Three Nightpieces

Introduction

In a letter dated June 11 from Ezra Pound, the overseas, British editor of The Little Review, to Margaret Anderson, American editor of The Little Review, Pound writes, “The […] Rodker stuff is not a compromise but a bet. [. . .] Rodker has convinced me at last, that he ‘has it in him’” (Pound 62-63). Pound’s optimistic defense of the young poet and fiction writer John Rodker was in response to Anderson’s doubt as to the promise of Rodker’s “Three Nightpieces” that would be published in an upcoming July publication in 1917. In his best attempt to assuage Anderson’s concerns, Pound asserts his assurance in Rodker’s potential as a writer, and concludes, “He has more invention, more guts” than many of his young contemporaries (63). “Three Nightpieces” was subsequently the first of Rodker’s short fiction pieces to be included in The Little Review, stamped with Pound’s hopeful approval.

Pound’s faith in the young poet was not in vain, as Rodker’s inventiveness as a writer is truly recognizable in the July 1917 issue. Though Rodker was more famously known as a poet, “Three Nightpieces,” though arguably poetic, breaks from the more traditional or even more contemporary poetic forms of his day—particularly the precision of images in the Vorticist or Imagist movements. Rodker’s piece instead embraces story-like prose and explorative subjectivity, and can arguably be read as an escape from the mechanistic, futuristic optimism of a Vorticist aesthetic in light of the tragic decline of humanity (which Rodker had himself observed during his inscription in the first World War ). “Three Nightpieces,” therefore, is arguably not a poem at all, for it embraces the investigative, subjective qualities of a modernist short story. In the context of and in line with the themes of the other pieces in the journal, Rodker is keenly concerned with representations of the body and the erotic, anarchy and the dismantling of structures, yet he takes his approach to body one step further, exploring in particular memory as it plays out in both the illusion of the image and the mystery of subjectivity.

The project of Rodker’s “Three Nightpieces” is perhaps most striking when juxtaposed with the other inclusions in The Little Review. Included alongside his story in the July 1917 issue, for example, are the poems of Louis Gilmore and T.S. Eliot, which when compared to Rodker’s short story clearly embrace the more rigid line of the image as vortex. To grasp just how much Rodker’s vision in “Three Nightpieces” differs from his previous investment in Imagism and Vorticism as a poet, one only need read “Three Nightpieces” set against the formula Ezra Pound established in the 1914 Vorticist manifesto, “Vortex.” Pound, establishing the concept of the image, writes, “You may think of man as that toward which perception moves. You may think of him […] as the plastic substance RECEIVING impressions. OR you may think of him as DIRECTING a certain fluid force against circumstance […] Every conception, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form” (Pound). The image as vortex and primary is still clear in the issue’s inclusion of Eliot and Gilmore. In Improvisations, for example, Gilmore writes, “My thoughts are apes/That clamber through the tree-tops/Towards the moon” (20). Within each stanza is one self-contained poem after another, each primary image embodying a thousand images, yet all without exploring the mystery of myriad perceptions.

What Rodker does in his own inclusion in the periodical not only refutes his previous Imagist and Vorticist influence as a poet, but works through prose fiction as a means of exploring the subjectivity that Vorticism lacks. In the first of Rodker’s three night pieces, the subject’s memory and nostalgia are jolted to life when he connects the silhouetted landscape beyond his window to the image of breasts. He writes, “And putting my head on my breast, faint and reminiscent—the smell from my armpits rises to my brain, and she stands before me vividly and the same smell comes from her” (Rodker 17) Rather than leave the imprint of the image for the reader to create meaning, Rodker’s subject weaves his way through one impression after the other, thus producing a stream-of-consciousness  connection that will lead eventually lead him to a moment of epiphany, a realization that perception is illusory, opaque—that the image merits exploration, that it can never be primary or contained in one great whole. The image is subjective.

 

Transcription

Toward eight o’clock I begin to feel my pulses accelerating quietly.  A little after, my heart begins to thump against its

walls. I tremble all over, and leaving the room rapidly go out on the terrace of the house and look over the weald^[1]An Old English word for ‘forest.’ Also used to signify a wooded district or open country (Oxford English Dictionary)..

There is a shadowiness of outline and the air is crisp. The sky in one corner is a pale nostalgic rose. The trees look like weeds and a bird flies up through them like a fish lazily rising. The hills really look like breasts: and each moment I look for the head of the Titan negress^[2]Negress, meaning “a black woman,” could also refer to the poetic personification of the night (Oxford English Dictionary). to rise with the moon in the lobe of her ear.^[3] Possibly an allusion to the Titaness Phoebe from Greek mythology. Phoebe, often associated with the moon, was also known as the Titan goddess of prophecy.

