Some Grass and a Broken Tractor: Larry Levis and Eden
Liz Soehngen
In his 1982 essay “Eden and My Generation,” Larry Levis
reflects that while English poetry has secularized its obsession
with
man’s
mythical
encounter
with
the
Tree
of
Knowledge,
turning Eden from a passage in the Bible into a place in, say,
western Vermont, this movement has taken a decidedly abstract
turn within his own generation.
Its language has become less
autobiographical, more meditative, preoccupied with exile not as
it experienced privately, but as it is encountered collectively.
He asserts that this change is a response to, but not a rebuke
of,
the
generation
that
came
before;
situation, with a somewhat new result.
it
is
a
somewhat
new
“It is simply that for
my generation there was no access via experience to the Eden of
its parents.
For to replace Eden in their own expressionist
language is simply to mimic Eden or mock it.
To find it is to
find the words it needs in one’s own time” (42).
Language,
which has been a bridge from one generation to another, is now a
barrier between them—the old mode no longer viable, the new mode
necessarily removed from the past.
Place is all that remains to
connect the two, but as it is impossible to access “the place”
as experienced by another—or even the self at another time—
without another’s language, there is a great lack, experienced
not only personally but generationally.
To attain Eden, then,
cannot possibly be to imitate, but to intimate, in words gained
by
the
poet
in
this
moment,
exactly what has been lost.
that
great
lack
by
describing
This, of course, is impossible.
In
his 1985 collection Winter Stars, Levis meditates on his need to
alleviate
the
inevitable
sense
of
consequence of this impossible desire.
the
awkward
conclusion
that
he
exile,
which
is
the
He ultimately comes to
somewhat
prefers
his
state, as it makes the Eden of his youth take form.
exiled
“Eden,” as
he writes in his essay, “becomes truly valuable only after a
fall.”
What Eden is Levis attempting to return to?
It would seem
he cannot conjure much to be nostalgic for against the gray
earth of his father’s farm; doing so would be a forced attempt.
As an adult, he cannot feign the innocence he had there, as he
lacks the genuine language he used as an innocent.
Thus, he
cannot
himself.
adequately
describe
it
either
to
us
or
to
Instead, he can only describe the past in terms of changes he
has sensed between it and the present, and this precipitates a
degree of loathing, both for his state as a person removed and
for the removed person he once was.
farm
in
California
is
his
memory,
All he has to recreate that
which
is
subject
to
his
2
experience
of
it,
then
and
now.
Perception
is
reality.
Attempting to remove the subjective impoverishes any meaningful
sense
we
aspects
might
of
any
obtain
of
the
objective,
memory
necessarily
but
remove
us
the
subjective
from
an
exact
understanding of the objective as it was originally experienced.
His exile is a result of his knowledge that he is exiled.
Levis focuses on the process and the effects of such a
transformation through sentiment and perception in “Some Grass
Along a Ditch Bank.”
Its exploration of the way the idea of
grass, for a farmer, shifts with time and the seasons explains
more generally why the past—Levis’s past—cannot be completely
recaptured.
Levis
begins
by
acknowledging
that
any
anthropomorphism of grass is the work of the observer, and not
an attribute of the grass itself: “I have seen it almost appear
/ To fight long & well / For its right to be, & be grass” (1315).
Its swaying is caused “by the wind, maybe, but not by any
emotion”
misleading
(10),
yet
after
tendencies,
he
noting
this
purposefully
perception,
avoids
and
its
negating
its
effect, admiring the grass’ “tact” in resisting his efforts to
uproot it, without going on to dismiss it as mere imagination.
He can’t, in fact, dismiss it; doing so would gain him nothing
but
would
cost
him
his
hardy, stubborn plant.
most
meaningful
description
of
this
(Having now read the poem, even I can’t
3
describe it without some anthropomorphism myself.)
The perception of anything, however, shifts with time; this
means something different for Levis’s spirited grass with each
passing season, and even each passing year.
He discs it under,
he feels silly.
“It’s all a matter
It regrows, he is annoyed.
of taste, / And how taste changes” (34-35).
Yet these shifts in
opinion do not occur just with the change from winter to spring;
March is the only time of year actually named, and so it would
imply that the narrator’s reaction to grass is like that of the
farmer (Levis’s father?) who has stayed on his land long after
others have left their own.
“[A]fter a few years, / He even
felt sympathy for grass—/ Then felt that turn into a resentment
/ Which grew, finally, into a variety of puzzled envy” (69-73).
