`I Still Tremble with Passion'

Four years before his death in 2004, Donald Justice conducted a lengthy interview with the English writer and scholar Philip Hoy, and in 2001 the edited interview was published as a book by Between the Lines. Justice was one of our best poets. He spoke softly in an age when poets shrieked. The interview is thoughtful and nostalgic but never toothless, and several notable excerpts follow. As a young man, Justice considered becoming a composer, and he studied at the University of Miami with the composer Carl Ruggles:


“Ruggles is one of those gifted amateurs of the arts that America produced, especially in the early modern period – Marsden Hartley and Charles Burchfield among the painters, Charles Ives and Roy Harris among the composers, and Sherwood Anderson, perhaps Hart Crane, among the writers. For me these artists have long seemed the truly American type of artist, though not necessarily as profound or world-shaking as some of their contemporaries. Nevertheless they may be the ones we can be secretly most proud of.”

This is shrewd and accurate and seldom noticed, though I would rank Ives and Crane much higher than Justice apparently does. He’s right: As an American, I’m proud of all these artists, and especially proud that Anderson and Crane come from Ohio, my home state. Later in the interview, Hoy quotes from a notebook kept by Justice and excerpted in Oblivion, a selection of the poet’s prose: “A copy of Chekhov’s stories lying open on a table. I realized as at once how glad I was that this man had lived. And that I did right to be glad. Of what writers now could that honestly and simply be said?” To which Justice responds:

“I hold Chekhov in very high esteem, yes, even when he is not quite at his best. One learns to like everything certain writers write. Well, almost everything.”

Again, Justice is right. To some writers, my allegiance is absolute. Even their minor or mediocre work, their juvenilia, is dear. This attitude, of course, is uncritical or pre-critical, and it’s nothing I would even attempt to defend in print, except to say that the existence of such writers gives me great pleasure and a sense of reassurance. I can’t get enough of them – Chekhov and Henry James, for instance, and Donald Justice.

And here is a curious observation, based on his 1982 return to Florida, the state where he was born, that sounds like the germ of a Justice poem:

“I have a distinct memory of walking out onto the golf course behind our house late one night, walking our dog, and standing there looking up at the moon as it flooded the fairway with light. Very nice. I felt touched by an emotion I must have been inventing.”

Then, as though to dispel the impression that he is a poet only of twilit nostalgia, Justice assaults the literary theorists who helped destroy English departments, literacy and the love of literature:

“I disliked practically everything about them: their jargon and their grammar, their vast intellectual pretensions, their easy disdain for things they knew little or nothing about and had no interest in, their lousy taste in literature and the other arts, their nasty politicking, their hatred of the past and the tradition in favour of the fashionable and the perfectly silly…But please don’t get me wound up. It’s been years and I still tremble with passion.”