’s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper
Fredrick C. Stern
A Biographical Sketch of Thomas McGrath
THOMAS McGRATH WAS born in 1916, the oldest son of James and Catherine
(Shea) McGrath. There were four younger brothers, Jim (killed in World War II), Joe,
Martin, and the youngest, Jack. His sister Kathleen was born between Joe and Martin. His
parents were farmers, the second generation of them, working the land in Ransom County,
North Dakota, near the town of Sheldon, about forty miles west of the Minnesota border,
between the Maple and Sheyenne Rivers.
McGrath went to grade and high school in Sheldon, and then started somewhat delayed and
intermittent University studies at Moorhead State University. Eventually, he attended the
University of North Dakota at Grand Forks, where he earned a B.A. in 1939. Awarded a
Rhodes Scholarship, he found that he could not use it immediately, because of the outbreak
of World War II. He had received offers from a number of universities to begin work on an
advanced degree—as had the other Rhodes Scholars that year—and accepted an offer
from Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. There he studied, most intensely with
Cleanth Brooks, was involved in radical political activity, wrote, and met Alan Swallow,
who published McGrath’s first book of poems as part of the development of The Swallow
Press.
In the 1940-1941 academic year McGrath taught at Colby College in Maine, but he did not
find teaching there entirely satisfactory and thus left at the end of the academic year to
go to New York City. There he wrote, organized, did legal research for attorneys engaged
in "political" cases, and worked at the Kearney Shipyards, until he entered the
armed forces in 1942. Most of his time in the service was spent on Amchitka Island. He was
discharged with the rank of sergeant in 1945. After a period of adjustment he was finally
able to undertake the year of study provided by the Rhodes Scholarship and spent 1947-1948
at New College, Oxford, England.
Returning to the United States after some travel, McGrath engaged in various
occupations and eventually found a faculty position at Los Angeles State University, where
he taught from 1951 to 1954. His dismissal from this institution was directly connected
with his appearance as an unfriendly witness before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, when that infamous body brought its hearings to Los Angeles in 1953.
From 1954 to 1960 McGrath worked variously as a secondary school teacher at a private
institution, for a company that manufactured carved wooden animals, and at other jobs that
might earn him his keep. He wrote film and television scripts from time to time, several
of the former for director Mike Cimino. In 1960 he resumed his academic career, teaching
at C. W. Post College (now part of Long Island University) in New York. At about this time
he founded, with his wife Genia, the journal Crazy Horse.
In 1962 he returned to North Dakota, where he taught for five years at North Dakota
State University at Fargo. In 1969 McGrath accepted a faculty position at Moorhead State
University in Minnesota, where he had first begun his studies as an undergraduate. At the
end of the 1982- 1983 academic year, he retired from Moorhead State and moved to
Minneapolis, where he now lives.
McGrath has held a variety of significant editorial positions and has been awarded a
variety of distinguished prizes and fellowships for his work as a poet. Among the former,
in addition to his founding editorship of Crazy Horse, he has been a contributing
editor of Mainstream (later Masses and Mainstream) and has served on the
editorial board of the California Quarterly. He has held an Amy Lowell Traveling
Fellowship in Poetry (1965), has twice been awarded National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowships (1974, 1982), was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1967, and was twice a Bush Fellow
(1976, 1981). In May 1981 the University of North Dakota awarded him a Doctorate of
Letters. In 1977 he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society for
Western Literature. In 1986, The Associated Writing Programs presented McGrath an
award at a dinner in Chicago, at which tributes to him were presented by author
"Studs" Terkel and poets Philip Levine and Michael Anania. In the same year, a
"Ceili" was held by Minneapolis’s "the loft," at which many
distinguished poets and writers celebrated McGrath’s seventieth birthday.
McGrath has been married three times, to Marion, Alice, and Eugenia (Genia), all of
whom appear in his poetry. He is the father of a son, Tomasito, to whom much poetry from
McGrath’s later work is addressed and dedicated.
from The Revolutionary Poet in the United States: The Poetry of Thomas McGrath.
Copyright ? 1988 by the Curators of the University of Missouri.
Thomas McGrath
My mother’s father came to North Dakota around the tail end of
the ’70’s, maybe it was ‘80. He came in working on the railroad–that would be the
Northern Pacific and, I believe, the Great Northern–they both come into Fargo. He came to
Fargo and he homesteaded, right in the center–practically the center of Fargo, so the
story goes. But he was broke, so he got a job freighting from Fargo to Winnipeg, and
according to him, he used to drive these old Red River oxcarts with the wheels about as
high as the ceiling, because it was a gumbo mud there. And oxen. And he’d make that trip
up to Winnipeg from Fargo, until … Well, it was when the seasons made it possible. I
don’t suppose he could have done that in the winter–probably would have frozen to death.
