'Warm-Hearted and Humorous Detachment'

“I STILL THINK POETRY HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE IMAGINATION; I STILL THINK IT OUGHT TO BE WELL-WRITTEN. I STILL THINK IT IS PRIVATE FEELING, NOT PUBLIC SPEECH.” 

That’s Louise Bogan in a rare concession to emphasis-by-upper-case (confined today to politicians, junior faculty and Twitter users), writing in a July 8, 1938 letter to her  longtime friend the poet-translator Rolfe Humphries. He had joined the League of American Writers, a Communist front group. That’s what Bogan’s friend W.H. Auden meant by “a low dishonest decade.”

 

Along with her poetry I admire Bogan’s resistance to the herd, her refusal to sacrifice independence of thought for the sake of fashion or friendship. In the letter she derides a recent speech given by Archibald MacLeish to the League of American Writers, soon after the third of Stalin’s show trials and with the Great Purge still grinding away. Scholars estimate the 1936-38 death toll among Soviet citizens exceeded 1.2 million. Bogan describes MacLeish’s speech as “the most awful tripe I ever read in my life,” adding:

 

“From now on, I’m not going to pull my punches with that bird. Of all the tub-thumping performances I ever read, it is the worst.”

 

I also admire Bogan’s toughness, her Irish fighting style. She wouldn’t relent. The friendship endured and Humphries in the early 1940s, like many others, lost interest in communism. For them, one senses, it was not an intellectual or moral repudiation; rather, the vogue had waned, especially after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact. Looking back, I’m not sure Humphries deserved Bogan’s friendship. She writes:

 

“You can easily see that I’m terribly mad, at the moment, about the C.P. [Communist Party], and all its works. The girls at the subway entrance saying, in soft tones, ‘Stop the mad dogs of Fascism; help our boys dodging Franco’s bombs,’ frankly make me sick. If the C.P. doesn’t stop all this ‘mad dogs’ ‘depraved’ stuff it will lose—well, I was going to say the respect of all intelligent people. But I take that back. There aren’t, as far as I can see, any intelligent people left.”

 

With a few word changes, this might have been written last week. We still have poets mucking around in politics. Bogan concludes her letter:

 

“But by gosh, I’m one [of the “intelligent people”], and I mean to put up a lot more fight, to stand up for the abstract idea of warm-hearted and humorous detachment, than I have ever put up before. I have nothing to lose.”

 

She signs herself “Your Fascist friend, Louise.”

 

[All quoted passages are from A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, ed. Mary Kinzie, 2005.]