I am writing this on February 22nd 2008. A few days ago I learned that the poet, editor, and publisher Alexander Taylor died toward the end of 2007, and the news brought memories flooding back that are more than a half-century old. I have written about some of these recollections in an essay titled “Friends at Last” in my book titled A Sheaf of Leaves: Literary Memoirs, published by Star Cloud Press in 2004. This is a slightly revised version:
In January of 1959 I graduated in mid-year from the University of Connecticut and became a graduate assistant and part-time instructor in English teaching Sophomore Composition and Introduction to the Short Story for the spring semester. I vacillated for quite some time about whether to apply to the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop or stay at UConn the following academic year, but my friends, Alexander Taylor, Jim Scully, and Morton Felix, decided things for me.
My wife Jean and I lived in campus housing at Northwood Apartments in Storrs. Sandy Taylor, as editor and publisher of a magazine called Patterns, had used some of my poems while I was serving my four-year hitch in the Navy between high school and college, 1952-1956. He phoned one day and asked if he could stay with us while he interviewed for a teaching job at the local high school. We were happy to accommodate him. He got the job.
It must have been during the summer of 1958 that Sandy and I decided to go up to crash the University of New Hampshire Writers’ Conference so that we could visit some of our friends, including Loring Williams, editor of American Weave Press which, in 1962, would publish my second collection of poems, a chapbook titled The Sketches.
We weren’t registered for the Conference, of course, so we had to be surreptitious about our presence on campus. Sandy spent the evening getting completely smashed. The next morning when I woke up I was warned that the Campus Security officers were looking for me because I was parking illegally. Immediately I went looking for Sandy. When I found him I was unable to waken him, he was still so drunk. He had spent the night with some young woman who was at the Conference, and she was still in bed with him. I looked around the room he had used and found a bottle of soda, which I poured over his head while he was still lying in bed. That did the trick. He opened his eyes. “We have to get out of here,” I told him.
“Why?” Sandy asked.
“The Campus cops are looking for me.”
“I’m not going,” he said.
“I have to take off, Sandy. I’ll have to leave you here.”
“Go ahead.”
I thought he was rational — he sounded as though he were — so I got in my car and took off for Storrs. I had no idea how he planned to get back.
As it turned out, neither had he, but when he finally managed it he accused me of having ditched him without telling him. I recounted my tale, but he had no recollection of it, and he never believed it. I wondered how he otherwise could explain the soda-soaked bed. That was one grudge he harbored.
James Scully was an undergrad with me, but a few years younger. He had been my discovery and protégé; as judge of the poetry contest sponsored by The Connecticut Writers club on campus, I had given him the poetry prize, which he well deserved. A few years later he won the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets for his first book. Later on Alexander Taylor began his Curbstone Press which would publish some of Jim’s later books. Scully and I were involved in one major incident while we were fellow undergrads:
I was responsible for bringing writers to campus to read under the aegis of the Student Union Board of Governors. Richard Wilbur was among those my committee asked to visit; others were Donald Hall, with whom I had begun corresponding while I was still in the Navy; the late George Abbe — who in 1960 would be one of three editors, with Loring Williams and Clarence Farrar (both also deceased long since), to choose my First Poems for publication as a selection of The Book Club for Poetry; John Hollander, Philip Booth (whose memorial service I attended last year (2007) in Castine, Maine), the late Richard Eberhart — who had taught at Storrs for a few years (and who was subsequently a good friend); E. E. Cummings — whose disciple on campus was my teacher, the scholar-poet Norman Friedman; the late novelist James T. Farrell and James Wright.
Wright was on a tour of area colleges when he visited our campus, and he was to go on to Wesleyan University in Middletown after he had read at Storrs. The plan was to deliver him to the bus station in Hartford where he would be picked up by Dick Wilbur and driven to Middletown for his engagement at Wesleyan. Accordingly, Jim Scully and I took Wright to Hartford, dropped him off, and drove back to campus. No sooner had we gotten back, though, than we were given the message that Wilbur was unable to pick Wright up, and he asked us if we wouldn’t go back to Hartford, fetch Wright, and drive him to the Wilbur home. Jim and I got back in the car and did as we were asked.
When we got to Middletown and rang the Wilburs’ bell we were ushered in and straight up to the master bedroom where Charlee Wilbur was lying in bed experiencing the early stages of labor. Wright, Scully, the Wilburs and I sat together visiting, but Jim and I were very ill at ease, and after a polite interval we excused ourselves, got back into the car and drove to Storrs again. We subsequently learned that Charlee’s labor had been a false one. Some while later she gave birth to a son.
Mort Felix was a psychology graduate student who was interested in poetry and began to hang around with us. We four had been talking about founding a magazine together, The Wormwood Review, but when the time came to do so I discovered that the others had decided to cut me out. They seemed to resent my publishing regularly in the little magazines, but Taylor especially felt rancor toward me beyond the New Hampshire incident. He had told me sometime during the fall of 1958 that he was applying to Yaddo, the artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. I had never heard of Yaddo, but I thought that sounded like a good idea, and I decided to do the same. As it happened, I was selected but Taylor was not. He seemed to feel that I had taken a place especially reserved for him.
When in the spring I was accepted by the Iowa Writers' Workshop, therefore, I decided to transfer. I was clearly not welcome in the society of my Storrs friends. Morton Felix and his wife Susan came eventually to visit Jean and me at our summer place in Dresden Mills, Maine, where he apologized for the Wormwood incident, but we haven't kept in touch. I never afterward heard from Scully or Taylor, although when my First Poems came out I heard that Scully gave my collection a bad review in the UConn Daily Campus; however, I never saw it as no one ever sent me a copy.
