Imagined Selves: David Rich on the Anti-biographies of Stephen Jonas

I first read Stephen Jonas (1921-1970) in 1994, when the great poetry publisher Talisman House issued Selected Poems, edited by Joseph Torra. Subsequently, it became the sign of the true initiate in poetry: have you read Stephen Jonas? Over 20 years later, I found myself in Gloucester, MA at the house of poet and mystic Gerrit Lansing (1928-2018), who, with Raffael de Gruttola, was the co-executor of Jonas’s literary estate. By then, the Talisman edition was long out of print and most secondhand copies were fetching three figures. Talking with Gerrit, I soon concluded that the time for a new edition of Jonas was at hand, and I felt confident I could bring the project to City Lights. Gerrit was delighted with the idea, but I knew I couldn’t do it alone. I enlisted our mutual friend Derek Fenner in the cause, and we quickly agreed we needed Joe Torra. Not only had he established the texts of so many Jonas poems for his edition, but he’d also written a biographical introduction for the Talisman edition that would have been impossible to supersede.

Yet there was one more piece to the puzzle. In the years since the Talisman edition, Gerrit’s good friend David Rich had been researching some of the more obscure questions surrounding Jonas’s origins. Little was known about Jonas’s life prior to 1948, apart from a series of conflicting tales he’d woven, seemingly for his own amusement, and imparted to various friends. I asked David if he’d be willing to write up his research for a postscript to the volume, and what he produced was so astoundingly thorough, I knew there was no question but to add him as our fourth editor. With his continued proximity to Jonas’s papers, David proved crucial to the book’s final form as he unearthed previously unpublished poems as well as extracts from notebooks. Sadly, Gerrit died before we were able to bring the project to fruition but with the help of co-executor Raffael de Gruttola, we have crossed the finish line, and the resulting volume, Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader, appears this month from City Lights.

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Garrett Caples: First tell us a little about yourself; where are you from?

David Rich: The fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts. My family lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood of Sicilian immigrant and Sicilian-American fishing families. When I stepped outside I usually heard Sicilian not English.

GC: What brought you to what we’ll call here the New American Poetry, say, Olson on down?

DR: I met Gerrit Lansing at his bookstore Abraxas when I was 13. My friend Amanda Cook, who’s now on the board of the Gloucester Writers Center, brought me to poetry when I was a freshman in high school. She recommended William Carlos Williams. I savored his poems “To a Poor Old Woman” and “Proletarian Portrait.” All my reading until then had been fantastic or supernatural in some way. H.P. Lovecraft. Sword and Sorcery. I marveled that the world I knew could be so accurately and sympathetically conveyed. I had no idea who Charles Olson was until I began reading him my last year of college.

GC: So you met Lansing at a young age; when do you and he start hanging out as friends?

DR: In 2007. We both knew Amanda. His home had become almost a site of pilgrimage, although he would certainly object to that term. Poets from around the country would visit, and more and more he would call to invite me over. We shared an intuition regarding how to conduct a conversation among a room of people, how to pace it and be inclusive. A certain attentiveness. I differed a bit from his other friends because I had worked at Hammond Castle as a teenager, where Gerrit had lived with the inventor Jack Hammond 35 years before. John Latouche had introduced them, and I was always curious to hear more about Latouche, Carol Channing, Marc Blitzstein, Alice Bouverie, and other figures from that time. The only poet from his past I really wanted to discuss was Stephen Jonas.

GC: Had you already learned of Jonas by then or had Gerrit introduced you to his work?

DR: Gerrit would often bring up Jonas if he felt a young poet would benefit from reading him. Several times he told me about getting the phone call in the winter of 1970. Jonas had overdosed, dead. Gerrit rushed to the Boston morgue where he and Raffael de Gruttola were appointed to take responsibility for Jonas’s possessions. Gerrit and Raffael served jointly as his literary executors. The Selected Poems Joe Torra edited for Talisman was, in the best possible sense, required reading in the Boston scene. I was moved by Jonas’s poems, which are full of beauty, sorrow, and vitality. Leaps from exquisite Elizabethan diction to the most startling invective or love declaration and back again.

GC: So, briefly, then, who was Stephen Jonas?

