Arts and Letters

Physical eccentricity marked this impressive human being. There was a fairly constant quota of motion about him. He walked as though with difficulty, using a stick, lurching and dragging a bit. I say as though with difficulty because in this matter of walking one can see the status of his disability: since he had never known any other condition, it seemed more serious to us than it did to him. And disability is not quite the word, since for much of his life he walked a great deal. Then there was the management of his hands, the effort he had to make, for example, to hold a matchbox and light a match. He smoked all the time, so we saw this often. His head and upper body, too, were involved in the general unsettlement, swiveling and ducking a little, and he would cock his head sidewise with strain on the neck and facial muscles.

I cannot think of him without thinking of Marya Zaturenska, his wife. These two highly independent spirits were devoted to each other and proud of each other. So delicate a small woman she was, dark-haired, dark-eyed, pouting to inhale her cigarette, quick in speech where Horace dilated and lingered. In the midst of uproarious glee—a gift of the Gregorys—she could turn somber in an instant, her eyes veiled.

All this from the time of our first becoming friends. He had taken a poem of mine for a section in The Forum and then another for a book called New Letters in America that came out in the fall of 1937. In those days there was a lot of "depression writing," as Horace called it, and in this collection, which he edited with Eleanor Clark, he hoped to do better than that and did. He printed among other things a cool fable by Elizabeth Bishop about a clean-up man on a beach, and a wild poem in the form of a film script, called The House, by James Agee.

They were living then in a flat in Bronxville, from which in a year or two they moved to one on Riverside Drive near Grant's Tomb. Of an evening we would ride up on the top deck of a Fifth Avenue bus to savor literary gossip and Irish whiskey. There would be glimpses of Joanna who was pretty and ten or eleven and Patrick who was red-headed and five or six. Fitzgeralds and Gregorys had the bond of Irishness—very important to Horace, whose grandfather had been a Dubliner, related to the Gregorys of Coole, an emigré to Wisconsin in the 1850s. We had, too, the bond of being Midwesterners in New York, stormers of the East out of the brawny heartland. My grandfather had taken his spot of whiskey every morning to fend off the malaria; Horace's father had had his double bourbon neat before his oatmeal breakfast. Marya had held a Zona Gale scholarship at the University of Wisconsin; my first wife came from Zona Gale's town of Portage and had spent her girlhood on the lake front in Horace's home town of Milwaukee. Furthermore, she had gone to Sarah Lawrence, the new progressive college where Horace had now been teaching for three or four years.

At that time I spent my days and nights writing news stories for Time, a job that made me now and then speculate on what else one might do. One thing led to another, and, thanks to Horace, one day I had a talk about a job with Sarah Lawrence's first president, Miss Constance Warren, a tall glinting gentlewoman in a paneled office. Nothing came of this kindly arranged interview, or rather nothing came of it for about eight years.

Friends who at one time or another shared Gregory evenings were Dudley Fitts, down from Choate, Norman Pearson, down from Yale, and more rarely Morton Zabel, on one of his New York forays from Chicago. Were we political? Not very, and not much. As the war in Spain went on, Dudley went in for a lot of Spanish—qué tal and hasta luego—and took to lifting his right fist in farewell. I didn't know whether I liked this or not, as it seemed somehow unearned. Very early on, in the '20s, Horace had been acquainted and sympathetic with people on the radical Left, and in 1937—the year we met—he became, I believe, poetry editor for a while of The New Masses. If I knew this at the time I should have thought his cause that of poetry primarily, secondarily the masses, and the Communist Party a poor third. I now know that, however Horace regarded it, Eleanor Clark thought this job too late in the day and hard to take; there was a strain between them (temporary, I'm glad to say), and he and she brought out no further volumes of New Letters.

To me, he seemed a free spirit. I remember one evening when the children were long abed Horace read aloud some of Lord Rochester's well-turned bawdy verses with enormous amusement. His whole being exploded in laughter. He resembled Dudley in this and in his delight in literary discoveries. He loved wit, whether displayed in the writing or in the lives of poets. What relish he took, for example, in the fact that William Ernest Henley had been Robert Louis Stevenson's model for Long John Silver.

