Map

Afterword

Fiction, Fact, and Verse

 
“For one reads what one likes—yet one writes
not what one would like to write, but what one is
able to write.”
—Jorge Luis Borges
 

The story of Ludlow has lived in my marrow for forty years, and I tell it now because it feels ripe and I feel ready. I knew it was a story long before I told it, long before I even did research on the historical facts. I knew it when, as a boy, I first laid eyes on the dry mesas north of Trinidad, Colorado. I have made my experience and that of my family part of the story, which freed me to change focus at will, move about my imagined landscape with greater flexibility than I had attempted in earlier narratives. What excited me about this story was not any political agenda, but the elements that have always obsessed me—family, landscape, immigration, language. It was already part of my life’s work before I had written a line or found myself inventing a girl named Luisa Mole.

As in another narrative poem of mine, The Country I Remember (1996), this work braids fact and fiction the way an historical novel would do.

There is far more fiction than fact, and “facts are not the story,” as I say in the text. When The Country I Remember was first published, one critic assumed that I had just set down family stories in verse, as if he could not imagine a poet actually inventing characters as well as scene-building details. Most of that work is fiction, not only in the sense of being made up, but also in the techniques employed. The same is true of Ludlow, though of course several characters and events are based upon fact. Friends have asked me to set the record straight—what is history, what fiction?—and I will do so briefly here.

The one major character based upon historical fact is of course Louis Tikas, or Ilias Spantidakis, and I have made no secret of my debt to Zeese Papanikolas’s book, Buried Unsung. That book gave me a great many details and was itself inspiring in its prose style and interrogative method. The arc of Louis’s story as I have given it here owes much to Papanikolas and other writers, though I have also felt free to imagine Louis’s mind, using my own experience of having lived in Greece. I even gave him a sex life. Though there really was a Pearl Jolly and though rumors abounded about her and Tikas, we don’t in fact know they were lovers. We do know that Pearl was uncommonly brave during the events at Ludlow, and we know the gist of how Louis died that night. For readers who would seek more of his life, I cannot recommend Papanikolas’s book highly enough; it is a brilliant and deeply moving investigation.

John Lawson was real—and a real hero, as far as I am concerned. His betrayal by the U. M. W. is one of the union’s more disgraceful chapters. My scenes with Lawson are largely invented or “reimagined” from sketchy facts. Likewise Karl Linderfelt, who was if anything more a racist son of a bitch than I have painted here. Pat Hamrock was real, as was Governor Ammons, as was Ethelbert Stewart. General John Chase, accused of corruption, was forced to resign from the militia in 1916 and died two years later. Frank Snyder and the other Ludlow victims are all given their real names in my account. Those names appear on the monument at Ludlow, which gives Tikas’s age incorrectly as 30. The monument was vandalized in the spring of 2003—apparently what it stands for still gets under some people’s skin. Jeff “King” Farr was forced out of office not long after the massacre, and has passed into legend—a corrupt sheriff suitable for Hollywood. And of course Mother Jones was real. Even her lies were real. Her highly colorful autobiography is worth reading. She really was held under guard at a Trinidad hospital. There really was a women’s march in protest where General Chase ordered a ridiculous charge and fell off his horse.

Many of these events did take place as I have recounted them. The Death Special really existed and really opened fire on miners more than once. The Baldwin Felts detectives were at least as brutal as I have made them here. The shootings in and around Trinidad and Walsenburg really took place. My job, though, was to make events comprehensible to the minds of my characters, to give them some “ground sense.” I wanted to use the drive, economy and rhythms of verse to make a compelling version of a story I could not get out of my system. The fact that I have spent much of my life in southern Colorado, where my family goes back four or five generations, certainly did not hurt. Nor did it hurt that many of my family members loved to tell stories. The voices of my grandfather Abraham and his four sons still sound in my head. They are among the most powerful influences on my writing life—as powerful as any book. It was my Uncle Tom who first gave me The Great Coalfield War by George McGovern and Leonard Guttridge. And my Uncle Frank was a veritable fount of detail, much of which, alas, had to be pruned away for the sake of narrative compression.

A minor character in my book, because I wanted to focus most on ordinary people where I could give imagination free reign, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was of course a major player in all these events, though he seems to have been ignorant of the hardships of his employees. He reminds me of other people who live life by a theory more than by experience. His laudable idea that people ought to be free and independent of collective bargaining could only have been held by a man ignorant of the violence and injustice of people’s actual lives. I’ve heard of others who wanted life to conform to a theory, and Rockefeller was certainly not the worst of them. They’re usually just wrong, rather than wrong and dangerous. Rockefeller’s ignorance was dangerous to a lot of people, but to give him credit, he had already established philanthropic credentials with the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, well before the massacre. In 1915 he toured the southern coal fields with his friend, the Canadian politician Mackenzie King, who had more experience with labor relations and helped Rockefeller establish better communications between labor and management. King was also a more openly gregarious man, and at a gathering in the town of Sopris he got Rockefeller dancing with the miners’ wives, which proved to be good public relations. Many years later, Rockefeller acknowledged having learned much about humanity from King, who had gone on to become Prime Minister of Canada.

One doesn’t want all the historical context in a work of fiction, of course—just enough to give the story some legs to stand on and to acknowledge the truth, such as it is. Most other characters in Ludlow are invented: Luisa Mole, her parents, the MacIntosh family, the Reeds, Cash, Lefty, the women of the camp, the Scholar and Dimitris. I’ll admit to using family photographs to help me picture the Reeds, but they are otherwise quite unlike my great-grandfather, George Mason, and his tribe.

