The Norman Maclean Reader
Page 29
I am trying to place you at an unfamiliar vantage-point to scrutinize yourself for your next step. In your last years here everyone was pounding technique and craft at you. That presupposes the poem has already gone through many stages of development—and is now being executed. Possibly you came to take these pre-technical stages too quickly and easily, as a result of this technical preoccupation. I am now suggesting you think of such things as this—what would a poetical soul be like (forever and at this moment), what would a particular poetical conception be like, is this a poetical insight, etc.? Perhaps I could put it this way concretely—think of Longinus2 for a while instead of “some technical elements of style,” for although ecstasy is probably not possible now, excitation, as I said, always is.
From this pre-technical location, I wish you would think of another closely allied matter—“inventiveness.” Step number one is that this is really a stirring concept, step number two—what can I add to, do it to get the maximum effect out of it? Too many of your poems, Marie, are too easy, too expected; and I think I should give you some examples. [. . .]
The odd thing is that I think that in thinking of these pre-technical stages you may well get new insights into technique. After all technique is a means, and a revolution in it is usually accompanied by some sort of mutation in what is being said.
It would be pallid of me to pretend I am not criticizing your poetry, but I want you to know that in criticizing it I am sure that I am criticizing the poetry of one of the promising poets of our country. And you know how austerely I believe that promise should not be allowed to get fat. Even so, if you were here I would try to tell you how much I like some of your poems. But it has taken me most of the morning to tell you what I think is even more important—where to stand in order to take the next look. But I admit that it is very dangerous for me to offer such advice, for a poet is ultimately known by where he looks. You might be wisest, therefore, to take this letter—this very long letter—as merely a sign of my very great interest in where you will go and my surety that the way will be marked with success.
Very sincerely yours,
Norman F. Maclean
Jan. 29, 1952
Dear Marie,
I should have answered your letter sooner if during the last two week I hadn’t been sick and busy, some times alternately but more often in conjunction. And if this letter is also brief, be sure that I strutted myself over the recommendation to Yale. But why the hell are you going to Yale? This answer is no I didn’t know you were going there. Why don’t you and Crane introduce me more gently to the grisly facts of life?
If you go there, though, I want you to know two people closely—Mrs. Wimsatt and Norman Pearson. Mrs. Wimsatt is a former student of mine who like yourself went to Yale for graduate work and married one of the distinguished members of the English Dept.—and if you go to Yale you might as well carry through the parallel. Mrs. Wimsatt is just as fine a woman as comes down the pike—in every way. Norman Pearson is a great man in my scheme of things. He is a fine critic, sensitive and searching; you may know him as co-author with Auden of the recent and highly praised anthology of poetry published by the Viking Press. But he is dear to me mostly because I knew him when he thought he was dying (and had reason to think so). It was a privilege to have known him then. His courage and love of life are absolute. I shall write both him and Mrs. Wimsatt shortly before you put in your appearance at New Haven.
I have had time to do only an impressionistic job on your poems. Beauty is a matter of pressure; within it, you have to feel thrusts and strains, and yet be at rest. I thought there was pressure on in these poems. Yes, yes, they are so much better than those made on the Bosphorus[. . . .]3 My only negative criticisms (and these are indeed very impressionistic) probably basically are—the craft and concentration you put in your poems sometimes makes them appear too highly wrought. Be careful of the “ornamental” that is visibly so. [. . .] I can remember when I thought [Gerard Manley] Hopkins was hot stuff and I still teach him because the stuff is so visible, but it’s stuff. Try [Matthew] Arnold for a while. You also use repetition of word, phrase, and line until if you don’t watch out you will be mannerized, and everything you write will sound like a rondeau. In “a last word” the repetition is crucial; “falling, falling, draw on, draw on” is for my money n.g. But these are only small signs of much but not enough labor. The last act of labor is to remove all signs of labor.
Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern4 is finally off the press and will be on sale early this month. It was my job to make a final compilation of the complimentary copies to be sent, and you may be sure I looked and saw your name was there.
Say, this didn’t turn out to be a short letter after all. I guess when I think of you I go on and on. I believe in you, and, if you have health, I know you’ll have everything else.
Sincerely,
Norman Maclean
Dec. 19, 1957
Dear Marie:
Thanks for the kind words about the paper at MLA,5 and, since we’re in that mood, I heard nothing but good words about yours. I suppose that I should have come back earlier from Montana and heard you and the whole show, but some day, I hope, you will see my country and understand why I always hate to leave it. [. . .]
Glad to know that you enjoy teaching on the flying trapeze as it swings back and forth between Smith and Yale. This is a feat that calls forth a considerable display of humanistic and prosodic skill, but I was sure all along that you would be equal to it. By all means, send a reprint of anything you do, even if it is criticism. You know, of course, what I think of criticism in general, but I’ll feel different about it if it’s yours.
