Joseph Moncure March Writes the Poem of the Century
In the spring of 1926, following what he called “…a series of brutal altercations with Harold Ross,” Joseph Moncure March quit his job as the (very first!) managing editor of The New Yorker. He moved into a depressing 4th floor walkup on 14th Street in Greenwich Village. He was all but broke. His father staked him enough money to get through the summer, which he (of course!) spent writing a book-length piece of narrative verse—rhyming!—about “a lot of people getting drunk at a party.”
He had the first two lines, which had popped into his head, apropos of nothing, a few months earlier:
‘Queenie was a blonde, and her age stood still,
And she danced twice a day in vaudeville.’
He never wrote an outline. If his 1968 memoir “A Certain Wildness” is to be believed, he improvised the whole thing: “On good days, I would be able to do as much as ten lines; on bad days, I would be lucky to get four.” Three months along, he wrote
‘The door sprang open
And the cops rushed in.’
That seemed like a good place to stop, so he stopped.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Wild Party is that it is actually about a wild party. It is not a metaphor for Late Stage Capitalism. It has no Homeric parallels. March plays no modernist or post-modernist games. There is barely any plot, though plenty happens and it concludes with a killing. It’s a 110 page drunken orgy, and it rhymes.
March had no doubts about its quality. He gave it to his friend Richard Simon, whose new publishing firm Simon & Schuster then specialized in crossword puzzle books. Simon liked it, but thought “The Wild Party” was a little too wild for 1926. He suggested they ‘dilute’ the sex, a curious word, by appending some of March’s lyrics to the manuscript, and he sent the whole shebang to the famous anthologist Louis Untermeyer, who loved it.
Simon then sent it to John Sumner, the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who very much did not love it. Sumner told Simon if he published it Sumner would have him thrown in jail.
This was not an idle threat. In 1927 Sumner shut down Mae West’s Broadway play Sex and Mae spent 10 days in the can.
Eventually the manuscript came to the attention of Chicago publisher Pascal Covici, who brought out a limited edition of 750 copies in the summer of 1928, with illustrations by Reginald Marsh. It was as big a hit as you can be with a limited edition of 750 copies; it got, for instance a rave review from Conrad Aiken, who was a year or so away from a Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems. It received a tribute (in verse) from Franklin P. Adams in his then-famous column “The Conning Tower.” (Untermeyer gave it another rave in his Modern American Poetry: A Critical Anthology (1930), where he reprinted 4 of the 15 short poems March had added to his book).
“When Covici asked me what I was going to do next,” March says, “I made up my mind to write something that had no sex in it at all.” Inspired by a James Chapin painting of a black prize fighter resting between rounds, March spent three months writing The Set-Up.
He rented another crap apartment on 14th Street. Incredibly, he decided to write his story in rhyming verse again. Even more incredibly, he once again worked without an outline or even a clear idea of where he was going. He improvised the whole thing. Well, it worked last time, right? There’s no sex in it. And—this is my third ‘incredibly’ in the space of 50 words, but no other word will do here—his sex-free book length poem about the fight racket made the NY Times best seller list.
In a better world, March would have turned out borderline obscene book-length poems at more or less 18 month intervals for the next 50 years, but alas.
He was whisked away to Hollywood and MGM, likely the first (and last) author to get a job writing movies on the strength of his poems.
This sounds crazy until you read the poems.
His first gig (as far as I can tell): Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels (1930). When production began, this was a silent film, but Hughes spent so long dicking around with the spectacular aerial dog fight scenes that sound came in and it had to be converted to a talking picture, necessitating the replacement of the heavily-accented leading lady, Greta Nissen, with a teenage Jean Harlow.
James Whale, coming off the Broadway hit Journey’s End, was hired to direct the dialogue scenes while Hughes continued tweaking and re-shooting the aerial scenes. Whale didn’t like the dialogue so he requested March for the rewrite and MGM lent him out. I haven’t been able to discover what connection, if any, Whale and March had in New York. Maybe JW just dug “The Wild Party”? This is the movie that introduced the immortal line “Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?” which made Jean Harlow an instant star, and with its many variations, might be March’s most lasting contribution to the popular culture.
