ALVA NP TURNER

In New York we live under the skin of the apple but in
Southern Illinois the core of the thing is more apparent. Here
is a man 41 years old who has been upon the track of poetry for
a lifetime, hailed as the brightest young man in that part of
the state from the first, went to college in Waco, Texas,
became a teacher, married, had two children, became a preacher,
failed to make good at anything, wanted to write, failed to
hold the attention of his wife, failed to be able to continue
work of any sort, was sent to an insane asylum, remained there
two years, was divorced - and at the end of that time, being
41, has managed to write one or two good poems. I mean poems of
striking freedom from the usual - there is no word to describe
the matted sewage that clings about most verse.

But I do not choose to speak of this man as a poet. That
will take care of itself. I am interested in the phenomena. It is
the perennial sign in the sky. He is not a poet except by
an excoriating scrapping of almost everything he has done - and
my God he has written reams of drivel - in order to come at a
stanza or a well turned line. No, not a well turned line
but a line turned with the precision and the supreme accomplishment
of a master. As a phenomena he is constant, as a poet he is
almost none existent.

But his weight has crushed for me the vapid American
literary world under him as if it were - what it is - toilet paper.

Alva N. Turner - preface to poems : The french exploited their couleur locale. Merimee wrote Columba. A pretty exercise. Bizet composed Carmen : a good french opera. But there is nothing Corsican about Columba. There is nothing Spanish about Carmen. # Couleur locale is an exploded myth. It is the cult of the exotic under a new name.

As to Gauguin - he became local by transplantation, he did not invoke couleur locale.

Americans follow their betters in dressing up small town folk to dance in their novels. There is nothing local in these pieces of work. It is the same tiresome Carmen. A newer Hardy, somewhat faded and altered to fit local conditions but there is no invention. There is no evidence of intimate relationship between the writers sensations and the environment he speaks of any more than if it were China he were describing.

A work of art is an evidence of complete identification between the artist and the thing he is treating of. It is not necessary alone that he be describing certain incidents of his life that he has actually lived. It is necessary that the work he is engaged upon will be wholly, to the last particle, identifiable as a # certain thing in which the form is related to the matter and the matter to a place and the whole to a living soul peculiar in its perfections that has colored it in a way never to be confused with # patchwork, colors already fixed and borrowed entire.

Americans have lived by eating the few words of Jefferson,
Franklin, Whitman, Lincoln for five generations and we are now
nearly starved. We are decaying under our own noses. Fed from
abroad: noyes, Materlink etc. Gh! Degraded. Without the
word we will cease to exist as a nation, our life is a scream
of desperate struggle. Turner is horrible to me from the
purity of his isolation and clarifying decay. The values
the typefies fill me with ecstacy.