Best wishes for the coming year. Hope to see you sooner next time.
Norman Maclean
The following letter was occasioned by a mailing of inscribed copies of Marie Borroff’s Wallace Stevens: A Collection of Critical Essays. Borroff’s publisher mixed up the addresses.
Nov. 5, 1963
Marie, my dear,
I always love your books, but it’s really your dedicatory inscriptions on the complimentary copies that leave me breathless. On my copy of the Wallace Stevens it says: “Yale’s Loss is Princeton’s gain,” and it could be true that my never having been in Yale could be a loss to Yale and at the same time it would also be that my never having been in Princeton could be a distinct advantage to Princeton. As I say, I can imagine both of these things to be true, at least when uttered by a poetess, but what I can’t imagine is someone whose ancestors came from the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides packing around a name like “Nina Berberova.”6 It would almost be easier for me to believe I was Shakespeare’s “Mr. W.H.” Still, I would have kept the copy if Ronald [Crane] hadn’t come into my office with his copy of Wallace Stevens inscribed with some flattering remarks that couldn’t be me but addressed nevertheless “To Norman.” So I have captured his copy and am keeping it, and am returning to you under separate cover the copy inscribed to someone who, from the name and from her going to Princeton, sounds like she might be a descendant of Catherine the Great, who certainly came from the north country but was a little too lively to be rated a Presbyterian.
In addition to the copy I am returning, both Ronald and I send our love, even though at the moment he is holding nothing but the bag.
As ever,
Norman
June 30, 1965
Marie my dear,
It isn’t very often, at least in my encounters, that love and business coincide in their courses. In fact, I think that Marvell did a poem on the difficulty of this geometry, and could not make the lines of love meet even though omitting the business factor.7 I should be lucky, then, if I can say what I have to say by letter.
I shall start with business, but only to sound business-like, not because I believe all things start there. I have just heard that Jerome Taylor has resigned from our department to become a dean at, of all places, Kent State. I think that he is a damn fool, but I have a simpl
e theory that Kent State is just where anyone should be who wants to be at Kent State. As for becoming a dean, I always remember Ronald’s remark when I told him that Rea Keast had become chairman of the department at Cornell: “Why the hell do most of my best students either die or go into administration?”
When I heard this news about Taylor, however, I didn’t say anything. I just went into my office to write this letter, and first I wrote the date, which is the last day of June, so, if you wish, you may include this letter among your June proposals.
Taylor, as you probably know, was one of those medievalists in our department. The senior one is Theodore Silverstein and the youngest, Arthur Heiserman (Skelton and Satire).
I am sure that the department will wish to make a really major appointment, and, the lady somewhat willing, I should love to propose your name.
Medieval studies have had a big revival here under Silverstein, Taylor and Heiserman, all of whom have great power in attracting top students, partly I believe because, with all their varied interests—linguistic, philosophic, and scientific—they are primarily devoted to medieval literature as literature. [. . .] If I didn’t believe that altogether there would be “a conjunction of murder and stars,” I wouldn’t be writing this letter. Moreover, the fact that you like to do a certain amount of free-wheeling and to teach courses in “Modern Poetry” or “Language and Poetry” would make you all the more welcome here where no one has to feel that his life must be bounded by conventional divisions in literary history. Who knows what Ronald will be teaching next? Perhaps a joint course with you on “Gawain and Tom Jones: A Non-Prosodic Study in Contrasts.”
I wouldn’t be writing this letter either unless I also believed that the department and the University as a whole are at one of their most flourishing moments. You have been through here recently and have seen for yourself that. [. . .] For the first time in years, I have the feeling that the whole “planisphere” is in orientation; hence the letter I have been longing to write and the questions I have been waiting to ask—could you be moved to go west?
For the moment at least, this is a quite personal communication, but, with the slightest encouragement I would hasten to publicize my feelings and propose you to the department. Who knows? Perhaps the three of us—you and Ronald and I—might teach a joint course on “Gawain, Tom Jones and General Custer: Or, They Died with Their Boots On,” a subtitle that hopefully might prove relevant to the teachers of course as well as to its subject-matter.
As ever,
Norman
June 10, 1969
Dear Marie,
This has been a somewhat numb and silent year for me, but I do not want the term to end without letting you know how happy I felt when I learned that you have a Guggenheim and next year off. It is a recognition of the distinction you have already achieved and a booster-shot to send you into higher orbit. Not least important, it gives you a chance to be lazy for awhile. All told, it couldn’t have happened to a finer woman, and don’t think that you are stealing time if you write a few more lovely poems on the side.