The dialogue scenes wrapped, but Hughes kept tinkering, and while he did Whale shot the film version of Journey’s End, with a screenplay by March. It was released before Hell’s Angels.
March worked on an awful lot of movies over the next 10 years, starting out at MGM and then Paramount, eventually moving down Republic. He called it a day after Lone Star Raiders (1940), a Three Mesquiteers programmer.
Many of his credited films are difficult or impossible to see. You Tube has a couple of different prints his 1932 adaptation of Madame Butterfly starring Cary Grant in his early wax manikin mode and Sylvia Sydney in yellow face. No arias, but lots of Puccini underscoring; I bailed quickly. I made it all the way through Three Faces West (1940), a John Wayne movie which Wikipedia promisingly describes as ‘a knockoff of The Grapes of Wrath that ends with a faceoff between Okies and Nazis.’ Well. The Okies are from North Dakota (and they’re Oregon-bound); the faceoff consists of the (Austrian) heroine going to a San Francisco hotel to rejoin her (Austrian) fiancé, finding out he’s a Nazi now, and saying no thanks. Not exactly the slug fest between Big John and The Red Skull I had been anticipating. This one is on YouTube as well, in a decent print. March’s (credited) co-writers were Samuel Ornitz (one of the Hollywood Ten) and F. Hugh Herbert—not the “woo woo!” Hugh Herbert, the Moon Is Blue guy. It’s hard to say who is responsible for anything in a screenplay by three credited writers with résumés like this, but Tim Cavanaugh quotes director Barnard Vorhaus: “Most of it was still being written by Joseph Moncure March while we shot, which was a bloody nuisance,” so let’s go with: March is responsible for something up there on the screen and leave it at that.
Post-Hollywood, there was war work in a steel mill, movies for the war department and the state department, short stories for Cosmopolitan, Hollywood exposés in The Times magazine. Finally he moved into advertising, producing and writing dozens of films for MPO Productions. The two that everybody still talks about are Design for Dreaming (1956) & A Touch of Magic (1961) for General Motors. They are easily found all over the Internet in gorgeous super saturated color transfers, and they are amazing. Clips pop up (used ironically, I’m sorry to say) in music videos by Peter Gabriel and Rush, Nintendo commercials, David Fincher’s The Game, and assorted horror movies. (They are in the public domain) (Also, they rhyme. “Girls don’t go to Motoramas / Dressed in a pair of pink pajamas” is at least as good as L L Cool J rhyming “Ayatollah” with “granola.” March may not have been thrilled about doing this stuff, and in fairness to the people who make fun of these movies they are absolutely nuts, but he got the job done.)
In 1968, now retired, he brought out a new edition of his two most famous poems, prefaced by a 20,000 word memoir, “A Certain Wildness.” This is the primary source for virtually every essay and article on March and his poems (including this one). There’s a little too much family background for my taste, but it’s pretty wonderful. March attended Robert Frost’s undergraduate poetry seminars at Amherst:
‘One evening he decided to be irreverent about Amy Lowell. He passed out paper and pencils, and made us all write two “free verse” poems in the Lowell manner. Then he collected the poems and read them aloud. Some were amusing parodies and some might have been written by Amy Lowell herself.
“You see how it is?” said Frost gently. “Anybody can write poetry like that.”
After that evening, I made up my mind never to write a poem in free verse again.’
(This decision was crucial to the success of The Wild Party. As its many adaptors have discovered, once you lose March’s (occasionally) goofy rhymes and syncopated rhythms, it’s barely a party at all).
March also says that whenever Frost spotted March strolling around the campus, he would ask “You got any poems you want me to look at?” I have to think Frost had an extremely dry sense of humor.
“A Certain Wildness” makes this edition essential, since it appears nowhere else.
Unfortunately, March revised both of his poems for it, and this was, to be as polite as possible, not a good idea. In the case of The Set-Up, he changed the protagonist’s crooked managers, originally Jewish, to “Stone and MacPhail,” and the dialog, previously thick with ethnic slang, is now colorless aside from “dese” and “dose” and the like.
