Arts and Letters

It was fifty years ago that Josephine Miles first made her appearance on the literary scene, and that appearance, like everything in her long career, bore the mark of a distinctive and forceful personality. In 1935, Trial Balances, an anthology edited by Ann Winslow and published by Macmillan, brought together selections of the work of some forty-odd young poets, undergraduate and graduate students at colleges and universities throughout the country, accompanied in each case by a critical appreciation by an older established poet. The volume introduced, along with Theodore Roethke, J. V. Cunningham, and Winfield Townley Scott, two remarkable young women, Elizabeth Bishop of Vassar and Josephine Miles of the University of California. The same year Josephine Miles, then a twenty-five-year-old graduate student won the first of her many national prizes, the Shelley Award, and had her first book Lines at Intersection accepted by Macmillan, which published it in 1939. Few poets in our history have won acceptance so young. Morton Dauwen Zabel, reviewing her book in The Southern Review, wrote: "Her keenness of eye, her swift seizure of her decade's peculiar accent and color, are nervously alive."

I shall never forget the impression that the poems of Josephine Miles in Trial Balances made on me when, as a college freshman, I read them for the first time. Like a knife blade, her poetry cut away all sentimental clutter and showed that it was possible to write with clarity and precision, and that wit, the instrument of reason, could still function brilliantly on the modem scene under the most unlikely circumstances. I found the poet, whom I got to know some twenty-five years later, as "nervously alive" as the poetry she produced.

Josephine Miles decided early on to follow the dictum of Emily Dickinson "to tell the truth but tell it slant," and by telling it slant she developed her inimitable style. Her poems are short and pointed and her technique, as Randall Jarrell said, is "relishingly idiosyncratic," "just a little off," and "carefully awkward." She is wholly absorbed in the ordinary and everyday: she follows the hosiery salesman on his round and watches the moon rise above the beauty parlor; in place of the saint's world "suspended in a golden globe" she sees in the plastic "globe of friendly credit… the whole trash / Flats of Berkeley." Her low-keyed poems are pieces of minimal sculpture: she picks up the tacky and trivial pieces of the modem scene and from them constructs a powerful statement. She is a moral miniaturist and her small frame encompasses a universe. She makes what is thrown away and discarded the main material of her work: she looks at the labels on objects around her (indeed at times, as in "Government Injunction Restraining Harlem Cosmetic Co." the label "La Jac Brite Pink Skin Bleach" becomes the entire focus of the poem). But she seeks always to peel off the label to reveal the truth beneath. No one in modern poetry has done so much with so little; so one has gone so far by recognizing such limitations. "It's when choices are limited that it's easy to make intelligent decisions," Josephine Miles once said, "and my choices are always very limited."

How limited indeed these choices were may be appreciated by examining the facts of her life. Josephine Miles was born to an old Chicago family on June 11, 1911. On her father's side she was of English origin. Two of her ancestors actually met on the Mayflower. Their descendants were merchants who settled in Providence, Tories who fled to Canada and New Brunswick at the time of the Revolution. On her mother's side, she was German, descended from Bavarian and Prussian sympathizers of Carl Schurz, who, fleeing Prussian dominance, settled in Milwaukee. Her father was a successful insurance man who died when Josephine was eighteen; her mother was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Chicago. Josephine was born with a dislocated hip, which was not discovered for almost a year. As it was being treated, an intern left a cut which he covered with a cast. The cut became infected and is thought to have caused her severely crippling rheumatoid arthritis. When the arthritis worsened in her third year and she was not expected to live, the family moved permanently to southern California, first to Palm Springs and then to Los Angeles. She underwent a series of operations and spent an entire year in a head-to-foot cast. Her early schooling was haphazard since she could not attend public school and the teachers sent to her were not always much help. One of them came to teach her to make pine needle baskets. This project, Josephine later commented, "was one of the lesser successes of the Los Angeles school system." But with the help of her strong-minded mother, who had worked with John Dewey, she learned to read and write.

