A Woman of Letters

...I read everything," she once wrote, "but books on Grover Cleveland and novels called O Genteel Lady...

...I have no one to sweep floors or get meals, or get out the laundry, or, in the case of sickness, make eggnogs and squeeze orange juice...

...I have decided, however, to mention the fact . . . that Anne Sexton is the first woman in history to have written a hymn to her uterus...

...her salary until 1941 was $15 a week), she broke down twice during the Depression, and had to be repaired in "the mad-house," as she called it...

...For some reason, people no longer feel the same uninhibited eagerness to share everything going on in their lives with friends apart, to communicate as freely as Miss Bogan did with steady correspondents like Morton Dauwen Zabel, Rolfe Humphries, Edmund Wilson, and William Maxwell...

...With a child to raise and no money (before the War, the New Yorker was not the Croesus of the magazine world it would later become...

...When Rolfe Humphries, a fervid Communist in the 1930s, rebuked her for her haughty refusal to take political sides, Miss Bogan, a lapsed Catholic, insisted on her hard-won contempt for all forms of authority...

...Miss Bogan had a rare genius for friendship-and the casual give-and-take of letters was a crucial life line of her enduring relationships...

...Of course, it had always been men, not women, who brought her to the top of her form as a letter-writer: She was a beguiling, if ironic, flirt...

...When she died in 1970, at the age of 72, Miss Bogan left behind more than a thousand letters that had been tossed off with breath-taking facility over 50 years...

...An elegant lyric poet and the New Yorker's highly influential poetry reviewer through most of four decades, Louise Bogan poured out a tireless flow of letters, keeping her friends informed of everything that went on in her complicated mind and life...

...Her poetry and criticism, we learn from this volume, were usually written in slow and effortful agony, but in a single communication she would often cover a staggering range of topics and happenings, books and ideas, jokes and random observations...

...Not even Wilson in his fellow-traveling days, however, was able to shake her lifelong resistance to confusions of literature with politics...

...Another time, unable to pay the rent on her Village apartment, she spent a September evening writing a meticulously detailed critique of his newest poem to her protege and one-time lover, Theodore Roethke, offhandedly adding, "I expect to be evicted tomorrow...

...Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred...

...Miss Bogan did not have an easy life...

...For What the Woman Lived is not simply the informal accounting of events one expects from such a collection...

...One misses the swift unself-conscious chop that in her youth she delivered straight to the jaw without a second thought...

...she calmly wrote: "I refused to fall apart, so I have been taken apart, like a watch...

...Ardent, opinionated, eloquent, self-mocking, often wonderfully funny, the letters should be read, as Miss Bogan herself remarked of Rilke's correspondence, as "part of the body of [the poet's] imaginative work...

...To Ruth Limmer, she complained, "If [May] would only stop writing sentimental poems...

...All these tasks are very good for me, but they are tasks I can never allow to slip...

...She first married at 19, and had her only child, a daughter, at 20...

...But her husband, an army officer, died in 1920, and a second marriage to the now-forgotten poet Raymond Holden, begun in the mid-'20s, came to an end in the 1930s...

...Whatever the reason, this constraint of spirit has put an end to an incomparable form of human communion...

...and in the crisis of illness, I have no free time...

...But how could I do otherwise...

...In the light of a beautiful new book, What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920-1970 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 401 pp., $14.50), this is no idle question...

...Miss Bogan's generation, born at the turn of the century, was probably the last to dislike the phone and to use it, as she did, with reluctance...

...But it was also to her devoted Edmund that she revealed, with characteristic dignity, the inescapable pressures of her life as a woman alone...

...Have we suffered a failure of nerve in our friendships, a numbing anxiety about boring or being bored...

...If she allowed herself a rare stifled cry ("She is possessed by time, who once/Was loved by men"), her poems remained as passionately reticent and spare as ever...

...She could skip nimbly from food and weather to prosody and lovers, from profound speculation about the nature of women to blunt gossip about such pet betes noires as Horace Gregory and his wife Marya Zaturenska, "coiled in their snake-like dignity...