The meaning of the anthropomorphism shifts as the farmer (or
Levis) changes; the grass, we can be sure, remains the same.
In
spring it turns “a green that has nothing / To do with us” (67), yet the farmer and Levis feel it should, and knowing that it
doesn’t
leaves
them
alone
and
empty,
envying
that
which
is
unfeeling towards both itself and them.
Levis cannot recover his past without confounding it with
the ways he has felt about it in the years between now and then.
His actual experience of his childhood has been long engaged in
the business of being disced under before rising again in some
4
new incarnation, the same and yet not the original; unlike the
grass, which is content to do so perpetually and feels no pain
that we do not imagine it to feel, Levis is haunted by his
repeated failed attempts to remake things as they once were.
He
characterizes the grass as nonchalantly “coming back, / In some
other spot, & with a different look / This time, as if it had an
idea / For a peninsula, maybe” (40-43). The farmer, however,
opens his mailbox “At the roadside which was incapable / Of
looking any different”(81-82).
Mankind cannot be content with
natural self-reinvention, and it is from this that nostalgia
emerges.
aging,
The shifts in perception, which are a natural part of
pain
original
us,
as
experience,
they
remove
which
we
us
soon
detail, only in vague substance.
more
can
and
no
more
longer
from
recall
our
in
If we were beings free of
memory, we might not suffer so.
“Some Grass Along a Ditch Bank” is a variation on images
originally
introduced
in
Levis’s
poem
placed
earlier
in
the
book, “Family Romance,” and if the poem previously discussed
concerns itself with noting that our minds and lives do not
always work the way we want, its partner concerns itself with
wondering why the hell not.
Levis’s ultimate conclusion is that
his exile from Eden was necessary for his spiritual survival.
“Family
Romance”
begins
in
his
adolescence,
spent
with
his
5
sister as they attempt to devise a set of rules their world will
adhere to; meanwhile, in the shed, their father has shrunk the
scope of his similar attempts to merely repairing a stubborn
tractor.
to
the
Young Larry occupies himself with divining some order
world,
but
by
the
age
of
twelve
has
revised
his
expectations: “I did not think that anything could choose me /
To be a Larry Levis before there even was / A Larry Levis.
It
was strange, but not strange enough / To warrant some design”
(29-32).
In this he places himself opposite of his old man, who
though he also has no deeper understanding of the world around
him
(or
of
the
mysterious
tractor)
nevertheless
attempts
force it into some state it would not otherwise take.
to
In “Some
Grass” Levis describes his father “piecing together some puzzle/
That might start up a tractor... / And do it without paying
money” (47-48, 51); we see in “Family Romance” that the answer
to these puzzles usually involves “some piece of metal / That
would finally fit, with grease & an hour of pushing” (7-8).
Mr.
Levis’s answers to the mysteries of his life are somewhat heavyhanded for the tastes of his son.
Given this, it is the deepest
of
himself
tragedies
when
Larry
finds
adopting
indelicate
techniques himself.
When he refers to the pigeons “Roosting stupidly & about to
be shot” (14) in the rafters of the barn, we hardly expect that
6
it is he who will pick up the shotgun and start firing; it seems
so much to be the action of a callous man, not a boy who spends
his
afternoons
with
his
sister,
talking
about
mathematics.
Levis hardly seems to have expected it, either.
There is a
sense of flattened affect, the type one sees in the victim of
some great trauma, when he describes the surreal event: “They
fell, like gray fruit, at my feet—/ Fat, thumping things that
grew quieter when their eyelids, a softer gray, closed... / And
their friends or lovers flew out of a kind of skylight / Cut for
loading hay. / I don’ t know, exactly, what happened then” (4042, 44-45). The next few lines describe how, like the pigeons,
his siblings left the roost and scattered; it is hard to not
hear some note of self-reproach for their flight in that sudden
transition, as if his uncharacteristic actions were responsible
for their departure.
Destiny, which he could not believe in as
a child, is now dangerously close to claiming him as an adult;
he has inherited something akin to his father’ s life, with its
use of force and its ever-present Catholic guilt.
Yet this is
not his fall from Eden; it is the consequence of staying there.
Perhaps the greatest horror of Eden is how unappealing it is
from the inside.
That fate—to remain inside—has all but overtaken Levis as he
drives to his wedding in a suit appropriate for a funeral—this,
7
it would seem, is something of a death for him (“A deceased
young flower” (55) in his lapel?
Come on).
