivist movement, with which he and his poetry were often grouped. Objectivism, he said, was “the attempt to construct meaning, to construct a method of thought from the imagist intensity of vision.” He added, “If no one were going to challenge me, I would say ‘a test of truth.’ If I had to back it up I’d say anyway, ‘a test of sincerity’—that there is a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction.” Mary perhaps means only to explain her husband’s relationship to a poetic movement, but, in context, the quote reads as a gloss on the couple’s way of moving through the world. She and George constructed a meaning from just such moments of conviction; from that meaning, they constructed a life.
George and Mary met in the fall of 1926, as undergraduates at the Agricultural College at Corvallis, Oregon. On their first date, Mary writes, they “drove out into the country, sat and talked, made love, and talked until morning.” When they returned to campus, Mary was expelled for breaking her curfew; the next day, she headed back to Grants Pass, Oregon, where her mother and brothers were living. George, who had been suspended by the college, soon followed. The partnership forged that night would last until George’s death, in 1984. Mary died in 1990, at the age of eighty-one.
In 1942, seven years after they joined the Communist Party, George, who was Jewish, voluntarily gave up his draft exemption and was sent to Europe. “It seemed to us that the lives of all Jews were endangered by fascism; our lives were in danger, and not to fight in the war was to ask of others what we would not do for ourselves,” Mary writes. George was thirty-four. He was seriously wounded just before the war ended, when a German shell exploded inside the foxhole where he and two other soldiers had taken cover. The other two soldiers died.
After the war, they drove West in a trailer George had refurbished himself; the family “passed horses on the prairie, and George caught one for Linda.” When they arrived in California, they lived, for a time, in a trailer park next to a stable where a “small circus wintered.” “Linda and I rode the baby elephant Zaida,” Mary writes. A few years later, the Oppens and their daughter left California, and the U.S. entirely, for Mexico; they lived there, in exile, from 1950 to 1958. Visits from the F.B.I. had left them concerned that their previous affiliation with the Communist Party might land one or both of them in jail.
Mary was, at various points, a photographer, a painter, and a printmaker; she produced etchings, collages, and lithographs. After the memoir, she published a collection titled “Poems & Transpositions” (1980), and then a chapbook, “Mother and Daughter and the Sea” (1981). It would be easy to read into these facts—late publication and the lack of, say, a solo gallery show—a thwarted ambition. That would be wrong, though. Over the phone, Linda told me that, when her mother and father first came to New York, Mary shopped her paintings around at a few galleries; she recalled one of Mary’s paintings being in “a big exhibit at the Smithsonian. But she didn’t enjoy doing that and stopped doing it.” Her mother “didn’t need anyone else’s approval,” she added. DuPlessis echoed Linda’s assessment, and in sharper terms. Mary “didn’t really want to be in the market economy,” she told me. In fact, Mary emerges, in her memoir, as an individual wholly unconcerned with pleasing others—not uncoöperative, just sure of herself. Both Mary and George “wrote to please themselves,” DuPlessis told me. “She’s not looking over her shoulder for an audience.” This is not to say that they isolated themselves. “They were very involved in whatever the conversation around them was,” Linda told me.
In “Meaning a Life,” Mary explains that she was determined to get out of Grants Pass because it “held for me the greatest danger I could conceive: to be trapped in a meaningless life with birth and death in a biological repetition, without serious thought or a search for life with more meaning.” Then she became determined to live a life with George—which meant, for one thing, doing the practical work that made that life possible. “Nothing would have functioned if it hadn’t been for her,” Linda told me over the phone, “and she always did it when you weren’t looking.” It’s tempting to see here that familiar dynamic of the male artist supported by his more practical wife, whose own ambitions are therefore necessarily subsumed. It’s tempting until one reads the memoir itself, which was self-evidently written by a woman who was not subsumed. Mary chose to make her life with George her life’s work. To assume that the practical efforts that followed from that decision were a burden would be to underestimate the degree of Mary’s self-possession.
In “The Argonauts,” from 2015, the writer Maggie Nelson cites the influence of the Oppens and describes “an almost sadistic urge to unearth some kind of evidence that George and Mary had been unhappy, even if at moments.” She is unable to. In their later years, the Oppens became touchstones for a younger generation of artists, critics, and intellectuals, among them the poet Sharon Olds and the novelist Paul Auster. (Essays by both appear in the collection “The Oppens Remembered,” which DuPlessis edited.) David R. Godine has kept “Meaning a Life” in print, but it is not widely read. In “The Argonauts,” Nelson mentions that, when she found “Meaning a Life” on Amazon, “there was only one review. It was by a guy who gave the book a single star, complaining: ‘Purchased this book hoping to gain insight into the life of one of my favorite poets. Very little about George and a lot about Mary.’ ”
“They tried to have an exemplary life,” DuPlessis told me. It is an example that feels especially apt now—particularly their ability to perform unromantic, inconvenient, unpleasant tasks when necessary; to set personal ambition and pleasure aside in favor of what can be dreary and largely unrewarded work. “Meaning a Life” is a reminder that sympathy is not nothing, but sympathy, when it leads to action, is something more, and greater.