Arts and Letters

Fate hangs over the head of writers as well as those of anybody. The study of fate is complicated, the full truth probably never being known of its complexities and intricacies. There are beliefs which are taken to be true and there are revisions of history. It was the fate of Babette Deutsch to be a woman of letters, not a woman known only in one field. She was a scholar, poet, essayist, professor, academician, friend, counselor, advocate, wife, and mother and she had the distinction possibly considered such by outlanders of living her entire life in New York. She was connected with Barnard for a long time and across the street with Columbia. She was a shining example of a complete literary personage. Formerly we had famous men of letters but she became one of our famous women of letters, noted for the wide scope of her literary endeavors, her lifelong enthusiasm for literature, the charm and grace of her writings, which were manifold and in various modes of empathy with the human condition.

It was a bracing reward recently to review the entire scope of her publications, to remember her in this way, although I like especially to remember her personally, the pleasure every time of seeing her and I have to report that I knew her exclusively, or almost so, in the Academy-Institute.

She was a radiant person loved by everybody, one whose friendship was cherished, who deployed good-will abundantly, and whose conversation and ideas were refreshing and stimulating.

She upheld Cummings and Marianne Moore and had the wit to follow her "Letter to Wallace Stevens" with "Homage to John Skelton."

Her "Letter to Wallace Stevens" has "Let us say simply / That a good poet in an evil time / Speaks of the beginning of the end." "He speaks of autumn, that's the dawn of dying." And "Your speech / Reveals an irreverent joy to which death is / Irrelevant."

Her poem "e. e. cummingsesq" cleverly imitates his style. She pays homage to Frost, Dylan Thomas, and others. Her generous tributes include the philosopher A. N. Whitehead, Cézanne ("His shadowless mystery"), Mozart's music, "Nike at the Metropolitan," a "Ballade for Braque," "Homage to Paul Klee," "Homage to Picasso, Sculptor."

She was a woman who had full knowledge of the poetry of her time and had wide enthusiasms, empathizing with various types of work in various disciplines. Her Collected Poems (1969) ends with thirty-two translations, a stalwart array including Heraclitus, Villon, Baudelaire, Gall, George, Rilke, Pushkin, Benn, Akhmatova, Lermontov, Pasternak, Mandelshtam, Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, and others.

Her poetry is always intelligent, rational, and expressive. Her poems are stable, sustained, and put us in her debt by their unity of style, their remarkable consistency. She dedicated her Collected Poems (1969) (there was another Collected Poems 1919-1962) "To a Certain Few / Among the Living and, if Among the Dead, / Remembered Living." She knew the signs of excellence not only in poetry but in other arts. I choose (because she "chose it") a poem showing her depth:

Damnation

Hell is not far below,
Not black, not burning,
Nor even past returning:
You come and go.

You go and come
As in a mirror,
But Hell is nearer,
And not so numb.

And when you go
You do not lose it,
Because you chose it—
As you know.