Yet something—
perhaps the speed of his brother’s Buick, a vehicle free of the
farm and utterly unlike the broken-down tractor—tickles the back
of his mind, and he asks himself something which both removes
his innocent belief in that marriage and cements his exile from
a world set to engulf him.
Unlike the scene in the barn, he
questions what he is about to do—he tastes of that tree of
Knowledge, and it gives something back to him as it takes the
rest away.
Along the pattern of his youth, he can ask himself
“Why me?” and “Why her?” and know that it cannot last; this is
as close as I can imagine one ever getting to attaining Eden,
which materializes only as we leave it.
If we are to believe
Levis, Eden takes the shape of the past in the words of the
present, and the questions he asks take their form from a musing
he entertained in childhood:
When I was twelve, I used to stare at weeds
Along the road, at the way they kept trembling
Long after a car had passed; Or at gnats
hovering over
Some rotting peaches, & wonder why it was
I had been born a human.
Why not a weed, or a gnat? (21-27)
in
families
As a boy, Levis saw himself reflected in inhuman things.
He
trembled with desire for the cars passing him on their way to
other places as he and his family hovered over their decaying
8
farm.
His father cannot anthropomorphize in this way, as Levis
demonstrates
in
“Some
Grass
Along
a
Ditch
Bank”;
when
the
steadfast farmer goes to the mailbox where the “rank but still
blossoming weeds / stir [...] / As you drove past” (64-66) Kent
Levis does not attribute them even the suggestion of emotion
which Larry Levis gives to the grass earlier in that poem.
That
“you” is also telling—we, and thus Levis, are to identify with
the person in the car, not with the peasant we pass by.
Levis
has dreamt of us, and the other world that passes him on the
road alongside his family farm, and it is that ability which
saves him from his father’s fate.
It is also what has closed
the world of his childhood to him forever.
He must leave.
What do you do, then, with a place you’ve lost so completely
and importantly?
the
other
indication.
exiles
In
Levis has some idea.
of
it,
his
he
generation,
mentions
He aligns himself with
if
Robert
his
essay
Lowell,
the
is
any
great,
terrified tyrant of Boston, as his tour-guide for that Eastern
city, claiming refuge in the “grave, ruefully humorous poetry of
[his] Life Studies” (43).
There is no small resemblance between
Lowell’s portrayal of his father—a childlike man who tiptoes
down the stairs to chain the front door at night and plays at
being a navy man after years from sea—and the equally uneasy,
alien sense we get of Kent Levis within Winter Stars.
Though if
9
Lowell
reveals
his
father
nakedly
on
the
page,
letting
him
stumble drunkenly about in “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms” or
going through his things in “Father’s Bedroom,” Levis takes it a
step further, laying him out literally nude in his bed in “The
Cry”:
[...] my mother & father slept with nothing on, & the pale
light
Shone through the window on the candor
Of their bodies strewn over the sheets, & those bodies
Were not beautiful, like distant cities [...]
I could see
The stooped shoulders & sunken chest of my father,
Sullen as the shape of a hawk in wet weather,
The same shape it takes in its death[.] (34-36, 46-49)
There is nothing childlike here, or even childish.
For Levis,
his parents—particularly his father—were linked to that stale,
gray earth that seemed less to grow grapes than to turn its
people to raisins.
They lie here exhausted, shriveled, inhuman.
They are harbingers of young Larry’s fate some day, and though
Levis writes of them with the same distant, yet fascinated tone
that Lowell uses for his own parents, they must be more bare,
more terrifying than some failed mariner and his ball-busting
wife, because while Lowell did not understand his father, he did
not fear, could not possibly fear, becoming his father.
did.
Levis
(It should be noted that Mrs. Levis sleeps on beside her
husband, equally worn by time and strain, whereas Mrs. Lowell—
Miss
Charlotte
Winslow
in
her
time—was
every
bit
as
much
a
10
tyrant as her son, who in most ways took after her.) Whatever
Lowell feared, it came from a different source than what Levis
speaks of, though they were both victims of family circumstance;
Levis, the victim of too little power, Lowell, the victim of too
much.
For both men, the members of generation before theirs
were terrifying, alien things, and they both sought desperately
for some other model towards which they could grow and age; no
such being existed in the land of their youth.
No such being existed in the land of James Wright’s youth,
either;
but
it
is
he,
not
Lowell,
who
provides
Levis
the
language he needs to speak of his exile, and thus approach more
closely his Eden.
There may be few better authors than Lowell
to study if one wishes to write of people, but Wright is a
pinnacle of place, and it is place that can tell us of our past
in what most resembles our own voice.
Levis notes in “Eden and
My Generation” that “Life Studies gave me a way to feel a place
which was not there anymore,” but adds that “It could never be
there at all for me... Lowell’s poems usually occur in closed
rooms, in privacies...” (44). This intimacy, which Levis uses to
great effect in Winter Stars, propels his audience to his past—
to his parents’ bedroom, to the barn full of scattering pigeons—
but does not pull us into himself, into his loss and desertion.
We meet Levis the exile in motion, outdoors, atop a tractor
11
“staring into the distance like / Somebody with a vision / In
the wrong place for visions” (65, 24-26).
world,
of
this
world,
is
the
view
of
His view of that
someone
apart,
hoping
something to emerge from the gray earth and expecting about as
much as Wright expected of those Ohio slagheaps.
The two are
brothers in a way Lowell is not; they need to be terrified of
the large, while Lowell was allowed the luxury of terror of the
small.
Those coal mines and grape fields are man-eaters of an
inhuman
scale,
particular
and
touch;
finding
to
locate
oneself
the
amongst
personal,
them
they
requires
must
a
orient
themselves within the impersonal.
This is the “abstract, meditative mode of thinking” to which
Levis refers as testifying “not merely to private loss, exile,
and knowledge, but to a collective and generational loss, exile,
and knowledge” (41-42). Take, for instance, these lines from
Wright’s “In the Face of Hatred”:
Only two boys,
Trailed by shadows of rooted police,
Turn aimlessly in the lashing elderberries.
One cries for his father’s death,
And the other, the silent one,
Listens into the hallway
Of a dark leaf. (18)
The passage reads like Levis’s “Some Grass Along a Ditch Bank,”
not just in its form but in its intentions.
These boys are not
merely lost in space, but in spirit—I am not sure which boy, the
12
crying
or
the
silent
one,
is
more
distressing—just
as
the
Levises atop their tractor turn the earth beneath them and find
nothing.
They
affects them.
are
examined
within
space—within
place—as
it
They are small figures upon a large field, and
this creates a very different examination of them as beings
within their world.
In his essay on Eden, Levis goes so far as
to say that Wright did “not fall from his Eden, but in fact
seems
adding
to
stay
there
[...]
through
memory
and
imagination,”
“But how can any Eden endure the Self?” (45). Levis’s
preoccupation with perception, with the distortions that time
and personal change can have on our understanding of our past
and present, stems from this: far as he goes from it, close as
he comes to it, something is always out of proportion.
Eden is
never captured because of the limits of his perception, as if he
were trying to seriously photograph anything armed only with a
Polaroid1.
The matter of scale is perhaps most important in examining
Winter Stars’ title poem, which comes near the beginning of the
book and constitutes something of its thesis.
locate
himself
in
terms
of
both
his
father
Levis attempts to
and
the
outside
world, and realizes that what connects them, or could connect
1 My friend, when I read this line aloud, insisted that Polaroids take the
best pictures because of their limitations. I might be inclined to agree,
but try getting a clear picture of anything with no zoom, a weak flash and
nine square inches of film.
13
them, if he could only catch hold of it, is language.
begins
semi-autobiographically
with
the
statement
The poem
“My
father
once broke a man’s hand / Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere
tractor” (1-2), an intensely specific image if ever there was
one.
But this is as close as Larry gets to Kent Levis, as most
of the stanza concerns itself with Rubén Vásquez and his knife.
The old man just leaves.
When Levis says “I never understood
how anyone could risk his life, / Then listen to Vivaldi” (1415),
it
is
admission
not
of
so
much
an
ignorance.
He
admission
doesn’t
of
know
admiration
because
he
as
an
has
no
understanding of his father as a person; that man lying alone in
the dark is a man lying alone in the dark.
Is it much wonder, then, that young Larry turned, and still
does, to the stars?
Their dim remoteness must have seemed in
some ways familiar, and he acknowledges that “In California,
that light was closer” (21). Though he explains later that he is
in the Midwest as he goes out in the yard and looks at the
skies,
he
“[F]or
years
became
is
searching
I
empty,
in
believed
/
And
/
instinctively
father
and
feels
stars,
only
very
That
pure,
persisted,” he tells us.
he
a
real
what
like
way
went
for
his
unsaid
starlight,
father.
between
and
that
us
it
“I got it all wrong” (45-48). Although
a
similar,
one
of
remote
them
was
connection
ever
meant
to
both
to
be
14
eternally unreachable, and only one of those connections can
endure.
It
is
not,
of
course,
the
connection
which
might
actually be reciprocal. As his father’s life draws to a close,
Levis finds himself in a strange position.
father
and
his
father’s
life,
and
While he left his
with
good
reason,
as
permanently and completely as he could, he wants to get back.
He
believes,
even
if
he
can’t
articulate
it
(as
his
father
becomes increasingly unable to articulate anything) that he can
have the stars if only he could capture that moon; that the most
remote could be accessible if only he had his father’s eyes, his
father’s words.
says,
having
ascends,
“You can almost believe that the elevator,” he
turned
his
open
upon
must
father’s
mind
starlight”
into
(41-42).
a
hotel,
The
“As
inside
it
will
access the outside, the personal will attain the universal, if
only
he
could
get
father’s thoughts.
stand
out
on
the
inside
and
use,
not
merely
observe,
his
Neither option, however, is available; “I
street,
&
do
not
go
in.
/
That
was
our
agreement, at my birth” (43-44). To be born human is to be born
separate, even from those closest to us, those most important to
us.
Levis is on his own.
So why not attempt to meet somewhere outside of ourselves,
in that shared present we must have together?
no common present, or past.
Because there is
There is no common place.
In “Eden
15
and
My
Generation,”
Levis
lists
the
many
places
that
have
belonged to many poets, including other Californias written of
at the same time he wrote about his, and concludes that “In a
way, we can never get to those places because they don’t exist—
not really, anyway” (43).
The “California no one will ever see
again” (24) in “Winter Stars” is his father’s California, to
which Levis belonged and which has never been described, in
whole or in part.
Losing that California when his father dies
means losing both a person and a place that Levis has already
struggled
to
capture
within
the
limited
scope
of
his
own
transient experience.
His father senses it, too, and wishes to
convey
himself,
something
of
hampered
not
only
by
normal
hindrances but by his encroaching senility: “Now, if we try to
talk, I watch my father / Search for a lost syllable as if it
might / Solve everything, & though he can’t remember, now, / The
word
for
it,
he
is
ashamed...”
(28-31).
creature, and words have their limits.
that lack, too; surely we all have.
Man
is
a
verbal
Larry Levis has felt
But there is something
infantilizing about it, anyway, and all the more humiliating
when we can see what we cannot have.
The stars are free from
such embarrassment, as they have no language to use, or lose:
“That pale haze of stars goes on & on, / Like laughter that has
found
a
final,
silent
shape
/
On
a
black
sky.
It
means
16
everything
/
It
cannot
say”
(56-59).
Untouchable,
mute,
the
stars are perhaps something of an Eden, too, if we believe that
Eden
might
struggle.
without
be
something
that
is
free
to
simply
be,
without
Here on Earth, however, the question is moot; being
language,
without
death, is the struggle.
difference
from
our
birth
to
our
We may as well accept our exile if it
means we are given something in return, and we are indeed given
something in return.
We are given Eden.
Eden is not a place one perceives while one is inside it.
It is ignorance, it is innocence.
A child in its mother’s arms
has no words to describe its safety and security because it has
no need of them.
The words “safety” and “security” only gain
their meaning once they must be actively sought, and Levis would
have no words, no perception even nearing his Eden had he not
left
it.
To
make
this
place,
this
feeling,
this
past
materialize, he had to step outside of it, and one cannot do so
temporarily.
I have not spoken much, if at all, about what
constitutes Levis’s Eden; he cannot tell me.
I do know it was a
place where he spoke with his sister and shot pigeons, where he
watched
weeds
and
gnats
sleeping forms one night.
things,
because
they
are
and
came
upon
his
parents’
naked,
These cannot seem like good, pure
no
longer
neither is Levis a good, pure being.
good,
pure
things,
but
If he were to attempt to
17
write about these things as if he were good and pure, the result
would
be
something
monstrous.
As
a
child,
he
might
have
experienced them, but it was as an adult that he remembered
them, and it was to his adult self that they mattered.
Perhaps
those weeds by the road trembled mutely for Kent Levis because
he
never
left
this
place.
Perhaps
they
never
trembled
meaningfully for Larry Levis until many years after they had
grown still.
Works Cited
Levis, Larry. “Eden and My Generation.” The Gazer Within. Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001.
18
---. Winter Stars. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992.
Lowell, Robert. For the Union Dead. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2007.
Wright, James. The Branch Will Not Break. Middletown: Wesleyan U
P, 1963.
19