'A Matter of Nobody’s Style But Her Own'

“It is not only the pianos that have vanished (the sound of the pianos along the streets in spring evenings when the windows were opened) but the world in which they sounded, and the young ears they sounded for. I shall never forget how beautiful they were or what they meant to me.” 

Louise Bogan was born in 1897, when the number of pianos owned by Americans was increasing five times faster than the population. A piano in the parlor suggested gentility and culture. In her posthumously published Journey Around My Room (1980), Bogan continues:

 

“And when I say that their world has vanished, I mean it poignantly: the slant of light over the shabby streets of that time. Totally shabby American streets with no shine or chic in them, only a few doorsteps, lampposts, carriage (wagon) wheels (and the sound that tired horses’ feet used to make, when the horses shifted them), trees, and lighted windows—and the tireless scales, like grain pouring from the hand, or the bad pieces those children used to play.”

 

Nothing evokes a time and place so vividly as music heard or remembered. Walk down our street when we were kids on a summer evening, windows open, no air conditioning, and you would hear children practicing scales, Mozart or a poplar song. Overhearing the piano without knowing who played was poignant then, doubly so now. Music takes us back. In the preface to his Collected Stories (1977), John Cheever’s remembrance of New York City in the nineteen-thirties when he was starting out as a writer, he writes:

 

“These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationary store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.”

 

Music is everywhere in Bogan’s poetry, and she writes musically. Listen to “To Be Sung on the Water”:

 

“Beautiful, my delight,

Pass, as we pass the wave.

Pass, as the mottled night

Leaves what it cannot save,

Scattering dark and bright.

 

“Beautiful, pass and be

Less than the guiltless shade

To which our vows were said;

Less than the sound of the oar

To which our vows were made,

Less than the sound of its blade

Dipping the stream once more.”

 

Bogan died on this day, February 4, in 1970 at age seventy-two. The novelist William Maxwell, her friend and colleague at The New Yorker, wrote after her death: “To say that she was one of the finest lyric poets of our time is hardly to do her justice; her best poems have an emotional depth and force and a perfection of form that owes very little to the age she lived in and are not likely to go out of style, being a matter of nobody’s style but her own.”