DR: A poet who lived in Boston from at least the end of the Second World War until his 1970 death. He was a major influence within the Occult School of Boston. Mid-century Boston poetry is often associated with Robert Lowell and his students at Boston University. However, there was a second scene with an entirely separate origin. Queer poets who were first-generation college. Jonas was the only poet of color in the group. John Wieners was German-Irish Catholic. Ed Marshall was from a Yankee farming family. The scene catalyzed when Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser moved to Boston to work in libraries. Jonas appeared in Measure (edited by Wieners) and Yugen (Amiri Baraka and then-wife Hettie Jones), and published Exercises for Ear with Ferry Press in England.

GC: Jonas seems like he emerged almost fully formed in late-’40s Boston and his biography prior to that is by no means straightforward. What do you know about Jonas prior to the late 1940s?

DR: Nineteen forty-eight is basically the cut off. Before that we only know what he told friends or wrote in notebooks: multiple conflicting origin stories, each containing some grain of truth. Most center on the Massachusetts fishing port of New Bedford where there is a large community of people from what is now the Republic of Cabo Verde. He claimed to be Cabo Verdean but also claimed to be the son of Puerto Rican parents. He sometimes made reference to upstate New York, but only one major piece of writing places his childhood outside Massachusetts, in Plainfield, New Jersey. Some friends thought his birth name was Rufus Jones, and that he was born in Georgia.

GC: So given all these conflicting stories, where and when did you begin your research into his early life?

DR: The fall of 2016. I worked from documents and notebooks Gerrit owned, as well as any published writing. I started with his death certificate, then census records, city directories, to see if any people or places in his notebooks checked out.

GC: How did you get a hold of your research materials? Was this information available online or was this more old-fashioned library research? Did you have to travel to consult any of these materials?

DR: When I was growing up I accompanied my father on research trips to Canada, and I remember when basic genealogical research was conducted in town halls and municipal libraries. Now, however, to search and cross-reference vital records from around the country—birth, marriage, and death records, ship manifests, nationalization documents, state and federal censuses, city directories, draft registrations—it really is necessary to at least begin with online subscription databases. The notebooks themselves gave me a lot to go on.

GC: Just to clarify, what databases are we talking about here?

DR: I hesitate to answer that question only because I don’t want this interview to inadvertently become an advertisement, but when researching someone supposedly born in 1921, as Jonas probably was, the first step is to check Federal Census records from 1930 and 1940 on Ancestry.

GC: In your Postscript to Arcana, you lay out several theories of origin about Jonas, based on various records that could match one of the conflicting origin stories he gave out to friends or recorded in notebooks. There’s no way to know, of course, which of the stories is closest to the truth and you present evidence for and against his competing claims with appropriate dispassion. With that caveat, however, I want you to indulge yourself here: based on the research you’ve done in total, which of his origin stories seems most plausible to you?

DR: Let me start by describing the mystery itself. For about 20 years Stephen Jonas devised pseudo-biographical and anti-biographical narratives; some he shared with his predominantly white friend group, some he kept private in his journals. Again and again he performed the act of yielding to his friends’ curiosity even as he kept the truth a closely guarded secret. He purposefully confounded people around him, forcing them to reckon with him and his talent on shifting ground they knew they could not control or even anticipate the terms of. That said, my goal was never to unveil Jonas but to delve as deeply as I could into the complex narratives of his imagined selves.

Let me lay out these selves in several broad strokes. Usually the story involves birth into a Catholic Cabo Verdean family, sometimes Puerto Rican, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, then adoption by a white couple who are described either as Quaker or Christian Scientist. The birth name he often gave was Santos, with a mother whose surname was Perreira. The name Dehoff surfaces in multiple iterations, either as the maiden name of his adoptive white mother, as the surname of his first lover, or as the name of a friend who gave him a ride from Philadelphia. Whether he was born Rufus Jones in Georgia, as he told David Rattray, or he adopted the name Rufus Jones out of devotion to the prominent Quaker theologian, as he told Edward Marshall, is unclear. Amazingly, each of these stories contains a grain of truth, almost always with respect to the most minor characters, who I could verify in city directories or vital records, but never with regard to the major ones.

