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In the sensibilities of a discerning few, James Broughton for decades occupied a special place
comparable to that of Jean Cocteau, Buster Keaton, Erik Satie, and Edith
Sitwell. As poet, film-maker, and playwright, he graced the San Francisco scene through its various and
countless renaissances since 1946, earning him such labels in its press as "San Francisco's own
man for all seasons," its "leprechaun poet laureate," etc. Yet he never was fashionable, nor
identified with any school: always the odd bird in the orphic aviary, he remained uniquely true
to his own visionary music.
Said James:
"I am a third generation Californian.
My great grandfather was a scout with Fremont,
my grandmother was born in the Mother Lode,
my aunt served in the State Legislature.
When the sun was in Scorpio, the moon in Aries,
and the cusp of Virgo and Libra rising in 1913,
I was born in the San Joaquin town of Modesto,
On the Tuolomne River of Stanislaus County
in the state of California.
My grandfathers were bankers, and so was my father .
But my mother wanted me to become a surgeon.
However, one night when I was 3 years old
I was awakened by a glittering stranger
who told me I was a poet and always would be
and never to fear being alone or being laughed at.
That was my first meeting with my Angel
who is the most interesting poet I have ever met.
My childhood passions were dancing and swimming,
circuses, amusement parks, movies, vaudeville,
the Book of Knowledge and the Land of Oz.
Pet playthings: my toy theater, my magic lantern.
When I was 10 I was sent away to military school.
There my Angel came to my rescue:
I fell madly in love with the English language.
(And also the captain of the baseball team. )
My favorite book is still Webster's Unabridged, 2nd ed.
At 12 I imitated all of the Oxford Book of English Verse
and most of the Louis Untermeyer anthologies.
But ultimately I have learned more about poetry
from music and magic than from literature.
The clearest poetic memory of my years at Stanford:
the day Yvor Winters ordered me out of his class.
Poetry is a living adventure, not a literary problem.
(Other favorite books: Roget's Thesaurus, Tao Te Ching,
Mother Goose, Candide, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. )
Ever since that visit from the Angel, Sunny Jim was singing those goatsongs and getting to the
True Bottom of Things. From Ga-Ga to Gay-Gay over half a century, doing that
Lingam-Gambol. Every poem a hymn to St. Priapus in his exceedingly comfortable logaoedic
meter consisting of a catalectic Glyconic and a Pherecratean. (Oh yeah!!!)
Rootin'-tootin' broughton-spoutin' pricksongs, O Friends &. Neighbours! Like I might say, some will want to
develop a migraine and go read the Gideon Bible or Robert Lowell. Why don't the rest of us
just strip off and jump in the hot tub? Walt's over in the corner talking to Arty Rainbow and
Pauline Verlaine, who has just this second quoted Victor Hugo:
"Laughter is the soap of the gods."
Almost as noble as James Broughton's willingness to stand there as naked as a jaybird is his
willingness to use babytalk, prattle, doo-doo, goo-goo, and loony-camp lingo when called upon
to do so. A lot of it works outrageously well. He reminds me of Jacques Tati playing tennis in
Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot. One imagines this bizarre figure coming onto the centre
court at Wimbledon to contest the formidable Boris "Boom Boom" Becker. He wears ancient
tweeds, a floppy hat, smokes a pipe, carries a stone-age racket made of petrified bat guano.
Herr Becker serves and a fierce backhand drive to the baseline by Hulot leaves Boris standing
there bug-eyed and flat-footed. Touche!
In JB's early poems the domain is often that of childhood. The forms are similar to nursery
rhymes and the polished nonsense of Lear and Carroll. A couple of examples:
"I don't like his looks and he don't like me,
but I'm a cowboy now and so is he.
So I'm gonna get my gun and go shoot Jesus,
I'm gonna shoot Jesus before he shoots me.'
"I'm a lightfoot buckaroo on a beehop pace
and Delicate Crazy is my hometown. II
"Love so they tell me, love so I hear,
love waves the trumpet and butters the tree."
Middle period Broughton fills us with the realization that into every life a little zen must fall.
James spent a lot of time in Sausalito, across the San Francisco Bay, on Alan Watts'
houseboat, where there was always some very antic company: Piro Caro, lev, Jean Varda,
Kermit Sheets, Daddy Waxwrath (aka Kenneth Rexroth), Robert Duncan.
I don't know what the Left is doing,
said the Right Hand,
but it looks fascinating.
He became, he said, "a hometown swami who can't keep his mouth shut."
Alan Watts remarked: "G.K. Chesterton once observed that when a typesetter substitutes
"comic" for "cosmic" he is not really too much in error. After all, Dante entitled his
description of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, The Divine Comedy. In the contemplation of lofty
themes most people are serious, though not always sincere. Broughton, however, is always
sincere but hardly ever serious. Indeed, seriousness is a questionable virtue: it is gravity
rather than levity, and it was, again, that devout Catholic, Chesterton, who
maintained that the angels fly because they take themselves lightly. And, in company with
the angels, Broughton laughs with God rather than at Him."
JB always had a string of sobriquets throughout his life: Sunny Jim as a child; Jimmy as a boy
and young man; The Unbuttoned One; Sister Sermoneta of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
I liked to call him The Modesto Catbird, and I believe it was I who deemed him Big Joy, from
the time (age 61) that the cinematographer and artist, Joel Singer, came into his life. O
frabjous day!
Many readers of his poems do not know about the 23 films JB created. The magazine Film
Culture referred to him as "the grand classic master of Independent Cinema." The American
Film Institute presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Some of the films are
Mother's Day. Adventures of Jimmy, Loony Tom, The Pleasure Garden, The Bed, The Golden
Positions, and Song of the Godbody (with Joel Singer). British readers will be interested,
particularly, in The Pleasure Garden, 1953. James had been living in Barbara Jones' wonderful
house on Well Walk in Hampstead. Barbara took him to see the ruins of the Crystal Palace
Gardens. James met Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert who said they would help him make
a film there. Hattie Jacques volunteered to playa fairy godmother. Jill Bennett was in it. And
John LeMesurier. The finished product delighted Broughton's supporters, though Stephen
Spender said to him, "Don't you think your film is rather too pleasant?"
Big Joy and Joel Singer retired from the San Francisco Scene and lived in the midst of a forest
near Port Townsend, on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. James, much reinvigorated by
the relationship, was very productive into his early eighties, until slowed
by a stroke. He was increasingly frail, yet cheerful. Joel Singer deserves Angel status for the way he attended
James.
You would have expected good letters from such a felicitous writer: "Wish you and Tom were
still here. Rhododendrons are abloom and columbine too. The hot tub in moonlight is a special
pleasure. We are considering naming our "estate" Zemmery Ridd which, surely you have not
forgotten, is where the Oblong Oysters grow, near the Great Gramboolian Plain.
Big Joy, a great fan of Stevie Smith, approached The End in similar spirit. A late poem begins:
How often do you think of Death?
Death thinks about you all the time
Death is fatally in love with you and me
and his lust is known to be relentless...
--Jonathan Williams
James Richard Broughton, poet, film-maker, and playwright; born 10 November 1913, Modesto, California; married
Suzanna Hart, two children: Serena and Orion; died Port Townsend, Washington, 17 May 1999.
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