'He Often Said Just Nothing At All'

“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 at 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.”