Most readers will recognize the name of the lyric poet Louise Bogan (if at all) as a brief stop on the way from Elizabeth Bishop to Gwendolyn Brooks in modern poetry anthologies. Two decades after a temporary resurgence spurred by Elizabeth Frank’s Pulitzer-prize winning biography, Louise Bogan: A Portrait, her literary status was once again threatening to fade into the shadows and solitude that she herself so coveted during her long career as a poet, essayist, and literary reviewer. So we welcome Mary Kinzie’s new edition of Bogan’s fiction, letters, and criticism as a timely if not altogether well-executed attempt to draw this literary recluse back into the public eye.
An iconoclast and moralist, Bogan shared none of Ezra Pound’s taste for literary bombast nor T. S. Eliot’s flare for moral oratory. Yet the confident, plaintive verse in her slim Collected Poems, 1923–1953 won her the Bollingen in 1955 and an award from the Academy of American Poets in 1959, and thirty-eight years worth of keen, incisive essays for The New Yorker made her one of the most influential and widely read arbiters of modernism. Thanks to Kinzie, we are now privy to Bogan as a writer of fiction as well. These (mostly) previously uncollected short stories are, like her lyrics, bold and deliberate. She’s at her best in pieces like “Journey Around My Room” and “The Short Life of Emily,” where she allows her prickly wit and cunning self-awareness to come to the fore instead of lurking behind an anonymous narrator. They are transcripts of an unusually alert, sensitive imagination filtering a wide spectrum of experience—from pushing through a horde of needle-working spinsters in “Art Embroidery” to suffering the tortuous “cures” of depression in “Hydrotherapy”—into a language characterized by both modern playfulness and Victorian elegance.
Into this prose miscellany Kinzie has also gathered a number of Bogan’s review essays, wherein we have the pleasure to rediscover the acclaimed masters of modernism with an underestimated master as our guide. Unfortunately, her more scathing pieces are missing, leaving us with an illuminating but sometimes timid tour through this period of literary bravado and experiment. She applauds W. H. Auden’s “cool, reticent sincerity,” W. B. Yeats’s “unbroken spirit,” and Marianne Moore’s “refreshing oddities,” all with neither reserve nor qualification. But Bogan’s real talent for judicious acumen and charming frankness shows best in her letters and journal entries, which alone would make this book worth owning. In an unsent response to one particularly banal questionnaire, she zestfully declares to have arrived on the literary scene “ten years before Auden, Isherwood, and L. MacNeice, and about two thousand after Sappho,” and adds with irresistible aplomb: “That was quite a while to wait, wasn’t it?” Willa Cather, we learn, is a “querulous” old woman who “bullies the waiter” at restaurants, while Henry James is both “a great artist” and “an old fool.” Her sassy and learned letters to Theodore Roethke (“twenty-six years old, and a frightful tank” she called him during their brief, uproarious affair) and Edmund Wilson (“my charming old syringa”) are the best of the bunch. “The difficulty with you now,” she writes bluntly to Roethke, “is that you are afraid to suffer, or to feel in any way, and that is what you’ll have to get over, lamb pie, before you can toss off masterpieces.”
Bogan herself never “tossed off” anything. Instead, her immense patience and artistic deliberation allowed her to transform her own suffering—and there was plenty of it—into lyric masterpieces that rival her better-known contemporaries in both intelligence and emotional depth.
To assemble a representative range of Bogan’s voluminous prose between two covers is an admirable aim. But if Kinzie’s wish is to prompt readers to go forth and read more Bogan, this volume makes it awfully difficult to find even the most basic information about any particular publication. We’re forced to flip between the table of contents (where there’s no pagination of the letters at all), the end of each piece, and the clustered acknowledgments page, where the information differs from the other two locations. Kinzie’s bracketed interruptions abound, while her awkwardly placed footnotes are mostly sparse and unpredictable, often explaining how a particularly intriguing letter would have concluded, had she not had to abbreviate it beyond recognition. Alas, we are rarely permitted to forget that this is Mary Kinzie’s Louise Bogan.
Anthony Cuda is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Emory University.