There are a couple of ethnic references snipped out or altered in The Wild Party (passages where he used “Jew” as an adjective, and rhymed it), but what’s mostly gone, are, amazingly, the hot parts. Not all the hot parts, but in the first section, we lose:
‘She covered his mouth with a kiss like a flame
And he quivered; and he gasped;
And he almost came.’ [Part One, section 3]
…at which point ‘She’ (Queenie) whacks him (Burrs) in the face. Then things get uglier. You can still follow the action with that passage gone, but my goodness.
And then there are 37 consecutive lines clipped from Part Two, all about another ‘him’ (Black) working his hand under Queenie’s gown, and then her brassiere, to excellent effect.
You can see why these passages would have made John Sumner’s head blow up in 1926, but in 1968?? This edition comes with a whole bunch of (mostly) perfunctory drawings by Paul A. Busch. And one of these illustrates the missing, boob-related passage! Were the drawings done for an earlier edition? Were the CUTS made for an earlier edition? I am flummoxed.
But what about the poem itself? I find myself asking what everybody who has ever written about it has asked, beginning with Louis Untermeyer in 1926: Is it any good? Is it even a poem? And like everybody else, I answer the first question with a resounding: I’m not sure.
As to the second question, I defer to Wm. S Burroughs, who said, “Of course it’s a poem. It rhymes.”
Whatever it is, it’s not dead.
The Wild Party is divided in two parts: a brief prelude to the party, introducing Queenie, the Vaudeville dancer, and her current live-in paramour, Burrs, a “clown /Of some renown” on the same bill. The geography of the apartment is laid out for us. Queenies and Burrs are quickly established (while they are lazing about on a lazy Sunday morning) as volatile, promiscuous, jealous, and prone to violence. Following a brief, nasty spat (it includes Queenie brandishing a knife and a glass bottle, and maybe a tiny bit of hate-sex), they decide to throw a party. The descriptions of the apartment, here and elsewhere, are as vivid as the character work, and do not slow things down in the slightest. In face they grease it along in some weird way.
Part Two, much longer and subdivided into 10 sections, is the party itself. 1: We are rapidly introduced to the guests: the predatory lesbian Madeline True; the bisexual tap dancer Jackie; the brutal ex-pug Eddie and his girlfriend, Mae; Mae’s underage sister, Nadine; Dolores, the faux Spanish aristocrat, and the d’Armano Brothers, Oscar & Phil, incestuous gay siblings and songwriting partners.
In section 2, Queenie’s BFF Kate arrives with a new boy toy in tow, Mr. Black; Queenies likes his looks and decides to flirt with him to annoy Burrs—‘The spurs / For Burrs!’ 3: Madeline True moves in on a girl stoned on something (in Speigleman’s drawing it looks like opiates are involved), Kate chats with Burrs, and Queenie dances with Black. Queenie expertly reels him in, and Burrs notices but affects not to care.
4: Oscar and Phil are seated at the piano (‘They hammered on the keys / And shrieked falsetto melodies’). Jackie leans in and kisses Phil on the lips, infuriating Oscar. Here follow 50 lines of hair pulling and ‘shrilling,’ cheered on by the other guests, until Jackie pacifies them by suggesting they sing their ‘nice new song.’ (Conrad Aiken says this part, “in vaudeville language, is a scream.”) We get the whole song, “My Sweetie Is Gone.” The room loves it. So loudly do they love it that a neighbor across the alley is awakened and threatens to call the cops. Lots of yelling back and forth, leading to the only 1968 revision which is a clear improvement: “He wants t’ sleep, th‘ dear sweet bastard!” / Sneered Eddie: “That guy oughta be plastered!” is swapped out for: “The son-of-a-bitch! He wants to sleep!” / “Jesus Christ! What a stupid creep!” (The plastered / bastard rhyme was used elsewhere anyway). Burrs warns Queenie to “lay off that guy!” Queenie dances with Black; Burrs watches. “He sneered / And joined Kate on the bed.”