There was practically nothing that you could suppose he had not read. It is quite possible that no one else but he on the Eastern Seaboard could have discovered in an obscure volume of bad verse published in London in 1804 a sentimental ballad by "Monk" Lewis from which Yeats had apparently got his figure of Crazy Jane. Beginning in Horace's years as an exceptional child, schooled at home by his mother, he had lived through books an intense imaginative life. The man of letters, the great reader, harbored a daemon. Some of his fears as a little boy had seemed so unaccountable but just that his mother wondered if he were clairvoyant. Occurrences of this kind had not ceased with childhood. On a visit to Keats Grove in Hampstead in 1934 he had found himself mysteriously sure of directions in streets he had never seen before, as though he were transcendentally guided. This touch of the visionary in Horace, of the uncanny one set apart, led Dudley and me to dedicate our Antigone to him in 1939 with a line of Greek spoken by Theseus to the aged and sacral Oedipus in the Colonus play: polla gar se thespizont'horô, k'ou pseudophêma: I have seen you divining many things and not falsely....

During the years of which I speak I should say that Horace was engaged in a struggle to bring together in his poems the literary and visionary sides of his nature, to strengthen divination with art and to give art the shiver of divination. To my ear and mind he did not really begin to succeed in this until the end of the decade. Marya's lyrics in Threshold and Hearth and Cold Morning Sky—1934 and 1937 respectively—were less ambitious but purer accomplishments. Of his poems in Chelsea Rooming House, 1930, No Retreat, 1933, and Chorus for Survival, 1935, I felt that, although there were moving passages and pages, such as the lovely "Stanzas for My Daughter," the monologues were in general too vaporously suggestive, drifting, blurred. Then in his New Poems in 1940—appropriately dedicated to Zabel, by the way—a certain iron began to enter into the incantatory rhythms. In the year before the war he sent me, to Santa Fe where I was then living, the small poem he later entitled "Look at Me," which I took as promising a new kind of concentration.

ERECTED TO THE MEMORY/ of / AN AIMIABLE CHILD 1797 / ST CLAIR POLLOCK / WHO DIED IN HIS FIFTH YEAR*

Look at me standing naked in cold and shifting sweet March air;
I am the hope of all you wished to be, popular, eager, quick and fair;
The truthful son with his blank stare seeing birds, trees, flowers; the irresistible lover;
The boxer happy, one round won; the careful husband on a Sunday morning; the heroic
Admiral, king, chief, president; the benevolent, sleepless millionaire.

I am perfect and dead, indestructible, faithful, alone;
See me cheerful and good, the eternal, unbroken
Gaze from blue eyes and my head wreathed with wind-flown and golden thin hair,
The invisible light within light,
And the deep smile engraved upon stone.

Horace could be touchy. I find among his letters one of January, 1940, in which he was evidently brooding on some off-hand and all too hasty suggestion I had made that he might like to get in touch with Empson who would be in New York at such and such a time and reachable through so-and-so. "Believe me," wrote Horace, "I am not trying to be inaccessible or 'important'—even my phone number is in the book—but I always feel a certain diffidence in calling people up and saying may I meet your guest; I never do it. And I don't think you quite meant that I should.... "

I am sure my cheeks burned, though of course I had not quite meant that he should. During the war, for five years or so, I have no clear memory of having seen the Gregorys. Wartime life took us apart. Then in the summer of 1946 when I was back in New York and at loose ends one evening I had a reunion with Horace. Soon thereafter came an invitation from Harold Taylor, then president of Sarah Lawrence, to teach a class in poetry at the college, and when I accepted and did this in the fall my teaching life began. It could not have happened if Horace had not had a hand in it. Now, although I spent only parts of two days in Bronxville, I saw him regularly. We were never on bad terms. One little incident sticks in my mind as a token not only of our relationship but of the poetic discipline in general. I had published in The Nation a poem that had filled me with excitement—the poet's self-entranced feeling of having "passed a miracle" as E. B. White once described it. And I met Horace going up one of the hillside walks at the college. "Your poem is charming," he said, scanning me, smiling and cocking his head. "Charming!" What a word for my miracle! Then I realized how just his restraint had been.

