ROBERT B. HEILMAN

ROBERT B. HEILMAN His Life in Letters

Edited by

EDWARD ALEXANDER,

RICHARD DUNN,

and PAUL JAUSSEN

Introduction by Edward Alexander

University of Washington Press

Seattle CJ[ London

ROBERT B. HEILMAN His Life in Letters

Edited by

EDWARD ALEXANDER,

RICHARD DUNN,

and P A U L J A U S S EN

Introduction by Edward Alexander

University of Washington Press

Seattle B[ London

"fb.·~ . . T(/'" .

This book is published with support from a generous bequest established by Robert B. Heilman, distinguished scholar and chair of the University of Washington English Department from 1948 to I97I. The Heilman Book Fund assists in the publication

of books in the humanities.

© 2009 by the University of Washington Press Printed in the United States of America

1412 II IQ 09 5 432 I First edition 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

University of Washington Press p.a. Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98r45 U.S.A.

www.washington.edu/uwpress

Credit for permission to reproduce certain letters can be found at the back of the book.

Ubrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heilman, Robert Bechtold, 1906-

[Correspondence. Selections] Robert B. Heilman : his life in letters", edited by Edward Alexander,

Richard Dunn, and Paul Jaussen ; introduction by Edward Alexander. - 1st ed. p. cm. Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-295-98866-5 (alk. paper) 1. Heilman, Robert Bechtold, I906-Correspondence. 2_ English philology-Study and teaching (Higher)-United States-Correspondence. 3. Critics-United States­

Correspondence. 4. Educators-United States-Correspondence. 5- College teachers-United States-Correspondence. 6_ Authors, American-20th century-­

rs-United States-Correspondence. I. Alexander, n. Dunn, 'chard J., 1938- IIJ. Jaussen, Paul. IV. Title.

820.9-dc22 2008030222 [B]

Frontispiece: Robert B. Heilman, late I960s. Courtesy University of Missouri Press

IN MEMORIAM

Richard Blessing

Edward E. Bostetter

Dorothee Bowie

Margaret Duckett

William Dunlop

Alan Fisher

David C. Fowler

James Hall

Andrew R. Hilen

Sherry Laing

Arthur Oberg

Theodore Roethke

Karen Shabetai

Amold Stein

Brents Stirling

)"

Acknowledgments

Nearly all letters to Robert Heilman inCluded in this book come from the

(beautifully organized) Robert B. Heilman Papers in the Special Collections

Division of the University of Washington. The letters from Heilman to

Theodore Roethke. Solomon Katz. Edward Alexander. Donald W. Treadgold.

and Raymond Alien are also located in UW Special Collections. We are greatly

indebted to the University archivist John Bolcer. and other members of the

Special Collections staff. especially Gary Lundell. Nicolette Bromberg. and

Nicole Bouche. Heilman's letters to Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn War­

ren come from the Beinecke Library at Yale University; letters to Eric Voegellll

from the Hoover Institution; letters to Joseph Epstein from the Library of

Congress; letters to Dorothea Krook from the Central Zionist Archives. Israel;

letters to Richard Eberhart from the Dartmouth College Library; letters to

Allen Tate from the Princeton University Library; letters to Malcolm Cowley

from the Newberry Library; letters to Kenneth Burke from the Pennsylva­

nia State University Library; letters to Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling

from Columbia University; the letter to Howard Nemerov from Washing­

ton University. St. Louis; letters to John Sisk from Gonzaga University; let­

ters to Raymond Havens from the Johns Hopkins University Library.

Thanks are also due to Beth Chandler and Eve Crawford at University of

Missouri Press for photographs of Heilman and Cleanth Brooks and Alien

Tate. Professor James J. Clauss of the University of Washington Depart­

ment of Classics has provided indispensable help in translating words and

phrases (and puns) from Latin and Greek. For quashing several computer

rebellions with a firm hand. we are indebted to Rob Weller. Financial sup­

port for our research has been provided by the UW Department of English.

Modern Language Quarterly. and the Graduate School Fund for Excellence

and Innovation of the UW Graduate School.

We are much indebted to the following librarians and archivists for effi­

cient and intelligent help: Liz Apodaca. Library of Congress; Joy Austria.

ix

Newberry Library; Barbara Bezat, University of Minnesota; Martha Briggs,

Newberry Library; Ron Bulatoff. Hoover Institution; Margaret Burri, Johns

Hopkins University; Bonnie Coles, Library of Congress; Diane Cooter, Syra­cuse University; Teresa Gray, Vanderbilt University; Sarah Hartwell, Dart­

mouth College; Bertha Ihnat, Ohio State University; Kathryn James, Yale

University; Jolene Kellner, Haifa University; Tony Kurtz, Western Washington

University; John Lancaster, Arnherst College; Carol Leadenham, Hoover

Institution; Jennifer Lee, Columbia University; David Null, University of Wisconsin; Sarah Patton, Washington University; AnnaLee Pauls, Prince­

ton University; Stephanie Plowman, Gonzaga University; Meg Rich, Prince­ton University; Jeannette Sabre, Pennsylvania State University; Natalia

Sciarini, Yale University; Simone Schliachter, Central Zionist Archives (Israel); Sandra Steltz, Pennsylvania State University; Sidney Tibbetts, Uni­

versity of Texas; Rebecca Watts, Ohio State University. For help and suggestions of various kinds, we are indebted to the fol­

lowing people: Leah R. Alexander, Rebecca F. Alexander, Judith Anderson,

Evelyn Avery, Jere Bacharach, Jeni Brooks, Michael Burke, John Burt, Joseph M. Butwin, Beth Chandler, Robert Cowley, Eve Crawford, Dikkon Eberhart, Charles Embry, Elizabeth Feetham, Menachem Fisch, Malcolm

Griffith, James A. Grimshaw, Jr., Champlin B. Heilman, Andrew G. Hilen, Ripley Hugo, Capria Jaussen, Donald M. Kartiganer, Richard Kenney, Richard Kirkendall, Jacob Korg, Howard Leichman, Carlo Levy, Beatrice Lush­

ington, Margaret Nemerov, William Matchett, Heather McHugh, Martha Mestl, Sam Monk, Ellen O'Connor, Nikolai Popov, Stephen M. Rittenberg,

J. J. Roth, Gaspare J. Saladino, Mimi Schorr, Leroy Searle, Toney Sisk, Robert Stacey, Robert Stevick, Terri Sutton, Warren Treadgold, John Vella, David Wagoner, John Walsh, Susan Williams, Hana Wirth-Nesher.

x ...".. Acknowledgments

Editorial Practices

i-'

The letters in this selection, whether printed in their entirety or abridged,

have adhered as closely to the original as possible. Major deletions are indi­

cated by a full line of ellipsis; minor deletions are marked by a bracketed

ellipsis ([ ... D. Minor spelling errors have been silently corrected, but obvi­ously intentional misspellings, usually in the case of jokes or puns, have

been left as they were written. Underlined words in the text have been ital­

icized in accordance with general printing practices. Occasionally, words have been inserted for continuity and clarity. These

are designated with brackets ([ D. Handwritten marginalia are contained by angle brackets «», with abbreviations indicating their location in the orig­

inalletter (TM: Top Margin, BM: Bottom Margin, LM: Left Margin, RM: Right Margin). Asterisks are those of the original authors and usually indi­cate marginalia. Postscripts, typed or handwritten, have been transcribed' without editorial markings. Mailing addresses are reproduced in the top right­

hand corner. Where the address is known but does not appear in the archived document, such as on a carbon copy, ithas been inserted with brackets. Esti­

mated dates are indicated with a question mark; in cases where this cannot be done with any degree of accuracy, the letter has simply been left undated. In some instances, the response to a letter or series of letters from one of

Heilman's correspondents is missing. This does not mean that Heilman did not reply, but simply that his replies have not been located. Thus, no

particular significance should be attached to their absence. Because more than eight hundred individuals are mentioned in these

letters, footnotes have been used sparingly, and only in the service of clar­ifying the meaning of the letter. For those readers interested in further

research, a large amount of secondary material is available on many of the figures, movements, and events mentioned in this volume. To reduce foot­

notes, an index of major correspondents has been included, with briefbiog­raphical data for the years of the correspondence. In some cases, individuals

xi

the artist as citizen." He warned that "to nationalize the poet is to deprive

him of detachment, to confuse artist with propagandist."24 Art had to speak

for all mankind, not for America. Like Samuel Johnson, Heilman took the position-both then and in all his later books on drama-that mankind is

everywhere the same, "from China to Peru," as Dr. J ohnson said in The Van­ity of Human Wishes.

