Literary Letters
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing LITERARY LETTERS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Although letter writing has become a lost art these days, a number of recent books evoke happier times when people were in the habit of...
...His overriding intention, however, was to give posterity a commentary on his own life, a drama he knew to be no less ironic and humorous than his stage works...
...And after perusing 2,174 pages of correspondence written by five literary figures, I am convinced that Aristotle's definition of poetry's purpose applies still more here: The fundamental object must be to give the reader pleasure...
...The young Ransom told his father, "I seem to use artist and moralist interchangeably, " and his letters reveal that he often treated differences of critical opinion as moral lapses in his opponents...
...Your courage, brilliance and generosity should have saved you from this," Lowell wrote, but there was no happy ending for the idealistic man...
...Together, they hoped to refashion tastes in art...
...The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, edited by Timothy Materer (New Directions, 346 pp., $37.50), casts light on the mean-spirited qualities of these equivocal modernists...
...Boogie Woogie is better than Sole Mio...
...A hero of literature was destroyed in his prime...
...This sounds like an inspiration for the epilogue of Saint Joan...
...Poetically, he'sal-most ruined by his attempt to put into practice Empson's doctrine of ambiguity...
...Mamma herself being at that moment leaning over beside me, shaking with laughter...
...In the beginning, the two would congratulate each other on the correctness of their views and vilify the opposition...
...Ransom's devotion to literary excellence was single-minded, verging on fanatical...
...Alas, she lacked the scruples of Pygmalion's heroine and set about knocking her Hig-gins off his lofty pedestal...
...Even when she published his love letters to her, in 1922, he confessed to G. K. Chesterton that the affair had been "delightful while it lasted," the embarrassment notwithstanding...
...Moreover, his stern artistic credo had a strong ethical dimension...
...Elizabeth's Hospital for the criminally insane...
...Young and Core acknowledge that "he was willing to sacrifice almost anything, including friendship, to enhance the quality" of the Kenyon Review, which he founded in 1939 and edited for 20 years...
...The exchanges continued after Pound's wartime broadcasts from Fascist Italy landed him in St...
...But he gave many writers, including Wallace Stevens, a forum they might otherwise have lacked...
...Having carefully dissociated himself from Pound's paranoid theories back in 1936, henowadvised: "You should chuck all politics, get out of that place, and become an American...
...Since Shaw lived for another 30 years, we can look forward to at least one more volume...
...it becomes impossible to tell where the posturing stopped and true madness took over...
...Our hunch," say editors Thomas Daniel Young and George Core, "was that the dualism [between logic and sentiment] that underlies John Ransom's poetry and criticism must also inform his life...
...Pat"—actress Stella Campbell—whom he recognized as a natural Eliza Doolittle...
...How can Redbe the soul of honor (as I still feel he is) and dally with the themes he does in the fictions...
...He added a sarcastic postscript: "Could you get me the Nobel Prize next year...
...OfTateas a poet he says, "Violence is to him, perhaps unconsciously, an intrinsic good...
...Farewell, wretch that I loved...
...Or ennoble him, as Sandburg's did...
...his own had not received the recognition accorded the works of friends like Lowell and John Berryman...
...it is almost necessary to live to a good old age...
...Jarrell never quite reconciled himself to a philistine world, much as he couldn't comprehend why his savage attacks on poets drew real blood...
...Pat, "The end was wildly funny: she would have enjoyed it," and proceeded to describe "cooks...
...Your present residence has a snobbish appeal for you," Lewis chided...
...Thedramaof Randall Jarrell's Letters makes his premature death—accident or suicide—resemble the end of a Greek tragedy...
...But in life as in art, Shaw could turn hurt into humor, so he expressed his chagrin in a parody of the irascible professor: "Go then," he told the coy actress, "the Shavian oxygen burns up your little lungs: Seek some stuffiness that suits you...
...In an ideally good society," he believed, "there would be no conflict between God and Mammon: Swann 's Way would make Proust and his publishers 20 or 30 million dollars, and Elvis Presley would be the favorite of a few eleven year olds...
...and you do a ABstrack dEEsign...
...I don't want to rape the Muses, just look at them in their traditional aspect—these haughty & beautiful ladies are very old, you know," he remarked to Allen Tate, his nearly lifelong correspondent...
...He did not exactly outgrow his formality, instead incorporating it into his adult style by giving it an ironic twist...
...He refused to print a chapter of Robert Penn Warren's Band of Angels that did not condemn segregation...
...Although this volume leaves John Crowe Ransom, dualist or no, something of a mystery, it affirms the Kenyon Review's artistic integrity...
