Affectionately,
Elizabeth
44 Porter Street
Watertown, Mass.
March 6, 1964
Dear Elizabeth,
As you see, I am sending you a revised chronology which I hope you’ll correct, amend, delete etc. as you see fit. As I work on the first chapter I find that I may need more factual information, and, if you don’t mind, I’ll ask a few questions before trying to answer your long letter properly. I don’t think the little I write about biography needs to be too detailed, but on the other hand, it’s best not to sound evasive, and worse, to make mistakes.
1. About your mother’s family. Was your grandfather a sea captain like his ancestors? Did his whole family come from Nova Scotia … and were there two or three aunts? Perhaps it would be helpful to know the name of your aunt in Boston — the one you liked because she was amusing. Is there anything you remember particularly about people in your childhood? Who introduced you to music, to poetry … Teachers? One can tell a great deal about your childhood in Nova Scotia from the two New Yorker stories, and the “feel” of it is in poems like Cape Breton, but I would like to be a little more precise about people and exact places.
2. You say you studied at the Schola Cantorum in Paris and later with Ralph Kirkpatrick. When was this?
3. I wonder who you knew when you went to Paris in 1935 or so? There was so much “in the air there”. One thinks of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, the Surrealists, painters and poets like Andre Breton. A great period of blossoming forth in that curious euphoric between-war period. And then the people on the Partisan Review, so fervent and determined to be “liberal” without knowing the consequences. I was looking at some old issues of PR in the library the other day and was seized with an awful sense of the bravery and, really, the fruitlessness of it all. I think it must have been exciting at the time. Again, when did you meet Calder, Dewey, Loren McIvor, Randall Jarrell. You seem to have been very fortunate in your friends. I think you are quite right about your belonging to the post world war I generation. Or, at least, I think one must make a distinction between the “you then” and the “you in Brazil.” That leads me to the poems.
4. What impresses me about the 1956 volume is a wonderful awareness of the ambiguity of things. “Faustina,” for instance … the impossibility of knowing her thoughts, that they might be either. Or the end of “Roosters” in which the sun “climbs in” … “faithful as enemy or friend.” This kind of uncertainty perhaps characteristic of the time as well of perhaps you. The new poems, except for Questions of Travel and Brazil, January 1, don’t seem to spring from the same kind of uncertainty or urgency, but from a new climate and culture really. They have the same qualities of exact discription but the perspective is different. Even the poems about childhood — Sestina, and Cousin Arthur and Manners are “detached” (Is that what I mean?) from your old vision. They don’t seem quite “it” … while the Brazilian poems have almost a settled quality. Manuelzinho, for instance, and curious mixture of superstition and mysticism and absurdity of The Riverman.
Understand I am not criticizing these new poems. I like many of them very much — and besides, as you see, I can’t really say what I mean about them. Therefore I don’t think I’ll say as much about them as about the others. The Fish, The Imaginary Iceberg, The Map, The Man Moth, Cootchie, Florida these all seem to me masterpieces — better and better as I read them. But unless you think me terribly “dated” I would rather not deal with what probably should be called the “contemporary poetic scene”. It’s a dreary one, in general, I think, and I’m not sure that any of your poems have much to do with it.
I see that I have “gone all muzzy again,” as Mark would put it. Well, maybe you can help me out. I do want to thank you for your long letter and to assure you that I will quote nothing without asking you. There is a passage that I would like to use, if I may, or if you approve. It concerns what you say about the “always-more-successful surrealism” of everyday life. As you have it, it is like this:
“There is no “split.” Dreams, works of art, glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important.” And then what you say of Darwin who builds an “endless heroic case” of observations “and then comes to a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown…”
It is that point where rationality and irrationally meet that that your poems “catch fire” for me. Their resonance, their real perceptions — not just the fine descriptions — comes from the central awareness … the hardest and most elusive thing in the world to catch.
Two weeks ago I ran away to Ann Arbor to visit my father … and to be by myself for a while. While I was there I did a sort of Victorian Table of Contents of this whole book … all the ideas written out in outline form with references to poems etc.… now I’m fitting what I have already written into my outline (and throwing reams away). So it looks as if there may be a book after all in spite of viruses, ear-aches, and headcolds which seem to afflict my family — even the cat has a cold! I haven’t yet looked up the photography of your house — I will, I’m glad you told me about “L’Architecture d’Aujord’hui” I hope I have everything you suggested include incorporated into the chronology. No, I havn’t seen “The Trial” and I won’t after your description. And I’ve been re-reading Chekov. Yes, Yes, Yes. Have you written any stories about Brazil? Somehow I think you should … What is it that makes good prose but isn’t poetry — or perhaps it is.
I’m “baby sitting” with a friend’s little girl and my own — we take turns — and I wish you could see the raisins and graham crackers piling up around the typewriter. And milk spilling! I think the time for literature has come to an end. Again, thank you for your kindness and help and patience in reading my letters to you.
Answers to your questions of March 6th—[1964]
1. It was my greatgrandfather (maternal grandmother’s father) who was a sea captain. William Hutchinson. He was lost at sea — all hands — in a famous storm off Sable Island when my grandmother was 9 years old. No — Cape Sable, I think — they’re two different places, but Cape Sable would be on his way into the Bay of Fundy. Better not say. I made a trip to Sable Island (as I believe I’ve said) on a Canadian Lighthouse Service Boat, around 1949—
My maternal grandmother had four brothers; three were Baptist missionaries in India, the 4th a painter who spent most of his life in England, George Hutchinson. (Israel Zangwill’s “Our Lady of the Snows” is supposed to be about him but I haven’t read it.) One of the others was also President of Acadia College in N S, and another taught there, etc. The Hutchinsons seem to have had brains, talents, and were rather eccentric. As I think I said — one wrote bad novels, including the first novel in Telegu.