Working with Biographical Materials

Colette Inez is the daughter of a California-born Catholic priest, who was a World War I chaplain, and a French scholar, who had assisted the priest in compiling a catalog of Aristotle’s medieval manuscripts. The priest died a few years after Inez was placed in a orphanage in Brussels. Her mother left France to become an archivist at Oxford and later a teacher at various English schools. The priest wished Inez to be an American citizen and arranged for her to be adopted by a former American student. She was sent to America but became a foster child of another family instead. It was only when she learned that that family had not filed the proper papers for her citizenship that she began the research that led her to the identity of her father and mother. She subsequently came to know her mother and the members of her maternal family. It was only after her mother’s death that she was freed to disclose her relationship to the family. The story of her early years in the orphanage, her foster family, and her search for her parentage is the substance of her recently published autobiography, The Secret of M. Dulong.

While the publication of the autobiography lagged behind the death of her mother by a dozen years, when she started writing the manuscript is unknown. Such information may be forthcoming in interviews concerning the recent publication, but what can be traced is the emotion and the processing of that emotion through her poetry and the autobiography. Examination of poems treating her parentage and her early years in the orphanage collected in Getting Under Way show an interesting progression from her earliest published book of poems, The Woman Who Loved Worms, in 1972, to the poems from Family Life, published in 1988, and those new poems in the 1992 volume.

The opening poem in Getting Under Way, reprinted from The Woman Who Loved Worms, is a satiric attempt on the part of the author to treat the marginalization that she undoubtedly felt growing up as an orphan. “Orphans of All Denominations Will Meet” was apparently spawned by a sign the narrator saw in the subway announcing the meeting of orphans. The satirical poem is organized around several fictional announcements presumably spread about the world. Intertextual warnings such as “Do Not Step on the Orphans,” “Check all Orphans With the Baggageman,” and “Put an Orphan in Your Tank” follow each announcement as does the narrator’s commentary. Commentaries such as “buckle them in to dream of passage like doomed geese/ stunned with corn and gorged for the feast of the organs” suggest the rawness of the emotion that the author attempts to distance rhetorically.

The anger in this poem is followed in “A Collar Rounds My Thoughts” with her attack on her priest father. The central image is the “collar jettisoned,/ a crescent on the floor.” That collar cuts the narrator’s neck, “rounds [her] thought” and “rounds [her] world like an equator.” That same collar choked “desire in the penitent hours/ before [her] birth.” The third from this volume, “Meeting in London,” compares her mother’s abandonment to the Jews who turned their children in to the Nazis, her birth to “rifling” of a bank by “masked bandits.” Anger and hurt drip from the harshness of the imagery.

The poems that appeared in Family Life mark both a change in emotion, a growing understanding of her mother, and an artistic distancing from the early trauma of abandonment. The plight of the orphan is treated in “Without Toys at the Home” not with angry satire but with poignancy. Without dolls and toys the children are left to invent their own. For the narrator, the naming of fingers substituted for dolls, and the lines of her palms became the settings for their imaginative flights. Her “playstone” slept in an imaginative “doll’s chiffonnier.” The years have given the narrator the perspective to know that her peers have children that “have toys enough/ to break, and their children enough for quarreling.” “Escape from the Iron Gates” remembers the narrator’s wish “for a white charger . . . / fit for a lady” on which to leave the orphanage, her friend Anne’s wish is “for a donkey like the beast our Lord rode in Jerusalem.” The focus on imaginative flight has snuffed out the daily routine, the thin gruel, the single dress, and the lonely nights.

“Gascon Journey” references the parents with an image of distance rather than the immediacy and intensity of the choking collar in the earlier poem. The movement of the train calms the narrator and she imagines that the secrets of her mother and father “hummed like rails, flew through/ road beds and coupling cars,” and simply calls them “Unlikely lovers.” Going to visit her mother, she knows that “There are questions I will never ask./ There are answers she will never give.”

In “Event Horizons,” the narrator puts her own ignoble birth into the context of the births of both her parents. Her priest/father is born in the context of her grandfather who welcomes a son to carry the family name. The baby is “ignorant of boundaries and time.” The mother’s birth comes in the “aroma of lavender and mint,/ fresh linen sheets.” Her own birth, she characterizes with the mother’s prayer that the daughter “be pardoned for giving testimony/ to her intense desire.” In the fourth section of the poem the “parents have vanished/ to live elsewhere at opposite ends of continents.” The child is not told when her father dies. The poem ends with an affirmation of time and an understanding of the humanity in which the narrator was conceived and abandoned.
In a province
of lost origins where borders fold one into another
and trail off, the child I tap on the shoulder
turns to me with my own face and we know
we will escape the custody of the past,
giving astonishment a horizon line not yet
defined but waiting to be drawn.

This poem shows the seasoning of emotion and the maturity necessary to revision past into a meaningful life story.
In the new poems in Getting Under Way, the loss that will never go away even though the mother has been found and the child has been recognized is treated in “Guarding the Unrevealed,” the finest poem in the series that treats the autobiographical materials. The father is figured as red, the sun who brings the “fire in the morning” and “mourns the death of night.” The mother is figured as the moon who “mourns the death of day.” The “secret daughter” mourns the death of the mother, but she knows that the past lives within, “red, spectral, filled with convolutions/ whispers and cloudy codes.” She mourns the mother’s inability to own her before her family and before the Church and she pities the mother’s own estrangement from her own faith. The “bells summoning worshippers to Mass” were forever silent for her.

One can only conclude that the growth in depth and understanding that is voiced in the autobiography was worked out in the poetry before the biography could be written.

