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12-01-06, 8:43 am
Bastard in the Ragged Suit: Writings (& Drawings) of Herman Spector
Synergistic Press San Francisco, California, 1977.
"You’ll turn out to be a ditch-digger or a Bolshevik" -- One of Herman Spector’s high school teachers
Prior to Synergistic Press’s publication of "Bastard in a Ragged Suit", Herman Spector was one of the "lost" social poets of the 1930s. Almost all of his published writing had appeared during the brief period between 1928 and 1934. For a time his poetry was regularly featured in the New Masses and Mike Gold had referred to him as "the raw material of New York Communism". Yet his work seemed to fall somewhere between Modernism (he often sounds like a T.S. Eliot of the Lower Depths) and Socialist Realism and when the New Masses came under the editorship of Joseph Freeman, Spector’s appearance in the magazine fell off sharply.
The single book published in his lifetime (1933) was a limited edition 64 page pamphlet in which he shared the spotlight with 3 other revolutionary poets of the day: Sol Funaroff, Edwin Rolfe, and Joseph Kalar. Budding novelist Nelson Algren was so impressed by the book that he rode the freights from Chicago to New York to meet the authors.
Spector then edited a revolutionary magazine entitled "Dynamo" (1934) which only lasted for four issues. Through the years he continued to write, working on poetry, a novel, and dozens of prose sketches, but few saw publication. In 1938 he was employed by the WPA’s Living Lore Project, and with the coming of World War II he went to work as a welder in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. After the war he moved from one unskilled, poorly paid job to another, finally becoming a cab driver in New York City. For the next 10 years, the rest of his life, he drove a cab, dying of a heart attack at 54, in 1959.
His daughter, dancer Judith S. Clancy, gathered together what she could find of his writing and Synergistic Press published it in a handsome edition which they have kept in print.
There’s been speculation as to how successful Spector might have been if he’d found an editor like Max Perkins, but that’s not the issue. To spend a few hours with "Bastard in a Ragged Suit" is to marvel at how much high quality, evocative writing he did managed to produce given the circumstances of a difficult life.
In writing of Spector and his poetry, George Oppen had this to say: ...the tones of the poetry...tell the storyof a man who risked himself for the hope of a poetry that would isolate no man and no thing, that would seem to him in no way "privileged", and he became perhaps the loneliest of the impoverished men of his time and I believe he must have become afraid. Before he died, fear had abolished the poetry."
On the contrary, Spector’s poems are still singing loud and clear for those who will listen.
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