Blackening a Critic's Reputation

...Similarly, an uncertain source tells us that at the Cambridge High and Latin School, Blackmur "got a new book to read every week, sometimes a leviathan like the Forsyte Saga When he was done reading, he wrote a thousand word essay " Blackmur was expelled from high school in 1918 The Forsyte Saga was not published until 1922 I noted the details of Blackmur's early life with a particular interest and scepticism, since I entered the Cambridge High and Latin School only four years after Blackmur did, 14 years after E E Cummings The three of us successively studied Latin under the learned Cecil Derry, reputed to be equal to any classicist then at Harvard My great aunt and great grandmother lived on the same street as Blackmur, and I knew a number of his friends, including Tessa Gilbert, with whom I went to Sunday school Are the facts in Fraser's narrative as slightly off in the areas I do not know about as they are in those I know at first hand...

...Did Fraser make the error, or Blackmur (which seems unlikely) or Sean O'Faolain, in whose memoir the confusion occurs as well...

...A photograph shows him at seven with curls below his shoulders, extremely unusual at that date, and possible only because she held him out of school until he was nine In all he went a mere five years After defiantly getting himself kicked out of high school, he settled down to self-education, using Poetry magazine and the Dial as guides Clerking in the bookstores around Harvard Square, he did more reading than selling, had a chance to master Eliot, Pound and Joyce before anyone at Harvard did, and made friends with poet-customers like John Brooks Wheelwright, Conrad Aiken and Robert Hill-yer, who recognized his authority An impressed Lincoln Kirstein offered him the editorship of the Hound and Horn He quickly made it the best avant-garde magazine in America and made himself one of the best American critics But the editorship lasted only two years On the shadow side was his personal life There was never enough money, sometimes not enough food He lived dependently in cramped households, first with his mother, then his mother-in-law It took him five years to get married to a grudging Helen, who said "she didn't like him very much ' But they stayed together 25 years On the New York-Boston boat Blackmur, to economize, shared a cabin with Tessa Gilbert, but she refused to have sex with him because—Fraser feels it necessary to tell us—she did not find him attractive What saved Blackmur as man and poet were his long summers in Maine, where his mother-in-law owned a house A man who knew nothing but books got his hands in the soil and on the tiller of a boat and found at last the right images for his poetry Blackmur evidences to a supreme degree what one often notices in brilliant students—the ability of a person of defective psyche and meager background not only to take into himself a wide body of serious reading, but to let it, under high charge, and almost on its own, interact in such a developing and self-correcting way that it produces truths and discernments quite inexplicable in the light of his own actual life experience, which is in many ways irrelevant to what he luminously asserts His peers early acknowledged this capacity tn Blackmur When still voung he was corresponding on equal terms with Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Marianne Moore Tempted to mock his faults, wo have constantly to remind ourselves of how Blackmur was valued by writers as varied as Tate and Winters, Lowell and Berryman and Delmore Schwartz Throughout his life, poet after poet of top rank testified that of all critics he understood them best and helped them most Whatever his personal destiny (how many end well...

...Blackmur's devoted labors, seen as a totality in relation to literature as a totality, were no tragedy but a triumph...

...In his last years Blackmur tasted to the full what Fraser calls the "ashes" of his success Lacking even a high school diploma, he became a professor at Princeton (Virgil Thomson maliciously called this Blackmur s one triumph) It was not, Fraser points out, a named chair Blackmur was " thick as thieves" with officials at the Rockefeller Foundation, and traveled luxuriously abroad at their expense (he was not scrupulous in these matters), dazzling "the poor Syrian wogs" (the phrase is Saul Bellow's) with Henry James, and befuddling the Japanese with the New Criticism Blackmur was an academic power broker with large sums at his disposal He was elected to the American Academy, made a consultant to the Library of Congress, named Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge (his lectures "were a flop"), and given an honorary degree at Rutgers He organized the Gauss Seminars at Princeton ("so he could talk to his friends") and turned up at, or ran, innumerable high-level conferences on all sorts of subjects as well as literature To Fraser such success meant intellectual and moral decay Blackmur is now the Old Pretender who "natters," "views with alarm," glorifies himself in "hightoned journalism," makes Orphic statements on science and history beyond his competence Fraser has to admit, though, that Blackmur remained a justly popular teacher with Princeton undergraduates and that his difficult, demanding classes were for many top students the best education Princeton had to offer, something that would stay with them always But to enforce his thesis of personal tragedy, Fraser can quote Blackmur's own jour-nal Conviction of unworthiness comes "back and up, hke the nausea or the sense of filth I stink in my own nostrils " Once, a colleague reports, Blackmur crawled into a fireplace and literally poured ashes over his head Fraser attributes the degeneration, the faking, the clawing for power, to the privations and ignominy of the first half of Blackmur's life Here the story is an amazing one Blackmur's father, of English birth, was a complete failure, to whom the son would not speak after adolescence His mother, the daughter and granddaughter of clergymen, kept things going for Richard and his siblings by running a boarding house for Harvard students By means which are not clear, Black-mur's mother made him what he was...

