"The hand of a Chinese master": Jose Garcia Villa and modernist orientalism

Moore's review shows the delicate ideological work necessary to incorporate Villa, a Filipino subject, into the Anglo American modernist canon. A number of the reviews of Have Come do dwell upon Villa's nationality, and by and large these reviewers have a more difficult time making an argument for Villa's poetic value. Babette Deutsch, reviewing for the New Republic, echoes many of the familiar points: comparing Villa to Dickinson, Hopkins, the metaphysicals; noting his difficulty, intensity, paradoxes, and ambiguities; labeling him (in classic modernist style) a "mythmaker" (512). But Deutsch allows Villa's national origin to surface directly in a way that Moore does not, linking his nationality directly to the peculiarities of his poetry: "The fact that he is a native of the Philippines who comes to the English language as a stranger may have helped him to his unusual syntax" (512). San Juan regards Deutsch's pronouncement as a racist assumption that Villa's distinctive syntax is a "defect of being a Filipino native not born to the language" (182). And it is true that this claim seems directly linked to what Deutsch sees as Villa's main flaw, his formal mannerisms: "Occasionally his pleasure in technical problems betrays him" (512). But in fact what the injection of Villa's national origin does is disrupt the universality of the aesthetic evaluation taking place in the rest of the review. Coming in the final paragraph, the observation casts doubt on the ground of Deutsch's objection: Villa's mannerism may be a poetic Failing, or it may be an effect of his foreignness. In either case, the injection of racial and linguistic difference destabilizes the criteria of judgment.

Those reviews that foreground Villa's nationality tend to be more negative, further suggesting that nationality disrupts the modernist criteria of judgment. Nationality also is coupled with religion, as a number of reviews blame the weaknesses of Villa's poems on Filipino Catholicism. Louise Bogan's New Yorker review labels Villa's weaknesses as those of a "Spanish mystic," effectively taking Villa out of the Anglo American tradition; the fact of Villa's foreign nationality and religion raises the specter of another tradition, one that is clearly not compatible with the high modernist tradition Villa's champions want to place him in. The most virulently anti-Catholic moments come in Elliot Paul's New York Herald Tribune review; although the review is quite laudatory overall, Paul makes no bones about blaming Villa's shortcomings on Catholicism:

   [He] can scarcely write eight lines without talking about God as if
   He were his "Brother Sylvest." Once in a while his Catholic
   background gets him into a kind of unthinking brutality. [...] To
   those of us not accustomed to seeing those terribly unaesthetic
   Sacred Hearts on the walls of rooming houses and even knocking
   shops, the idea of a pigeon walking toward one and bursting into
   God, wounds and all, is more than mildly repulsive. (28)