...That mosaic of dailiness has now been put together by her close friend Ruth Limmer, and ranks with the letters of Keats, Henry James and Rilke...

...To her editor at Scribner's, John Hall Wheelock...

...But the reasons for the Decline of the Letter, I think, go deeper than a technological invention...

...Yet there is not a bleat of self-pity in her letters of this period...

...Getting back to the opening question: Why is the letter, as a casual literary form, no longer a regular habit of artists or intellectuals...

...No more pronouncements on lousy verse...

...Yet she was kinder and more circumspect when corresponding with Miss Sarton, less exuberantly outspoken and therefore less interesting...

...She had not sent him a promised poem because her daughter had been ill: "I am a housewife, as well as a writer...

...Toward the end of the Red Decade, in a letter to Roethke, she reaffirmed her position...

...I've had it...

...and though, in her early 20s, she went to New York, where she spent most of her adult life (mainly in a small apartment in Washington Heights crammed with books), part of her remained New England provincial forever...

...As late as 1954, already widely respected for her incorruptible New Yorker judgments and about to be awarded the Bollingen Prize, she crowed, "Not bad for the little Irish girl from Rox-bury," when the Times Literary Supplement asked her to contribute to a special issue on American literature...

...Born in Maine in 1897, into an Irish Catholic family, she grew up in and around Boston...

...My, how happy I am that I stood out for the humanities, even under pressure...

...She was...

...Tired and ill and more lonely than she could bring herself to admit, she had enough of the old sting and fire left to remark in one of her last letters: "I have read a lot of tripe...

...Astonishingly, in the five years before Miss Bogan died, when the inner demons once more had her at their mercy and she suffered through months of treatment in mental hospitals, she could no more break the habit of letter-writing than she could stop caring about poetry, or plowing her way omnivorously through the collection of her beloved New York Public Library...

...I can truthfully say that the fires of hell can hold no horrors for me now...

...William Maxwell observed in his New Yorker obituary of Louise Bogan: "In whatever she wrote, the line of truth was directly superimposed on the line of feeling...

...They remained friends, and went on fighting about Robert Frost until her death...

...The prime culprit, obviously, is the telephone, since talking is less trouble than writing...

...As Miss Limmer remarks in her introduction, these letters "remind us that a poet's reality can include both Flaubert and flounder...

...No more struggling not to be a square...

...No book of hers more perfectly accomplished this than What the Woman Lived...

...On those occasions when her hot Irish temper boiled over on Wilson ("You do give me such a pain, sometimes, that I'd like to cut your throat"), the disaffection soon vanished...

...Nonetheless, during her 60s she sometimes sounded rather strained in her correspondence, indeed a trifle cautious-particularly in comments to her friend, the poet and novelist May Sarton...

...It still rankled, as it had for years, that none of her books had been picked for the Pulitzer, and when her last volume of poems, The Blue Estuaries, was similarly ignored, she wrote with acid pleasure: "The Pulitzer comes from a school of journalism, we must remember...

...In the poems of her old age, Louise Bogan took a dry, unsentimental look at women who face the dwindling hoard of years vulnerably on their own...

...At the age of 71, she informed Miss Limmer that she was quitting the New Yorker...

...I know, and knew, that politics are nothing but sand and gravel: It is art and life that feed us until we die...

...Her letters to and about Edmund Wilson, one of her earliest New York friends, offer a uniquely engaging portrait of the Great Cham of American Letters as a high-spirited young man-about-town, always game for a long night of larky boozing and violent literary quarrel...

...And her letters continued, for the most part, to tap a vein of careless panache, of hyperbolic and reckless abandon which was never permitted into her poetry and criticism (this may be the reason she wrote so many letters-that side of her had to come through somewhere...

...Through much of it she was plagued by poverty, critical neglect of her poetry, depression, and mental illness...

...No more hidden competition...