It was last autumn, I believe, when we talked last, and I told you that my wife was very sick. She had been sick for so many years that we had all come to think (her doctors included) that her courage transcended medical reality. In the end, though, she developed cancer and died on December 7, but with her courage still unbroken. I have taught the winter and spring quarters, and at first it was very difficult. Now, though, other [or outer] things have more meaning to me, in particular the joys of others. And so it is nice to write you again. May the Lord continue to shine upon you and bless you.
As ever,
Norman
Feb. 11, 1971
Dear Marie,
[. . .] Yes, I feel much better—actually, better than I have for some years. I am still teaching, although I am beyond normal retirement age, and have been asked to teach still another two years. I probably shall if my health holds up, but I am not sure I want to teach a full load. I have taught a long time, and it would be nice, for instance, to have the winter as well as the summer quarter off.
Speaking of teaching, I had a student some five or six years ago who was a senior in Yale, lived in Chicago, and for some family reasons was allowed to take a quarter of work here. I had him in the old Shakespeare course, and about a third of the way through he stopped after class and, when everybody else had left, he looked at me out of the corner of an eye and asked, “Do you happen to know Miss Borroff who teaches at Yale?” I said, yes, I do—she and I were here together for a good many years. And he said, “I thought so. It is kind of funny, but you teach a lot like the way she does and you even say some of the same things.”
He watched me out of the corner of the same eye for the rest of the quarter, and I am sure that he felt he was watching a guy making a living stealing your stuff.
He was probably right, too. All I can say, it is a nice way to make a living. [. . .]
As ever,
Norman
Christmas, 1971:
Marie, my dear,
[. . .] It will be on toward the holidays when this note gets to you, and I hope that they and the coming year and the years to come will be very happy ones for you. You are in full bloom now, with powers and gifts that everyone stops to admire. I am proud that I knew you when you were a girl and I am proud that you are now Director of Graduate Studies at Yale,8 but don’t let administrated [sic] laurels make you forget that when you were young you started to write poems and about the poets.
Bless you,
Norman
July 24, 1972:
Marie, my dear,
Thanks for your sweet letter and lovely poem about swimming on your back in the sun.9 Marie, instead of (in addition to?) picking out several volumes of the poems of others to publish, don’t you think it time to publish a slight opus of your own? You are such a fine critic that you do not allow yourself to write anything but beautiful poems. I myself have seen quite a collection. Beautiful mood pieces where at the end the mood drops several levels in depth—like this one. Then, too, very masterly in technique—also like this one with its triple rhymes. I thought that only one of them was breathing a little hard to be a rhyme—the last line in the last stave. But it’s a slight thing and the poem is a beautiful thing and “there are many more besides—more besides.” And it is time for you to lose your amateur standing. Do you think your devoted students are going to start collecting them when you retire and publish them posthumously? Something like Wayne Booth and Gwyn Kolb did for the Boss?10 Touching, but not bestowed upon many and nothing to hang around and wait for. It would be nice, though, to get a few devoted students to help you. That’s really what the Boss did, and it worked very well. I hope you will take all this as a very strong hint. Otherwise, there is going to be a lot of Maine sea-coast that is going to perish for want of a publisher. [. . .]
Yes, I am back in what you call “my country.” It was 50 years ago last summer when my father and I built our first cabin on this lake (see enclosed card).11 So last summer some of my old fishing pals and I had a Half Century Celebration, and were drunk for miles around.
I have fallen in a regular routine—so much so that the other day I thought it was the wrong day all day long. Before I have thought it was the wrong day for a few hours in the morning and then got straightened around, but Saturday I thought was Friday until late in the afternoon when I went over for the mail and found the Post Office closed. I felt strange and am still having to make adjustments.
In the mornings I “write.” I write “stories” or reminiscences or something like that. My children put me up to it. Then, besides my children, I have always had western pals with whom I have always swapped “stories.” The oral tradition is still strong here. When I was young, they called it “pulling the long bow.” First of all you have to tell a good story, but you are supposed also in the story to record some aspect of western life that is passing on or already gone. I wrote two last summer—a long an
d somewhat raucous one set in the lumber camps when logging was done only by men and horses and not by chain saws and “cats.” The other is much shorter and is about my family and my duck dogs and the Blackfoot and Missouri rivers and my dead brother. 12
At the University I belong to a club called the Stochastics. It has 40 members, including the President and Provost, but mostly big scientists, with a few odd balls like me. We meet once a month, drink too much and have dinner, the chief purpose of which is to sober you up in time to hear a scientific or scholarly paper. It was my time to speak so I decided I’d read them the story about the summers I spent in the logging camps. The secretary of the Club asked me for a title so he could send out notices, and I changed the title and it came out: “Norman Maclean, noted authority, will speak on ‘Logging and Pimping.’” I liked the notice so much that I got several copies, and will send you one when I get back to my files. Darling, it really packed them in. The secretary told me it was the largest attendance of the Club in 9 years.
On the slightest provocation, I would send you copies of either or both of the stories.