Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend: Parts I-IV
(Copper Canyon Press, 1997)

Thomas McGrath was a 36-year old Rhodes Scholar, World War II veteran, accomplished poet, and teacher at Los Angeles State College when he was blacklisted in 1953 for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. During the next several years, McGrath worked at menial jobs while writing the first part of Letter to an Imaginary Friend, an epic-scale autobiographical poem that would take 30 years to complete. While the poem could be considered “Proustian” in its heroic effort to recover a past from the distance of middle age, McGrath’s hard-earned political insights provide the work with a wrought philosophical frame. This separates it from the belle-lettrism that has marred many American middle-century long poems with their facile displays of learning, narcissistic reminiscences and trivial details culled from “daily living.” McGrath wasn’t unaware of his distance from mainstream literary culture. Posing as an outlaw, he writes that he “held to the hard road/ While Establishment Poets, like bats, in caves with color T.V. / Slept upside down in clusters.” (154) Written several years before the publication of Ginsberg’s Beat milestone Howl, Letter already recorded, with prophetic tones but through un-Puritanical eyes, “the junky medics, night walking, their ears full of barbs / And the loony preachers, their ears ringing with gunshots / From the suicide farms…” (113) The poem is imbued, however, with an ethical earnestness — not to mention a pure love of family, wives, and friends — that has been long absent from the postmodern equation, providing the missing link between the right wing dogma and politics of a poem like the Cantos and the aforementioned chaotic Howl. His capacity for evoking images, whether describing vegetables or labor strikes, is often amazing, compacting the wealth of an entire poem in a few lines. He describes, sadistically but lovingly, the appearance of a young girl: “And the daughter, big as all three, with a backside for a face, / With a mouth of guttapercha, with a cast, with a fine / High shining lunacy crossing her horsy eyes.” (81) An atheist since thirteen, he hyperbolically confesses to the Christian flavor of his ethics in Book III, writing: “Yes, I do know sin, / For haven’t I felt the whole universe recoil at my touch?,” echoing at the same time the the metaphysics of J. Alfred Prufrock. He then proceeds to parody the entire confessional act with a litany of sins fueled as much by Joycean wordplay as by a sincere belief that he (or someone else) has cheated his fellow man. Letter is one of the most readable long poems in the Pound tradition of personal epics, and yet is complex enough to promise disclosure of many secrets upon rereading. This edition is a literary event that will help secure McGrath a place in the twentieth-century canon.