Two years later, again in Sewanee, Heilman, writing as a kind of honorary' Southerner, defended both Southern agrarians and New Critics in a veri' '

polemical piece entitled "Mr. Bentley's Bad Boys: 'Reactionaries.'" It was

written in response to the drama critic (and, at that time, English professor

at Black Mountain College) Eric Bentley's political assault on Sewanee's edi­tor AlIen Tate, on T.- S. Eliot, on Heilman's old teacher Irving Babbitt, and

on a host of other disparagers of Romantic poetry and (alleged) haters of Romanticism as the precursor of modem decadence. In his essay in the

Antioch Review of spring 1944 Bentley had attacked Tate and Eliot not for their poetry but for their social criticism and political views, labeling them "reactionaries of a very familiar pattern." Bentley's hostility to the classi­

cism and "elitism' of Eliot and to the alleged nostalgia of Tate and his fel­low Southern Agrarians for a society based on slavery led him to link them

withthe forces of fascism and Nazism that were bent on the violent destruc­tion of modem European civilization. To be sure, Heilman conceded, Bent­ley was "too civil ... to call the bad boys fascists outright" but he "plants his victims in contexts which must brownshirt them."'5

The position Heilman stakes out in this essay is not exactly an endorse­ment of the sociopolitical views of the anti-liberals, as set forth in Eliot's "Notes on Culture" or in Tate's discussions of the old confederacy. Rather,

he insists that "pointing to the inadequacies of liberalism is [not] tantamount to attempting to inaugurate social and political tyranny." Although his argu­ment with Bentley is ostensibly political, it is rooted in Heilman's concep­tion of the timelessness and universality of literature, perhaps his most deeply held conviction, and one often to be reiterated in the decades to come.

Bentley's willingness to concede that Eliot and Tate, though sinister and reac­tionary as critics of society, are nevertheless poets of the first rank, reveals to Heilman the brittleness of his argument: "Between the extremes of poetry­as-meringue and poetry-as-propaganda there is a central poetry which by its constant reassertion of human truth, its insight sub specie aeternitatis, provides the measure for all men, the perspective from which men of any given historical moment must be seen."

12 ..., Introduction

;~:']-Ieilman was embracing Matthew Arnold's idea that poetry is a criticis~ ,oCHfe, not because it espouses or rejects certain doc~nes but ~ecause 1t

c ,_, ~ , ' in a high degree those qualities of energy, bnghtrless, and coher­possesses "'ce which life itself might but rarely does possess. Nevertheless, one may : ~Jnnre Heilman's affirmation of literature's unique way of "criticizing" life

,'., ~detremain skeptical (especially given the particulars of Eliot's polemi­

",>:~L~adventures on behalf of royalism, classicism, Anglo-Catholicis.m­,'c <arid antisemitism) about his conclusion that "If Mr. Bentley really beheves

.thi~:Eliot and Tate are poets of the first rank, he should be intently heeding

. ,'their criticisms of society. "26 '.~, "'The whole issue of poetry and politics would soon be brought sharply

;: mto fotusby the Ezra Pound affair. In 1949 the jury for the prestigious Bollin­

',_ .,~tr Award for excellence in poetry, a jury that included Tate, Eliot, and War-

e /.!en,among others, voted to give its coveted prize to Ezra Pound for his Pisan 'Cantos(1948), a work permeated by fascist and antisemitic sentiment and

'id~a,~7'Indeed, insofar as the Cantos had an organizing idea, it was Pound's "belief in fascism. Even Tate, who staunchly defended the jury's decision,

candidly admitted that "the disagreeable opinions are right in the middle ofthepoetry.".8The Pound controversy revealed the rift between the two

- Wings of modernism: the New York critics (mostly Jewish) and the (m~stly cSc:iuthern) New Critics. Still more, it brought literary and moral values mto \harp conflict. It was one thing to acknowledge pound as the chief poet of

, . the right wing of modernist culture, quite another to give him public honor . , ~, few, years after the political leaders he adored and worked for during the

wilrhad destroyed European Jewry and much of European civilization. ,One can only guess at Heilman's view of the Pound controversy. He

praised Malcolm Cowley for his New Republic essay on "The Battle over Ezra

, Pound," but Cowley's essay is itself "even-handed" to the point of ambiva­,'" ' leilce. In any case, by 1949 Heilman was chairman of the University of Wash­-. ington English department and embroiled in very different kinds of political

_. controversy, in which he would appear (to untrained eyes) to be espousing

the "liberal" side.

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

The tremendous concentration of talent in LSU's English department began to dissolve in 1942 when Warren left for the University of Minnesota;

in September 1947 Brooks left for Yale; and at the end of 1947 Heilman

I ntrod uction ..., 13

himself left for the University of Washington. Although he had good rela­

tions with Thomas Kirby, chairman of the English department, Heilman

thought LSU was now under the control of incompetent deans who had

allowed the faculty to be depleted by low salaries. In June of 1947 Joseph Harrison, acting Executive Officer of Washington's English department, had written to ask Brooks about Heilman as a candidate for chairman who would

have, in addition to an aptitude for administration, "distinction in scholar­

ship and teaching." He consulted Brooks, so he wrote in a second letter, not

only because Brooks had been Heilman's colleague at LSU but because Har­rison was "inclined to go a long way in trusting the judgment of one of [the] authors" of Understanding Poetry.29

After his visit to Seattle in August of 1947 Heilman reported his impres­sions of the university and especially of the English department to Brooks

in a letter of August 19. The former head had been dismissed for general incompetence, for assuming Washington's Ph.D.s were the country's best

job candidates (two-thirds of the regular English faculty held one or more

Washington degrees), and also for flouting the established democratic machinery, which a new head would be expected to respect. More impor­tantly, he would be expected to rebuild the department, via new appoint­

ments, to where it had been in "the great days of [Vernon Louis] Parrington and [Frederick Morgan] Padelford."

Indeed, Harrison-in his capacity as interim chairman-encouraged by the university's president (Raymond Allen) and executive officer in charge

of academic personnel (Edwin Guthrie), devoted much of 1947 to making five new appointments (in addition to Heilman himself) from outside the university. Among them were Theodore Roethke, who would become one of the first professional poets with a long university career, as associate pro­fessor, and Porter Perrin, nationally known in the field of rhetoric, as pro­

fessor. The incoming chairman would also be expected to keep himself in the public eye by writing and to encourage his faculty to do likewise.

Heilman came away from his August visit to Seattle with a very favor­able impression of the university's administration, but the unofficial sit­

uation struck him as much more problematic than the official one. "The place is lousy," he further told Brooks, "with Am. Lit. people-spawned

by Parrington's real ability, butthemselves second-rate and philosophically limited." There was also "a vast teaching of contemp. lit." and a corre­sponding weakness in English literature prior to the nineteenth century. "In the midst of this there is apparently a high degree of active concern

14 ..", Introduction

: . with. political matters-ranging from stern Republ~canism to ~ggr~ssive ., '., .. ' .. m How possible it would be to get on wlth a total sltuahon of commums . ,

... '. thiS kind I don't know. The technique would obviously have ~o be one, ~ot , .. '-r' ' l·ti·on but of amicable envelopment by new appomtrnents. It -o,oppos , .

should be noted that the department already had, pnor to 1947, such tal-

~ .ented (and later to be prominent) members as the Shakes~earean Brents . Stirling and the Romanticist Edward Bostetter, both assoClate professors,

;, and the Americanist Andrew Hilen. ., -':" Heilman's decision on whether to accept the position, if offered, as depart­

ment head and tenured full professor, hinged on a number of personal ques­

tions. The first was: "Can I attract, and then put over on the local boys, the kind of men I would feel essential to giving the dept. at least potential dis-