Let’s talk about that bed for a minute. There are two beds in this apartment. One of them is in the bedroom, just like yours. The other one, described in in Part One, is in the studio:
Pink cushions,
Blue cushions: overlaid
With silk: with lace: with gold brocade.
These were propped up on a double bed
That was covered with a Far East tapestry spread.
This is located (Spiegelman provides a helpful diagram of the apartment) where you or I would put a sofa, or some chairs. So this is, basically, the orgy bed, and the other one is for sleeping (or privacy).
Section 5: Hotcha! We get to the orgy!
The candles flared: their flames sprang high:
The shadows leaned disheveled, awry:
And the party began to reek of sex.
White arms encircled swollen necks:
Blurred faces swam together: locked
Red hungry lips:
Closed eyes:
Rocked.
We get brief glimpses of people we’ve met before, entangled or disengaged, and then an unnamed couple ‘saunters’ out of the bedroom,
What had been going on in there?
Everyone knew
Who noticed the two
And nobody seemed to care
Black and Queenie sit nearby, sharing what he (foolishly) thinks is a tender moment. Burrs watches surreptitiously from the bed, working himself into a rage:
“Lie still, Burrsie!”
Kate’s hand pressed
His hot head back against her breast
(I’m not certain, but I do get the impression that mostly what’s happening on that crowded bed in the studio is heavy petting.)
Section 6 opens with the Brothers d’Armano passed out under the piano, joined shortly by Jackie. There’s an attempted rape, a couple of fights, a rousing chorus of “Sweet Adeline,” the guy across the alley (the very short section 7) calls the cops, Black and Queenie get hot and heavy and stroll past the unconscious Burrs into the bedroom (8). Section 9 is a total of 12 lines, 6 couplets, 4 beats to the line. “Some love is fire: some is rust / But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust…” etc. Some people like this part a lot. For instance, Ian Fleming, who quotes those two lines without attribution in Goldfinger. Anyway, it’s a little lyrical interlude before the big finish (10), which I won’t give away but I bet you can figure out.
As a poem, there are issues. Some are technical. The same rhymes pop up multiple times. Sometimes the rhythm is jarring and effective, sometimes it’s just jarring. Some of it is flat, like uninspired prose with unjustified margins. Elsewhere it flirts with being out and out doggerel. At times it goes beyond flirting— it’s on third base and sliding into home. There are places where the word choice is lazy to the point of distraction. Sometimes it’s because a rhyme is needed, sometimes it’s just inexplicable.
But paradoxically, these sloppy parts make it seem like the whole thing was written in one sitting. And, it has velocity. When it’s hitting on all cylinders, and it often is, it’s impossible to stop reading. Long passages stay in your head for days. It reads more like a film treatment than any kind of narrative verse. You’re never unsure of what’s going on with the story. It would have been remarkable if Hollywood had NOT scooped up Joseph Moncure March.
Technical issues aside, there’s something else amiss, but that’s easy to articulate. The Wild Party doesn’t need deeper characterization, subplots, better scansion, or any of that stuff.
What the poem requires is more fucking.
Other kinds of sex, too, naturally (especially the ones that are easy to rhyme), but mostly more fucking.
This thing desperately wants straight up pornography. In fact, it wants to BE straight up pornography. Somewhere, in the depths of his far-too innocent soul, I think Joseph Moncure March knew this, but he couldn’t admit it to himself, let alone pull it off.
And if he had? It would have been insane. It was nearly unpublishable as it was. The syncopated gin-fueled fuck-fest, which you can sense trying to burst through this all over the place, could never have been printed by any legitimate publisher in 1928 and if it had been, it would have landed him in the slammer for sure.
It would have been great. But we should be thankful for what we have.
It’s absolutely sui generis, and it is alive.