The Logic of Jarman’s Sonnets

The one structural standard that holds constant throughout Mark Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets is that the poems are composed in fourteen lines. The traditional sonnet meter is relaxed when the dictates of the language or meaning predominate, and the rhymes of traditional forms are mixed, slanted, or ignored when a poem seems to call for necessary freedom. The jarring of form is consistent with the jarring of meaning or the traditional orthodoxy that is challenged by the poems. In terms of meaning, the sonnets are constant in the way that each explores a concept of religious orthodoxy through a process that builds to subversion. The sonnets concern themselves with language and the ways that man imagines God and tries to communicate with him in human terms. The turns the sonnets take attempt revision based often on man reaching for the unknowable.

Most of the sonnets are meditations that gently nudge the meaning of religious orthodoxy, but three are addressed directly to God. These three carry the voice of the supplicant and come at the beginning of the volume, at number 3 and at number 33 as though their placement carried the significance of spiritual numbering.

The introductory sonnet petitions God as driver of the other car on the highway. Each of the quatrains in the Petrarchan octave begin with “Please” and follow with a request for erratic driving—bear down, swerve, slow, cut off, and blast the horn in the first octave, tailgating and jockeying for position on a mountain road in the second. The turn reflects the exhaustion of “sanity/ and fuel,” and with the signature “please” asks the other driver to stop, get out, and walk back in rage to show his face. The tone evokes the Old Testament God, who frequently appeared out of a whirlwind or within violent experience, to appear in incredibly modern terms. The request central to the poem is for God to appear in the most unlikely circumstance and to reveal himself “face to face.” While the poem is organized around a slant rhyme scheme of abbaabbacdecde, there is the sense of a quatrain and couplet embedded in the sestet. The first four lines, even in their turn, increase the momentum of the action with the repetition of “please,” while the final two lines figure the response of the supplicant and rise to a crescendo with “My Lord!”. The two final words are both oath and penitential response. The sonnet establishes the “unholy” parameters of the sonnets to follow.

In sonnet 3, the “imagined God” is addressed with a request that the “blow” be softened. The speaker admits that his concept of God is “derivative,” but he believes that partly he is “bent” to make God appear to be accidental. Again, using the Petrarchan form, the octave questions the pressure that is brought to bear on the speaker while the sestet acquiesces. If he is to be bent “like the pole/ A horseshoe clangs against,” then he asks God to bend him “like the grinning iron monger” twisting a bar.

In sonnet 33, God is addressed in a conventional form at the beginning of the octave—“Lord, spare me”—and at the beginning of the sestet—“Lord, stop my hand,” but the subject matter is less conventional and what begins with a semblance of rhyme loses any sense of rhyme after the first quatrain. Basically, the poem is the writer’s request that God keep him working and deliver him from the boredom of routine activities that prevent the holiness of his task from being realized. While there is very little progression in the development of the idea of the sonnet, there is a turn in mood in the ending couplet. Following the recital of those things that intervene in a writer’s life, there is a request that the writer be “equal to the task,” and the task be the “preoccupation of the lifework.”

There are four sonnet sequences within the volume. Two of these use the interlocking first and last lines characteristic of Donne, but two short sequences choose not to use this form and are simply tied by turning a common theme to several angles.

The first of these is written in response to a quotation by the theologian Karl Barth that suggests that God’s action or creation is the “answer” to a voiced prayer. The short sequence begins with a testing of the Barthian axiom and follows with a sonnet that explores the same concept in the temporal rather than the spiritual world. The next modulates back to a devotional approach, and the final sonnet in the sequence ends with a prayer of its own.

The octave of the first sonnet enumerates natural phenomena such as lightning, meteors, and viruses, and uses the Barthian notion as the turn in the sonnet: “Into this random rightness comes the prayer.” Jarman seems to challenge the notion by suggesting that the prayer is only interested in its answer and “twists time in a knot until it gets it.”

The utter disregard for the larger picture that seems to be figured in this preoccupation with answer is portrayed in the poem that follows. There’s a knock at the door but the man of the house is in the bath. The knock continues and accelerates causing the man to go see “what’s the matter.” The metaphorical suggestion is that if a demand is expressed loudly and insistently enough, it will get an answer.

The third poem in the sequence spins off the traditional supplication for life and daily bread. The speaker suggests that whatever comes is assumed by the supplicant to be the answer. The turn of the poem questions what the proper request could possibly be. If it is for God’s return, then the request is really invoking the end of time. In the last poem of the sequence, the supplicant acknowledges that prayer is basically man trying to make up or imagine God. As a kind of example, the narrator suggests that he is going to make up a God “immanent as snow.” In the turn of the sonnet, this snow God is addressed directly with a request that he reveal himself “as dangerous as it is beautiful.”

The sequence does what a single poem could not do. It explores the logic of the proposition of prayer and the imaginative dimension that it expects, and while it does not reject prayer per se, it does debunk the easy notions of the reality of man influencing God and argues for understanding that at best it can be merely a channel for understanding what is rather than arguing a whimsical what might be.

Sonnet 9 continues this debate on the problem of man communicating with God in its insistence that “someone is always praying as the plane/ breaks up.” The octave delineates the possible prayers before the crash, and the sestet answers with the crash and the ominous reality that “prayer/ struck . . . the rockhard, rippled face of facelessness.” The audacity of man communicating with God as though he were man seems to be an underlying problem. If the sonnets do anything, they argue for man to come to terms with the “facelessness” of God.

Sonnet 11 pictures a boy being influenced by a gang member to rob a convenience store in the octave. The sestet answers by forcing the gaze back on the gang member and suggests that the reader look inside the nylon stocking pulled over the head for the “sacred face inside that face.” The search for the sacred, the understanding of the sacred as sacred rather than a man’s version of sacred, is central to these sonnets.