,'. tiriction?" How would the job affect his own personality? Would "rustica­

tioll to the West Coast" strike those in "the more central academic world" . '(. the East Coast) as a resignation of one's pretensions there? Would the . l.e.,

d 1 ttl·· 1 lli b ~"30 "'''inevitablereductionofwritingmeanagra ua se mgmtoa oca m o . . ' And what if he failed as a chairman? Heilman posed all of these questions

to the more experienced Brooks, but knew he had to answer them himself

Even late in November, after he had accepted Washington's offer, Heilman

kept asking himself: "What have I done?"3' In mid-December, as he was packing his bags for the move to Seattle,

Heilman wrote the Foreword to his first book on Shakespeare, This Great , Stage: Image and Structure in "King Lear." He announced at the outset that the imperial intellect of the New Critics was about to conquer Shakespeare's

greatest tragedy. "The methods upon which the present essay fundamen­tally relies will not seem strange to anyone who has some acquaintance with the techniques of poetic analysis that have come into general use during the last two decades." 32 Heilman approached the play through a study of its patterns of imagery, which, he showed, developed different aspects of a

complex tragic outlook. The patterns, centered on the play's central events­the blinding of Gloucester, the storm, the nakedness of Edgar, the madness of Lear-led directly to ultimate questions of good and evil, the relation­ship of reason and madness. Thus the blinding of Gloucester, imbedded

in a field of vision centered in the concept of seeing, implied problems of moral vision as well as external Sight. The violence of the storm, upsetting the natural order, led to a consideration of the meaning of justice. The book, which incorporated the most fruitful work that had been done on Shake­

speare in the previous quarter-century, was hailed as the first successful major

Introduction ..", 15

study of a Shakespeare play through analysis of its structural imagery. "Mr.

Heilman," wrote a British reviewer, "passes from one 'pattern' to another

and gradually elaborates his account of their interrelation; but as he pro­ceeds he wins the reader's confidence more and more, and the play comes

to make better sense-sense at once complex and lucid-than it ever did

before. Starting with the most obvious examples of recurrent imagery, what he calls the 'sight pattern' and the 'clothes pattern,' the author works up to

the delicately balanced statement Shakespeare has to make on the central paradoxes-Nature, Reason, Justice. "33 Cleanth Brooks presciently declared

This Great Stage "the dne book on Lear (and on Shakespeare's poetry) that

people are going to have to reckon with and be referring to for the next ten years. "34

~aving just successfully "New Criticized" Shakespeare's greatest play, did Hellman also try to do the same to Washington's English department? Could

he practice neutrality between New Criticism and its adversaries as a depart­

~ent. chainnan in Seattle while he remained embattled on the national stage, m pnnt and also at professional meetings? In April of 1950, for example,

~e was busy organizing the MLA program in Contemporary Literature, pit­ting a Leavisite against Rene Wellek, and asking AlIen Tate to champion the

New Criticism against its manifold adversaries, which included not only the "philistines" of the Saturday Review and the New York Times but the Chi­cago "Aristotelians," George Sherburn ("that ass"), Douglas Bush, Howard

Mumford Jones, John Berryman, and nearly all writers for the Partisan Review. Heilman's own work had been the particular target for Robert Gorham Davis and also William Empson,35

In later years Heilman would vigorously dispute the charge that he had, in his capacity as department chairman, imposed New Criticism. He noted,

for example, that when curricular "reform' was periodically undertaken, he would usually argue for a tightening of the historical requirements for degrees. Yet he did believe that making faculty appointments rather than

est~b1ishing programs was the most important (and interesting) task of a chaInnan, and that appointments made policy rather than the other way around,36

For this reason he began his administrative task by turning to Cleanth Brooks for recommendations of new faculty (in seventeenth-century, eigh­teenth-century, and contemporary literature). "I need not tell you," wrote Heilman in February 1948, "that the field does not prescribe the man so much as it names a general center with respect to which the man should

16 ..." Introduction

-~ rt of relationship .... [or] of my preference for someone whose ha,vesomeso . t rest is critical With reference to the seventeenth century, the primary m e' . ideal appointee would be one who could combine you~ own mastery ~f the field with a recognition of the relationship between It an~ .mode~ l~tera­

.. ,.' , d who could use it intellectually as a source of cntical cntena for ,Me, an .. --application to our own times."37 This request ~o Brooks el~C1ted a s.~ong

_--,', dati'on (from Warren) of Arnold Stem, the fonnIdable cntic of recommen . . -seventeenth-century poetry and regular contributor to Sewanee Rev~ew, who

" b~came Heilman's first major appointment (as associate professor) and a

,~mainstay of the department. . ' , _ ,'" By.April of 1948 Heilman began his attempt to lure hIS (and Stems)

_ , '_, -.', friend Robert Penn Warren himself from Minnesota to Seattle. He assured - , , • ~~~ rren "that we can very easy and quick get a welcome sign here, and maybe

vva '1 -we-can raise some pretty good dough."38 Making good on his promise, HeI -

" m;tn, after extensive negotiations with Warren, extended an extremely gen­

. efous fonnal offer on 30 September 1948. They continued to correspond about the matter until January 16, 1949, when Warren finally declined the

_ offer, saying that he had decided to take "an indefinite leave-perhaps a res-

ignation' from teaching altogether. .' At the very same time that he was courting Warren for a pennanent

. appointment, Heilman was trying to persuade I. A. Richards, a spiritual ancestor of the New Critics, to come to Washington as a visiting lecturer. Throughout his twenty-three years as chairman Heilman worked diligently

. to bring "outsiders," especially during summers, when he would reserve four budget spots for visiting professors. This, like his abolition of inbreed­ing and his hiring new faculty from thirty-three different graduate schools

during his years as chairman, was a system designed to diminish provin­cialism; it also provided contacts with the outer professional world while enabling that world to get to know the Washington faculty-in short, mov­ing the department toward a wide participation in the literary and scholarly life of the whole country. Over the years the department's visiting faculty

in summer included Maynard Mack, Murray Krieger, NorthroP Frye, Irvin Ehrenpreis, Ralph Cohen, Dwight Culler, Robert Hayden, and many other "eminentoes," as Heilman liked to call them. He also showed his ability to

spot'remarkable talents at the beginning of their careers, as when he gave Malcolm Cowley and Irving Howe their first experience of college teaching

in the early fifties. Decades later Howe recalled how warmly he had been

treated at Washington in 1952 by his ideological opponents, Heilman and

Introduction ..." 17

Stein, and would even invoke these New Critics in his own battles with New

Leftists who thought ofliterature mainly as an instrument subserving polit­ical ends.

For promising young poets Heilman showed an even sharper eye, and

he sought them out not merely for their celebrity value but Qecallse he

believed that "whenever you can, [you should) get writers to teacH literature".

because they are likely to have an inside grasp of it as art that would counter­

balance the emphasis on literary and cultural history that could always

be found in English departments)9 He gave a number of poets their first

teaching jobs, starting with Richard Eberhart in 1951, followed in later years by Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, the Englishman Henry Reed, the

Welshman Vemon Watkins, and many others. Heilman liked to tell the story

about an early class of Bishop's, in which her students were to establish them­

selves by reading their own compositions. One roughneck decided to chal­

lenge her by reading a poem full of four-letter words, which had not in those

days established themselves as common currency. When he finished and

everyone was aghast, Bishop hesitated, yawned, and said, "That's the most

boring poem I ever heard." By 1956 Heilman was telling Eberhart that

"Washington may be able to make a claim as the mother of poet-teachers."40

Watkins even wrote a poem some years later to suggest the at-homeness of Welsh poets in Heilman's realm: "But what a stir and what a rumpus / Ran

from the station round the campus / When [Dylan) Thomas, finger stuck in bottle, / Taxi'd to Roethke in Seattle."

Not all the tales of professorial poets at Washington were so happy. John

Berryman, for example, in 1950, became angry at something someone said

at a party and left his post without notice a week before the end of the term. Reed, after being at Washington for a term, was brought back with the expec­

tation of his becoming a permanent department member, as indeed he

wished to be. But he proved to be a chronic complainer, who expected to be

driven everywhere by others; and his budget spot mysteriously disappeared.

Roethke, as the letters in this book amply indicate, would cause Heilman a

great deal of trouble over the years. Andrew Hilen, Heilman's adroit and

witty graduate chairman, once said at an Executive Committee meeting:

"For God's sake, Bob, if you want to support poets, just pay them their sal­aries and keep them off campus."

