(Ed. note: This is Part IV of Chester Johnson's series about Henri Faust. You can read Part I here, Part II here, and Part III here.)
Maybe just one of these exceptional forces or maybe an aggregation
of a few or possibly all or maybe none caused the poet, William Edgar Spencer, then
to seek a life outside of Arkansas. We
do know that armed with a law degree from the University of Arkansas and with additional,
advance legal studies in hand from Northwestern University, Spencer went to
Washington, D. C. in 1938 as personal secretary to U. S. Congressman W. F.
Norrell, long-term representative from southeast Arkansas and who, more than
twenty years later, would appoint the author at age fourteen to be a
Congressional page. Subsequently,
Spencer held the position of administrative law judge with the National Labor
Relations Board in Washington, D. C., and then in California, where he
ultimately retired.
Between 1930
and 1975, even though Spencer continued to write verse – still, in the name of
Henri Faust – and publish poems in newspapers and poetry magazines, he did not
produce another volume of poems. It
should nonetheless be mentioned that Half-Light and Overtones was
reissued by the AMS Press of New York in 1971. Then, in December, 1975, a new
book of his verse appeared, entitled Sharecropper Sonnets – at last,
under his real name; Spencer was finally freed from the encumbrance of his
vassal, the long-tendriled Henri Faust. Notwithstanding the fact that decades had
passed since Spencer lived in Arkansas, he chose, once again, southeast
Arkansas, not northern California, where he had been living and working, as the
campestral setting for his new book of verse.
In the Introduction to the Sharecropper Sonnets, he states,
“Many of the poems that follow were written in my late teens and early twenties
when, following my mother’s death, I lived alone with my father on his hill
farm of several hundred mortgage ridden acres near Lacey, Arkansas (Drew
County).”
A
meaningful part of the volume does not consist of sonnets at all, and several poems
are written in free verse, a distinct departure from the earlier style that dominated
Half-Light
and Overtones. I’m not one who normally disagrees with the last few
words of a poet. I trust Spencer that
the sonnets are indeed from an earlier period; however, there are other poems
in a section of the book he calls “Arkansas Sketchbook” that reflect a much
different style of writing; in such poems, the construction is more stark, less
uniform and more contemporary, if you will.
For example, while the milieu remains southeast Arkansas, the
perspective of the poet in this excerpt from the poem, “Swamp,” is hardly one
reflected, either in structure or content, from Spencer’s youthful verse:
“There’s something whispers a secret every night
Across the cypress knees of Buzzard Bayou
But none have lingered
To make it out.
Stricken with a fatal malady
The swamp is decomposing
And myriad tadpoles like maggots
Turn in its soft, gangrened flesh.”
Before the poetry actually surfaces in Sharecropper Sonnets, a front
section of the volume recounts the poet’s background and previous work, emphasizing
that during the full arc of his adult life, Spencer had written and often published
poetry. If this be true (and why shouldn’t it be?) and if Half-Light and Overtones
and Sharecropper
Sonnets illustrate the poet’s
early work, up to the age of around thirty – with the probable exception of some
poems included in “Arkansas Sketchbook” of Sharecropper Sonnets – then what became
of the rest of his verse, written during the long period, 1930-1975? Importance
of the subsequent, missing verse gains more relevance when one considers that Spencer,
at one point, called the Yale prize book, “premature.” William Edgar Spencer died a few months after
publication of the Sharecropper Sonnets, but there is a statement in that volume
that it constituted only the first of four volumes to be issued. One could thus
presume that those three additional volumes to be published would have
contained the poems he wrote during the 1930-1975 period. He died before the goal could be reached –
thus, with a likely outcome that the body of Spencer’s work had been left in an
inchoate state. I’m sorry I won’t have
the opportunity to read the missing verse.
From the
“Arkansas Sketchbook” section of the Sharecropper Sonnets emerges the
poem, “Epitaph For A Solitary Oak,” out of which the following excerpt is
taken:
“For my epitaph (if there be an epitaph
For my unshriven dead)
I would have the unrepentant truth,
That I led
A life of indifference
More impenetrable through the years;”
William Edgar Spencer. Indifferent? Hardly. Impenetrable? With the absence of the poems we
have reason to believe were composed by him over more than four decades,
possibly forming a crucial part of his overall oeuvre, the prescience of the line,
“more impenetrable through the years,” should not be missed – those words may now
have become the most forcefully ironic line of Spencer’s known body of verse.