She composed her first poem at the age of seven. Celebrating the return of the soldiers at the end of World War I, it ended with a simple direct statement not unlike many in her later poems: "No war, no." On the basis of her frequent contributions to St. Nicholas magazine, she was admitted to the Los Angeles High School, which her brothers attended. Here she studied Latin and Greek and took science courses because these subjects were taught on the first two floors. She could climb stairs only with difficulty and thus avoided most of the English courses, which were taught on the third floor. She would no doubt have avoided them anyway since she found English teachers hopelessly sentimental. Her parents wanted her to enroll at Scripps, but she chose instead to attend UCLA, where she first prepared to major in classics and then shifted to English literature. She went on to graduate school in Berkeley, where she obtained a Master's and then a Ph.D. She thought she would continue in research but her professors were convinced that she would be a valuable teacher. When Mills College refused to offer her a position because she was "too delicate to subject to the rigors of teaching" (two operations on her legs and one on her good hip had all failed to increase her mobility), she was kept on at Berkeley. She became the first woman in the English department to receive tenure. She was promoted to professor and then was finally named one of eight (again the only woman) university professors to lecture on all nine of the California campuses.

In her double role of poet and scholar, Josephine Miles seemed to express the two sides of her nature. Her low-keyed, understated poetry clearly stems from her British heritage, and her statistical studies of poetic diction, replete with numerical tables, reflect the thorough, academic side of her German origins. She sought to be orthodox in her scholarship, and yet, even though it won her several awards, it is in its way just as idiosyncratic as her poetry. In it she sought to relate the particular to the general, the word to the sentence, and the sentence to the language.

Interested always in the individual's place in the social fabric, she became a great teacher and a great humanitarian. At the university she was, in the words of her colleague Thomas Parkinson, both an "irritant and an ornament." She worked tirelessly for what she believed in. Her later poems are a marvelous record of the upheavals of the Sixties. But passionate social activist that she was, she is in her poems of the period cool and objective just as in her accounts of her early suffering she displays not the slightest trace of self-pity. Proud and courageous herself, she championed the courage of others, but she knew that poetry is not propaganda.

Josephine Miles was a wiry, wrenlike little woman whose twisted hands looked like wounded wingtips. The discomfort that anyone felt at the sight of her misshapen body was immediately dispelled as soon as she spoke. She had bright eyes, a firm strong voice, and a face that radiated boundless energy and curiosity. Her quick lively speech was punctuated by constant laughter. In the eighteenth century her fervent espousal of reason, her ready wit, and her great charm, would have made her the mistress of a salon. Because she could so clearly see the humor in every situation, she was able to turn even her failures into triumphs. Her inability to read music became a kind of mental block. Unable one summer to travel to Europe, she decided to enter the Berkeley campus by a gate other than the one she normally used so that most people would not know she was there auditing a course in musical composition. The final assignment was to compose a tune to one's own words. Jo had plenty of words, of course, but no tune. She finally managed to compose one, which her instructor said had a kind of "floating quality." Another colleague remarked that it did indeed have such a quality; in fact, it closely resembled the Japanese national anthem.

I saw Jo Miles for the last time when she came to New York in the fall of 1984 to receive the Lenore Marshall-Nation Award of $5,000 for her Collected Poems 1930-83. Although her laughter was just as strong, she seemed somewhat subdued. She would not want me to sentimentalize about her physical condition in her last years but she would not object to my putting down the facts. She was operated on for breast cancer and for a twisted gall bladder. In the final months her hips could no longer support her weight, frail as she was, and unable either to sit or stand, she was in constant pain. She died on May 12 at the age of 73. The little house on Virginia Street near the Berkeley campus, where she had entertained and encouraged so many poets during her lifetime, she left to the English Department as a center for writers.

One of her colleagues, Jonas A. Barish, at a memorial service in Berkeley, told of a final visit with her: "The last word I ever heard Jo Miles speak was the word 'amazing.' This was two days before she died, and she said it twice. I had been telling her of the campus disturbances caused by the anti-apartheid demonstrations, and I don't know how much of what I was saying was getting through to her. Probably very little. She was very wasted at this point and almost totally inarticulate. I was holding her hand and speaking with my mouth only a few inches from her ear. I no longer remember what specific incident or remark I had referred to, but I ended by saying, 'Don't you think that's amazing, Jo?' And she said in response, very clearly, 'Amazing.' Then she repeated it: 'Amazing.’" All the friends and admirers of Josephine Miles throughout the world will agree with Mr. Barish that that last word might well serve as her epitaph. For, as he puts it, "she herself was amazing, unendingly the cause of amazement in others, and also blessed with the unlimited capacity for amazement herself.''