Arts and Letters

For some time Francis Fergusson seemed to recede in front of me. I don't mean intellectually: in that regard, he was always quite out of sight. I mean almost literally. His essays—on Oedipus the King, on Hamlet, on Henry James—had struck me with something of the force of religious revelation, and I was eager to meet him and talk with him, to ask him to elaborate on some of his most stimulating but oddly elusive critical concepts, primarily, of course, the complex notion of "action." But I arrived at Bennington College in the fall of 1948 to discover that Fergusson, who had taught there for a dozen years, had just taken terminal leave to become a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His shadow loomed with magisterial grandeur at Bennington. His presence was felt in the special orientation of literary studies, in the critical vocabulary on campus and the dramatistic atmosphere thereof, even in the college's library resources (it was because of Fergusson that the little library surprisingly stocked Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, a text that was crucial for a course I was thinking of giving). I even came to grow impatient with the reports of his intellectual heroics and his powerful, lingering authority, and acquired a quite false impression of him as a gray eminence and canny dialectician whose dark influence none could dispel.

He was at Princeton University for a few years, organizing and presiding over the remarkably distinguished and successful series of Princeton Seminars in Literary Criticism—the Gauss Seminars, as they were called. But by the time I in turn reached Princeton in 1952, he had moved on to Rutgers, whose president created by fiat the position of University Professor chiefly to make possible an appointment for Fergusson. At about this time, I happened to talk with Richard Blackmur, who was telling me about some large plans for a school of humanities at Princeton University. What was the purpose of such a school, I asked. Blackmur replied at once: "To keep Francis Fergusson around." Insofar as that was the intention, the plan didn't succeed; but the answer made perfect sense. R. P. Blackmur and Francis Fergusson did belong in the same literary workplace, and Kenneth Burke with them.

Looking back from the late 1980s to the early 1950s, that gleaming era and seed time for literary criticism in America, we seem to see those three engaged in a kind of rich dialogue with each other—a give and take, through their writings, about the whole matter of the literary enterprise, about form and value in poetry, about motives and actions in fiction and drama. They were the great begetters.

It was thanks in good part to Fergusson that I, too, eventually moved over to Rutgers, where, in 1954, toiling hard, I at last caught up with him. I perhaps pressed a little in the early days of our friendship. We invited him and Marian to dinner on a series of summer evenings, and my wife, working from dawn, prepared a variety of sumptuous lobster dishes, which, as it turned out much later, Francis was not supposed to eat. He was much too kind to say so, however, and it was not long before I realized that my image of a towering authoritarian was ludicrously wrong and that Francis Fergusson was a man of remarkable simplicity of spirit, of warm affections and unquestioning loyalties, as well as an extraordinary tenacity and clarity of mind—and in the most casual conversation, one of the greatest teachers I have ever known.

In the winter of 1958, my wife, Nancy, and I were in Paris for a week, and I was holding discussions with Albert Camus. The latter was directing rehearsals for a revival of his play Caligula, and I received his permission to bring Francis Fergusson, who was also in town, along to the theatre one afternoon. We had just come from Munich, where the pre-Lenten Fasching was in progress, and we brought and gave Francis one of the anticly designed black masks which gentlemen wear to the more exuberant of the Fasching gatherings. I can still see him striding across the Pont Royal under a gray winter sky, his coattail flapping in the wind while he dangled the black mask from his hand with no more self-consciousness than a child and discoursed spiritedly on Henry James's The Golden Bowl. At the theatre, Camus shook hands warmly and said how glad he was to meet M. Fergusson. The Idea of a Theatre, he declared, was the best book on tragedy he had ever read.

Fergusson's reputation in Europe was enormous, perhaps greater than in his own country, where academic folk sometimes look askance at a colleague who has truly fresh and infectious ideas. Effortlessly, Fergusson managed never to be absorbed into the academic establishment—the influential members of which he would refer to as "Heap Big" This and "Heap Big" That, stretching out his hands and waggling them with an amiable, dismissive smile. But once in Venice, for example, I ran into an internationally renowned professor of Italian literature and expert on Dante who was clutching and exulting over Fergusson's book Dante's Drama of the Mind, that superlative journey through the Purgatorio. Later that same year in Rome, during an afternoon with Alberto Moravia and Giorgio Bassani, who was at that time director of the Rome School of Drama, Francis Fergusson's name came up, and the other two exclaimed that L'Idea del Teatro was an absolutely exceptional book and for Bassani in his professional work a kind of bible. Similar responses have been reported in Japan and elsewhere around the globe.

There are, needless to say, a great many more memories, all happy to contemplate, in a friendship that lasted for three decades. There was the winter evening when we went to dine at the Fergussons', who had also invited Jason Epstein down from New York. (When Epstein was given free rein to begin the epochal Anchor paperback series, the second book he selected for publication was The Idea of a Theatre.) It was snowing when we arrived, and before dinner was over drifts had completely blocked the Fergussons' driveway. Bunks were found for all of us, and Francis had just enough bourbon on hand to keep us satisfied till we had exhausted ourselves in talk, mainly about current literary periodicals and the feasibility of starting a new one. I was struck then, as I always would be, by Fergusson's combination of quiet serenity and utter masculinity of intellect. He would no more compromise a literary opinion than he would cut off his hand. Not that there was ever a question of imposing his views on others; he was much too good a teacher for that. In the 1960s, he came up to Yale to see the production of Robert Lowell's Prometheus, and we asked Robert Brustein and his wife, Norma, to join us for dinner. Brustein, the exceedingly tough-minded dean of the Yale Drama School, said that nothing on earth would keep him from the opportunity of meeting Francis Fergusson, whom he regarded and had regarded for years as the finest and most illuminating writer on drama in the land. There was much harmonious and sociable talk about the performance the Fergussons were about to see; but Francis's account of the play later, in The New York Review of Books, did not conceal behind its courteous and elegant rhetoric the fact that he considered it a dramatic mess, a wild flailing of sometimes brilliant language around (to his stern critical sense) an inertness of action.

But perhaps the most enduring recollection of Francis Fergusson is likely to be in his garden, tending the flower beds and pointing out the tracks of the foxes and deer that sometimes strayed out of the woods at the foot of the slope. This is what in a real sense he has always been doing—cultivating and enjoying his garden, unconcerned with the literary fashions of the moment, almost unaware of them.