The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston, from Robert Frost to Robert
Lowell to Sylvia Plath, 1955-1960
Peter Davison
1994
Knopf
$24
It was one of those moments--rather than movements--of artistic development
that seem to defy neat categorization. "One of the most vital milieux
for poetry in the history of this country," is what Peter Davison calls
it in his new work, a mixture of memoir and history about the poetry scene
in Boston in the late 1950s. A different estimation of this moment, however,
seems to have affected the views of several literary critics, judging at
least from early reviews of the book, The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston,
from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, 1955-1960. These
critics, while recognizing the importance of Davison's artfully-written
recounting of personal poetic observations of the period, and while hailing
the epoch and its celebrant, show some unease in agreeing to exactly how
its significance in 20th century American literary history should be defined.
It is seldom that an author's work depends so heavily in its reception upon
an agreement of definitions among literary historians as does this book
of Davison's. In my view, the critics' mis-evaluation of the late 50s' poetic
"milieux" has diminished this book's reception.
Definitions deferred for the moment, The Fading Smile is a superb presentation of readable biography, candid personal memoir, and critical balance. In this much-anticipated commentary on the period, place, and personalities of the "Boston Milieu"--of the poets of the late 50s--Davison brings coherence to the interrelationships and generational positioning of a score and more of 20th century poets emerging just before, during, and a decade after World War II. And an impressive emergence it is: Lowell, Eberhart, Ciardi, Wilbur, Kunitz, Roethke and Holmes in the semi-"established" first wave; Booth, Plath, Hall, Rich, Merwin, Sexton, Kumin, and Starbuck in Davison's own rising generation. These are the major players among the author's "grouped" biographies. (Also brought into supportive perspective are such other young poets of the Poets Theatre and the Cambridge/Boston axis as L.E. Sissman, Robert Bly, William Alfred, Arthur Freeman, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch.)
Davison's unique position as editor, poet, critic, publisher, and correspondent
to many of his talented generation has prepared him--some might say, challenged
him--for the responsibility of sooner or later recording this particularly
dynamic period of American letters. That he has fulfilled the challenge
exceedingly well is not as surprising as the ease with which he has packed
so much pure detail, so careful a choice of material--quite often short
poems by or about the author under discussion--, and so comprehensive a
bibliography and set of scholarly notes into a tome of merely 346 pages.
Part of his success is sheer readability, the work--and here I can rely
a bit on my own memories--faithfully recreating this group's mood and color.
The urgency, the striving to strike their images and their poetry off against
one another in private and public readings combined sometimes with antic
humor and deep seriousness, and yes, to share their sexuality and poetic
sensuality with one another as well--of the more febrile of those youthful
groups, all of it rings true to me. That Davison treats all this with a
remembered, shared enthusiasm and a benign, if slightly skeptical, eye adds
to the pleasure one can take in The Fading Smile.
Most of the critics note the superiority over the numerous "colorful"
biographies of the Confessional poets of Davison's book in its expert collation
and careful delineation of personal relationships. In some ways, gauging
the influence of those relationships must have been the most difficult preparation
of this thoughtfully prepared resume of that multi-faceted group of poets
and their friends. Recognizing Davison's carefulness, David Bromwich in
the New York Times Book Review of November 20, 1994 felt a certain
"diplomacy" as though the author had treated his subjects "with
the reserve of a man foreseeing the likely mood the next time he dines with
the portrayed-and-still-living." Perhaps, but Davison is the one more
likely to be invited back to dinner, and hence a better gauge of how to
relate some of the more emotionally-loaded episodes of the poet's past.
The sum of critical response to Davison's work has been, on the whole, quite
favorable. A strange exception might be made for the tasteless layout in
The New York Times Book Review--of Bromwich's review of The Fading
Smile sandwiched in behind the
same critic's review of Paul Mariani's latest addition to the Robert Lowell
list of biographies, Lost Puritan. In some feeble attempt at humor,
a self-congratulatory memoir about Lowell, "Bobby Was a Difficult Child:
My Cousin Robert Lowell," by Sarah Payne Stuart (who?), was bonded
to the two Bromwich reviews in an arrangement that submerged the Davison
review into Robert Lowell's increasingly murky, biographic sinkhole.
Publishers Weekly and Dana Gioia in The Washington Post
both commented favorably and pointedly at the collation and interrelationship
strengths of the work, deeming his approach novel and illuminating, given
past exploration of nearly all this "painfully familiar landscape."
W.H. Pritchard of the August 21, 1994 Boston Sunday Globe compares
Davison's work favorable with Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth
and agreed "that during that time . . . most of them . . . found or
began to find a voice, . . . [but,]forty years after the time, does this
late 50s Boston milieu seem as vital as Peter Davison claims?"
As I indicated earlier, the significance of the late 50s' poetic movement,
and hence the credibility of Davison's "vital milieux" interpretation,
resides in the realm of literary definition. If it was not a literary or
cultural movement as we know it in the modern sense, what was the
nature of the beast? How did it act together--and in its many separate parts?
Earlier we learned where the poets hailed from and, particularly through
Davison's book, how they interrelated in much of what they did during the
50s, and we can subsequently trace what they became over the past thirty
years. The resulting question then must be, how alike is the totality of
this group to another identifiable beast with which we can compare its horns,
fur, voice, territory, and so on?
To me, the most obvious answer is that which has been comfortably resting under my critical nose all those years: The Cambridge/Boston "vital milieux" was nothing more or less than its own time's manifestation of the voice of the Northeast/New England literary heritage. Before rejecting this assessment out of hand, understand that we are talking about a literary margin extending somewhere south of Williams's Paterson, New Jersey, and west of the culturally-dominant magnetic pole of New York City, where all the publishing went. We are talking, voice-wise, about Frank O'Hara, the Benets, Tom Wolfe (the 1st), and the New Yorker magazine as well as the somewhat exhausted soil of the three eccentric Lowells.
Consider as connectives the "gray eminences" of Robert Frost, Archibald MacLeish and Richard Eberhart hovering around in the background. John Ciardi, Richard Wilbur, and Conrad Aiken were as much purveyors of the Northeast/New England tradition as they were unique creators of their own. Even T.S. Eliot's inspiration reached into the early Poets Theatre in Cambridge. The independence of the 50s poets in content and style, their dispersion toward and away from the mainstream academic literary traditions that preceded them--none of this, despite the insistence of several critics, indicates a lack of cohesion in the group; it is, rather, in the grand tradition of the often stringently iconoclastic voice of the Northeastern/New England message. They sailed out in several independent passages because they shared and spoke of the vision of an individual artistic fulfillment; because, indeed, this is what they were driven to do. Time and space do not make for a full exposition of this interpretation, but I am as sure of its main thesis as I am of any other serendipitous piece of poetic insight that has overtaken me during these past thirty years.
The Fading Smile is fully evocative of the uniqueness of the period;
it has been a somewhat bitter-sweet personal pleasure to recall the hopes
and enthusiasms of those crowded days. Whatever tragedies that occurred
thereafter--predictable or not--cannot obscure the often courageous achievements
of those poets of the Boston 50s who endured, and those who could not.
Neil Bradford Olsen was, from 1965 to 1994, Director of Libraries at Salem
State College. His previous writings about, and familiarity with, the Boston/Cambridge
poetry scene of the 1950s has recommended him to critique Peter Davison's
new book, The Fading Smile, for this publication of the Sextant. For more
on Neil Olson see Jay McHale's Tom Sexton: Alaska's Poet Laureate by
Way of Salem State College in this issue.