Ida’s unimpeachably expert first book, Virgin Again, published by J. Laughlin at New Directions, had appeared to outraged and ecstatic notices in the little magazines, the blogs of the day, when she was an eighteen-year-old rising sophomore at Bryn Mawr. Its scabrous title had nearly gotten her expelled, but Katharine McBride, the incoming president, saw the scandal as an opportunity to demonstrate the forward thinking that had won her the job, and pardoned the young offender. Within a year there had been forty-three articles about red-hot Ida Perkins and/or Virgin Again in Abrasions, Stalactite Review, The Hellions, and numberless other magazines on both sides of the Atlantic and the Channel. Richard Aldington, to name only one, had praised the “crystalline purity” of Ida’s “finger-shredding shards” in the Camberwell Rattlebag.
Two years later, just as the war was ending, Ember and Icicle was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber in London and by Laughlin in Connecticut. Eliot wrote Marianne Moore, whose own revolutionary work he had championed two decades previously, “Young Miss Perkins, like you before her, has helped recalibrate my understanding of my origins,” while Moore herself told Ida, “We are pierced by the intricate needlework of your asperitic formulations.” She had the obligatory meeting with Miss Moore on the same bench outside the New York Public Library where the senior poet had met her soon-to-be disciple Elizabeth Bishop, though little seems to have come of their encounter, as far as Paul or anyone else could tell from the available evidence, which included Mollie Macdonald’s scathing cameo portrait of Ida as the promiscuous villainess of The Bridge Game, her satire of Seven Sisters womanhood. Neither Moore nor Bishop seems to have had much truck with Ida — and, perhaps unsurprisingly, she turns up nowhere in Bishop’s voluminous correspondence.
And Ida? She herself said very little; at least Paul could discover very little she’d said. Unlike most of the garrulous scribblers of her moment, she blazed across her world silently, cunningly, her only documented words the ones stamped on the smoking pages of her Faber and ND books — though Sterling succeeded in wooing her over to Impetus as soon as he was able. Apart, that is, from a few barbed remarks caught on the fly (or could they have been manufactured ex post facto?) by the literary memoirists of her era. Millicent Crabtree, in her recollections of life with Sheldon Storm, reported that Ida refused to spend the night in the composer’s weekend house in the Berkshires. “I don’t trust men with fingers that fast,” she is supposed to have complained, insisting on bunking in at a nearby rooming house. She also reportedly told an openmouthed Delmore Schwartz, who up till then had been in hot and voluble pursuit, “Hold your tongue, please, if you want me to hold your prick.”
Was Ida what they used to call a “man’s woman,” with not a lot of time for her sisters in the art? Paul thought it was possible. “Your aloofness and frivolity leave me arrested and … chilled,” Moore wrote on February 15, 1944, after one of their rare meetings, giving Ida the title for her third book, as it turned out. Aloofness and Frivolity was published in 1947, its modernist severity and private preoccupations—“navel-gazing,” more than one critic sniffed — seemingly at a far remove from America’s triumphalist postwar mood.
Not that Ida appeared to care. The structure and organizing principles of her first mature period were already well established. Stark dichotomies, rigid caesuras, and the same dissonances that make modernist music so challenging to the conventional ear were the stuff of her art in the forties and early fifties. Nevertheless, her freshness and informality put her at odds with her contemporaries and competitors, among them the neo-Miltonic Robert Lowell (also a relation, on her mother’s side) and the willfully obscure, surrealist early Bishop. Ida’s love poems — and all her poems were arguably love poems, from first to last — are defined by contrast and dichotomy, the yin and yang of lover and loved one, giver and taker, remover and removed, night and day, growth and decay. A world of ineluctable oppositions with no gray areas: that is early Ida Perkins to a T.
It wasn’t long before Ida was almost universally acclaimed as the distinctive poetic voice of her generation, though no one could have predicted the broad popularity she would later find. Yet in spite of the standoffishness for which she was often criticized, Paul perceived that Ida’s passions were accessible to everyone on paper from the very beginning — except in her “atonal” period in the early eighties, when she experimented (uncomfortably, most would say) with poetic abstraction. Nothing is hidden or remote in Ida Perkins; it’s all on the surface, in your face — the title of her epochal fourth book, which was quoted and imitated by Lowell, Duncan, Plath, and Gunn, among others. Lapidary — obsidian, even — the poems nevertheless embody human feeling with a directness that over time proved irresistible for hundreds of thousands of readers. Paul saw, too, that some of these poets’ most characteristic lines had been lifted from Ida. Think “Viciousness in the kitchen!” (though Ida was rarely known to cook a meal), or “savage servility,” or “The love of old men is not worth a lot,” or even “Life, friends, is boring.” Then think again. Yes, Ida was there first.
But everyone — or almost everyone — stole from her. Paul discerned her influence in her snubbed suitor Delmore Schwartz, in the plangency of later Roethke, everywhere in Rukeyser, and in Elspeth Adams’s mid-period figured love lyrics — though nowhere, as we’ve seen (the silence is deafening), in Bishop. Ida was one of those rare poets who bridge the divide between aesthetic schools. The Beats and Objectivists looked to her every bit as much as the East Coast formalists. The fountainhead, the freewheeling, free-spirited Martha Graham of mid-century poetry, its Barefoot Contessa, with a dash of Dorothy Parkerish spice for good measure, she was ages ahead of everyone, and the living, breathing antidote to everything she’d come from. Like Botticelli’s Venus, she arrived out of nowhere on a half shell to bring up the rear of modernism. Quoting her is inevitable, somehow: Bringing Up the Rear was Ida’s arguably most influential collection, the one that finally brought her diva status — and reliable royalties.
Thanks to Ida, too, poetry not infrequently found itself at the heart of American culture and society. Paul considered her encounter with Jacqueline Kennedy at the 1962 White House dinner for French culture minister and all-around culture hero André Malraux the stuff of myth. Malraux was seated on Jackie’s right, of course, but few were aware that Ida was on his right and that he spent virtually the entire evening in tête-à-tête conversation with her (Paul learned that she had been ably translated into French, practically from the beginning, by the critic René Schorr’s first wife, Renée, an intimate of Malraux’s). For most of the dinner, Jackie was left staring into space, pulling her Parker House roll to bits. Needless to say, Ida never darkened the White House door again during the Kennedys’ tragically brief reign — though she was later close to both Rosalynn and Nancy, to the surprise of many, and a kind of fairy godmother to Chelsea, who stayed with her twice in Venice, complete with Secret Service detail, during her father’s second term, when she needed a break from Monicagate.