One of the first changes Heilman made as department chairman was

gradually to phase out the class of people who taught only freshman

English and to require that every member of the literature staff teach at least

18 ..", Introduction

one section of composition a year. Moreover, he himself practiced what he

required of others. "From 1927 to I948 I taught Freshman Englis,h in every

term, often three or four sections, occasionally only one or two. Since I948

I have taught one section every other year .... I thought we tenured types

ought to keep a hand in the toil and trouble that are often pretenure. At any

rate my tour of duty extends from the handbook days when grammar, cor­

rectness, propriety, and even elegance ... were the defining symbols of our

faith, to the day when the symbols of communication ... appear to be the

free wheel, the asyntactic rush, the expletive and interjectional props-I men­

tion only 'y'know,' the short uh and the long uhhhh-and the fecal and gen­ital cliches. "41

As Heilman's magisterial lecture on the subject-"Except He Come to

Composition'-would later reveal, this administrative change reflected a phi­

losophy of education, of literature, indeed of civilization. In the making of

appointments, Heilman could legitimately claim that he did not "New Crit­

icize" the Washington department: he hired people of quality regardless of

their critical "school" and he made Andrew Hilen, who epitomized the "old"

historical approach at its best, both a close friend and the first regular head

of the graduate program. By I952, his fourth year as chairman, he was ~eady

calling for a compromise between "the historiophiles and the historiophobes

[who) threaten a balance of past and present that society needs."42

But Heilman did "New Criticize" the department by vigorously supporting

the philosophical position of the New Critics that teaching and criticism are

not only inseparable but ultimately linked to the definition of civilization

itself. He believed that by offering and indeed requiring freshman English

a university engaged in an important kind of symbolic action, with respect

to its students and its faculty. It declared to the students that writing means

"composition' and not merely effervescent self-expression; it declared to the

faculty that they were not employed to satisfy the demands of their own

personalities by "doing their own thing" but to satisfy the demands made

by an objective body of material. When interviewing prospective faculty

or when evaluating junior faculty, Heilman used their attitude towards

teaching composition as a litmus test of character. When Lore Metzger, a

German-Jewish refugee who taught tile Romantics, complained that "I afl'l;

a scholar, and they want me to teach Freshman English," Heilman "praised

her for an opening ... at Emory."43

As the years passed, Heilman concluded that a profession that voted Dem­

ocratic about ninety percent of the time was very "Republican' in its com-

Introduction ..", 19

mitment, where teaching assignments were concerned, to laissez-faire and the belief that unregulated private enterprise in the domain of pedagogy

leads to the public good. Few expressions irritated him more than "my course-that telltale phrase that comes so easily into the professorial

mouth" and that "tak[esj us away from the idea of the great communal enter­

prise and back to a system of private property. "44 One of Heilman's early appointments was John Simon, later to have a brilliant career as a theatri­

cal reviewer in New York. But when, in 1955, a delegation from his class on

American prose complained to Heilrnan that Simon was teaching only Amer­ican poetry because-so he declared to them-"American prose is no good," his days in the department were numbered.45

Heilman's flair for efficient, energetic, and imaginative administration quickly became evident to his superiors at Washington, and it did so in large part because of his epistolary powers. On April 13, 1948 he wrote-calmly.

respectfully, firmly-to President Raymond AlIen and Dean Edwin Guthrie specifying the reasons why his first recommendation of a major addition

to the department had failed. Frederick Hoffinan, then at Oklahoma, had chosen Wisconsin's offer over Washington's because it gave him "better assur­ances for the future" with respect both to early promotion to professorship

and financial aid in research projects. Heilman also mentioned "an unspo­ken reason' why Hoffman had chosen Wisconsin: namely, that it had a more distinguished faculty than Washington's. At the top of Heilrnan's letter Allen

scribbled a note to Guthrie: "I like this man's philosophy very much .... Would he not make an excellent Dean of A & S? R.B.A."46

One year later, in the spring of 1949, Heilman was indeed offered the deanship of Washington's College of Arts and Sciences, as well as a virtual

guarantee of the academic vice presidency of the university to follow.47 He declined the offer, telling AlIen that he thought it best for him to remain on "the smaller stage" of the English department. The underlying reason for his decision was that he did not want to give up his writing for a career in university administration, one that would almost certainly have led to a uni­versity presidency. "As far as jobs are concerned-if one had any adminis­trative interest, it would now be easy to incite offers of deanships, presidencies, etc. One has to be in that sort of thing only a little while to become a possible candidate for damn near everything. "48 Heilman would

be confirmed in the rightness of his decision in later years by the fact that one of his closest friends at Washington, the erudite and brilliant historian Solomon Katz, essentially left scholarship and writing behind as he moved

20 ....\1 Introduction

.--, ~, ~

"from the chairmanship of history (in 1954) to the deanship (after Hei1ma~

. had declined it-once again-in 1959), and ultimately (in 1965) t? the POS1-

tion of Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs that could also have

, been Heilman's had he wanted it.49

Literature and Politics: The Malcolm Cowley Affair and Its Successors

Not long after becoming chairman Heilman became embroiled in a spec­tacular controversy that would test both his courage and his resourceful­

ness; and he would be brought to what Lionel Trilling, in his essays of the forties about Vernon Parrington, Theodore Dreiser, and Henry James, had

called "the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet. "5°

On November I, 1948 Heilrnan, on behalf of the English department, invited Malcolm Cowley to be a visiting professor. Cowley was widely known and

admired as a literary critic and thought of by almost nobody as a political figure-except, that is, for the cadre of Communist hunters in the Canwell Committee (the Washington State legislature's version of the congreSSional

Martin Dies committee and a foreshadowing of the activities of Senator J oseph McCarthy) and, to a lesser extent, the university's Board of Regents Y

Heilman recommended and pressed the Cowley appointment against the

background of a fierce national debate that had raged throughout 1949

between two staunchly anti-Communist socialists-Irving Howe and Sid­ney Hook-about an incident at the University of Washington early in the year. Three of its professors had been fired and three placed on probation

because of alleged membership in the Communist Party; and it was the professors, including members of Heilman's own department,52 not the uni­versity, who were being charged with violating academic freedom. Hook,

in the New York Times of February 27, 1949, the Saturday Evening Post of September lO, and Commentary of October, had argued that the professors were guilty of flouting academic freedom because they belonged to a polit­ical party which demanded absolute intellectual discipline of a kind that pre­vents free and honest functioning in the classroom. Hook maintained that

the Communist Party laid down and enforced its line "in every area of thought from art to zoology." Howe, writing in Labor Action in March and then in· New International in December, while separating himself from the civil lib­ertarians' outright opposition to all legislation to keep Stalinists from teach­

ing jobs, nevertheless argued that each teacher must be judged by his behavior in class and not by his party membership.

Introduction ....\1 21

Amply informed by Cowley (on his own initiative) of his fellow-travel­

ing activities back in the thirties, Heilman made full disclosure of them in

his recommendation to the university's Board of Regents, which approved

the appointment on May 13, 1949. Nevertheless, one member of the board

had managed by December to stir up a storm of public opposition to it, led

by veterans' groups and the two local newspapers. After consultation with

President AlIen, Heilman, a newcomer to the state and only in the second

year of his first administrative job, decided to meet and reason with Cow­

ley's accusers rather than assert the university's "right" to do as it pleased,

regardless of the public's outcry: "riding white horses was, to mix a metaphor

joyously, not my dish of tea."53

Shortly before the scheduled meeting, however, the opposition to Cow­

ley took a new turn: he was now not only a Red-sympathizer but a poet who

revelled in filth. In searching his early writings, with little success, for polit­

ical transgressions, his foes had noticed some "dirty" language. Respond­

ing to this charge was at once difficult and welcome for Heilman: difficult

because there was by this time such demand for Cowley's works in Seattle

that he had to order the writer's long-ago volumes of poetry (1929, 1941) by interlibrary loan; welcome because now Heilman could move his defense

from the alien world of politics to the familiar one ofliterary criticism. And

so, exercising not only his ineffable charm and a talent for seeming to suf.

fer fools gladly, but also his knowledge that the single four-letter word used

by Cowley-turd--was also to be found in Chaucer and Shakespeare, Heil­

man avoided politics altogether; and he won over his hostile audience of

American Legionnaires with New Critical explication de texte applied to

various Cowley poems. When the department threw a party for Cowley and

his wife in January 1950, Stephen Chadwick, head of the Legion's investi­

gatory committee, could be seen sharing drinks-and dirty stories-with Cowley.54

The Cowley affair was virtually duplicated, but with a less happy out­

come, about two years later, when Heilman's invitation to Kenneth Burke

(Cowley's Pittsburgh high school friend) was vetoed by AlIen's successor as

Washington president, Henry Schmitz, and the Board of Regents because

of Burke's past leftist activities. Although Heilman lost this particular strug­

gle, it produced one of his epistolary masterpieces, written to Schmitz on

September 18, 1952. In it Heilman powerfully articulated "the role of the

university in a time of unusual fear and tension."

