Box Vox

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November 8, 2011

Poetry, Hotel Bar Butter & The Communist Party

HotelBarButter

Albert Lowenfels (who invented the triangular prism-shaped butter package that we looked at yesterday) had a brother: Walter Lowenfels, a poet who was imprisoned under the Smith Act during the McCarthy era.

“Well, Walter,” I said, “I’m here to find out about you.”

“Then you should ask me about butter,” he obliged. “When I was young, I was in my family’s butter business. In my autobiography I wrote:

For me, butter was a huge, independent world, as self-contained as a spiral nebula. It was the galaxy of business.

…I decided that… I’d rather die as a poet than a butter man. so I told my father I was going to quit his business. He just couldn’t believe it, and he said: I want you to get checked up physically. I said okay; so he told me to go to a doctor, who asked me to bring my book of poems and a urine specimen. When I got to his office, this doctor told me to lie down. (It turned out that he was a psychiatrist!) I told him: ‘Look, I’m going to Europe. My father is the man who’s sick, try to take care of him.’ So my father sent me to another psychiatrist who told my father that I should see Dr. Freud. My father said he’d pay for it, but I never went. I took a slow boat to Spain and never got to Vienna.”

Village Voice, Jan. 16, 1978

But he did get to Paris where he continued writing poetry and became part of the Paris avant-garde. There, with Michael Fraenkel, he established Carrefour Press, which printed anonymous works.

Fraenkel and Lowenfels became excited by the idea of total anonymity in art, deciding to found their own press and publish unsigned books. They believed that gaining recognition in art was like competition in business  … To get their “anonymous” movement going, Lowenfels and Fraenkel each contributed work…  A number of writers, including Kay Boyle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Michael Arlen, expressed interest in the venture, but no manuscripts were forthcoming.

Walter Lowenfels Biography, Bookrags

With WWII Walter Lowenfels’s creative energies were once again drawn into the competive galaxy of the butter business.

Lowenfels and his family returned to the United States in 1934, moving to Mays Landing, New Jersey. Lowenfels returned to his father’s butter business and worked alongside his brother, Albert. During that time, Lowenfels introduced new ideas to the business; he invented a new waxed paper packaging for butter and he applied date stamping to improve the butter’s freshness. At night and on the weekends, he continued to write poetry.

Yale Library

I’m guessing that it was Albert who submitted the patent for Walter’s waxed paper packaging and that this is it…

WalterWrapper

Although his work at Hotel Bar Butter sounds creative in some ways, Lowenfels was not happy about returning to work as a “butter man.”

He wrote to Henry Miller about the transition from poet to businessperson: “I butter from nine to five and then I change into a butterfly and go ahead with poems.”

from Wikipedia’s entry on Walter Lowenfels

(Walter Lowenfel’s arrest, after the fold…)

In 1938, he left the family business again and moved to Philadelphia where he began writing for the Pennsylvania edition of the Daily Worker and became increasingly involved in the Civil Rights and Communist movements. He soon became editor and held that job through 1954. His social activism and writing focused on civil and worker’s rights. Through the 1940s, he sometimes worked only part-time for the paper, while also selling intercommunication devices and relying on his wife’s teaching salary. The couple’s family grew to four daughters. In 1951, Lowenfels suffered a heart attack and recovered fully. The same year, his family moved to a cabin in Weymouth, New Jersey.

In July of 1953, Lowenfels was arrested with eight others (they were known as “The Philadelphia Nine”) and accused of sedition and conspiracy to overthrow the United States government under the Smith Act. While planning how they could best strategize their defense, the group agreed that Lowenfels should return to writing poetry to raise money. After seventeen years, Lowenfels began to write poetry again and started to translate others’ poetry from French and Italian into English. The group was convicted but the government’s case was overturned in August of 1953. He was arrested again in 1954 for distributing “subversive” materials and was imprisoned at the Holmsburg County Prison in Philadelphia for treason. His conviction was overturned for lack of evidence in 1954. That same year, he published A Prisoner’s Poems for Amnesty. In the midst of Lowenfels’s arrests and trial, Lillian was asked to sign a loyalty oath. She pled the Fifth Amendment and was fired from her teaching job. After his release from prison, Lowenfels quit the Daily Worker and devoted himself to writing and editing the writing of others.

Yale Library

Better known as a poet than a butter man, Lowenfels died in 1976.

“Oh Walter, he belongs to a party all his own.”

–Harold Rosenberg, art critic

(See also: CCCP Energy Drink)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

 

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