Mary Oppen
Mary Oppen ( November 28, 1907 – May 14, 1990 ),
American poet, was also an
activist, artist,
photographer, and writer. Though of a lesser fame than her husband (the
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
George Oppen), she maintained a vital, animated role in the community of poets, painters, and activists who surrounded them.
Born Mary Colby in
Kalispell, Montana, she was raised in the Pacific Northwest and met George Oppen in
1926 while both were students at
Oregon State University,
Corvallis. Although they were, respectively, suspended (George) and expelled (Mary) for staying out together overnight, they formed a serious commitment, eventually to be a lifetime bond. Together they travelled extensively and this began the succession of friendships and contacts out of which the poetry and politics of George and Mary Oppen grew.
Fifty years later in her autobiography
Meaning A Life (1978), Mary takes note of these times, observing that:
After these initial peripatetic years together, they finally took up residence in New York City in the late 1920's. There they joined a circle of artists and writers, among whom were the poets
Charles Reznikoff and
Louis Zukofsky. During the 1930s the Oppens involved themselves in leftist political movements and joined the
Communist Party USA in 1935 after the seventh
World Congress of the Communist Parties called for intellectuals to join in a united front against
fascism and war.
After the
second World War, in which George Oppen was severely wounded at the
Battle of the Bulge, the Oppens were persecuted by the US government for their leftist activities during the
Depression. Rather than testify against friends and associates, the Oppens decided to flee to Mexico in 1950, where they found their way to Mexico City's United States emigre and refugee circle. In the late 1950s George Oppen began writing again after a 25 year hiatus and the Oppens soon relocated to New York City.
After a brief trip in 1958 to visit their daughter Linda at her university, the Oppens returned to New York in the early 1960s. Back in Brooklyn, George, who had started writing again towards the end of his time in Mexico, renewed old ties with his fellow
Objectivists and also befriended many younger poets. The Oppens continued to move around, once driving an amphibious car from Miami to New York. In the later part of the 1960s, the Oppens took up residence in the San Francisco Bay area, which is where George's family was largely located. For a time, they summered at Deer Isle, Maine, where they entertained a number of east coast writers such as
Theodore Enslin,
Rachel Blau DuPlessis,
Michael Heller, and
John Taggart.
In 1970 Mary Oppen resumed writing poems and continued painting and work in
collage. By 1975 she was in the full-swing of the composition of her memoirs, eventually to published as
Meaning a Life: An Autobiography by
Black Sparrow Press in May, 1978. In this work, Mary Oppen makes apparent how completely she and George shared the risks, adventures and commitments of their itinerant and artistic life.
|
George and Mary Oppen in later years |
This included their harrowing, life-changing trip to Israel in September 1975. They had been invited by the Mayor of Jerusalem to be his guests at the
Mishkenot Sha'ananim, a residence facing the walls of the Old City, for distinguished artists, writers and musicians from abroad. [
1] After their return from this trip, Mary noticed the decline of her husband in his health and a waning in his artistic authority.
In 1977, Mary provided secretarial help so George could complete his final volume of poetry
Primitive. According to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, this "help" was atypical of their practice and was related to George's decline. During this time, George's final illness begins to manifest itself with confusion, failing memory, and other losses. In 1980, the Montemora Foundation published her book
Poems & Transpositions.
George Oppen, age 76, died of pneumonia preceded by
Alzheimer's Disease on July 7, 1984. On December 3, 1987, Mary read from her autobiography at the
San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. Mary Oppen died on May 14, 1990.
She is survived by a daughter,
Linda Oppen.
Mary Oppen was a prolific artist, producing hundreds of sizeable paintings and collages and competent etchings and sketches. Her work conveniently divides itself among decades and their matching media: the oils of the 1950s, the etchings of the 1960s, the mixed-media collages of the 1970s, and the water-color collages of the 1980s. Several of her works have been exhibited. Mary Oppen was also a diligent photographer and hers is a record of a life shared among writers and artists only now achieving recognition. These photographs afford glimpses into the world which George and Mary Oppen inhabited--one which was not officially recorded by the arbiters of taste or by academics in a depoliticized postwar America.
*
Register of Mary Oppen Paper at Mandeville Special Collections, UCSD*
Object Lessons: Andrea Brady on George Oppen's New Collectd Poems includes a brief but insightful discussion of Mary.
*
quotes from Mary Oppen's autobiography