In 1954 Heilman extended an offer of a permanent position to the Cana-

22 Jr' Introduction

George Woodcock, who accepted. But Woodcock was unable to get an

jritkigrant's visa because, when he applied and was asked his politi~al beliefs,

°hewas faithful to a distant (and rather mild) past, and put down "Anarchist."

, HeUman later recalled how "I thought that this was the work of some offi­

- daus ignoramus at the consulate in Vancouver, and tore off there to set him

crigh,t. No luck. ... An immigrant's visa could not be given to a professed

- Ah1!rchist."55 Woodcock, as Heilman would often observe ruefully, went on

to become the outstanding non-academic man ofletters in Canada (second

tQNorthrop Frye in academe). '. oo~.~' A year later Heilman became embroiled in the university (and soon nation­,~c 0wide) controversy over its snub of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. In 1953

coppenheimer's left wing (and probably Communist) past led to withdrawal

of his security clearance by the Atomic Energy Commission; his appeal of

''c this decision led to the conclusion that he was indeed a security risk. In the

:: fall of 1954 Oppenheimer's name was broached as the University of Wash­

ington physics department's choice to give the Walker-Ames scientific lec-

-ctures in 1955. President Henry Schmitz rejected the initial recommendation,

. which was renewed in February with the approval of a faculty selection com­

mittee. Schmitz, with the support of the Board of Regents, again rejected

it, and this time the press learned of the decision. On February 21 Heilman

(Who must have known that Oppenheimer, by this point in his career, was

a liberal anti-Communist) drafted a letter, subsequently signed by many of

the university's department chairmen, urging Schmitz to reconsider. It read

(in part) as follows:

We are sorry that you have ruled against the appearance of Dr. Robert Oppen­

heimer as a visiting lecturer at the University of Washington. This decision

appears to us to be not in the best interests of the university, because it is not

consistent with the objectives and spirit of a major university. In Faculty

Appointment Policy (1953) we all agreed on a statement of principles which

would seem to justifY the appointment of a man as professionally distinguished

as Dr. Oppenheimer. We know that this decision will have a bad effect upon

the reputation of the University among our professional colleagues through­

out the country .... 56

This prediction was soon realized. By March, Washington had become the

target of a retaliatory boycott: seven scientists refused to participate in a uni­

versity conference, which as a result had to be cancelled.

Introduction Jr' 23

Once again, as in the Cowley and Burke affairs, the defense of the prin­

ciple of academic freedom at Washington had been led by one of its most

conservative faculty members.57 Indeed, the complex unity of Heilman's wor~ as writer and administrator is nowhere revealed better than in his time- and'

energy-consuming struggles through the 1950S against what came to be

called McCarthyism-at the very time that he was becoming known in lit­erary circles as a sharp critic of what he used to call "liberal dictatorialness"

and its accompanying dogmatic naturalism. One of the aforementioned foes

of New Criticism, Robert Gorham Davis, had even accused him of taking the position that "holding liberal-democratic-progressive views with any con­

viction made one incapable of appreciating imaginative literature at all."58

Within his department Heilman quickly discovered "a singular bond of socio­political feeling among [the faculty]: a liberal-democratic feeling probably

inherited from Parrington (the two known Republicans in the department were apparently felt to be ~omewhat odd exceptions to normality, though

bearable personally)." He wrote to Voegelin (April 26, 1948) that "No one ever suspects that there could possibly be any imperfection of any kind in

liberalism~" Nevertheless, Heilman labored, then as later, to avoid all polit­ical coloration and "to remain simply a voice for professional quality."59

While Heilman the ostensibly illiberal chairman was busy battling the

American Legion and assorted yahoos and "pre-McCarthy McCarthys," Heil­man the critic and scholar was still producing essays with the efficiency of

a well-oiled machine. In 1948-49 alone they included, among others, such literary essays as "The Unity of King Lear," ''A Critical Method for Poetic Drama," "The Turn of the Screw as Poem," "Hawthorne's 'The Birthmark': Science as Religion'; and such excursions into large questions of education

and culture as "Lowest-Common-Denominator Education' and ''An Inquiry into Anti-Highbrowism." And these were only Heilman's major essays; his bibliography shows that in those early years as chairman he was also pub­lishing "review articles and long reviews"-on O'Casey, on Dreiser, on Trilling, on Sartre-as well as "short articles and notes." In addition, from

1945-55 he was reviewing books on a regular basis for the U.S. Quarterly Book Review, just as in later years (1959-90) he would do for Phi Beta Kappa's Key Reporter. Before the end of 1953 he had added to his bibliography two major essays on Othello, a general commentary on "The Antiquarians and

the Up-to-Date," a discourse on "The Southern Temper," another on "Alces­tis and The Cocktail Party," still another on "Impressionistic Literary Criti­cism." He was well on the way to establishing himself not only as one of

24 ...... Introduction

, --- ,

c"~thei:ountry's premier English department chairmen but as a formidable

•·· •. ··(;ritic offiction, of modem drama, of the contemporary cultural s~ene, and,

. rhost.notably, of Shakespeare. 'As early as May 16, 1950 Heilman had written to Stanley Burnshaw about

his plan for a book on athello. "The book is not conceived of as an illustra­

;':tlon of new-critical tenets. What I hope to show is the way in which the dra­··'rnatic structure and the poetic structure collaborate in making the total

~f~tetnent which is the play." As he had done in This Great Stage, Heilman would show that the verse was not merely a prettification of an "underly­

. ,inrf' prose, but the very skeleton and muscle tissue of the play. The book, he said, would be "Chicago-school" in assigning importance to plot, New

Critical in its analysis of the verse, and "strictly Heilmanesque in its esti-

mate of the aesthetic collaboration of word and deed." Magic in the Web: Action and Language in "athello" appeared in 1956. Heil­

.. ' man drew his title from Othellds speech in Act Ill, Scene 4 summing up

,"the myth of the handkerchief which was kept by Desdemona: "There's magic {tithe web of it." From Othellds guiding the reader beyond the literal object into the symbolization oflove Heilman infers magic in the web of the drama

, itself. The magic in the web, as elucidated by him, was the mysterious endow­ing of many parts, especially Shakespeare's poetic language, with a dramatic

. value and meaning in excess of the minimal logical requirements of the

occasion. As was his wont, Heilman insisted on the "universal" aspects of _ the play, not the "cultural" ones: "Othellds scope is lost sight of if we can

understand him only by racial psychology. at hello is not a treatise on mixed ,marriages, but a drama about Everyman. "60 Magic in the Web received the

Explicator award for "the best book of critical explication' published in 1956 .

J0

Heilman's immersion in the business of the department and of the uni­versity at large from the moment of his arrival in Seattle did not mean that

he was at once certain that his future lay there. On November 15, 1949 he told Cleanth Brooks that Pete Dean, the chairman at University of Con­necticut, was interested in luring him there as a professor-with no admin­istrative duties. "In the main I would be glad to get out of administration (despite the definite satisfactions that arise when things go right) ... and I' need more time in which to read (I virtually don't read now) and try to

write .... On the other hand there is a great deal of promise here, the 'future' ... seems large if ever the dead holdovers die off. I am not sure that

Introduction ...... 25

I am not committed to something which it might seem somewhat unfaith­

ful to walk out on, and I suppose the silly part of one's pride is concerned

a little about the appearance of professional retreat and demotion which such a move might involve."