...Blackmur By Russell Fraser Harcourt 357 pp $19.95 Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia WHEN Matthew Arnold was living miserably in a Washington hotel during his very untriumphant lecture tour of America, Mrs Henry Adams took pity on him and invited him to Christmas dinner The event was not a happy one "I never wish," she wrote her father, "to know again an author whose work I like, nor to see a cook after eating his soup I cannot read anything of Arnold's until I forget him I've never enjoyed Browning since knowing him By and by Herodotus will be all that is left " In the last 30 years we have seen one American writer after another go down before his biographer's scandal-relishing chronicle of drunkenness, lechery and—in the case of Lawrance Thompson's relentless deflating of Robert Frost's favorite anecdotes—lying Yet even within this tradition, Russell Fraser's biography of Richard P Blackmur is an extreme act of betrayal by one who was a colleague and supposed friend at Princeton for the last 15 years of the critic's life Blackmur died in 1965 at the age of 61 Today several of his books are difficult or expensive to obtain, his reputation seemingly in eclipse Under such circumstances a first full-length biography, brought out by Blackmur s primary publisher, might be expected (o be an invitation to reread and revalue him, not to mention learn Irom him Bui the hapless leader ol A Mingled Yarn who daies afterward to pick up a Blackmui lext will find himself staring straight through it, as through a stage scrim, at the lacerated, naked figure that Fraser's lighting primarily reveals This is a double betrayal Blackmur was a man of reserved, even ponderous dignity, defensively reticent about his early years and private agonies He would have hated this book Anyone would Moreover, Blackmur's early essays on Ebot, Pound, Hardy, Stevens, Cummings, and Lawrence made him foremost of his generation, the generation of New Critics and hard readers, at tackling the always difficult relations of form and content in art, of doctrinal faith and poetic truth, of the poet as maker and the poem he makes In his own essays Blackmur set exactly the limits beyond which discussion of the poet's private life, his ideas, his social conditioning becomes a distraction from the poem or even a willful denial of what art supremely is Blackmur's wife Helen is mentioned on at least 100 pages of A Mingled Yarn The index lists for her 14 distinct categories—with "marriage, failure of having the most page references, 19 in all Under the heading "Henry Adams, biography and" there are only three references, and one deals with Blackmur's problem in writing the book, not with its contents The disproportion is striking Fraser goes on at great length about Blackmur's wife, his mother, his early love (Tessa Gilbert), and the women from whom in his last years he sought a solace they could not or would not give Fraser is not willing to tell us what relation all this has to the quality and content of Blackmur's writing Yet in Henry Adams and in Eleven Essavs on the European Novel (dismissed by Fraser as not worth discussing), Blackmur wrote explicitly about sex and womanhood?in the Adams biography with an eloquence and exaltation of feeling rare in his other writings Of Blackmur s three masters, T S Eliot, Henrv James and Henrv Vlams...

...he telt closest to Adams, making him a kind ol second sell, adopting almost too complcielv Ins nouns ambivalences, alienation I ate in life Adams surmounted some of these, writing for his meces his great book Mont-Samt-Micheland Chartres, and in it revealing to them how the cult of the Virgin?that "passionate outbreak of religious devotion to the ideal of femimne grace, charity and love" which broke out in Normandy in the 12th century—realized itself in the unpredictable beauty of Chartres In his own intricate pages, Blackmur shows how Adams' vision marks a recovery from the disaster of his wife's suicide Earlier Blackmur had defined criticism as "the formal discourse of an amateur," that is, a lover Now he identifies the comprehending, reconciling, superrational powers of the Goddess of Love with the same powers in art The whole discussion has its bearing for contemporary feminism in our sex-obsessed time when sex has lost most of its spiritual power Russell Fraser s own principal previous book, The Dark Ages and the Age of Gold, studies the break of modern rationalism with the Middle Ages It is remarkable, then, that he should have done so little with the central themes of Henry Adams His chapter on the book, dealing as much with Blackmur's problems in finishing it as with what it says, is only two pages longer than his excruciating chapter analyzing the failed stones and novels Blackmur never could get published With so much to talk about, whv did Fraser choose the emphases he did9 Blackmur was the sort who preserved every scrap of paper, every scribbled note, everv accusing letter from his wife His diary recorded moments of humiliation, of despair and self-abasement When he died suddenly he was living alone By steps that are not clear?it is inconceivable that he should have wanted this—all his papers, manv ot them open wounds, landed in the Prince-ton libraries Struck bv the evident contrast between Blackmur s public style and pri-vate self, Fraser decided to cast his Mors as a traecdv, w ith the emphasis on humiliation and defeat Martini: in 19~s he industnouslv fleshed out the written records by interviewing about 180 people (they are all named) who had known Blackmur Some speak with affection, or at least fascination, some with the practiced, sharply honed malice that is one of the less attractive features of academic life Fraser directs a portion of his own malice at Princeton in one of the most knowing and entertaining chapters of the book Sometimes Fraser goes in for short, slugging Hemingway sentences, sometimes for verbal play like the following, in talking of a father figure in one of Blackmur's stones "In bed or out he can't make ends meet So he turns pan-dar and lays down his wife for his friend " But Fraser is a subtle, learned man with an ambivalent, aphoristic, rather quirky style very much like Blackmur's own At intervals, when he gets serious, his formulas lift to a level of literary discourse as high as anyone could desire Unfortunately, he seems ready to believe everything his informants tell him He also weaves their memories, Blackmur's words and his own frequently harsh and condescending judgments (he calls Blackmur "Richard" throughout) into a meditative monologue that at times runs shirungly clear, but often makes difficult reading, has to be read twice Even then, and after consulting the cryptic notes in the back, it is not always apparent exactly who is speaking Where Blackmur, boastmgof his residential nearness to the Harvard great, spoke of sledding as a boy in "Norton's woods," the book identifies that Norton—the Dante scholar, Charles Eliot Norton—as "the President of Harvard," confusing him with Charles W. Eliot...