“Whenever I could, I used to draw him out on literary subjects, for it seemed a waste of opportunity to talk to him about spinach, or cigarettes, or beer.”
My strategy with
well-known writers, even those I admired, was different from Frederika Beatty’s. I never presumed an intimacy, literary or otherwise, that had no reason to exist. I
kept it mostly businesslike with Steven Millhauser, William Gaddis and Robert
Coover. They were not my friends. They had agreed, reluctantly or otherwise, to
answer my questions. My interview with Coover in a motel room in suburban
Albany, N.Y. surprised me by turning into a pleasant conversation. The same
thing happened with Guy Davenport when I visited him at his home in Lexington,
Ky., though we had already been exchanging letters and I had reviewed his book
on Balthus, and he claimed to approve of my judgments.
I find little information
about Frederika Beatty, but her remembrance of Edwin Arlington Robinson – “Edwin Arlington Robinson As I Knew Him” – was published in 1944 in the South
Atlantic Quarterly. She published at least one book, William Wordsworth
of Rydal Mount (1897). In his biography of Robinson, Scott Donaldson
mentions Beatty only once in passing. He tells us they met at the MacDowell
Colony in New Hampshire, where Robinson had a residency every year from 1911
until his death in 1935. The anecdote:
“Frederika Beatty, another
young writer at MacDowell, told Robinson one morning that she was sleeping in
the room once occupied by a famous and beautiful lyric poet whose wraith had
visited her during the night. ‘How did she manifest her presence?’ EAR asked,
in all apparent seriousness.
“‘I felt a chill go
through me,’” Beatty answered.
“‘No,’ Robinson said a
once, ‘wrong temperature.’”
Beatty’s brief memoir is a
collection of anecdotes about the poet, not a critical piece. I read it and
enjoyed it because of my admiration for Robinson’s work, especially the early, shorter
poems. Beatty confirms my impressions of Robinson the man, a quintessential New
Englander:
“Two traits of Mr.
Robinson’s I like particularly to think of, besides his dry humor—his integrity
and his kindness. Mr. Robinson was absolutely honest, both with other people
and with himself. This is shown in his poetry; it is shown in every contact
anyone had with him. His honesty apparently made him independent. Being
unwilling to say more than he meant, he often said just nothing at all.”
Robinson is on my short
list of the greatest American poets, with Dickinson, Eliot, Frost, Winters,
Wilbur and a few others. Beatty concludes her piece:
“The last morning of my
stay at the Colony, in September, when I was returning to New York, I went over
to tell Mr. Robinson good-by. Again it was breakfast, and I sat a while with
him. I told him that I was really no writer, that I had come to the Colony to
finish a particular book, and that it was almost done. Then I told him that I
might have to develop into a writer after all, for I hated not to come back to
the Colony.
“‘You write another book,’
he said slowly, ‘and come back.’”
“Those were the last words he ever said to me, for he died the following April.”
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