And there were still a few Indians around, not that they were killing people, but they
were there–enough to ride in on my grandfather halfway up to Winnipeg and want to
take some of his flour. Which he did not refuse to give them–they scared the shit out of
him. And he was an anti-Indian man from that point on. He had an old Civil War, I suppose,
Remington.
In any case, he did this for a while, I don’t know for how long. Then he traded off
this place in what is now more or less the center of Fargo this is the story
[laughs]–because the land was too low-lying. The Red River, in winter, or at the end of
summer, is thirty–oh, it may be fifty feet wide, around Fargo, something like that. You
couldn’t drown in it, probably it’s too thick with mud–that’s why it’s called the Red
River (though people did use to swim in it when I was a kid; I remember coming into Fargo
once and seeing people swimming near a dam, which is no longer there). So, he trades this
off. In the spring, see, the river would–it’s in a valley, it’s the center of what was an
old glacial lake bottom, Lake Agassiz. So the land is lake bottom, it’s one of the three
richest places in the world, and when the river gets over its banks, which are no more
than about twenty feet up, it’s got nothing to stop it and it can be thirty miles wide,
practically! And about so deep [measures inches with his hand--and laughs]. I mean it just
rolls out in the fields and that’s it. I’m exaggerating a bit, but I mean it is something.
He didn’t think that was a good place to farm, so he traded off and got a place out on
the Maple River, which is outside the valley, about sixty-some miles from Fargo. And
that’s where he started out. He sent back to Ireland and he got a wife who was about three
times his size from over the Shannon, where the English said they would drive the Irish to
hell or Connacht. And so, he got one of those beauties from over there (and probably she
was). She was a Gaelic speaker, whereas his Gaelic was very, very little. And so here he
is, about this tall [indicating very short stature], and here she is, a giantess! And then
they produced two sons and four daughters. He parlayed that bit of land–because the times
were good, the prices were good–to a point where he owned, I don’t know, a couple of
thousand acres of land, which was big in those days. He gave a section of land (640
acres), buildings, cattle, horses and a huge threshing machine, to his oldest son, and the
same thing minus the threshing machine to his other son, and nothing to his daughters
until much later, because they were getting married.
He became very rich on paper, as a lot of people did out there who got there early. He
lost his ass, totally, and one of his sons lost all that land and all his stuff. At the
end, when I knew him, when I was going to high school and when I was staying with them, he
had one miserable little farm left, and, I don’t know–he owned a few acres, some of which
he gave to his daughters, split up a half-section among four daughters.
So eventually my father, after years–a lifetime–of renting land, managed to–as a
result of the war, the Second World War, good times, good crops and good pay–managed to
own that land. So, he wound up, my father–when he was, oh God, must have been around
sixty or so at that time–a landowner, after all those years! I think it really sort of
amazed him. He always seemed to think it was kind of funny, that he had this. He had
worked in the woods and to a limited degree on railroads, so he was more cosmopolitan
[laughs] than most of the people around, most of his contemporaries. And then, in the
woods he encountered the Wobblies. And that’s where he picked up a certain point of view.
From Thomas McGrath: Life and The Poem. Ed. Reginald Gibbons and Terrence Des
Pres. A Special Issue of TriQuarterly magazine. 1987, Northwestern University
Press. Copyright ? 1987 by Triquarterly.
Terrence Des Pres
Thomas McGrath was born in 1916 on a farm near Sheldon, North Dakota, of Irish Catholic
parents. Every aspect of this heritage–the place, the hard times, the religious and
political culture–informs his art in a multitude of ways. His religious upbringing
figures centrally in Part Three–’the Christmas section"–of Letter, and in
his poetry at large there is a steady preference for the ritualistic forms and sacramental
language of the Church. Being Irish also worked in his favor when, in 1941, he entered the
maritime world of seamen and longshoremen–the Irish community that worked Manhattan’s
West Side docks–where the fight for reform went forward on the piers and in the bars and
walkups of Chelsea. There McGrath worked as a labor organizer and, briefly, as a shipyard
welder. His politics led him into a world of experience that, in turn, backed up his
political beliefs in concrete ways. To be a Red on the waterfront was to be the natural
prey of goon squads patrolling the docks for the bosses and the racketeers. It was also to
see the world of industrial work at firsthand. In Part Two of Letter McGrath
recalls his job as a welder at Federal Drydock & Shipyard:
"After the war we’ll get them," Packy says.
