Arts and Letters

Witter Bynner, born Brooklyn, New York, 1881, died Santa Fe, New Mexico, June 1, 1968, was a member of the Institute since 1962.

In the more than eight decades of his life, he was a tireless member of a rare species in our cultural scene—that of the versatile man of letters, whose whole working career was given to the act of literature, with all its involvements not only in many forms of literary statement, but also in Platonian responses to the civil values of free existence. He was an eloquent orator, in poetic forms, who spoke out for the individual dignity of his fellow-men, whether in terms of politics, popular mores, or artistic commitment.

His long career began during his undergraduate days at Harvard, where he was graduated summa cum laude in 1902. He was the Phi Beta Kappa poet in 1907 with Young Harvard, which became his first book. It was followed by a long list of works, extending until 1960, when Alfred Knopf, the publisher of all but a few titles in his copious bibliography, brought out his last, and in many ways, his most remarkable work entitled New Poems, 1960.

These final poems were the autumnal fruits of the unconscious, for they occurred to him complete in a dream state, and in their first and final form were recorded immediately on awakening, already refined by his command of the sure poetic technique which he had earned in a lifetime of single-hearted devotion to the mysterious cause and the demanding privilege of poetry.

Between the beginning and the end, subject to many trivial fluctuations of critical and popular esteem, Witter Bynner wrote plays, essays, a narrative autobiography in verse, highly personal lyrics (the best of which will live while our literature lives), many truly intuitive poems drawn from the life of the southwestern and Mexican Indian, a deeply significant book about D. H. Lawrence which may survive as the best personal portrait of that mercurial and protean creature, ironic jeux d'esprit (in many cases wittily scandalous), and a huge correspondence which when ordered, edited, and published, may be recognized as one of the key resources of twentieth-century American cultural history. In addition, he produced classic translations from the Chinese: The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu, and (with Dr. Kiang Kang-Hu) The Jade Mountain, the Tang dynasty anthology of poetry. Using the pseudonym of Emanuel Morgan, he collaborated with Arthur Davison Ficke (Anne Knish) on the triumphant literary hoax published in 1916 as Spectra. It was a satire on the then-current new schools of Imagist and other free verse.

His literary acquaintanceship went back as far as George Meredith, to whom he made a youthful pilgrimage, and included such other figures as Mark Twain and Henry James, continuing through the decades to reach out to the young writers of the mid-sixties, when he suffered the series of emotional and physical disasters which rendered him inactive and, in effect, unreachable, until his merciful deliverance by a blessedly placid death on June 8, 1968, at the age of 87. His last words, suddenly articulated despite his paralyzed state, were said to be, "Other people die, why can't I?"

He never married, though documented suggestions link him in contemplated matrimonial arrangements with such interesting women as Clara Clemens (Gabrilowitsch) and Edna St. Vincent Millay; and his Grenstone Poems (1917), addressed in large part to a beloved "Celia," carry a confessional note of love. In 1921, on a lecture tour which brought him to Santa Fe, he was temporarily hospitalized by influenza, and on recovery, he decided that he had found the place where he must live henceforth. Thereupon he acquired a small adobe house which grew through the years into a large, rambling structure filled with his profuse collections of ancient Chinese, Mexican, American Indian, and contemporary works of art.

A man of commanding stature, splendid good looks, and infectious energy, he presided throughout five decades, by common consent, over the cultural and convivial life of Santa Fe. His wit was a delight. It ranged through every degree of style, not disdaining ribaldry and brilliant puns, and it often took your breath away with its instant response to an unexpected lead. One early example of the latter: on his first youthful lecture tour he was introduced by a local worthy to a provincial "lyceum" audience as the "eminent American writer, Mr. William Winter." Already rigid with stage-fright, Bynner was further appalled by this, but then, joyfully inspired, rose to his feet and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I fear I must be the Witter of your discontent."

Anyone who ever spent an intimate evening in his fine library, with a handful of like-minded men and women of wide culture and high wits, will keenly remember his presence—his gusty humor, his generous sensibility in honor of any honest human manifestation, his range of civilized and often hilarious reference, and above all his feeling for the common cause of human life itself, with all its hopes, wonders, and satisfactions, which he saw as deserving of tolerance and respect even at its most pathetic or misguided. Beyond all this, his generous and time-giving encouragement of younger poets was legendary.

Witter Bynner's own art as a poet of deceptively simplistic technique, embodying forth a unique lyric vision, belongs safely to the future. He was allied to a great tradition of letters entirely beyond the fashions of his time—a tradition rooted in those verities of literary art which always survive the fugitive urgencies of any passing hour.