Arts and Letters

Robert Fitzgerald said, "Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation."

When I made his acquaintance he was a sophomore at Harvard and I was a graduate student. We were both from the Middle West—from two small towns that were separated by only thirty miles of corn and wheat fields. The fact that we found ourselves in a, so to speak, alien land, among people whose vowel sounds were really diphthongs and whose assumptions were often ludicrous, strengthened the connection. His room was on the top floor of Hollis Hall, on the same landing as the room that Thoreau had had roughly a hundred years before. A quarter of a century later, John Updike occupied Robert's room. And, unless a pleasant custom has been discontinued by the College, if you go there you will find all three names on a plaque at the head of the stairs. On the left as you walked in, there was a small piano, and on the right-hand wall a framed print of the Hokusai wave, which had not yet become a cliché. Many years later, monitoring a Princeton seminar on Baudelaire, Robert was reminded of how in that room he read Les Fleurs du Mal for the first time, and of the sound the book made when he let it fall to the floor beside his bed at three o'clock of a cold winter night. The poems that he wrote while he was in Harvard are full of night images, night fears, darkness, and cold. In conversation he had a careful way of expressing any thought, as if the words were being passed on for accuracy and truthfulness before he allowed his tongue to utter them. This gave him a magisterial air that, though he was only twenty-two, sat quite securely on his shoulders. His nostrils flared disdainfully when he spoke of writing or writers that he considered second-rate. Just when you expected him to seize the jawbone of an ass and start laying about him, he would break into laughter. At himself. I loved him for his poetic gift, for his intransigence, for the fact that he looked the way a poet ought to look, and because he could play Mozart's Piano Sonata Number 11 in A Major.

Among the experiences common to his childhood and mine was the knowledge of what it is like to have a funeral wreath fastened to the front door. His mother died when he was three, and his younger brother when he was seven. He had, as he later expressed it, "a very good, direct sense of what it meant to die; it meant not to be there at all anymore." His father fell and injured his hip, and tuberculosis of the bone set in. For a while he was able to get around on crutches, and even to practice law, but from Robert's eighth year on, his father was confined to his bed in an upstairs room of Robert's grandmother's house in Springfield, Illinois. Before Robert started off to school in the morning he would open the door of his father's room, put down the window, pull up the shades, and turn on the radiator. Then, having wakened his father, he would empty out and rinse the urinal. On Saturday and Sunday mornings he would bring a basin of warm water from the bathroom and hold a mirror in front of his father's face while he shaved. In the evening he stood beside the bed with scissors, adhesive tape, and cotton, while his father changed the dressing on his wound. And then his father would make a place on the blanket for cards or the checkerboard. Once he took his fountain pen and wrote the Greek alphabet. Though bedridden, he was a better and more tender father than most. He died while Robert was away at boarding school. All this weight of early sorrow and deprivation stoically endured I felt in him. And in his poems as well:

...our hearts faint with grief to think of it:
How crickets dinned in the sure evening, late
Locusts would come, each to his ancient tree;
Mowers on many lawns, leveling summer,
Measured the slow festival of the air;

Or in bright gusts of winter by the door,
The shadows thin beneath a glitter of icicles,
Our mothers in their ceremonial furs,
Delicious ladies laughing, their cheeks cold—
Gone from the light like their breath's vapour, leaving
This image or another bound in thought
With scent of old spoons, handkerchiefs and roses."*

Robert began to write verse in high school—a great deal of it. When he graduated, his father, thinking that seventeen was a little young for entering college, sent him to Choate for a year. There he had Dudley Fitts as a teacher. Fitts encouraged him to learn Greek, read "The Wasteland" to him, and in one way and another changed his life.

He spent his junior year at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he attended the lectures of the philosopher G. E. Moore and a seminar given by an obscure young Austrian named Wittgenstein. Of other disciplines than poetry he was most drawn to philosophy. General thought was to him simply another language, like Latin and Greek, to be mastered and used in describing the nature of experience. As an elderly man he observed, "Everything runs on as process without pause. We ourselves, who temporarily weight the chairs we sit in, cannot arrest our continual vanishing."

When he returned to Harvard for his senior year he took the lead in a production of the Philoctetes of Sophocles, in Greek. Elliot Carter wrote the music for the choruses. Robert had to memorize seven hundred lines of Greek and I wonder if the experience didn't make him forever a little homesick for the ancient world.

His family meant him to practice law, as his father and two of his uncles had done. Robert was of two minds about this, and decided finally that if he could afford a legal education he could afford the alternative of devoting several years to writing—only to discover that he couldn't afford either one; his small inheritance had been wiped out in the falling stock market.

