(Note: I originally wrote this in 2020 - I still think of this book way too often and wanted to finally post this)
The Journal of Albion Moonlight found its way to me as I was shelving books in the used bookstore where I used to work. A beat-up copy of a New Directions paperback with scribblings inside, I began salivating the instant I saw it. With comparisons to Camus on the back cover and praise from Henry Miller (“Nothing like it has been written…in all English literature it stands alone”), it was too on the nose, up my alley, a pair of gloves made just for me. I purchased it without giving any customers a chance.
I expected a couple punches to the gut.
“I want to say this now. There is a new plague. There is a plague from which there is no escape anymore. The great grey plague – the plague of universal madness.”
True to the book’s title, this story (novel?) begins as a journal. But it quickly dissolves from there. The plague Patchen writes of is not a viral illness. But much like Camus’s The Plague as symbolic of rising fascism, so too can the plague of Albion Moonlight be that of World War II – a state of the world Patchen clearly saw as mad. Patchen was a pacifist and opposed US involvement in World War II. Albion Moonlight was supposed to be published in 1941 – Delmore Schwartz, offended by Patchen’s anti-war stance convinced New Directions not to publish it. So Patchen did what any good Midwest, Rust Belt, son-of-a-steelworker know-it-all would do: he self-published it. It wasn’t until 1961 when New Directions would publish the work – a time when an anti-war stance was a bit trendier in the midst of the Cold War, the failure of US involvement in Korea, and the preamble of what would turn into the Vietnam War.
“Hitler will be gone tomorrow – a withered leaf falling into a millrace – but the hatred of Hitler will live to breed others like him. I do not hate Hitler. I hate what brought him into being – and the thing that keeps him where he is.”
Despite his pacifist stance, Moonlight the character doesn’t suggest he doesn’t believe in evil. For our narrator (and presumably Patchen) the next steps are clear: “There is only one answer: end War. There is only one way to end War: that is by bringing Capitalism to an end.” Yes, in 1941, Kenneth Patchen was calling for worldwide Socialism. When one considers the consolidation of power in publishing, it also makes that much more sense why Establishment-Schwartz prevented this from being published.
“There is no such thing as super-realism. (The surrealists have managed to put on a pretty good vaudeville act for the middle-class; but there isn’t a religious man among them.)”
Here’s a sentence I wish I wrote: “A roaming stove gratifies no mice.”
And while certain passages have the playfulness of a Hieryonumous Bosch painting, much of the book depicts the grueling darkness of, well, a Hierynonymus Bosch painting. There are content warnings for everything you can think of: infanticide, pedophilia, molestation, suicide, murder, castrations, lynchings, “men masturbating stallions with greased inner-tubes.”
This is an ugly book.
But it has to be an ugly book. From Patchen’s own words documented by the University of California-Santa Cruz:
"I attempted to write the spiritual account of this summer... [1940]-a summer when all the codes and ethics which men lived by for centuries were subjected to the acid tests of general war and universal disillusionment. I had to recreate that chaos...uncharted horror and suffering and complete loss of heart by most human beings...I have I think kept the reader on his toes-I have made him a participant...To love all things is to understand all things; and that which is understood by any of us becomes a knowledge embedded in all of us...To recognize truth it is only necessary to recognize each other."
“Universal disillusionment” could certainly have been the motto for 2020 had Patchen not gotten to it first 80 years earlier. Despite the gritty, brutal, degenerate parts of the book, they are never used to minimize the brutality and degeneracy of said acts. But ignoring the actions will not make them disappear. Shining a light on racism, on sexual harassment and abuse, on transphobia, on police brutality – these are all the things we need to see and especially us with the privilege to normally look the other way. These, says Moonlight, are all the rocks we have to climb on the path to truth.
“I mean that there are as many worlds as there are human beings. And because of this, there is only one world…”
Ultimately, this is the role artists have to play in society. A portion of the journal was created into a standalone, Whitmanesque poem called the Artist’s Duty: “So it is the duty of the artist to discourage all traces of shame / To extend all boundaries / To fog them in right over the plate / To kill only what is ridiculous / To establish problems / To ignore solutions / To listen to no one / To omit nothing / To contradict everything.” And so on.
The Journal of Albion Moonlight is a brutal work of literature. An anti-war, anti-capitalistic, strange but real world of fiction, with stories inside of stories, with stories without explanations, equal parts incoherent and lucid, full of interruptions, bits of poetry, diversions in the margins of the page, an ending more confounding than when it began, it is paranoid, it is afraid, it’s funny, disillusioned, joyful, supreme.
“My journal is [the plague’s] record. I have traced its origins, defined its boundaries, shown its course. It was too late to write a book; it was my duty to write all books. I could not write about a few people; it was my role to write about everyone. I have told the story of the great plague-summer; as an artist I could have wished that there had been more structure and design to it – as a man, that there had been less of the kind there was.”
It’d be madness if it weren’t all so deliberate.