The Passion of Jean Garrigue
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing THE PASSION OF JEAN GARRIGUE by PHOEBE PETTINGEL Upon hearing Edna St. Vincent Millay read in the 1930s, the young Jean Garrigue rushed out and spent her entire meager...
...Her dutifulness toward the patriarchs and matriarchs of Modernism is evident in her two apprentice volumes from the '40s...
...Writers & Writing THE PASSION OF JEAN GARRIGUE by PHOEBE PETTINGEL Upon hearing Edna St...
...But her newfound political savvy was not without humor, as "A Civilization Constantly Worrying about Itself As It Goes On Doing What It Is Worrying about That It Is Doing'' attests...
...You did not win and yet It deeper and more deeply burns Although the seal is on the door, Although the words go into stone...
...A poem from the late 1960s gives fullest expression to Garrigue's hyperromantic manifesto...
...Indeed, she believed that the artist should be "Passionate, wholly passionate," and gave the term its broadest definition: full of strong feeling, enthusiastic, sexually ardent, wholehearted in effort, and, most important, willing to suffer...
...Wylie could have composed the flower painting of "Bees rolling in golden cups/And the Persian wine of those pinks/Crossing the sense with their powders, oils/To be pressed in the prime/Of the year's still white and green...
...She might have added that what she strove to convey, intellectually and emotionally, required elaboration and incantation...
...Modernism's ironic detachment had inhibited her true voice, which is about to break through and manifest its full strength...
...McClatchy's fascinating and informative Introduction makes this volume particularly accessible...
...The style seems a bit contrived and, for her, repressed...
...McClatchy underlines her choice of the gender-ambiguous Jean...
...They do not live it either, they enact The fiery powers of instants in a light Held up to them they cannot clarify...
...They were a glamorous lot, those Bohemian literary women of the '20s and '30s, rivaling male daring in both their artistic efforts and love affairs...
...and Millay's rallying cry for flaming youth, "Whose lips my lips have kissed, or where, or why,/I have forgotten, or whose arms have lain/Under my head till morning...
...Vincent Millay read in the 1930s, the young Jean Garrigue rushed out and spent her entire meager savings on a first edition of the writer's verse...
...Twenty years later, I would not alter that judg-ment...
...Fortunately, the Selected Poems ensures that, for a long time to come, readers will have Jean Garrigue's example before them...
...Yet in the prospect of that abyss, her loneliness and fear give way to a kind of holy awe at "the brute Sublime...
...Nevertheless, by letting herself go she was feeling her way toward an expansiveness congenial to her temperament...
...Garrigue never stopped evolving...
...Her essays evinced a sensitivity to the nuances of others, and a strong grasp of the roots of her own art...
...Light and clouds drifting across the landscape in "Pays Perdu" mark what she called "thresholds" of the present, the past and eternity...
...Metaphorically, she was in the position of a student who seeks the approbation of teachers, temporarily subsuming her personality in theirs...
...It's in the breaking face the clouds give to the moon And in the flower that leans upon the air Pouring its full life out into its scent...
...From the late '50s on, Garrigue blossomed exuberantly...
...Aileen Ward, literary executrix of the poet's estate, and coeditor Leslie Katz have culled the finest from her eight books and added four memorable previously uncollected verses...
...Writing about Emily Dickinson, she described the New England poet's "ecstatic bereavement, that loss she gets strange gain from...
...The "fireworks of water," in "For the Fountains and Foun taineers of Villad'Este," link the fluid arcs and jets of cascading liquid with a continuous flux between "love and rage...
...In the concluding stanza she tells a lover, who may be her own reflected image, We made a play but not a discipline...
...Sometimes the most sympathetic reader can feel trapped in a Platonic cave with only the shadows cast by reality for company...
...That is a painful way to function, to be sure, and as we might expect, hurt pervades Garrigue's imagery...
...That neglect should now be remedied by the publication of Selected Poems: Jean Garrigue (University of Illinois, 194 pp., $27.50...
...Love is the sternest master of the school...
...Elinor Wylie's "We'll swim in milk and honey till we drown" ("Wild Peaches...
...The Monument Rose (1953) demonstrates Garrigue's rediscovery of what I take to be her earliest models, Wylie and Millay...
...Their fiddles are broken, they are lame and laid up, The ants are sneering, 'Now dance!' Still, she rejects the French fabulist's moral that prudence triumphs over careless excess...