...Even proteges could fall out of favor: "Randall [Jarrell] is a very strange boy, and I'm not sure whether he's got a career ahead ofhim or not," he informed Tate...
...Not content with helping people yourself," he told Pound, "you want the most unlikely people to share the task of supporting what they hate most —namely talent in another person...
...He loved to puncture his friends' balloons, and often did the same to his own...
...During World War I Pound smugly informed Lewis, stationed on the Western Front, that "I appear to be the only person of interest left in the world of art, London...
...Karl Shapiro was a "bobby-soxer's" decadent, Jarrell's comments to Robert Lowell on his early poems are illuminating even to a reader who knows them by heart...
...To the present rising generation, they are classics, a bit old-fashioned and ponderous in places...
...Mary Jarrell wonders how her late husband will come across in her compilation of Randall Jarrell's Letters (Houghton Mifflin, 540 pp., $29.95...
...Writers & Writing LITERARY LETTERS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Although letter writing has become a lost art these days, a number of recent books evoke happier times when people were in the habit of conveying their ideas, anecdotes and emotions to absent friends through the mails...
...To the next generation, they came quite naturally...
...The book opens theatrically with Shaw's romantic pursuit of "Mrs...
...Drug therapy brought on mania, then a suicide at tempt...
...From the ages of 55 to 69, the period covered in this volume, Shaw penned over a thousand missives annually that discussed his polymath interests: Fabian politics, religion (A ndrocles and the Lion and Saint Joan belong to these years), music, psychology (including a comic sketch of Oedipus in terms of Freud's complex), the Irish question, and the adventures and misadventures of his acquaintances...
...Only one thing ruled out his being the model for a Hollywood hero played by Robert Redford: He was a brilliant poetry critic...
...Humor, of course, was Shaw's defense against any unpleasantness...
...He was practically devoid of vices, devoted to his family and cats, a good tennis player, and fascinated by cars and audio equipment...
...Ezroar" and "wynDAMN" developed a private slang, half comic-strip talk, half Finnegans Wake: " Ef you must diddle an MONKEY with problumbs you take a GNU canvass...
...its lucidness, the Selected Letters of John Crowe Ransom (Louisiana, 430 pp., $32.00) reveals only what the Southern poet and New Critic chose to show of himself...
...In middle age Jarrell fell into depression...
...The earliest selections in the book go back to 1911...
...Smutty stories of the early years gave way to scatological abuse of enemies, and vicious racial slurs...
...For you and me and the true 61ite whom I know—art is the true religion...
...But Pound remained unrepentant, and his language grew so cryptic that Lewis complained, "Just cannot imagine what lies behind the words.' The reader will share his bemusement...
...it is necessary to write constantly, indefatigably, with ever-recurring zest...
...Apropos ofhis beloved mother's cremation, for example, he informed Mrs...
...Editor Dan H. Laurence introduces this third chronological installment of Shaw's epistolary cornucopia with an observation by Lytton Strachey: "To be a great letter writer...
...Pound was then carrying the torch for Imagism...
...Will they discredit him somewhat, as Frost's did...
...exclamations...
...Howard Nemerov, meanwhile, was eliminated from consideration as Ransom's successor at the Kenyon Review because "I thought [him] a little foolish in [praising] Lolita, Nabokov's naughty novel that I had found pretty pointless...
...Actually, Jarrell sounds like the ail-American boy in his correspondence—down to his " Gee Whiz...
...At 68, he wrote: "To my contemporaries my plays were what Wagner's music was to [hostile music critics...
...he demanded of Tate...
...If so, in his letters he never let his guard down...
...The young Lewis tended to be cantankerous...
...You have wounded my vanity: an inconceivable audacity, an unpardonable crime...
...They started corresponding in 1915, when both were living in London...
...his friend was a Vortecist painter and satirical novelist...
...He burned out reading the poetry of his contemporaries closely...
...Encouraged to flirt, Shaw for once lost his head and his passionate advances so alarmed the lady that she hastily married a fellow-actor...
...deftly and busily picking nails and scraps of coffin handles out of Mamma's dainty little heap of ashes and samples of bone...
...or do you want it yourself...
...ThepoethelpedshapetheideologyofLewis' magazine, Blast, which attacked 19th-century esthetics...
...Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters 1911-1925 (Viking, 929 pp., $45.00) provides the same kind of delightful insights into the life of GBS that his introductions and stage directions supply for his plays...
...Thelettersaboundwithhisperceptivereadings...
...Considering how modern letters of that era can sound, one is surprised at this old-fashioned 23-year-old, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, who signed himself to his mother" Aff ly your son, John C. Ransom" and thought it "agood lesson" to bede-nied first-class honors on graduation...
Vol. 68 • April 1985 • No. 6