* * *

Anyone who writes narrative verse will confront a version of the following question: Why didn’t you just write it in prose? The assumption underlying this question is that prose is the proper medium for storytelling. After all, no one really takes verse seriously any more except for the poets, adherents of a counterculture of one sort or another. Prose is thought to be more lucid and true to the tale—easier to read, closer to how people really understand life, etc.

This, I would argue, is an impoverished view.

It’s not just that I have literary history on my side and can cite vital narratives in verse from Homer to Frost. It’s not just the perpetual popularity of new translations of ancient works, or that my own generation has seen a resurgence of interest in narrative and dramatic verse, from figures like Anthony Hecht and Louis Simpson to Vikram Seth, Andrew Hudgins, Mark Jarman, Chase Twichell, B. H. Fairchild, Dana Gioia, Marilyn Nelson, Rita Dove, Robert McDowell, Sydney Lea, Brad Leithauser—a woefully incomplete list, to be sure, though it does include some of our ablest contemporary poets. The fact that narrative verse continues to be written does not entirely justify it as an art form, or so many literary editors might claim. Narrative verse may well be popular when performed, but few are eager to publish it. For one thing, it takes more space than lyric poetry. It’s like a rapacious tree that crowds out smaller plants.

There have been champions of narrative verse, including the poets listed above and the editors of a few journals such as The Hudson Review, The Paris Review, and The New England Review. These angels are just like anyone brave enough to publish imaginative writing these days, whether prose or verse. We live now in a culture of nonfiction and the even more popular media of film and music. A few good novels can break through to a popular audience now and then; a few mass market periodicals still publish fiction, and one can’t help relishing the fact that Seamus Heaney’s vigorous version of Beowulf was a bestseller. But I would still admit that writing stories in any form is a risky business, and writing them in verse is positively quixotic.

Nevertheless, I do not see why this must be so. To begin with, verse is often more cinematic than prose in its rhythms and images, its narrative economy. When I worked in the movie business in the 1980s I met a film editor who was also a poet. Over drinks in a Beverly Hills bar, we discussed similarities inherent in the two media, the poem and the movie, and I came away feeling that one was more popular than the other only because it was usually more passive. Reading takes more effort. Nowadays, teaching difficult poems by, say, Eliot, I often begin by asking students to make an imaginary film in their heads as they hear the poem performed; it’s remarkable how much understanding can take place before one gets down to the usual business of analysis. Poems can speak rather more directly than they are sometimes given credit for.

Narrative verse is not inherently harder to read than narrative prose. In the right hands, verse actually has more clarity, drive and economy than prose, and it can offer literary pleasures of a sort unavailable in other genres. Take a look at the old Scottish border ballads—poems like “The Wife of Usher’s Well” and “Sir Patrick Spens”—and you will see how a simple stanza allows the poet to eject reams of exposition. Speakers of dialogue don’t need to be identified but are inferred from context. And that same quatrain stanza can be used for lyric repetition, a rhythmic underscoring of tones and themes. One can see these techniques at work in a more recent poem such as Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Burglar of Babylon,” as good a ballad as any I know.

Look at the short narratives of Robert Frost—poems like “Home Burial,” “Out, Out—” and “The Witch of Coös” and you will see how blank verse technique can be used to dramatic effect. A line break can illuminate psychology, put an extra twist in dramatic tension, impressing tonal shifts more subtly than sentences alone. There is a culture of verse that is different from the culture of prose, but just as capable of engaging great subjects at length.

Of course “Home Burial” is a mere 115 lines long, though every bit as intense as the best Pinter play. What happens to that intensity when you move to book-length narratives? The truth is that it falters on occasion, just as prose novels have their peaks and valleys. Rising and falling language, like rising and falling action, is part of the experience of the longer work. Poe famously objected to the long poem on these very grounds, suggesting that the quotient of poetry would be diminished the longer the poet kept going. He had a point. Homer apparently nodded. Even Milton gets a bit much now and then, doesn’t he? I would be lying if I insisted that lyric intensity could be sustained indefinitely, though these old masters performed remarkable feats.

But lyric intensity is not the only component of a narrative poem. There is also the story, and if you have a good one it will have a form of its own. To me, the story is a remarkable and irreducible element of humanity. Stories are forms every bit as much as sonnets and ghazals are, yet even the most traditional stories allow for the subversive imagination of strangers—readers—each of whom might experience the tale in remarkably different ways. Stories are stable in one sense, unstable in another, just as great lyrics may be coldly logical in form yet passionate in expression.

In his Harvard lecture called “The Telling of the Tale,” Jorge Luis Borges concluded,

. . . there is something about a tale, a story, that will be always going on. I do not believe men will ever tire of telling or hearing stories. And if along with the pleasure of being told a story we get the additional pleasure of the dignity of verse, then something great will have happened. Maybe I am an old-fashioned man from the nineteenth century, but I have optimism, I have hope; and as the future holds many things—as the future, perhaps, holds all things—I think the epic will come back to us. I believe that the poet shall once again be a maker. I mean, he will tell a story and he will also sing it. And we will not think of those two things as different, even as we do not think they are different in Homer or in Virgil.

It is my fervent hope that Borges was right, that we are ready again for stories in verse.

–David Mason