Horace had two offices at Sarah Lawrence, the first so small it became known as "the broom closet" and the second in such a noisy corner that they called it "the airport." Neither bothered him. And he became a grand old man. Glamorous visitors came and went—Stephen Spender, Randall Jarrell, Mary McCarthy—but Gregory remained, I think, the heart and soul of the English faculty. I remember one assignment he gave his writing class: it was to take the Third Avenue El to a certain stop, get off, and describe what was visible from that platform. Horace never lost his eye for the visual phantasmagoria of New York. As to his presence among his colleagues, Rudolf Arnheim's impression must be typical: "The constant tilt of his stance, the deviation from the normal vertical, stood in my mind for a diagonal way of smiling and playfully sniping at the world."

When I took my family to Italy in 1953 I left Sarah Lawrence and saw no more of the Gregorys until after Horace's retirement. Then briefly back in New York in 1963 I met Stanley Burnshaw, who was kind enough to drive me out to see them in Palisades. This was a very happy visit indeed, not only because they had found a peaceful and comfortable cottage in which to live with their photographs and their books but because Horace had been transformed by an operation: he had been relieved of his tic, his tremors, and seemed by using a walker to be gaining normal physical existence. I went on my way rejoicing. But Patrick Gregory tells me now that the new life did not last, that a broken hip and other complications put Horace in a wheelchair for the years thereafter.

I sent him my books, of course, and he sent me his autobiographical work not well entitled, The House on Jefferson Street, in 1970, and his final book of poems, Another Look, in 1976. This last included an eloquent and magical encounter with Dudley Fitts among the shades. Apart from brief correspondence over these exchanges, we remained silently sure of one another's affection, although there were no more visits and I never saw him or Marya again. From his memoir I learned a great deal that I had not known before. I had always assumed that his physical difficulty must be a mild form of cerebral palsy, but it was not. Tuberculosis of the bone in infancy had affected his upper vertebrae and led to tremor on the right and paralysis of the left foot and hand.

I had noticed in the old days that he and Marya always spoke with liking and respect of "Bryher," or Lady Winifred Ellerman. From the memoir I learned that it had been a gift from her that enabled them to spend the summer of 1934 in England and Ireland and to meet many literary people including at the very end William Butler Yeats—the whole adventure a turning point in Horace's life. That same year of 1934 his appointment at Sarah Lawrence rescued them from the hand-to-mouth existence they had led, freelancing in New York for the first nine years of their marriage. It had been a hard life for these brave people, with more than their share of desperate moments, desperate but also heroic, as when Horace himself delivered Patrick in a taxi on the way to the hospital.

Partly no doubt because I was out of the country between 1953 and 1964, I missed Horace's translation of the Metamorphoses and his book on Whistler, but I have now read his Ovid with appreciation (15,000 lines of readable verse) and his Whistler with gratitude. Whistler was, I think, his perfect subject, the precursor of Pound as an American sensation in London, the creator of Nocturnes, the possessor of an immortal gift, with a lot of personal and technical shortcomings. These books, and his study of Amy Lowell, and his essays, and his poems, along with all the incidental editings and anthologies and introductions, make up a large life work. He must have taken satisfaction in it as his and Marya's life drew to a conclusion in the nursing home at Shelburne Falls. We know another matter in which he took satisfaction: the lives of his children and grandchildren. Eleanor Clark Warren has shown me a letter she had from him last year in the summer, speaking with pride of Joanna's two boys and a girl, all grown up and in government service, and of Patrick's small boy and girl with their French and their Latin. "Part of the secret of their brightness," he wrote, "is that all five have been kept away from TV."

I am very grateful to Patrick, who has written to me about his father's last period. "He read enormously," he says, "and critically, and it was a continual challenge to keep him supplied with new stuff that was up to his standards. Like all old men, he mourned the passing of his few intimate friends, and suffered from the diminishment of his affective world. Yet in spite of malady and mishap, and a growing sense of isolation, he always maintained that cheerfulness that was a fundamental part of his personality. Right up to the end he remained lucid, sane, and responsive to his surroundings. The specific cause of death would be hard to determine. The day after my mother's funeral service [Marya died in January] he went into what the Victorians would, I suppose, call a 'decline'—took to his bed, and gently relinquished his hold on life. Joanna flew in from Scotland (where she is now living with her husband who has retired from government service) a couple of days before his death. One of the last things he said to us was 'I'm so happy, I'm so happy,' and with deep expression, but I admit I cannot fully grasp the true context of that statement…."

*Reprinted by permission from Collected Poems of Horace Gregory published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., copyright © by the Estate of Horace Gregory.