He dives
Into the iron bosque to bring me another knickknack.
The other helpers swarm into it. Pipes are swinging
As the chain-falls move on their rails in.
Moment of peace.
The welders stand and stretch, their masks lifted, palefaced.
Then the iron comes onto the stands; the helpers turn to the wheels;
The welders, like horses in fly-time, jerk their heads and the masks
Drop. Now demon-dark they sit at the wheeled turntables,
Strike their arcs and light spurts out of their hands.
"After
The war we’ll shake the bosses’ tree till the money rains
Like crab-apples. Faith, we’ll put them under the ground."
After the war.
Faith.
Left wing of the IRA
That one,
Still dreaming of dynamite.
I nod my head,
The mask falls.
Our little smokes rise into roaring heaven.
These lines are full of commotion and wordplay, for example the double meanings in
"faith" and "war" and the "nod" at the end. The scene itself
suggests McGrath’s larger figure of the "round-dance," his emblem of communal
action wherein his double vision–materialist and sacramentalist at once–is reconciled
with itself. In the passage above, the rites of work become an act of prayer, a moment of
working together beneath the hegemony of a faith now defeated. After the war the bosses
had won and it was Packy O’Sullivan gone, him with his curse on capital. McGrath returned
to Chelsea to find everything changed, his friends dead or departed, the vigorous
radicalism of the National Maritime Union bought off and a new breed of
"labor-fakers" running the show:
And the talking walls had forgotten our names, down at the Front,
Where the seamen fought and the longshoremen struck the great ships
In the War of the Poor.
And the NMU had moved to the deep south
(Below Fourteenth) and built them a kind of Moorish whorehouse
For a union hall. And the lads who built that union are gone.
Dead. Deep sixed. Read out of the books. Expelled.
McGrath’s family immigrated from Ireland and the Shea’s (his mother’s side) were
Gaelic-speaking. Some arrived by way of Ellis Island, others through Canada. Both
grandfathers worked their way west as immigrant laborers on the railroad. They got as far
as the Dakota frontier and settled as homesteaders, living at first in the ubiquitous
dirtbuilt "soddies." For young McGrath, the specific gifts of family and place
included the liturgical richness of Catholicism to fill up frontier emptiness, but also
the political richness of farming in a part of the country and at a time when the
broad-based Farmers’ Alliance was strong enough (during the 1880’s and early 1890’s) to
pursue the first and only nationwide attempt at a national third party, the People’s
Party, thereby awakening radical consciousness and endorsing a spirit of grassroots
insurgency. From Texas up through Kansas and into the great northwest, the Farmers’
Alliance gave rural populations their first taste of dignity. For the first time power was
more than a courthouse coterie. Decent life for a while looked possible. And from early
on, this unique addition to American political culture, now called Populism, was strong in
the Dakotas.
Neighborhood, for McGrath growing up, was part of an adversary culture with collective
traditions including self-help and sharing. This state-within-a-state gave countless small
farmers a defense against the unchecked plundering of grain companies, banks and the
baronial railroads. When McGrath curses wealth and the money system, we should keep in
mind that his family was working to get a foothold in America during the depths of the
Gilded Age, our most ruthless era of capital accumulation. Boom and bust were the signs of
the time, when economic depression and political helplessness ruined "plain
folks" by hundreds of thousands and, an important point, made every year’s
harvest–each autumn’s race with nature and the money supply–a time of national crisis.
The glory days of the Farmers’ Alliance were over by McGrath’s time, but the political
imagination of the populist tradition was ingrained and open to new forms of expression
each time economic disaster shredded the nation. Until World War I, members of the
Industrial Workers of the World–the Wobblies–were a strong and often strong-armed force
in key sectors of labor (lumber and mining most firmly), carrying forward the tradition of
"agrarian revolt." After the war the Non-Partisan League (started in 1916, the
year of McGrath’s birth) organized the vote and worked toward the public ownership of
vital facilities. In North Dakota the League came to control the state legislature and
established a public granary system. The populist spirit thrived on these successes; it
also counted on a tradition of communal work that rural peoples have known since the dawn,
maybe, of independent yeomanry. This broader background, as McGrath suggests in an
interview, underwrites his own kind of visionary populism:
The primary experience out in these states, originally, anyway, was an experience of
loneliness, because the people were so far away from everything. They had come out here
and left behind whatever was familiar, and you find this again and again in letters that
women wrote out here. The other side of that loneliness was a sense of community, which
was much more developed–even as late as thirty or forty years ago–than it is now. The
community of swapped labor. This was a standard thing on the frontier; everybody got
together and helped put up a house or put up a soddy when a new family came along. You