Too Sweaty For This World: A Life of Portis Filch
By James Lentil
Crumb Hill House; 302 pp.
Why did Portis Filch
abandon poetry? The question has haunted and irritated scholars for decades,
given the promise of his early work and the tragically odd denouement of his
short career. Sadly, the poetry has been overshadowed by the outlandish events
that followed, but it is worth remembering just how dutifully Filch’s early
poems answered Ezra Pound’s call to "make it new." (Though, as James Lentil's
new biography points out, that famous quote has been taken far out of context:
in reality Pound spoke those words to a man behind a deli counter who failed to
hold the Russian dressing on his Reuben, as Pound had requested.)
Filch, of course, wrote
only in Greek, and celebrated peasant life – or so we thought. The new volume
provides the first new English translation of the poems since Helga
Muffenstruss’s standard 1932 edition, and some of the differences are striking.
For example, it seems that his most famous Ode, "A Stroll Along Heffernan Lake," was not an appreciation of the fall
harvest, as long believed, but an expression of Filch’s distrust of gourds.
Every poem Filch ever
published was written before his twentieth birthday. But just as he started to
gain recognition, he fled America,
complaining of the smell. Touring the capitals of Europe, he met Ibbicus Howe,
an American expatriate living in Rome, who
worked as an usher at the legendary Rivaldi Theater by day and stayed up all
night working in his tiny, cluttered third floor studio, which he referred to,
somewhat grandiosely, as Blue
Raven Hill
Community Gardens.
Filch had fallen in love
with the Rivaldi Theater, with its crystal chandeliers and aisle seats dusted
with truffle shavings, and he met Howe
during a matinee intermission. Based on more than sixty conversations with
relatives of fellow expatriates close to both Filch and Howe, Lentil has
recreated their first fateful conversation.
Howe: I’m sorry, sir, you can’t stand there.
Filch: I most certainly can.
Howe: I’m sorry, you’re blocking the concession stand. If you want
to stand there, you have to buy something.
Filch: Pig!
Howe: My dear sir, there’s no need for name-calling.
Filch: Brute!
Howe: May I suggest the salted cashews? Delicious, and the price is
quite reasonable.
Filch: [looking at the price tag] Oh my, that is actually very
reasonable.
After that
evening’s performance, Filch accepted Howe's invitation to return with him to Blue Raven
Hill Community
Gardens. Stepping into
the studio, which doubled as Howe's workshop, Filch renounced poetry on the
spot. Howe believed the workout apparel of the time was crude and didn't allow
the body to properly breathe. That first night, as Filch listened, captivated,
the older man lectured for more than six hours on thermals, the pros and cons
of polypropylene and the deleterious effects of clogged pores.
Howe hoped, in the
confines of his studio, to design and manufacture a line of workout apparel
that, as he put it, "would work with, not against, your body’s natural oils"
and, as his tombstone reads, "Never, ever sacrifice comfort for style." Lentil is silent on the much-rumored romantic
relationship between the two, but perhaps it is better that way, since the
scant evidence consists entirely of a single photograph, which shows Howe
buttering a stack of wheat toast as Filch, nearby, looks on with appetite,
though whether for the toast or Howe is unclear.
But the book is
rich with stories about the American literary establishment’s abandonment of
Filch. Leading New York
intellectuals savaged his reputation after, in a letter to the Partisan Review,
Filch declared, "mesh garments are the new poetry." And when, in 1930, Filch
founded the journal "American Acrylic," critics contrasted the poor
quality of the articles with the high quality of the Spandex binding. Unable to
disagree, Filch used the fabrics originally intended for the second issue to
construct what is believed to be the first semi-formal jogging suit.
Gregory Beyer is a writer
living in New York.
His journalism, essays and reviews of actual books have appeared in The New
York Times.
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