'Begotten by Despair Upon Impossibility'

Sophisticates don’t get excited when meeting their heroes. Our veneer of coolness and suavity mustn’t be ruffled. At least that’s what I thought when meeting Count Basie, Sonny Rollins and B.B. King. But I was much younger and preoccupied with my “image.” Today I would gush and sputter if I could meet those guys again. In contrast, here’s a star-struck Louise Bogan after meeting T.S. Eliot: 

“I sat beside the Great Man at lunch; and I looked into his Golden Eye! How beautiful is the combination of physical beauty (even in slight decay), high qualities of mind and heart, and perfect humility. We talked, during the end of the entrée and through the coffee and ice cream!”

 

Bogan sounds like a bobby soxer swooning over Frankie. She’s writing to her friend Morton Zabel on November 28, 1948, after attending a luncheon thrown by the Fellows in American Literature of the Library of Congress. On that occasion they voted to give Ezra Pound the first Bollingen Prize. The sole dissenter was Karl Shapiro. Years later, Bogan said she agreed with him and regretted voting for Pound. Eliot was a more problematical anti-Semite than Pound, who was a raving, treasonous egomaniac. Bogan tells Zabel of her conversation with Eliot:

 

“Of form, and Youth’s fear of form; of rhythm (we got it back to the heartbeat and the breath); of the true novelist talent; of Henry Miller and little magazines; of Brancusi and modern architecture (‘who wants to live in a machine?’) and, finally, of the cat poems! [Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939)].”

 

Bogan describes Eliot’s manner during the Fellows’ meetings as “v. quiet, shy, reserved. He smokes incessantly, and at one point took time off to sharpen a pencil (with a pen-knife, in his lap). He looks quite frail, really; but what beauty. Well, it is all too late and too sad—but I must love him in a mild, distant sisterly way.”

 

Two months earlier, Eliot had turned sixty. Bogan was fifty-one. She opens her letter to Zabel with the first stanza of Andrew Marvell’s “The Definition of Love”:

 

“My love is of a birth as rare

As ’tis for object strange and high;

It was begotten by Despair

Upon Impossibility.”

 

That poem always reminds me, because of six-syllable “Impossibility,” of two poems by Emily Dickinson (here and here). Bogan closes her letter with Marvell’s final Stanza:

 

“Therefore the love which us doth bind,

But Fate so enviously debars,

Is the conjunction of the mind,

And opposition of the stars.”

 

[You can find the Bogan’s letter in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan (ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005).]