Arts and Letters

What his father, a dramatically successful businessman, found admirable—not "just a poet" but "A Man of Letters"—Howard Nemerov, also with dramatic success, became. His thirty or so books are divided among poetry (fourteen volumes), short stories, novels, and criticism. (I might add that the latter is so full of wit, commonsense, and soundness of judgment that I reread it with as much pleasure as I reread the poems.) His countless prizes, medals, and honors include thirteen honorary degrees, the Bollingen and Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the first Aiken/Taylor Prize, the first Roethke Memorial Award, The National Medal for the Arts in Poetry, and two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States.

Howard's poems are at body temperature, the heart's temperature, but they arrive at that bath for the spirit by a mixture of two streams of vision, one bitterly chill and the other tenderly warm. Regarding the first, I know of no other poet whose courageous, undaunted, uncomforted mind has presented his readers with so uncompromising a picture of our little planet lost and untended in the terrible vastness of space, which mocks our absurd and insignificant wish for immortality, our foolishness, our pride, our ignorance, and our precious delusions. It is a planet whose seasons are passing always passing, its Time a bearer away of everything we wish to keep, its running water forever going, carrying away, its still water forever offering these cold reflections. A cutting wit and the bleakness of scientific abstractions are often at the service of this wintry view.

The warmth consists of the exquisitely observed and preserved details of those passing seasons: their migrations of butterflies and birds, their blooms, however brief, color of leaffall, perfection of snowflake; it consists of the love of creatures in their brief bloom—dogs, cats, children, turtles, beetles; it includes love of the shelter of home and the profound pleasures and comforts of paintings, poetry, music, and myth. At the service of this warmth are the jokes, the many, many jokes, often bawdy, which tame the tragic, domesticate the dreadful, and, of course, his glow of meter and language, his conflagrations of metaphor.

He dazzled and daunted those of us who usually face most directly only one aspect of the double truth, especially as in the later books the first stream grew even more chill, the second more and more warm. Having dwelt on last things since he was a young man, his poems' persona grew precociously old. I have often been struck over the years, sometimes with a smile, at the contrast between the speaker of the poems and the handsome, fresh-faced Howard sitting in our living room every weekend drinking his martini.

Like his poems, Howard himself was a strikingly divided personality, as if a cornstalk and a lilac bush had grown up side by side from one root. My husband, Jarvis Thurston, brought him in 1969 from Brandeis to Washington University in St. Louis as a one-year Visiting Poet, and he stayed there happily until his death. As the years passed, the books came out, the prizes and honors fell faster and faster upon him and the press and television displayed his achievements, he became, for the entire community, a familiar and cherished embodiment of Poetry. Wearing his blue denim jacket (hooded in winter, unbuttoned over shorts in steamy summer), Harvard book bag slung over one shoulder, whistling Bach, he strolled through his neighborhood and walked the mile to the University and back each day under the doting eyes of his townspeople. At large chapel readings, community members vied with students for seats; he rarely read without receiving a standing ovation. His public persona, his humor, his charm, his friendliness, his lightning wit, won him friends and admirers everywhere in the country as he gave readings. His generosity to young people and old friends (recommendations, nominations) was infinite.

The Howard that his closest St. Louis friends (three couples) saw at least once a week was a deeply hidden and private man (though he might laugh or cry at the triumphs and problems of his three sons, none of us knew he had any siblings until Diane Arbus's suicide made their relationship public), socially ill at ease, uneasily rivalrous, in constant need of proof (praise or prize) that his work was good. Extraordinarily lacking in empathy (and concealing his own feelings: "I don't spend time thinking about my feelings," he would tell interviewers), he often astonished us with bizarre misreadings of people and situations. Off the platform he carefully cleared a space between his own feelings and those of other people. Returning from a trip he might tell his wife he had heard that a friend of theirs was very ill. "What's wrong? What is it?" Peggy would ask urgently, and Howard would say: "I don't know, I didn't ask," to her frustration and consternation. Rarely could he join in the give-and-take of conversation; his talk consisted of listening to a topic for a short time, then uttering one of his "conversation-stoppers," as we called them, a witty epigram which was intended to be the last word on that subject. (One of his old friends from Bennington days, Kenneth Burke, after a visit with him announced that he could hardly wait to get back home so they could write letters to each other again and have "a real conversation.") The depth of our love for him sometimes puzzled us, though I now know that it was an accurate response to the depth of his own hidden affection.

I want to say something about Howard's manner of dying, which was so exemplary that I never again expect to see anything like it. When his throat cancer was found and removed, it had already spread to the lymph system and his doctors gave him a year at best to live. He lived actively for about a year and a half. During that time he taught, as I did, a summer Writers Workshop at Sewanee and taught the following fall semester at Washington University. There is a double row of gingko trees lining the walk between the English Department and the Library, and Howard had written several poems about them. One, in 1975, called "The Consent," asks what signal from the stars causes them suddenly to drop all their leaves on a single night, and ends:

What use to learn the lessons taught by Time
If a star at any time may tell us: Now.¹

On Howard's last autumn the gingko leaves had fallen and been raked into piles ready to be scooped up by the machine when a colleague caught sight of Howard kicking furiously at one of the piles until its leaves were thoroughly scattered again. In a 1980 book Howard has a sonnet elegy for one of the family cats, one who scratched whenever he was petted. The sonnet ends:

Now what avails
Your caterwauling in that sightless See?
If Death should stroke thee, Thompson, scratch Him for me.²

I have never seen anyone kick and scratch Death as fiercely, courageously, and gracefully as Howard did. When, by indirection or metaphor, he sometimes called on us for assurance that death was not yet upon him, we had only to give him that reassurance, by indirection or metaphor, and he was able to feel that some life still lay ahead of him and to return, sometimes with astonishing vigor, to his professional concerns. At his birthday party on the last day of February (held in a large public building at the zoo to accommodate the crowds), Howard was unable to speak, but smilingly wore a sign, "I HAVE LARYNGITIS." After he had rested from the party the doctors surgically loosened the new tumor that was pressing on his larynx and sprayed Teflon on his vocal cords; Howard immediately flew to Kansas City and then on to Arizona to give readings and workshops. By the end of May he entered the hospital to receive oxygen and radiation treatments, receiving a private honorary degree ceremony in his hospital room. When the cancer shrank under radiation he went home for a month of vigorous professional work from his couch. He kept in touch with his friends by phone, proofread his new book of poems, voted and nominated for his professional organizations, spent hours (abetted by his friends) planning a change-of-scene train trip. Five days before he died he urged the president of the Academy of American Poets to make a change in procedure, and she was preparing to make her report to him when she received word of his death. A very few days before he died he called this Academy to reactivate a nomination for membership which he had been sponsoring.

During his last month the expression of his deepest feelings and affections became available to him. Cornstalk and lilac merged into one hybrid, radiantly flowering. All rivalries fell away, he wished to give every honor he had, or believed he had, in his power to give, embarrassing some of us by his insistent efforts to offer some last token of his love. At the end of twenty-two years of our friendship, Howard and I had said our goodbyes in poems, mine to him called "Endings" having evoked his to me, his lovely last poem, "The End of the Opera." The mingled tears and happiness in his poem provides the "ending" to his own works, his own opera, which my poem wishes every "story" to have—an ending whose "backward-shining lights up the meaning of the whole work." And it seems to me that his manner of dying cast its "backward-shining" over the entire life. His ashes are scattered among the gingko trees.

1. Nemerov, Howard, "The Consent" from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 476.
2. Nemerov, Howard, "Elegy" from Sentences (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1g8o), p. 83.