...Spring Night...
...She well understood what her vulnerability cost her...
...H.D.'s "I send you this,/who left the blue veins/of your throat unkissed" ("At Baia...
...On the war in Vietnam she observes, "Might's still right/In this our swollen pigsfoot of a state...
...I would note that garrigue in French means "wasteland," an allusion that cannot have been lost on her, especially in a culture that venerated Eliot's words as almost sacred writ...
...The grasshoppers are bitterly paying...
...Actually, though, the dashing role models of the era encouraged most aspiring female poets not to repress themselves...
...Cease and be still...
...In addition, J.D...
...What we know of her circumstance enables us to see that "at the edge of this maw, gash/deepest in the world," she was facing up to the unfathomable mystery of death...
...In "Address to the Migrations," species faced with the onset of winter find themselves on the brink of change, be it hibernation, travel to a temperate climate, metamorphosis, or extinction...
...Since her death in 1972 at the age of 60, her reputation has suffered a partial eclipse...
...Over and over, she speaks of the "panging" of bells—conflating the onomatopoeic sound of ringing with the jangle and stab of raw nerves...
...We catch the same quality in Garrigue's ambitious works of the '60s and '70s...
...I prefer elaborate structures to functional slick ones," she once admitted...
...Yet despite the influence of Eliot, Moore, Auden and Co., the spirit of the earlier women continued to nourish the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, Leonie Adams, and, indeed, Garrigue—the most passionate writer of them all...
...They "have more grace" than "those sour ones," the parsimonious ants "who never had such a song/To make life seem dancing and warm...
...life fraught with affairs with both sexes, with abortions and obsessions—she tried to recover in art...
...Those who are used to the bald "confessions" of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath might find the rococo intricacies of Garrigue's A Water Walk by the Villa d'Este (1959), or even the posthumous Studies for an Actress and Other Poems (1973), somewhat bewildering without McClatchy's sympathetic evocation of the neometaphysical climate she worked in...
...McClatchy attributes the change to her longtime liaison with the radical novelist, Josephine Herbst, "the most important relationship of Garrigue's life...
...Those lines could serve as her own epitaph, for she too always glowed with mystery...
...Cracked Looking Glass" deals with the contrast between our actual lives and the way we have chosen to describe them...
...He clarifies the values she espoused, and his insight helps us understand how unstintingly she poured her emotional resources into everything she wrote: "What she lost in a...
...The kind of poet she originally set out to be tends to brood over interior perspectives...
...A Note to La Fontaine" begins: I have come into the time of the ant...
...In her eyes, it does not matter that the entertaining grasshoppers are doomed by the consequences of their improvidence...
...Readers who had cut their teeth on the fervid eroticism of Shelley and Keats warmed to lines like Sara Teasdale's "Why am I crying after love...
...A line like "We will hang from the cross and chatter of love in the winds" echoes Millay at her most posturing...
...By the time the following generation began to publish, Modernist tastes were mocking that kind of romanticism...
...But players tell a truth they cannot know...
...Certainly, she never spoke more poignantly than in a poetic tribute "In Memory" of her friend: a mystery Burned its way through you...
...The overblown emotionalism of such lines certainly mars the book...
...Studies for an Actress includes poems such as "Lead in the Water" and "Resistance Meeting: Boston Common," which take up the issues of the day...
...Her most famous poem, "The Grand Canyon," was written during her fatal struggle with cancer...
...The pain is otherwise...
...In the years contemporary with her later poems, Garrigue was also The New Leader's poetry critic...
...I found her inspiring, and thought then that her powers of endurance, like those of Elizabeth Bishop or Louise Bogan, perhaps made her a more salutary model for an aspiring woman writer than the prevailing icons, Sexton and Plath...
...Her longer poems create chiaroscuristic transitions...
...The flawed mirror is, at once, our limited and mendacious perceptions—how we pose for others—and the poem itself, as it refracts the interior truth...
...The impulsive gesture was characteristic of Garrigue's temperament...
...Garrigue would have concurred with Yeats that "Whatever flames upon the night/Man's own resinous heart has fed...
...In her last works she broke out of this solipsism, much as she had freed herself from previous constricting influences...
...c Christened Gertrude Louise Garrigus, the poet abandoned that name in 1940, when she moved from the Midwest to New York City to pursue her vocation...
Vol. 75 • July 1992 • No. 9