He went to work for The New York Herald-Tribune as a cub reporter, and was so obviously a fish out of water that the benign city editor transferred him to the job of assistant to the business editor, where he was no less out of his element, but at least did not have to meet a daily deadline. After eighteen months he resigned in order to spend the summer at the MacDowell Colony, putting together his first book of poems and collaborating with Fitts on a translation of the Alcestis of Euripides. Their translation has an emotional simplicity that is almost Middlewestern. On the morning of the day that Alcestis gives herself up to death so that her husband can remain alive, she prays to the Hearth-goddess:

"now I am going into earth.
I shall not pray to you ever again.
Watch over my children when I am dead:
Give the boy a wife who will be dear to him,
And give the girl a good husband."**

I was at the Colony, too, that summer, and carried away, down through the years, a memory of the sound of his footsteps—of his highly focused being—mounting the outside stairs to his room, which was above mine.

He was hired by Time magazine to write stories about business. The managing editor said to him, "I want you to make the Business department sing." In due time he was promoted to Art. He was partly color-blind and had to take his wife with him when he looked at pictures, to correct his impression of the colors. His columns showed no trace of the homogenous prose characteristic of the surrounding pages, which means that the editors kept their hands off his copy. He had enough leftover energy to translate, with Fitts, the Antigone of Sophocles. Into it they poured their own poetic talent, producing an excitement you won't find in Gilbert Murray.

In the fall of 1940, wanting a longer stretch of free time before he was caught up in what he knew was coming, Robert got a year's leave of absence, and spent it in Santa Fe, writing poetry and translating Oedipus at Colonus. Then he went back to Time and covered Books, with James Agee. In 1943 he joined the Navy as a lieutenant j.g. While he was stationed in Guam he had three books in his footlocker: the Oxford text of the works of Virgil, the Vulgate New Testament, and a Latin dictionary. Rather than spend evening after evening drinking at the Officers' Club, he "went through Virgil from stem to stern."

When the War was over, he wrote one book review a week for Time, to keep the wolf from the door, and translated Oedipus Rex with Fitts. Robert translated one of the odes seven times and was not satisfied. The eighth attempt was made during a stay in Rome, and, the spirit of the place supporting his endeavors, he got the lines to unfurl with the true Sophoclean grandeur:

Alas for the seed of men.
What measure shall I give these generations
That breathe on the void and are void
And exist and do not exist?...***

And so on. A marvel. How long he spent on something was never a consideration. In a letter to me he wrote: "What I would keep is our criterion of style. In behavior and in writing it looks as though you achieve it, you don't fall into it. You exact it of yourself. So you fail a good deal, and know it. This does not seem insupportable. It keeps things clear. I would also like to keep a sense of mystery, of the Unknown."

He was offered a part-time teaching job at Sarah Lawrence College, and this led to other teaching appointments, all of them temporary until Harvard claimed him for the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory. The house in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where he and his second wife were living in the early 1950s saw the arrival of one child after another in quick succession. A Guggenheim grant and a publisher's advance made it possible for them to live in Italy, where there were plenty of young women who were willing to change diapers and keep an eye on infants with a tendency to wander off into harm's way. Robert sat down and copied the whole of the Odyssey into large ledger-like notebooks, with a blank line between every two written ones, and then he began to reshape the Greek hexameters into the iambic pentameter that is the bedrock of English poetry. What was also involved was reimagining the action of the poem, so that it was alive from start to finish, and feeling his way into a style that in our time would seem as timeless as the original. After six or seven years of this, he felt, he said, that Homer was looking over his shoulder and he could ask him, "Will this do or won't it?"

The years in Italy were rich with the kind of family happiness he had been deprived of as a child. In 1961 he wrote, "We now have a house near Perugia, a tall old house near a road along a grand hillside looking out over the Tiber Valley. One of the towns sprinkled on the mountainside opposite is Assisi. The valley goes gently and is wide and the slopes are planted with olive trees." But lyric poetry doesn't thrive where there is no shade. In that same letter he said, "I understand your going back to Lincoln last year. I went back to Springfield one weekend in July in a rented Chevrolet, and I drove around the streets like the very ghost that was ahead of me on my bicycle forty years ago. The years intervening were like heavy plate glass between me and everything. The elms were gone, and the era, and the people. It is well that, as Yeats put it, all things remain in God."

He loved music, especially Bach and Schubert. He delighted in the beauty of women. His letters to his friends were crammed with affection. His illness did not intimidate him, and, with the help of his wife, Penny, and his grown daughters and sons, he held the enemy at arm's length while, wandering around the house in his bathrobe or sitting up in bed, he put his affairs in order, and lived in joy.

*From "First Movement," published by Arrow Editions, copyright © 1935 reprinted by permission of Mrs. Robert Fitzgerald.
**From The Alcestis of Euripides, translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; renewed 1964 by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
***From The Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald, copyright 1949 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; renewed 1977 by Cornelia Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.