Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony comprises around 450 poems that tend to begin with a name, a place (farm, factory, saloon, boarding house) and sometimes a time of day or the age of the named person if relevant, and that tend to end with violence – gunshots, knife wounds, mutilation in industrial accidents. Their language is court-room plain, these are the facts; courtly, I’d say, respectful; no Henry James sub-clauses; the power is accumulative. Testimony was published in the US in several volumes by New Directions and Black Sparrow Press between 1965 and 1978; it was reissued in 2015 by Black Sparrow in a single edition – subtitled The United States (1885–1915): Recitative – that also includes as an appendix the prototype volume, written in prose, first published in 1934.
I’ve known of this book without ever, until this year, getting to it. It is one of the books of the last century; it has never been published in the UK. Repeat: it has never been published in the UK.
Reznikoff (1894–1976), by all accounts, was a modest man. He was born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. He sold hats for the family business. He wore out a lot of shoe leather, walking 20 miles a day on the streets of New York. In his twenties he had poems accepted by the magazine Poetry and then withdrew them; most of his work until the 1960s was self-published, and typeset and printed by himself. His poetry is included in anthologies of the Objectivists alongside that of Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi (all of them immigrants to the US or the sons of immigrants). He studied law and practised very briefly but then ducked down, Bartleby-ish, and for many years earned his living by writing summaries of court records for legal reference books.
‘I glanced through several hundred volumes of old cases – not a great many as law reports go – and found almost all that follows.’ This is Reznikoff’s brief prefatory note to his 1934 prose version of Testimony. Given that what comes to court is the bad stuff – murders, rape, theft, claims for negligence, property disputes and forged wills – Testimony is not a picnic in the park. It could be shelved in the True Crime section, a descendant of The Newgate Calendar, the 18th-century compilation of stories detailing the crimes and punishments of notorious criminals – except that Reznikoff cuts off before the jury declares and the judge’s sentence, and doesn’t do moralising and titillation. As a documentary record of poverty and harsh conditions of labour, it could be shelved in the region of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, first published in 1941 with photographs by Walker Evans – except that Agee’s own anger and bitter frustration are built into his text, while Reznikoff absents himself.
Some opening lines, at random: ‘She was a widow in her fifties / and lived in two rooms with her son’; ‘Price lived on a creek and Porter on the same creek about a mile above’; ‘A man, tall and husky, came from a city to a neighbouring town / on a Saturday / and went to a lodging-house for blacks’; ‘A young woman, a Syrian who had been in the United States only about six months / and as yet could not speak English / was travelling by railroad from town to town / peddling lace’; ‘He was a plumber who did not earn much – / a widower with three small children’; ‘John had slept with the wife of the man at whose home he boarded / for over a year and told her that if she were a widow / he would marry her’; ‘When Susan was about eleven, she worked in a cotton mill: / at first sweeping the floor, and afterwards “doffing” bobbins’. You can sense from such beginnings that things aren’t going to turn out well, and usually they don’t, but there is occasional small relief. Here is a complete poem that describes a crime scene without recording the crime: ‘The murderer walked through the woods towards his victim / along logging paths no longer used: / rubbers on his feet to keep the mud from his shoes / and holding an umbrella in case it rained.’ There is sly humour: the thief who gets tangled up in the sacks he is wearing to conceal his identity; the thief who is shot and turns out to be a fox. Here is another complete short poem: ‘When they told her husband / that she had lovers / all he said was: / one of them might have a cigar / and set the barn on fire.’
I think Reznikoff was concerned with justice – not legal justice, which is hit-or-miss (most crimes don’t even come to court), but the justice that is involved in giving voice to unheard lives. This is a delicate matter: serve the material, stay out of the way, no special pleading. Acts of witness to the casual, pervasive, day-to-day violence of men on men, and men on women, and sometimes women on men, and machines on children, the poems take no side and deliver no verdicts. An out-of-work labourer is slashed with a knife by three others, robbed, and thrown into a river, but manages to struggle to the bank: ‘Here he was seen by men on a passing steamboat / and picked up / to live a little longer – and tell what had happened.’
There will be, surely, there must be, if there’s any point to writing at all, written records of Palestine suffering genocide by the Israeli state, and Sudan and Yemen and the very local violence of power on my doorstep, and literature hasn’t made a damn bit of difference.
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