'And in the Darkness Comes the Light'

Chard Powers Smith (1894-1977) was a latecomer to the protracted Era of American Writers with Three Names, coming decades after John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell and William Dean Howells. Smith is probably more thoroughly forgotten than the others, though in 1939 he won a National Book Award in the “Bookseller Discovery” category for his novel Artillery of Time. He started as a lawyer with a law degree from Harvard but gave it up to write fiction, poetry and assorted nonfiction, including Where the Light Falls: A Portrait of Edwin Arlington Robinson (1965). I read it because I would read almost anything about Robinson (another three-namer), who was a friend of Smith’s. 

I don’t underestimate the importance and interest of writers’ biographies, but neither do I think their lives are infallible guides to their work. We already knew about Robinson’s partiality to alcohol, usually whiskey, and Smith recounts Robinson’s binge-drinking, often after long spells on the wagon. Smith is a ham-handed writer, averse to nuance and ambiguity. He loves his adjectives and is partial to hints of melodrama. He writes with a thesis, likely rooted in second-hand Freudian malarkey: all of Robinson’s subsequent life was determined by his unrequited love for Emma Shepherd, who married Robinson’s brother Herman in 1888. When Herman became engaged to Emma, Smith writes with a straight face, “American literature turned a corner.” He reads Robinson’s poetry through that reductive lens.

 

One recalls the exaggerated fuss readers and critics have made over A.E. Housman’s crush on Moses Jackson. True, a few of Robinson’s poems seem to hint at private revelations. Take “Mr. Flood’s Party” and Robinson’s drinking. But recall that J.V. Cunningham described Robinson as “a man almost without biography,” adding: “And he knew we do not really know about others; we do not know about him.” Psychology, amateur and otherwise, has its limitations. Smith took the title of his book from Robinson’s Lancelot (1920):

 

“Where the Light falls, death falls;

And in the darkness comes the Light.”

 

[The Cunningham passage is found in “Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Brief Biography” (The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham, 1978).]