Louise Bogan

I first heard of Louise Bogan in 1969 when I read The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke, by Alan Seager. I was 16 and outrageously taken by such Roethke lines as “What's madness but nobility of soul/At odds with circumstance?” which today reads like a bumper sticker scripted by R.D. Laing. Forty-three years after his death, Roethke is a big precocious baby. Bogan once had an affair with him and acted briefly as his poetic mother confessor. She was a fine, highly mannered writer of metric verse and for 38 years, until the year before her death in 1970, was poetry reviewer for The New Yorker.

The poet Mary Kinzie has edited A Poet’s Prose, an ungainly collection that throws together fragments of Bogan’s fiction, selections from her journal, letters, criticism and, despite the title, poems and drafts of poems, much of it juvenilia. A lot of this has already been published, though her letters, reviews and journals are long out of print. I like Bogan best in small doses, especially her letters and reviews, and I have been poking about in the book for a week. The fiction is mostly autobiographical and awful, but a slim anthology of apercus, especially about Henry James, one of her favorites, might be gleaned from the heap.

From a July 10, 1925, letter to Edmund Wilson:

“I have been reading Henry James very swiftly, so that I might, if such a thing were possible, get the color without too much of the sense. I am enchanted by the absolute sureness in method. – Even though he does the thing all wrong sometimes, he is always sure of how he wants to do it. The people that mirror the action never slip up, lose their outline, and become Tom, Dick, or Harriet.”

From a 1944 review of F.O. Matthiessen’s Henry James: The Later Phase:

“From one point of view, The Golden Bowl, written in the same year (1905) as Debussy’s La Mer, is one of Impressionism’s triumphs. Both works are formal accomplishments `of magnificent scope’ of that school. And the later James must be approached in the same way as one approaches music. Soon any surface stylistic oddity disappears. The center continually shifts, but the development of theme never stops for a moment and never errs. As in great music and in tragic life, the shifts are always toward the larger and unsuspected capacity, modulation, event; and toward a final major resolution.”

From a March 2, 1962, letter to Ruth Limmer, after seeing the film The Innocents (an adaptation of James’ “The Turn of the Screw"):

“Good old Henry J.! I came straight home and read the original story straight through. How wonderfully managed it is! And that `frame’ bit -- at the beginning! What the old boy knew – and was determined to express – was the hypocrisy of children, as well as the delusions of suppressed old maids. . .Read the preface to [The Portrait of a Lady]: see H.J. holed up in Venice, trying to get the book finished, but continually running to the window to watch the life and the color, outside. Most moving.”

And, on a non-Jamesian subject, this from an Oct. 20, 1960, letter to Ruth Limmer:

“The event of the week was my reading of John Updike’s new novel, Rabbit, Run (Knopf). The boy is a genius. Every sentence counts. The story is rather contrived, but one believes every word of it. And the flashes of weather, and of the `American scene’: drugstores, highways, main streets, factories, used car lots! And the passion and the grief! The sex gets out of hand, once in a while; but for the most part he uses the sexual aberrations to striking purpose. And he believes in God (`something there’)! Do get it at once; it’s worth buying – ($4.00).”

I love that: “it’s worth buying – ($4.00).” Updike’s last novel, Villages (2004), his 21st, retailed at $25. Bogan is wonderfully prescient about Updike’s entire career.