The Connecticut offer was among the earliest of many attempts during

the next two decades to recruit Heilman, sometimes with the promise of "no administration." In the mid-fifties, for example, two of the University

of Minnesota's transplanted southerners, AlIen Tate and Samuel Monk, aggressively courted Heilman, but to no avail. As the years passed, those

"definite satisfactions" that arose from successful administration became

not just more important to him; they defined him. "Perhaps the subtlest satisfaction [of the department chairman) is less in what he measurably does

than in what he perceptibly is. He may be an image for that department; he is bound to be an image of it. It will tend in some degree to become what he is .... "61 Nowhere did this ambition realize itself more powerfully than

in Heilman's handling, for fifteen years, of his department's most famous

but also difficult and occasionally pugnacious member: Theodore Roethke.

The Roethke Saga: 1948-63

Arriving in Seattle within a few months of each other, they were at the out­set suspicious and even hostile. On March 8, 1948 Heilman asked Brooks: "Do you know or have any impression of Ted Roethke? He is doing a bull

in a china shop act around here, and I can't make up my mind, on so slight acquaintance, whether this is the forgivable eccentricity of genius, or the talented man's bid for recognition as genius." Red Warren, who had appar­ently received a similar inquiry, wrote back on April 22: "As for Roethke ...

I am not mad about his poetry, but he is, to my way of thinking, what you might call 'respectable.' If you are hunting a poet, there are certainly better ones on the market-even better ones with reputations. For instance, it is quite probable that Randall Jarrell, R. T. Lowell, or Karl Shapiro could be

had." Roetbke, for his part, at first thought Heilman a "time-server" and "political hack."62 But by September 14,1949, Roethke wrote to Heilman from Saginaw, Michigan, where he had spent the summer with his mother and sister: "Let me say that your last letter left me with more than a sense of pleasure: as if certain barriers had fallen away." He also made a point of

adding that his mother thought Heilman "sounds so like a nice human being."

26 oX" Introduction

after his return to Seattle for the new school year Roethke began

~:';:",c·',.;..~n''''''signs of the mental instability that Heilman would have t? deal with fofthcllext thirteen years, until the poet's death in 196} Roethke's friend

ailliaepartrnental colleague James Jackson reported that one day the poet

,'ba:l:1 gone on a wild spending spree, the typical beginning of one of his manic . :~haies. In the evening he turned up at the Heilmans' home and "started

;jhtpWingthings around the Heilmans' kitchen ... tin pie plates, saucepans, - -the like. Heilman was baffled and somewhat frightened." He called a

~c-,:~,:nj."vi:l"'l::rrL who then called the police, who took Roethke (against his will)

" , " Hospital.63

- ,'Establishing a pattern that would repeat itself over the years, Heilman, recovered from the Cowley imbroglio, moved to secure Roethke's uni­

position and salary. In February 1950 he officially informed Roethke would be paid for the rest of the quarter in which he had been taken'

_ :m~i1d given leave of absence (albeit-to Roethke's great dissatisfaction­

. without pay) starting on January I (and, as it happened, continuing through :June). Heilman soon recognized that the turbulence of Roethke's mental

,illness would be a permanent problem. Writing in June of 1950 to Brooks, '-':h~said that one of the manifold strains Of his job was "Roethke's blow­

-, ing' up."

i:'lnFebruary and March of 1954, for example, he was in touch with Dr. .William Horton of the Northwest Clinic of Psychiatry and Neurology about

-: Whether Roethke would be able to teach in the coming (spring) quarter. Early

rh 1955 Heilman himself was asked for his assessment of Roethke's '~personal stability" by Francis Young, executive secretary of the "Fulbright"

, Awards committee, before the committee could decide finally about Roetbke's ; application to teach in Italy. Heilman sent a lengthy, subtle, and honest reply

iliat touched on both the literal and metaphorical applications of the word "stability" to Roethke's condition. "If 'question of personal stability' meant prOfessional irresponsibility, personal flightiness and unpredictability,

, eccentricities of a sort likely to weaken his professional position, proneness . to public or semi-public demonstrations of a sort likely to be embarrassing to others, then I can say most emphatically that you need have no fear on

- this subject. ... If by the problem of stability you refer to the fact that Pro-. fessor Roethke has occasionally had brief periods of nervous illness, that is

true, and there is of course no guarantee that there will not be a recurrence. This is something which as a part of the record must be set down. But I find myself quite willing to set it down because ... it does not constitute

Introduction oX" 27

an important bar against his appointment." After describing the mitigat­

ing circumstances-Roethke's entry into therapy, his marriage, the relative

mildness of his illness-Heilman made the positive case: "I think that Roethke is a good enough man-that is, a sufficiently devoted and talented man in his field-to justify the risk."64

In between the crises, however, the two men grew to respect each other

and each other's writing. Roethke, reading Heilman's King Lear book, com­

mended not only its style but "a sense of real conviction of belief-rare enough today." Heilman was appreciative of the way in which-as he wrote in a let­

ter to Bernard Malamud-his colleague was "getting back to a fuller range

oflanguage forits own sake." Bp956 it had come to be understoo.d between them that neither would consider leaving Washington without informing

the other. "Now what's all this," Roethke wrote Heilman in March 1956, "about Minnesota's wooing you? Remember you promised me, once, that if you left, you would let me know immediately of your decision. Of course

we hope you don't go. I am deeply serious about this, for selfish and unselfish reasons."

Roethke's repeated leaves of absence for illness (and with pay) in winter

quarter 1953-54, fall and spring quarters 1957-58, and winter quarter 1958-59 led one of his departmental enemies to complain, in late 1958, to a state legislator about special treatment for the poet. The legislator approached the university'S vice-president, Frederick Thieme, about the matter. Thieme,

who was at that very moment presenting the university's budget to the leg­islature, hastened to ask Heilman for a letter justifying the department's treatment of Roethke.

That request elicited one of the most remarkable letters ever written by a university administrator, a perfect blend of Heilman's moral clarity, rhetor­

ical nimbleness, and shrewd pragmatism. Writing in January 1959, he recited the facts about Roethke's leaves during his II 1/2 years at Wash­

ington and pointed out that a total of four quarters with pay during that time was not an exorbitant number because Roethke had never taken a sabbatical leave. But he hastened to add that he did not want to justify Roethke's sick leaves with pay in such terms because he would have rec­ommended them in the interests of the university itself. Roethke, Heil­man observed, possessed a reputation that would likely make him a permanent figure of American literature, and was "an investment in his­

tory such as many a university would be glad to have ... he has done more to make us known favorably as a university than any other single person on the

28 ...... Introduction

is known nationally and internationally, and wherever he is

~e are known." He had established Washington as one of ~he great

· cehters of poetic study and poetic creativity in America. Finally, Heilman-.. be$t tradition of the New Critics-stressed that Roethke's contribu­

~(jne of the oldest creative arts" was helping to create a certain type

being and thereby contributing to the quality of American civ­itself. Roethke's biographer Allan Seager has called Heilman's let-

lS" ...... ·"·,· c,'--,~",~, """,finest support of a staff member I have ever heard of any university

'delDartm1e'11tmaking anywhere."65

. a striking tribute to Heilman that the poet Richard Hugo, without

ev.~n .KIU)WJLll~ of this letter, nevertheless took it for granted that Heilman

'~Jc"ll<LU' ""JV~ up" for Roethke: "I don't know," he wrote to Heilman in 1962, . ever had to stand up for Ted at the University or not. ... The point

J;:t I.LL .. ',.,. .... ~. you did, or a lot of people think you would have had the occa­~~-sion tequired .... It's one hell of a good thing to have thought about one."

