BIRTH | July 28–John Ashbury (Need for a 5th Dimension)

John Ashbery receives the National Arts and Humanities
Medal from President Obama.

This day in Rochester, NY in 1927 was born John Ashbery. He is a time traveler in the way people thought of it before Einstein's followers started to think of it in scientific terms.

Garrison Keillor today says in The Writer's Almanac:

[Ashbery] grew up on his family's fruit farm near Lake Ontario. He went to a small, rural school, and although they read some poetry, all of it was old. Then he won a contest, and the prize was Louis Untermeyer's anthology Modern American and British Poetry. He didn't understand many of these contemporary poems, but he was fascinated by them — poems by W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

A generous neighbor, seeing how bright Ashbery was, paid to send him to a good academy for his last two years of high school, and he started writing poetry more seriously. He went on to Harvard, and he published his first book, Some Trees (1956), when he was 29. He has been publishing ever since. His books include Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), A Wave (1984), Where Shall I Wander (2005), and Planisphere (2009).

Comment

Keillor describes Ashbery as having been helped by a generous neighbor. Ashbery and David Kermani are neighbors in New York and they have been generous.

An article in the NY Observer says that when Ashbery grew up on a farm, he didn't like it. He preferred living with his grandparents in the city to attend school. His grandfather was a professor at the University of Rochester. When he was 12, Ashbery's younger brother died of leukemia. Ashbery spent most of his time by himself until a wealthy friend of his mother (the "generous neighbor") put up the money for him to finish high school at Deerfield. Ashbery explains:

By that time I had already discovered modern poetry. High schools used to have current events contests sponsored by Time, if the class subscribed to the magazine. They were quite easy. I won the prize of a book. Of the four that they offered, the only one I was vaguely interested in was an anthology of modern American and British poetry by Louis Untermeyer.

Keillor gives us two quotes from Ashbery. One is about the fact that Ashbery's poetry is not easy. People say they don't understand it. Especially freshman students in college or high school who have to read it for their English courses. 

I don't quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure. I don't want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience. [Italics added.]

Dorothy Parker once said: "Millay did a great deal of harm making poetry seem so easy that we could all do it but, of course, we couldn’t." Ashbery tries not to make poetry too easy because he believes  it should stop you in your tracks - he wants his poems to stop you and make you spend some time. Keillor cites Ashbery's poem "At North Farm", which follows. It has a time-travel aspect. 

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you? 

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

The basic problem with the science of time travel is that in order to travel in time, we would need to travel "at incredible speed" - incredible because weight is a function of speed. We would need to be very light, preferably weightless. The only way that science knows how to time-travel so far is in the mind. But that gives us an important degree of freedom.

Physicists have been driven by unexplained phenomena to come up with a hypothetical fifth dimension that could unite the dimensions of space and time. Until they tie up the loose ends, we will have to rely on time-travel in the mind. We will have to rely on poetry.

BIRTH | May 8–Edmund Wilson (Comment)

The young Edmund Wilson.

This day in 1895 was born in Red Bank, NJ, the writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson. He was an editor in the 1920s at Vanity Fair and The New Republic, and later a book reviewer for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

Garrison Keillor provides the following samples of Wilson's acerbic attacks on writers he didn't like:

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since being shot by Booth was to have fallen into the hands of Carl Sandburg. 

[Another writer's] style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Wilson called "juvenile trash" and Kay Boyle's Avalanche "a piece of pure rubbish." In 1959, he wrote to Lionel Trilling:

In my opinion, [Robert] Frost is partly a dreadful old fraud and one of the most relentless self-promoters in the history of American literature.

He said that his friend and fellow Princetonian F. Scott Fitzgerald

has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given a desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.

Comment (JT Marlin):

Wilson's To the Finland Station, which I had to study for an exam at Harvard, was a good read. While I was an undergraduate, I wrote Wilson a letter and then called on him to try to persuade him to speak to a group of students. He was sitting on a sofa with Mary McCarthy, drinks in their hands, in their ancient two-story house in Cambridge. He said–"Wait a second"–and he made his way to the upstairs floor. There were sounds of rummaging around, and he returned downstairs with a card that said, at some length:

Mr. Edmund Wilson does not write introductions to books, read manuscripts, give speeches etc. etc.

It was neatly printed on a postcard flyer. Having established the principle, he then said he would be glad to have a meal with a group of us, which was a fine prize for my aggressiveness.

I did not know then, nor did he, that the woman he was once passionate about, Edna St. Vincent Millay, was my great-aunt. She married my mother's uncle. In her letters, she refers to him affectionately as "Bunny". He was mad for her body and her lyric poetry. Maybe the first influenced the second. She was grateful for his interest in her poetry but unflattering about his desirability as a lover. When she married, in 1923, it was a blow for him.

In his book on the 1920s, he expresses disappointment that she would marry someone he described as  a "Dutch importer". It was an accurate enough description, but he could have added "successful Dutch importer" which has a slightly more interesting ring to it. Boissevain & Company had a fleet of ships operating between Java and New York City delivering coffee.

Furthermore, Eugen Boissevain had already won over Inez Milholland and had established his credentials as a ladies' man twice over. Other men gave Eugen more credit. William Marconi, inventor of the radio and finance for several months to Inez, told Eugen that Inez needed a stronger man, someone like him. Max Eastman, who fancied both Inez and Edna, gave an admiring appraisal of Eugen Boissevain in his book Great Companions, identifying in Eugen the qualities that made him appealing.

Having lost his first wife to an illness, Eugen was totally dedicated to Edna's well-being. She once regretted not having their satin sheets at their home in Austerlitz. So he got in his car and drove to New York City to get them...

Edna herself paid the ultimate tribute to her husband after he died in 1949, a year before she did. She wrote: "The only thing I ever did for you was survive you. But that was much."