I spent six weeks during the summer of 1959 as the youngest Yaddo resident, writing a huge amount of material. Afterward Jean and I traveled out to Iowa in August in our little, underpowered Fiat 600. In September of 1959 I was enrolled in the Graduate Program of the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa. Paul Engle and Donald Justice were my poetry professors, and I took a course in modern fiction with Hortense Calisher whose husband, Curtis Harnack, was also around, writing his first novel.
I recognized one face in the Poetry Workshop, that of Ed Skellings who had been a fellow student — one year ahead of me — at Suffield Academy in Suffield, Connecticut, during 1947-49, scene of the Suffield Reader-Writer Conference during the ‘fifties, while I was an undergrad. That had been another conference my Storrs friends and I had crashed at the behest of George Abbe, who had been on the staff there but who had for some reason been fired. When we showed up to show our solidarity with him, it appeared that the Conference had been forewarned, because State Police were stationed at the doors. But all we had planned to do was attend a public lecture and there was no trouble.
At Iowa I quickly made friends with Morton Marcus, Jim Crenner, Vern Rutsala, and John Gilgun. Robert Mezey didn't seem to like me; his friends were Kim Merker, Raeburn Miller, and Peter Everwine, so there was a distance between his crowd and mine. This coolness was entirely on Mezey's part, because I had wanted to meet him ever since we had published poems together in the national college anthologies Riverside Poetry 3, edited by Marianne Moore, Howard Nemerov and Alan Swallow, and New Campus Writing 3, edited by Nolan Miller and Judson Jerome. In fact, one of the first things I did when I arrived in Iowa City was to go looking for Mezey, but he had moved from the address I had been given, an apartment outside of which I noticed rather a large stack of chapbooks titled, as I recall, Berg Goodman Mezey, published in Philadelphia in 1957.
When the new bookstore The Paper Place opened nearby, I recalled those evidently discarded booklets, and I went back to see if they were still there in the hall of the apartment building. They were. I gathered them up, carried them over to The Paper Place, and donated them. Many years later I learned that when the bookshop burned down most of those booklets were destroyed in the fire. I didn’t keep one for myself, for some reason, and I wish I had.
For two years in a row Mezey had won the Academy of American Poets Prize at Iowa. Unknown to me, he had been barred from entering the contest a third time. Everyone else in the Poetry Workshop entered, of course. The judges, E. L. Mayo and Ralph Salisbury, awarded my poems the prize, and Mezey was quite disdainful. Evidently he felt it was a sure thing that he would have won had he been allowed to enter.
Perhaps it was so, for I began to have some insight into how things were done at Iowa. I overheard a conversation between Mezey and Harry Duncan, the famous fine editions printer and publisher of The Cummington Press in Iowa City. Harry told Mezey that Paul Engle was going to be one of the judges for the next Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets, at that time one of the two most prestigious first poetry book awards in the country. Only publishers could enter a book in the contest, so he suggested that Mezey give him a manuscript, which he would accept and then submit to the contest. If it won, and he was pretty sure it would, he would then publish the book in one of his famous limited editions and also in a trade edition. And that’s what happened with Mezey’s The Lovemaker (1961). Don Justice’s first book, The Summer Anniversaries, had been published a year earlier and also won the Lamont Award.
I remained friends with Marcus, Rutsala, and Gilgun, and with Justice until his death in 2004. Though Engle and I had our differences, we made them up before he died, and I have written about him in two reference books and the Iowa history, A Community of Writers, edited by Robert Dana (University of Iowa Press, 1999). The Justices lived in Syracuse for several years while I was still teaching at Oswego State University, less than fifty miles away, and we visited each other often. Howard Nemerov was a good friend until he died, and the late Judson Jerome later published his first book of poetry from the same publisher, Golden Quill, that issued my First Poems in 1960, while I was still at Iowa. Norman Friedman and I have always been friends and correspondents, and when his first collection of poetry was published, a chapbook titled The Magic Badge: Poems 1953-1984, I reviewed it favorably in my annual essay, “The Year in Poetry” for The Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1984. As editor of the Cummings journal Spring Friedman used two or three of my scholarly essays.
The oddest thing, though, is the fact that Curtis Harnack became Director of Yaddo where I spent a second summer in 1977. Mezey spent a semester at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland while I was teaching for four years at what is now Cleveland State University, and during the summer of 1996 he came to Gardiner, Maine, for an Edwin Arlington Robinson Festival; I had retired that year to Dresden Mills, eight miles away. In 1999 Mezey published a Selected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson and sent me a copy. I wrote him to say that I thought the life of Robinson he wrote for his book was the best short biography I'd read in a very long time. He replied that my opinion meant a lot to him, and when I sent him a copy of my book The Green Maces of Autumn: Voices in an Old Maine House (2002, subsequently gathered in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2007), he wrote me a letter that ended with, “The writing is awfully good throughout and sometimes rises to an eloquence that silences everything else in the world.” That’s got to mean we’re friends at last.
A Sheaf of Leaves: Literary Memoirs, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004. ISBN 0965183564, jacketed cloth, $35.95; ISBN 0965183548, paper, $24.95, 254 pages. A continuation of Fantaseers, above. ORDER FROM AMAZON
Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-5, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, trade paperback, $32.95, 640 pages. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM
