"The Hand of a Chinese Master": Jose Garcia Villa and Modernist Orientalism

On November 9, 1948, a reception was held at the Gotham Book Mart in New York City in honor of Edith and Osbert Sitwell. The distinguished literary guests included W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Tennessee Williams. A photograph of the evening shows Auden, perched on a ladder, towering above the scene; Moore sits directly below him, with Bishop to her left. To their right is a less familiar figure, no less at ease than the rest, but perhaps most striking for being the only non-white person in the group: Jose Garcia Villa (1908-1997), a forty-year-old Filipino poet whose 1942 collection Have Come, Am Here had earned him wide acclaim and admission to the highest American literary circles. That Villa's name should be largely unknown today would likely be quite surprising to the literary luminaries who surrounded him at that reception. Villa's prominent friends and champions--Moore, Edith Sitwell, E. E. Cummings, Mark Van Doren--considered Villa a significant writer, and his work was widely anthologized in collections of modern American poetry of the 1940s and 1950s. Although he had only published two volumes in the United States, his reputation was substantial enough for a Selected Poems to be issued in 1958. Yet by the 1960s Villa was already sliding into obscurity. His poems stopped appearing in major American poetry anthologies, and his books went out of print and remained so. Perhaps his baroque religious imagery came to seem dated and his formal innovations--"reversed consonance" and "comma poems"--derivative of poets like Cummings. In any case, Villa fell quickly from the canon of modern American poetry and now seems a mere footnote to its history. In examining Villa's rapid rise and fall, I argue that his American reputation emerged in a kind of contact zone between Filipino and US literary formations. Villa has been regarded since the 1930s as the Philippines' greatest modern English-language poet, the writer who, as E. San Juan, Jr. puts it in The Philippine Temptation, "almost singlehandedly founded modern writing in English in the Philippines" (171). Through much of the later twentieth century he wielded enormous authority in the Philippines as critic, anthologist, and arbiter of literary reputations, and his status as a great "National Artist" was even officially ratified by the Marcos regime in the early 1970s. But American modernism could only adapt to the phenomenon of a Filipino modernist writer by placing him squarely within the Anglo American literary tradition, while filtering his racial difference through an orientalism already present within modernist ideology. The presence of that orientalism also meant that there was a particular space available for Villa to occupy. In this sense, race became a curious kind of asset in his US canonization. But it also, as his fall from favor suggests, placed a limit on the kinds of formal gestures that would be accepted in his work. Modernist orientalism allowed readers to aestheticize Villa's race in a way that did not disrupt the ostensibly universalizing standards of modernism; those readers that did thematize Villa's nationality tended to reject his work, revealing the deep connection of aesthetic criteria to national boundaries. Although Villa was hailed as a major new American poet when Have Come, Am Here was published by Viking in 1942, his career had already spanned over a decade in the US and the Philippines. Villa was born in Manila in 1908, the son of a doctor. His first collection of poems, swaggeringly titled Man Songs and published in the Philippines Herald, got him expelled from the University of the Philippines for its erotic content, but it also won him a literary prize whose funds allowed him to travel to the United States (Joaquin 160). He studied at the University of New Mexico and published a well-received short story collection, Footnote to Youth, in 1933. While he remained obscure in the US, Villa's reputation in the Philippines soared through the 1930s. …