Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

As you might have found, I have a penchant for picking up books abandoned in cafes, especially if they seem to be written by lunatics.  My latest such find was, I am surprised to say, rather brilliant. Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, first published in 1915 is a dark and blunt assessment of the inner life of a small town. This book is a collection of short poems in the voices of the dead, lying side by side in the town cemetery, giving voice to their sorrows, jealousies, regrets, and, occasionally, joys, most of which are deeply lodged in their life on earth rather than there unclear place in an ill-defined afterlife.

The cemetery holds rich and poor, powerful and outcast, bankers, publishers, poets, prostitutes, drunks, thieves, and a few murdered, all lying in repose beneath its old trees. Each of the graves is marked with a monument, many of which were carved by the aptly named Richard Bone.  His jaundiced view arrives about half-way through the collection, by which time its message has already become clear:

When I first came to Spoon River
I did not know whether what they told me
Was true or false.
They would bring me the epitath
And stand around the shop while I worked
And say "He was so kind," "He was so wonderful,"
"She was the sweetest woman," "He was a consistent Christian."
And I chiseled for them whatever they wished,
All in ignorance of the truth.
But later, as I lived among the people here,
I knew how near to the life
Were the epitaths that were ordered for them as they died.
But still I chiseled whatever they paid me to chisel
And made myself party to the false chronicles
Of the stones,
Even as the historian does who writes
Without knowing the truth,
Or because he is influenced to hide it.

I don't read much poetry written after the thirteenth century. I have little tolerance for nostalgic tones or soft focus. This collection has neither, just hard-hitting, bald truths, and the odd moment of brilliant light.  Part of the fascination comes from piecing the stories together -- a husband thinking fondly of his loving wife might be followed a few pages later by the same wife, speaking with love and lust of another man. A murder and his victim provide two sides of the same event. Beloved and respected figures admit their hypocrisies, now that they are dead and mute.

A convenient online edition links the gossiping characters to one another.  This was all quite shocking in 1915, when the myth of the happy small town was quite robust.  It is still a mainstay of political speeches, though thanks to Masters -- and 100 years of history -- we know better, now.