Arts and Letters

If, when I look around this room, these is one face, the absence of which seems particularly implausible, it is of course that of Glenway Wescott. This institution, this building, all that they stood for: this was his second home. No one ever gave to the Institute and the Academy more than he did in feeling, in understanding, in enthusiasm, in belief in its importance. If he did not already deserve honor, as he does, for his own work, we would still have to honor him today for what he gave to this institution.

Glenway was known of course primarily for his first and only great full-length novel, The Grandmothers. It was an extraordinary book, like nothing else I can think of. Written when he was only twenty-three or twenty-four years old, it was in reality a book about the older members of his family—as he saw them, and as he thought he understood them. The family was a pioneer farming one of early American Puritan tradition. It had moved from Upper New York State to the wilds of southern Wisconsin in the middle of the last century. I understand something about it, because my own family was almost exactly like this one in all these respects. And Glenway was only three years older than myself.

The book was based largely on observation and memory and partly on imagination, but on a very special sort of imagination—not the kind that dreams up persons and situations outside the framework of one's own experience, rather, one that took its departure from, and was based on, what the author remembered of what he had once observed. As a child Glenway had watched and studied these people intently, with a child's wonder and a child's impressionability, animated, one senses, by some imperative compulsion to understand the hidden springs of their words and actions, to penetrate their mysteries, to absorb into himself, so far as this was possible, their impulses, their strivings, even their tragedies.

The observations and impressions recorded in this book were thus those of a much younger person still—partly those of a child, at best those of an adolescent. And what a child and adolescent this was: immensely sensitive and impressionable, endowed with powers of observation and memory for detail second to nothing I know of in the literature of that period, driven not by any idle curiosity but by an almost desperate sense of need—a childlike sense of need but in a way far more than childlike—to grasp the meaning of what was going on before his eyes in the family, to understand it, to identify with it, and to explain it to others.

The fruits of all this effort were poured out, with truly exceptional power and artistic feeling, in The Grandmothers. The book was a great and immediate success, winning, among other things, the Pulitzer Prize; and it placed him at once in the ranks of the foremost American writers of that period. I could well understand it if some of the members of the family then alive were not entirely pleased with what he wrote (families seldom enjoy this kind of exposure); but actually, I can think of no instance in which a young person ever did a greater service to his elders than did Glenway in this book. Child that he was, he became their confessor and their defender. They were people who could not write, in the literary sense, and would have had no opportunity to do so even if they had been able to. They could not explain themselves. He, unintentionally perhaps, and in any case meaning to say nothing but the bare truth, pleaded their cause. He spoke the words they could not utter. He wrote the books they could not write. In his account of their experiences, partly observed and partly intuitively divined, they found the understanding, the justification, and the sympathy for which they themselves had been incapable of asking and had never expected to receive.

It was not until many years after this book appeared that I had the opportunity to read it. Always aware of the relevance to my own family, I was naturally much moved by it. I, like so many others, was impressed with its literary power. But as I completed the reading and put it down, I found myself wondering—found myself in fact skeptical—as to whether a boy who had immersed himself at so tender an age and with such precocious intensity in the problems of people older than himself would be able to cope successfully, later on, with the problems of his own maturity, personal and professional.

And in this, I think, I was not entirely wrong. Glenway's later career did indeed bear in some respects a certain tragic quality. He was, by total dedication, a literary person, a writer. This was all he was. This was all he wanted to be. His greatest hope and ambition, after the appearance of The Grandmothers, was to write at least one more great full-length novel. He did indeed write, in the ensuing years and decades, many things: short stories, long stories, essays, reviews, what you will; and many of them fine works; but no great novel. Thirteen years were to elapse, in fact, before he produced one more piece of what we might call major fiction. This was a novelette, entitled The Pilgrim Hawk, published in 1940, somewhat similar in length and approach to Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby; and an excellent work it was. It was followed shortly, to be sure, in 1943, by what was at least, in dimensions, a full-length novel—a war novel, entitled Apartment in Athens. This was a book on which Glenway worked very hard. He attached much importance to it. But it is one which I find, as I believe did many others, definitely inferior and not worthy of his talent. I suspect he must have recognized this too. It was, in any case, his last effort at major fiction. The remaining forty-four years of his life were given to other things.

What had gone wrong? That something had, is clear. He himself was keenly aware of this, and suffered from the awareness. He was even at times unjust to himself in the effort to understand it. "No one warned me," he said, in the person of the narrator of The Pilgrim Hawk, "that I really did not have talent enough. Therefore my hope of becoming a very good artist turned bitter, hot, and nerve-wracking; and it would get worse as I grew older. The unsuccessful artist [and here he was using the tamed hawk as an example] also ends in an apathy, too proud and vexed to fly again, waiting upon withheld inspiration, bored to death…."¹

This self-reproach was of course overdramatic and unjustified. Glenway was never without talent. He would go on long after that, making literary contributions such as no one without talent could have made. But they were not the kind he had aspired to make. And his suffering over this fact lay, I strongly suspect, in an inability to arrive at a correct understanding of his own capabilities—a tendency to underrate the value of the ones he had and to overrate the importance of the ones that he lacked.