EPILOGUE-ISH
Both of March’s long poems have had interesting afterlives. The Set-Up was made into a 1949 Robert Wise movie with Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter. The characters have been altered considerably (changing the protagonist from black to white enraged March) but the plot is largely intact: a boxer’s low-life managers agree to have him take a dive, but they’re so sure he’s going to lose anyway they don’t bother to tell him, and thus get to keep his part of the payoff. The fight itself follows the poem almost line for line, and it’s very convincing, partly because Ryan moves like a real boxer (he was the heavyweight boxing champion at Dartmouth 4 years running), and partly because Wise, unusually for the period, used multiple cameras, including a handheld one. The whole film takes place in real time, like High Noon avant la lettre. There’s a quasi-happy ending, unlike the poem, which concludes with the protagonist cornered by hoods in a subway station and falling under the wheels of a train. March was still bitching about the changes 20 years later, and you can see his point, but it’s a terrific film.
The Wild Party was turned into a James Ivory / Ismael Merchant film in 1975 (for Samuel Arkoff’s AIP!), and by all accounts it is a Stench In The Nostrils of God. It was originally intended as a musical. This idea was abandoned early on, but every other pre-production decision seems perverse, beginning with the idea of moving the story from New York to Hollywood and incorporating elements of the Fatty Arbuckle scandal into it. Everybody involved in this debacle blames everybody else. Raquel Welch, fresh from her 1973 Anno Mirabilis (The Last of Sheila & The Three Musketeers, the latter of which brought her a Golden Globe), is Queenie, definitely not a blonde. The story is so far from the March’s poem you might wonder why they bothered purchasing the rights. Ah! Because one of the characters is called James Montgomery Morrison (played by David Duke), occupation: poet!
I confess I have not seen this thing (the clips on YouTube are unpromising), but the Internet Archive does have a digitalized copy of the novelization, which is instructive. It opens with the poet, who has been shot in the throat by the Arbuckle character (James Coco) (he was trying to shoot some other people) (and eventually did), in the hospital where the police are trying to get a statement. He can’t talk, of course, but he’s a poet, so he writes them a book length poem.
“Morrison, weaker than he realized, settled the pad in his lap and started to write:
Queenie was a blonde
And her age stood still.
She used to dance in vaudeville…”
So they didn’t even leave the first two lines intact. 154 pages later, we arrive at:
“Nadine watched
In wonder,
Amazement—
Not in horror.
Can this be true? Her face asked.
Is this what you get in the end
After hitchhiking and hoping and believing
In something?
On the top of the first page Morrison wrote “The Wild Party” and placed the clipboard and the yellow legal-size pad on his bedside table. Then he went to sleep.”
Mr. Morrison’s poem does not take up the whole book. He does a lot of his remembering in prose. Since the screenplay and March’s book don’t track, sometimes we get chunks of the (real) poem, lightly altered to match the events of the film, and sometimes, he’s just gotta freestyle:
‘He sat brooding like an overweight satyr
Over a cup and a percolator’
That’s fun, but I guess by page 154 the novelizer was pooped, or misplaced his rhyming dictionary.
Art Spiegleman brought out an edition of the poem (the original text, not the 1968 revision) in 1994, copiously illustrated, with a good introduction (it’s where the William Burroughs quote, “Of course it’s a poem. It rhymes,” comes from). Spiegleman’s Party is an expressionist inferno and it is a lovely piece of work, still in print and easily available.
This edition was the catalyst for not one but two musical adaptations in 2000, which briefly played literally minutes from each other, one on Broadway, and one Off-Broadway. (I keep reading that one of them is in a ‘twenties idiom’ and the other one is in a ‘deliberately anachronistic modern idiom,’ and I’m sure it’s true, but I’ve listened to a bunch of songs from each and I don’t have any idea which is which. For a good time, I suggest comparing the opening numbers of each, both of them settings of the “Queenie was a blonde” stanza).
The triple XXX version (NC-17 won’t do!) still waits to be made.
By Jeff Grimshaw
FORMERLY FOOTNOTES BUT NOW JUST NOTES
1. Greil Marcus thinks the poem goes off the rails immediately, because you need to pronounce “vaudeville” as “vau-de-ville” for the first two lines to scan. It’s a feature not a bug, as the kids like to say. (In the Off-Broadway musical version by Andrew Lippa, it’s pronounced ‘Vaud-ville.’ In the Broadway version by Michael John LaChiusa, it’s ‘Vau-de-ville,’ although his melody requires him to change the line to ‘THE vaudeville.’)
