by Ruth Limmer

To Theodore Roethke, 1935: The difficulty with you now, as I see it, is that you are afraid to suffer, or to feel in any way, and that is what you’ll have to get over, lamb pie, before you can toss off the masterpieces…You have a hell of a good mind, and real intelligence…But it is, half the time, hiding, from itself and its agonies, and until you let it do more than peek out, from time to time, you aren’t going to get much done.

When Louise Bogan died in February 1970, she left behind, in the files of friends and libraries, more than a thousand letters spanning precisely fifty years of literary and personal history. Even the smallest collection gave evidence of a voice still reverberating with humor and wisdom. It soon became clear that those letters told a story, and that the story was important not merely to those who knew her, but also to all who cared about twentieth-century writers and writing.

To reveal the story required only that the letters be selected to provide the fullest record possible of the complicated woman who gave her energies - in an elegant and remarkably self-effacing way- to the creation, encouragement and appraisal of poetry in particular and of literature in general.

But Louise Bogan stood for public reticence. Her way of life precluded publicity seeking, loud noises and vulgar gestures; she joined no groups, signed no manifestoes. Her name was not a household word, and she did not want it to be: for most of her life she lived, wholly apart from literary cliques, on the upper reaches of Manhattan Island, where the slit beside the bell in her apartment house read "Holden."

The fact of her determined privacy opens the question of whether, for the value of the story, it is permissible to publish such a collection. Obviously I have judged it is, as have those who shared her letters with me. The reasons are clear but, in view of Louise Bogan's disdain for lifting veils in public, may need specification.

First, I believe the public should have access to information about the woman who helped to shape poetic tastes for nearly half a century and who added to the body of poetry in English some of its finest lyrics. Second, because the persons she wrote to and about were so often major figures on the literary scene, the reflections we get of them also deserve to be part of the public record. It is a charming corrective to our present view, for example, to see a rubicund and merry Edmund Wilson, and instructive to see, up close, Theodore Roethke's poetic apprenticeship.

This is not to say that the lifework of Wilson or Roethke, or Bogan herself, needs the support of biographical revelation to give it richness or meaning. I do suggest that when-as here-it is experienced consciously and described finely, with the precision instruments of art and insight, then the artist's life has its own significance. That significance may cast no light whatever on the work produced; I do not think, in fact, that these letters will provide many new interpretations of Louise Bogan's poetry.

But I am convinced that the letters-of irreducible value in themselves-will bring readers to her poetry, and to the books of a great many other writers who live in these pages. If, because of Miss Bogan's enthusiasms, The Princess Casamassima or Follow Thy Fair Sun or The Dog Beneath the Skin or Open House is again taken from the shelves, then no one, least of all Louise Bogan, is going to begrudge the action because of the (perhaps) impure motive.

But reading lists do not animate themselves. Another reason for the invasion of privacy is the joy of her style. And her wit, taste and largeness of spirit hearten and refresh at a time when such qualities are unfashionable. There is the additional fact of Miss Bogan's professionalism. A professional, no matter how little she herself participates in "entrepreneurism" on her own account, knows that she is, ultimately, a public person, whose work and personality will be dissected by scholars and strangers. It is well, then, to provide the future with clarifying documents from her own hand.

And because these documents also dramatize the suffering and growth of a personality that struggled to adjust the demands of its own genius to the many-sided realities of private life, they are additionally valuable as a psychological study of exceptional penetration and honesty. It is no small thing to know, as precisely as Louise Bogan did, what it is to be a woman.

For such reasons, then, I believe that she, too, would have accepted this volume as an inevitable next step, perhaps even as a posthumous responsibility. And in any case she suspected it would come: as she once joked to Rolfe Humphries, toward the end of a typographically snarled missive, "God help the man who has to edit our letters."

At the same time, she would undoubtedly have insisted on limitations and excisions. She deplored as academic tedium all hour-by-hour accounts, for she knew that while details give life, trivia turn into social history only after many decades. Much of the dailiness of these letters has been excised; only enough has been included to give a sense of the pressures she worked under as a journalist, and to remind us that a poet's reality can include both Flaubert and flounder. Further deletions contain repetitions, irrelevancies and material more fully covered in subsequent letters; and a few have been made to provide her friends with a privacy that is their right.

The author too, deserves privacy, although the distinction between prissy concealment and responsible reticence is probably never as sharp as the editor thinks it is. The solution was forthrightly to include items of an intimate nature whenever I thought them humanly instructive or important either as personal or literary history. Hence, for example, Louise Bogan’s various breakdowns and recoveries, being part of the fabric of her life, neither could nor should be concealed. On the other hand, the smaller privacies- those that I believe can make little difference in the assessment of character or in sharpening a view of the American literary scene- were cut whenever I felt it appropriate to do so.

With less confidence, some further cuts have been made to avoid gratuitous pain to people still alive. And yet, to have removed all such discomforting remarks would have been to denature the letters and distort the record. I have followed a rather intuitive line here; often: the more public the person, the more unkindness I thought he or she could survive. But certainly cuts for this purpose (as, indeed, for the purpose of privacy) are infrequent and would not, if restored, change the picture we form of the writer.

It is clear from the letters that Miss Bogan was both tough and vulnerable, sharp-tongued and generous, intemperate and serene, wildly prejudiced and wholly fair. Which is to say: she was grandly human. It need merely be noted, in defense of the acerb comments which remain, that they may be wholly revised a hundred pages later, and that no single letter can safely be used to define her response to her contemporaries. In the last years, in fact, and without any diminution of intellectual power, she came to an almost absolute charity and forgiveness. The human sin then was to be boring, or coldhearted.

Her critical opinions, on the other hand, wavered hardly at all, for published judgment never depended upon her feelings toward the author in question (although, inevitably, just as some of her friends wrote works she esteemed, some of the people she didn't like wrote things she deplored). The letters attest to her incorruptibility; she was simply not buyable. In this regard it is instructive to read her collected criticism (A Poet's Alphabet, 1970) alongside the letters. A stinging remark dropped in a letter becomes, on the printed page, a no more favorable but now thoroughly tempered comment stemming from the inviolable principle that one judges from within the poem, from within the poet.

And when, having done so, she found the poetry weak or unworthy, she increasingly often left it unreviewed. To squash flies against walls, which she could do with unerring skill-and which her friend Edmund Wilson had more than once urged upon her-was a sport she came to relish less and less. "Why bother with the bad," she asked, "when there's so little space for the good?" And, indeed, why enter into so uninviting a talent? This entering-into explains, in part, the difficulty she faced in her last years: the creative energy her kind of criticism demanded was frequently beyond her strength. As she said in 1960, faced with a request to do an extended article on Robert Frost: "The notion of spending all those months in close relations to that wicked old man is rather daunting." But she undertook the job because "he is a fine poet, essentially."

Such was the heart of the matter, and what these letters demonstrate: that Art justifies the struggle. For if she earned her living by writing criticism, she earned her life by writing poetry, poetry as pure, as intense, as permanent as any ever published. She was, I believe, too severe; out of all the poems she had written, she chose to preserve only one hundred and three, all but twelve less than a page in length; but in them, as W. H. Auden has said, she wrested "beauty and truth out of dark places." That, surely, is the ultimate triumph. So while it is possible to read this volume without at the same time reading her poetry, to do so is to grasp only partially the meaning, and the force -and the joy-of a singular life.

Book: What The Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan (1920 - 1970)
Edited by Ruth Limmer
Harcourt Brace Javonavich Inc., New York
ISBN: 0-15-195878-5