There were two books written about Glenway during his lifetime, by competent and serious critics. Both gave much attention to the situation I have just described. Both came up with what was essentially the same answer. It was of course not the total answer; for that, Glenway was too complicated a person. But it was, I think, the main answer, and a valid one. And it was this:

Glenway's finest fictional achievements were ones in which he, as the observer and the narrator, was part of the happenings. These were not detached, imagined pictures of persons and scenes remote from his own experience. They were persons and scenes indeed, and very vividly portrayed, but only as observed, analyzed, and explained by Glenway Wescott. Without the presence of this observer and narrator they would have lost much of their meaning. His participation in the story was often veiled, but the reader was never allowed to forget it. The eye of the observer was always essential to the image of the object observed.

For some reason, Glenway regarded this intense personal involvement with his subject matter as a weakness—as something to be overcome. He often exhausted himself and wasted his powers in the effort to overcome it. He would have liked (and I am here borrowing language he himself used in writing about Katherine Anne Porter)—to "send himself outside of himself," to think himself into the thoughts and feelings of other human beings, and this, (and I quote) "in circumstances wholly and strangely different from his own."² But this he could not do. And in the misguided effort to do it, it was as if, to quote one of his best critics, "he threw away the fine novels he might have written for the sake of… the novels he thought he ought to write but could not."³

What would have been, in other circumstances, the "fine novels" he might have written we shall never know. But what he did write, in place of them, was not only far from negligible but had a certain tragic magnificence about it. He became a fine and discerning literary critic. The volume of essays on contemporary writers published in 1965 under the title of Images of Truth was a work of literary criticism in the grand manner of the nineteenth century: serious and unhurried, unapologetically impregnated at every turn with his own personality—his own reactions, his own prejudices, if you will—but deriving its strength from their very earnestness and the charm of that impregnation. He became, in those years, a truly great and good friend of modern literature. He did his fellow writers the honor of looking deeply, sympathetically, and with the utmost honesty at what they were doing; and where they themselves were incapable of clarifying—perhaps even of understanding—the full significance of what they had written, he did this for them. His rich and fruitful participation in the activities of this Academy-Institute; the encouragement he gave younger writers; his multitudinous oral contributions—the impressive lectures and the expromptu interventions in numberless literary discussions: these in themselves constituted a service to American literature all the more significant for the essential modesty, and perhaps even the misplaced brokenheartedness, out of which it flowed. Through all of it ran, like an undeviating thread, the powerful strains of those qualities for which so many of us recognized him as a friend: the earnestness of devotion to literature as a form of revelation of the truth; the essential innocence of that devotion with all the helplessness that this implied; and the generosity of spirit so unmistakable that the occasional vehemence of his verbal reactions only made it the more endearing.

Glenway had seen in The Grandmothers, written actually in France, a way of finally separating himself from the cloying Wisconsin origins that had preempted so much of the emotional power of his young life. But that separation, I suspect, was never successfully completed. He always remained in some respects the wide-eyed, wondering farm boy, desperately anxious to understand. He recognized this at an early date. There is a revealing passage in a book of his stories written in 1931, when he was thirty years old—a book bearing the significant title of Goodbye Wisconsin. This passage, while written in the third person, obviously referred to himself, and it was a prediction of his own future. Let me read it:

Soon he would depart again, to his distant ambitions—the necessary infatuation with himself, the remorse incessantly attendant upon his faults…. Time could not be depended upon to sweep him safely, normally onward; but would be forever letting him fall back into what was over and done with, and letting him, enfevered by the unwanted past, leap weakly into what was to come.⁴

What a penetrating and moving description of Glenway's own dilemma: true in every word except the one adverb "weakly." The leap was a long one—often impeded, often painful, but it was not weak. It had in it all the strength of the artist's faith in his own art; and it was for that faith, and for his abiding love of literature, and for his often anguished contribution to it, that many of us will remember him.

¹Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk (New York : Harper and Row, 1940), pp. 23-24.

²Glenway Wescott, Images of Truth (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), p. 36. Some, at least, of this language appears to have come from something Coleridge once wrote; but G.W. does not say where.

³William H. Ruckert, Glenway Wescott (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1965), p. 134.

⁴Glenway Wescott, Goodbye Wisconsin, as cited by William H. Ruckert, ibid., pp. 106-107.