I think of my youth and the intolerable legacy it left me.

I think of the crazy scaffolding of my youth and wonder why I should be surprised that the superstructure should be crazy too, wavering to every breeze and threatening ever to come down about my ears. I think too of wrongs done to this one and that one, and

. . . . . ." Oh, my God," I cry, "I did not know, I did not know," and my heart thumps louder in my breast and my pulses throb like a tide thundering and sucking at some crumbling jetty.

I gulp deep breaths of air to steady myself, but it is of no good. I think of her whom I love and futility overwhelms me: for this too will have its common end, and our orbits grow ever remoter.

And putting my head on my breast, faint and reminiscent—the smell from my armpits rises to my brain, and she stands before me vividly and the same smell comes from her; but it is more heady and more musky and she looks at me with intolerable humility.

And a minute after there is only the dark; a hoot-owl's terrifying call and the queer yap that comes in reply; the frogs that thud through the grass like uncertain feet; the trees that talk to each other.

And I would willingly let my life out gurgling and sticky, and sink without a bubble into its metallic opacity.

 

II.

I had gone to bed quietly at my wife's side, kissing her casually as was my custom. I awoke about two in the morning with a start so sudden that it seemed I had been shot by a cannon out of the obscurity of sleep into the light of waking; at one moment I had been, as it were, gagged and bound by sleep; and the next I was wide awake and could distinctly sense the demarking line between sleep and waking. And this demarking line was like a rope made of human hair such as one sees in exhibitions of indigenous Japanese products.^[4] The Higashi Hongan-ji Temple in Kyoto, Japan was constructed in part by female devotees’ hair. In order to hoist up the final beams of the temple, women cut their hair and fastened it into long, thick ropes to create levees for heavy lifting. The hair ropes, exhibited at the temple, continue to attract a number of visitors (Atlas Obscura).

In my ears still rang the after-waves of the shriek which had awakened me. The nerves governing my skin were still out of control as a result of the sudden fright, and portions of it con­tinued twitching for a long time after; my scalp grew cold in patches and my hair stood on end. . . . . In the dark I found myself trembling all over and bathed in a cold sweat. . . . . And it was impossible to collect myself. My wife, I felt, was sitting up in bed and a minute afterward she began to weep quietly.

I was still trembling and her quiet weeping made me more afraid. I was angry with her too, but could not talk to her, I was so afraid. My voice, I knew, would have issued thin and quavering, and I was afraid of its hollow reverberations losing themselves uncertainly in the darkness. By the little light I saw her put her hands up to her head in despair. . . .as though still half asleep; and before I could stop her again the same piercing, incredibly terrifying shriek burst from her. Again I trembled all over, involuntarily gnashing my teeth and feeling my skin ripple like loathsome worms.

“Stop,” I cried, seizing her by the arms, ''Stop," afraid to wake her, yet more afraid to hear again that appalling shriek—and in a moment she was awake. . . .looking wildly round her, and the quiet weeping gave way to a  wild and tempestuous sobbing.

I was afraid of her, afraid to go on sleeping with her, lest she should again shriek in that wild and unearthly fashion; afraid to fall asleep again lest I should be a wakened by that appalling shriek dinning in my ears and my body quivering vilely under the impossible sound. I clung to her: "What is it, tell me at least what it is," I said.

For a time she would not tell me. Trembling all over with anguish and fear of I knew not what, I insisted. When at last she did tell me it was as though the world had suddenly been cut away from under my feet. Helplessly and weeping I clung to her, with cold at my heart. That any human being could accuse another of devilry so sinister, so cold, so incredible even in dream, I had not conceived of. Loathing her, I clung the closer in my anguish and despair.

 

III.

One night at supper I had eaten cucumber.  Soon after I went to bed and on the first strokes of ten fell asleep.

After sleeping for a long time I awoke into a dimly lit room. I still lay on the bed and after a moment a figure entered, and after a few moments more, another, until in this fashion there were half a dozen people in the room. I could not distinguish who they were, and quietly and obscurely they moved round my bed. Now and then there was a hiss out of the corners of the room, or a chuckle in reply to some unheard obscenity.

A heavy weight oppressed me as though I knew they menaced me in some obscure and dreadful way.   I could not move.

I could not move, and always the same obscure and dreadful procession encircled me and shadowy bodies pressed a little closer, then drew back again to join the sinister group.

And though I saw nothing save their shadowy forms, I knew their eyes gleamed down at me: their faces were lecherous: their hands clawed; and forever and through long ages they went round me in sinister procession.

Suddenly. . . .and how I do not know, I had broken the bonds of sleep^[5] The original reads “I had broken the bonds of of sleep […]”. and lay trembling in a cold sweat. Through my protecting blankets the last strokes of ten were fading.