Only once does he place his origin outside of Massachusetts. In the story “What Made Maud Hum,” his longest anti-biographical piece, he set his childhood among Christian Scientists in Plainfield, New Jersey, a major city of the African American Great Migration. On one hand we are confronted by his Social Security Death Index listing, which gives his legal name as Stephen Jonas, and the state of issuance as Georgia some time before 1951. If his name were originally Rufus Jones, and he were from Atlanta, as some close friends have suggested, then I do have someone in mind who could fit. But listen to the recording of him at the Woodberry Poetry Room website. Not a hint of Georgia in his voice. He spoke with what sounds like an entirely unfeigned Massachusetts accent. And not a Boston Brahmin put on, but the voice of a bookish lower-middle-class person from a medium-sized town, with a slight speech impediment. The closest friends Jonas had were not the poets, or the upper class Yankees he also associated with, but local Boston Irish and Italian guys he had known from a young age. One was named Nino, whose surname I haven’t found yet, and another was named Manning. I’ve seen a photograph of the three of them as teenagers. I suspect they may’ve bonded together in a Boston-area orphanage.

At one point in a journal he recounts this exchange: Cynthia said your people American Indians? told her fergit baby it’s a bad scene anyway. If his surname were, indeed, originally Jonas, then based on his appearance, the name, and his accent, I think there is a possibility he was Mashpee Wampanoag, since there is a Mashpee family named Jonas whose ancestry includes African American mariners. But that is only speculation; if that were the case, however, we would have to throw out the supposed 1921 birth year, since I’ve already checked the Massachusetts Birth Index for a match.

GC: This is rather a speculative question but do you think it’s possible that Jonas stole an identity during his time as a civilian bureaucrat in the records bureau? He did indicate that he rigged himself up a pension that way, and as I understand it, there’s no actual records of him serving in the army.

DR: From what I’ve been told, Jonas had a desk job at the South Boston Army Base during the early days of the Korean War. I think military lore and urban legend has always included the character of the sly desk worker who gets a noxious commanding officer declared legally dead through some alchemy of paperwork, or makes off with a sweet package of benefits. The truth of the matter is Jonas faced serious mental challenges, and he was regularly treated at the VA Hospital in Brockton, Massachusetts. At the same time, he served a short prison sentence at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, having been convicted of defrauding a mail order book club. At the trial in 1958 Jonas defended himself, haranguing the judge and jury on the ills of the American economy. Hopefully a scholar will go looking for the transcript.

We have to face the possibility that no birth record for Jonas survives. In one notebook entry he states that he was one of seven children born in New Bedford to a Cabo Verdean fisherman named Manuel or Peter Santos, with none of the children officially registered. A Cabo Verdean Peter Santos does appear in the Federal Census for New Bedford in 1930 with seven children, but that may’ve been a lucky guess on Jonas’s part. If the surname was originally Jones rather than Jonas and the birth year 1921, then he might have been Edward Jones, an African American state ward of no known parentage who appears on the 1930 census for Cambridge, Massachusetts in the household of an African American foster father who was working as a clerk in the U.S. Customs office. What is particularly compelling about this possibility is that in the same household was Pauline Hopkins, an African American writer who authored the novel Contending Forces. That Jonas could have been encouraged by Hopkins to write poetry is an intriguing possibility, but entirely within the realm of speculation for now. But, listening to recordings of Jonas, this is precisely the kind of middle- or lower-middle-class circumstance I would expect to find him in.

GC: Given all the work you’ve done unravelling these various mysterious strands, could you sum up your sense of the significance of Jonas as a poet?

DR: As the shadow Jacques Derrida cast over American poetry has waned, there is a renewed ability of poets and critics to appreciate the power of music, speech, the energies of vernacular in verse. We can see this in the Charles Olson revival of the last decade. The formidable achievement of Jonas was the way he merged the torque and melodies of Elizabethan poetry with jazz and blues. There are two excellent scholarly pieces on Jonas I recommend. The lecture “No Saints in Three Acts: On Stephen Jonas” by Aldon Lynn Nielsen, which was published as the July 1997 installment of The Impercipient Lecture Series, is foundational and ought to be reprinted. In 2004, T.J. Anderson III included a chapter on Jonas in his book Notes to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry. Professor Anderson supplies a deep-tissue reading of the way Jonas constructed his poetic lines. Jonas believed that true poems arose from interior, individual source waters of insight and emotion, a private music. He guarded that interiority with his life, and took the secret of his origin to the grave, but the music plays on.