2. My Pick to Click, from March’s “15 Lyrics”:
SUDDEN STORM
Under the seed of rain sowers
The streets burst into crystal flowers
Papers flap torn, white
Wings in bewildered flight.
Black mushroom shapes walk
Each on a human stalk.
The sowers pass. The crystal crop
Vanishes. The fungi drop.
Strange fragrance is the sole token
Of enchantment made, enchantment broken.
Curtain. After a brief pause
Distant thunder stamps applause.
Which reminds me of H. P. Lovecraft’s poetry, most likely because who else was writing cool poems about fungi back then?
3. The early versions of the HELL’S ANGELS aerial dog fights were not working, because I
If you shoot aerial dog fights against a clear sky, it’s a total yawn. You need CLOUDS. Sources differ as to how long it took Hughes to figure this out, but by God he did. Three pilots and a mechanic died during the production, and Hughes himself suffered a skull fracture when he crashed doing a stunt everyone else refused to attempt.
4. In 1935, between Bride of Frankenstein and Showboat, James Whale directed a weird comedy-mystery called Remember Last Night? whose premise—a bunch of friends try to solve a murder that took place at a party none of them can remember because they were too drunk—is pretty March-ian, although there’s no record (or hint even) of his having been involved, and he was employed elsewhere at the time. The characters make jokes about Dracula’s Daughter and Bride of Frankenstein!
5. Howard Hughes and March got on well, at least for a while. (Very few folks got on well with Hughes for more than a while). Their bat-shit crazy adventures, which include March spending a night in jail for theft of Warner Brothers’ property (at Hughes’ instigation), and his running Hughes independent studio while Hughes vanished for months (!), are recounted in Tim Cavanaugh’s excellent 2005 article, “After the Party,” accessible via ‘external links’ on March’s Wikipedia page.
6. The direction of both “Design for Dreaming” and “A Touch of Magic” is credited to Victor Solow on screen (and on Wikipedia) but on the IMDB, William Beaudine gets the nod for “Design.” Nothing much out there on Victor Solow. Solow = “’So Low,’ as in: So Low Even William ‘One Shot’ Beaudine Is Embarrassed to Claim Them? Oh, I suppose not. Anyway, they’re a gas, even unironicially. They play out like trippy David Lynch fever dreams.
7. Paul A. Busch worked for the WPA in the thirties, and for Disney. His Wild Party drawings are in a style about midway between WPA post office murals and… well, Dan DeCarlo’s work for Archie Comics. Or Joe Schuster’s sub rosa fetish art for “Nights of Horror,” which is aces. (Although Busch, I have to say, does kind of… wake the fuck up when he’s drawing boobs.
8. In the wake of The Set-Up hitting the best seller list, new (what we would call mass market) editions of The Wild Party were published. “The apprehension over censorship proved unfounded,” March says. “[The Wild Party] was banned in Boston, but as far as I know, no action was taken against it anywhere else.” Hold that thought. Sumner and The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice were active as late as 1946, when they succeeded in getting Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County banned (the ban stood until 1959). I wonder if the hot parts of Wild Party were prophylactically snipped out for the earlier (post Set Up) edition, and March simply didn’t remember it forty years on?
9. In Art Spiegleman’s gloriously illustrated 1994 edition, posters of Burrs show him as a literal white-face clown, rubber nose and all, but when I first read it, I thought ‘clown’ meant comedian. I still think so, in fact. (In both musical adaptations, he’s an actual clown; Mandy Patinkin’s Burrs (Tony nominated) performed in black face.
10. I’ve been trying to popularize the acronym “SITNOG” (Stench In the Nostrils of God) for decades, to no avail.
11. March allowed the copyright to lapse in the 1950s, which accounts for simultaneous adaptations running in New York in 2000 without any lawsuits, and also for the berserk ‘revision’ of the poem within the movie novelization. (A witty video essay by Zach Barr on the ‘And Now They Sing’ YouTube channel tells the story of the dueling Wild Parties. The essay has extensive clips from both productions. )