" • .0. ',,' fleilrhan's unwavering support of Roethke, as if he were a wayward child,

.v;,iiifalllong the reasons why the poet, although just two years younger than 'l;ieilman, thought of him as his "old Man," often addressed him as "Pa"

.' ~l:1d<:onsideredhim (along with Kenneth Burke and w. C. Williams) "a father­. _fi~e to me." He was immensely pleased when students said "that my course

atidHeilman's were the best in the department.,,66 'cBYmid-1960, however, Heilman felt forced to seek out Solomon Katz,

.. 'then: dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, to discuss some way of

• '-!iea1ihg~perhaps by means of a dual appointment (as teacher and writer . ····.··~futesidence)-with what he called Roethke's incurable "megalomania" and

· -~ !!trong "money sense." He admitted to Katz that he was moved in part by a

";pretty selfish concern: taking care of myself." By this he meant having to 'deal With the pressures coming from Mrs. Roethke and "a crafty psychia­

trisewhenever a crisis arose and the poet's salary was threatened. _ 1l1it Heilman's need to support Roethke came suddenly to an end in the

,sWnmer of 1963: "Midnight, July 31. Camano Island, cold and clear. Taylor 'and Dorothee Bowie drive up from Seattle to tell us of the death of Ted "-Rpethke several hours before. End of an era. "67 In his beautiful memoir of

he was always compelling. It was part of the good luck of my own life to know

. him well, for fifteen years, this witty and imaginative man, sometimes trou­

blesome but more often troubled, sometimes combative but more often play-

Introduction ...... 29

ful, yet always of high earnestness and conscience in his double vocation of

teacher and poet-a man in whom I felt something that, I came in time to

know, was to be called greatness. "68

THE SIXTIES

"There are our young barbarians, all at play!" -Matthew Amold69

When the poet Tess Gallagher complained to him, in 1997, about a "smart­

as sed" student harassing her at Whitman College, Hellman replied that such

types would always remind him of "the late 1960s (when brats on drugs or

drink or both ran up and down the corridors, trying to break up classes, and

yelling, no doubt with a sense of fine perception, 'Don't give us no more of

that shit' ... it was the worst [period] in my full 50 years of college teach­

ing" (RBH to Gallagher, July IS, 1997). At Washington as at scores of uni­

versities across the country there were violent outbreaks of what Saul Bellow

described in the opening chapter of Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) as "con­

fused sex-excrement-militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth-showing,

Barbary ape howling." "Motherfucker" was in the air all over campuses, and

students were keen to urinate on the rugs of university presidents (or out

the windows of deans' offices).

Although Archibald Cox's description (in his official report on the Colum­

bia University uprising of April 1968) of American college students of the

sixties as "the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic

this country has ever known' would soon become a cliche, it bore little rela­

tion to the truth. Lionel Trilling, who had been in the eye of the Columbia

storm, said that the sixties students were "much less literate, much less intel­

lectually curious, and much less intelligent" than most of their predeces-

. sors at Columbia.70 At universities all across the country students rebelled

against an institution that they viewed as a training school for capitalist soci­

ety and wished to t],lm into a finishing school for revolutionaries. "The late

1960s," Heilman would later write, "produced the most successful anti­

educational putsch that I saw in fifty campus years. In the vanguard of it

you had the active ideologues, who were uneducable because they already

knew all the answers, which they had learned by rote in various cells ... ;

their aim was only to disrupt education and produce a chaos through which

they could take over. Their slogans victimized a much larger segment, the

30 ..", Introduction

5cent}deallSt:s, who were seduced into supposing that they could protest, or bomb virtue into the world. "71

+h •• lpvPI of curriculum, these were also the years in which, as Hell­

magruficentletter of November 19,1974 to Thomas Lockwood would the movement to "imprison' American graduate students in their

bw.b]'lllg:ual~e by abolishing foreign language requirements went into high

i:te~lran<1'tne slogan of "relevance" held sway. In 1968 Heilman asserted that efemlotional torrent coming closest to "wrecking the dike [of the

,nULtn:aruties] is the cry for relevance. It is one of the main question-begging cMlf~r()r<:1S of our day; threatening because undefined, it terrifj,es some school­

into crying peccavi's like defendants at a Stalinist treason trial. as if

:;theJr h,id'(:ontllluaJLl) genocidally practiced willful. first -degree irrelevance." had the courage to ask what the evangelists of relevance meant, or just

. ," ',they wanted. "To make Chaucer speak on Vietnam? ... Dickens on

grtaranteednational income?"72

. 'CAt Washington the most spectacular example of the "putsch" was organ­

" ,iz~din March of 1969 by Michael Lemer, then a visiting assistant professor , ',' " fnthephilosophy department but later to gain national fame as the (Jew-

',,:3sh) Rasputin in the Clintons' White House. Within a few days of being voted

,dowri by his colleagues for reappointment in philosophy, Lemer organized

, a: series of campus demonstrations which culminated on March II when

his followers in the Seattle Liberation Front joined with the Black Student

, .:Oirion to form a combined mob of 1,500-2,000 that invaded six univer­" sity buildings and brutally beat at least fourteen instructors and students

. who did not heed their strike order. The "issue" in question was the refusal

of the university to cancel an athletic competition with Brigham Young Uni­

verSity, which Lemer had labelled a racist institution because the Mormon

Church that sponsors it did not admit blacks to its priesthood.

. As administrator, Heilman encountered the new radicalism mainly in the

form of black student demands, including those for a Black Studies program

and appointment of black faculty. English was one of the departments asked

by the university's administration to meet with black students and consider

their demands, primary among them the insistence that black faculty be

hired-and quickly. And so, as Hellman later recalled, "we went looking like

mad for black appointments, [which] was enormously difficult, since all other

colleges and universities were doing the same thing .... Some places were

giving associate professorships to blacks who hadn't yet finished their

Ph.D.'s .... [Professor] Roger Sale was sent on some kind of national recruit-

Introduction ..", 31

cus of concerned assistant professors. The 'Campus Art Collection COrn"'

mittee will have to approve, but they will be less of a problem than the

Dean whose interests run less to ars gratia artist than to G.N .P.

Aesthetically yours,

Duveen2

Dear Provost:

To SOLOMON KATZ

January 28, 1970

I suspect you are one of the most brilliant students of calendars

ever to grace your office. We need more people who can see that 1971

really means 1991. The trouble with most administrators is that they

think 1971 really means 1961. I have done a good deal of this mysel£

In fact, for years I had a list oflocal boys with dates of birth, and I used

to call upon the services of a well-known female magician in the depart­

ment to try some of her Merlinerie and convert 1902 into 1892, etc.

This worked in two cases: we got one man out five years ahead of

expectation, and the next one, one year. But then the magic ran out.

Now I am glad that you see it can work the other way too, and that

I can be declared born in 1916. If we can stop senatorial clocks, can

we not stop faculty aging? But I see a hesitant look crossing your

thoughtful mien, and I can hear you saying, "If it only lay with me.

But you know Dean [Philip) Cartwright. Very literalminded type. He

has never heard of the relativity oftiine. Never heard of Joshua. Never

once hailed the sun and made it stand still."

Away with these excuses. Dry tears. I'll just live on my nine months'

salary. I'll go home and won't play with the assistant professors-oops,

I forgot! Out of the hands of the assistant professors into the hands of the

students, full time. Oh, no. Back to the frying pan.

Final heroic touch, as in the noblest words of J. Caesar at the Ides:

1. "Art for Art's Sake." Dean Cartwright was an economist. 2. Baron Joseph Joel Duveen was an international art dealer who had relied on Bernard

. Betenson as an advisor.

Robert and Ruth Heilman Courtesy Champlin Heilman

From left: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert B. Heilman (st~nding), Rolfe

h. Mrs Humphries Dorothee Bowie (standmg), Henry Reed

Hump nes,. ' . . University of Washington Libraries, SpeCial CollectIOns, UW 23179

cus of concerned assistant professors. The Campus Art Collection

mittee will have to approve, but they will be less of a problem than the. Dean whose interests run less to ars gratia artisJ than to G.N.P.

Aesthetically yours,

Duveen2

Dear Provost:

To SOLOMON KATZ

January 28, 1970

I suspect you are one of the most brilliant students of calendars

ever to grace your office. We need more people who can see that 1971 really means 1991. The trouble with most administrators is that they think 1971 really means 1961. I have done a good deal of this myself. In fact, for years I had a list oflocal boys with dates of birth, and I used

to call upon the services of a well-known female magician in the depart­ment to try some of her Merlinerie and convert I902 into I892, etc. This worked in two cases: we got one man out five years ahead of

expectation, and the next one, one year. But then the magic ran out. Now I am glad that you see it can work the other way too, and that

I can be declared born in I9I6. If we can stop senatorial clocks, can

we not stop faculty aging? But I see a hesitant look crossing your thoughtful mien, and I can hear you saying, "If it only lay with me. But you know Dean [Philip] Cartwright. Very literalminded type. He

has never heard of the relativity of time. Never heard of Joshua. Never once hailed the sun and made it stand still."

Away with these excuses. Dry tears. I'll just live on my nine months' salary. I'll go home and won't play with the assistant professors-oops,

I forgot! Out of the hands of the assistant professors into the hands of th~ students, full time. Oh, no. Back to the frying pan.

Final heroic touch, as in the noblest words of J. Caesar at the Ides:

1. ''Art for Art's Sake." Dean Cartwright was an economist. 2. Baron Joseph Joel Duveen was an international art dealer who had relied on Bernard

Berenson as an advisor.

Robert and Ruth Heilman Courtesy Champlin Heilman

From left:cElizabeth Bishop, Robert B. Heilman (st~nding), Rolfe

H h · Mrs Humphries Dorothee Bowie (standmg), Henry Reed ump nes,. ' . . University of Washington Libraries, SpeCIal CollectIOns, UW 23179

Charles Odegaard, with John F. Kennedy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW 27993

Richard Eberhart, 1965 Rauner Special Collections. Dartmouth College Library

Photograph by Frank Sandiford

Donald Treadgold, 1951 University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections. IS 1471-A

Carolyn Kizer © 1966 by Mary Randlett

Courtesy University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections

Department of English, Tel Aviv University

Joseph Epstein Photograph by Mike Fisher

John Sisk Courtesy Toney Sisk

guilt and the guilt in the innocence." lbis is what I meant to say about.

the ambiguity, in particular in the last section of the chapter on TS (pp;

131-4), and throughout the chapter on The Sacred Fount. But I fear noW,'

that I may not have said it explicitly enough [ ... ].

What a long letter this has become! And I am so tempted to go on,

because you raised such fundamental points in your letter and there is, '

so much left to say. But I must not go on. May I now thank you and Pro-.

fessor Hilen very warmly for your kind invitation to me to be corlSl(lerc~d?·X

for a visiting appointment at your University at some future date? The idea appeals to me immensely, and it really was most kind of you to ' '

gest it. I have to say at once, however, that I have taken another vow;

to stir out ofIsrael, or even far out of Jerusalem, until I have nnlShedmv

next book (on Tragedy); and since this is barely started, I cannot say

long it will take to finish. May I say, therefore, that I would be delighltedl'r';i~

to be put on your waiting-list if 1 may be allowed to leave the date quite

vague? 1 would like to think that this arrangement on the whole fits ill,

with your own plans, and consequently may not be completely UUJLCdi>W,''''''';c.

lbank you again for your generous, heart-warming, delightful letter.

Yours very sincerely,

Dorothea Krook

Dear Dr. Heilman,

From CAROLYN KIZER

June 7, 1963

Betty Kray' has submitted a list of poets suggested for next spring~ , .

a list made up by herself and Louis Simpson of Berkeley (the idea

that all the poets listed would also be acceptable to Berkeley, Louis Delllg:,y,'i;

in charge down there): eliminating the names of those who have been'

here recently ([James] Dickey, [Robert] Creeley, Donald Hall, and [w'Dl;

Snodgrass recently enough as far as I'm concerned), the list is as follows':

Galway Kinnell / Jim Wright / Ted Hughes / Anne Sexton / lboma~'.

I. Elizabeth Kray was the first executive director of the Academy of American Poet~. ' 11,:'

'. McGrath (who he?) / X. J. Kennedy / Anthony Hecht / Philip Booth /

Howard Nemerov My own preference would be, in this order, Nemerov, Kennecly, Kin­

neU (I understand he's gorgeous; L. Bogan sighed something about wish­

ing she were twenty years younger; 1 also understand he has a penchant

for big blondes; of course 1 expect the Department to take all these factors

into account) Hecht and Sexton. 1 think Jim Wright is pretty familiar

around here, much as 1 would love to see him again (of course [Richard]

Hugo will vote on this list on the basis of friendship so he'll vote for Jim);

1 doubt very much ifTed Hughes will be available (though that would be

dandy); I'm against McGrath because I've never heard of him and Booth

because he's no good. I'm lukewarm about Sexton because men poets are

more fun than lady poets (for other lady poets, that is).

Betty Kray makes a typically mad remark about Nemerov, that he "is too

well known to go on a circuit." Hub??? I've never heard him read, I think

he is a fine poet, and his last book is a real honey. 1 think Kennedy is a bril­

liantly witty poet (I'm reviewing his book right now), and I have heard from

several people that he is a splendid reader (he was just on the mid-west cir­

cuit). Kinnell is supposed to be a good reader also, although I'm less certain

about his qualities as a poet. (He and I always turn up cheek by jowl ill anthologies because of our last names-kissin' poets so to speak-but I've

never made up my mind about his work.) Hecht is doing splendid work

just now, and he has a splendid mind-trouble is, Nemerov, Kennedyand

Hecht are a bit similar: all cerebral wits with all sorts of formal virtues­

which is, of course, the kind of poetry I like. Still, though, I'd like to see

someone more on the order of Dr. Williams or [Charles] Reznikoff or Cree­

ley: a colloquial voice, or a technical innovator, or gnomic mystic or some­

thing. One can have too much of Eastern Seaboard smartness, 1 feel. Still,

it's a good list. Would 1 be in order, do you think, in stating some of these

things to la Kray? (Actually, if these people reflect Simpson's taste, and I'm

sure they do, why not Simpson himself? He has been at Berkeley for a

number of years, he has a splendid book on the brink of publication, and

I know for a fact that [Henry] Reed would like to have him. He is also one

of the biggest dolls in the Western world. 1 do know him. Yum.)

Let me feel your thinking, or think your feeling about all this. How

about lunch one day? How soon do you absquatulate from the scene?

massive devotion,

ck.

I am cheered, in part, by the sage dean's advice that Lt. Ingram2 is keC~Di]tia,~

a watch on this sort of thing, and by your own generous quotations establish so well that the heart already given is no longer there to give ..

I am bothered by only one aspect of the case: in one sentence you':'

a celebrated courtesan, and in the next you have changed your

lotion. This probably indicates a giddiness that may not augur well for I can only envy the aroma that is driving mad the hounds from

heavens. If such madness must continue-and doubtless it mllst·-l

can only hope it does not shake loose the deviled creature from her. proper home and her domestic inclinations. I shall brace and gird; I

shall whip and flail; I shall yell and snarl. And when I am exhausted, the Dean will take up; indeed he will not wait until then. Let them

do their worst: we stand ready to fight.

Sincerely yours,

Robert B. Heilman

Dear Joe:

To JOSE PH LANGLAND

January 28, 1964

Since your own letter ought to be acknowledged immediately, let

me answer it now and postpone other matters. Your suggestion that I might want to be available for an appointment in your department' is a generous and flattering one, and I am grateful for it. Being with you and with some of the other people I know there would be a most

pleasant prospect, and it is a tempting one. However, I would not be available for two years because next year is a sabbatical, and a sabbatical . means a return to original institution for at least a year. The sabbatical

is very important to me; it seems to me that I have now spent several years surviving in expectation of it. Secondly, I am not a Shakespearian; by that I mean that despite some dabbling in Shakespeare criticism, I .,

2. 1bis is probably Robert F. Ingram, a member of the University of Washington police department from 1951 to 1978.

1. Langland taught at the University of MassaChusetts-Amherst.

412

have never taught Shakespeare. Hence for classroom purposes I wouldn't'

consider myself very well qualified for the post. You will have detected by now that I am a moral coward and am try-

.' 'jng to get the isSU'e settled in mechanical terms because this will save me the anguish of wrestling with it substantively. I'm beginning to suspect

that there is every reason why I should leave administration and, as

papers always put it when some administrator has been dumped, "return

to full-time teaching and research." I really sort of hope that one of these days it will get settled accidentally, without the interposition of my mind and will, which seem unable to cope with it. Then there's that other prob­

lem, non-academic but real, of the topographic change; I've become rather

fond of the Pacific Northwest and hate to try to settle the issue of whether

New England would now have the same great charm that it had for me

back in the thirties, when I taught at the University of Maine. You do need a man now. And you need a proper Shakespearian, up

to his ears in quartos, folios, acting companies, and the oddities of Eliza­

bethan printers. Please accept these facts oflife, patent as they are, and save me from that battle with imponderables that I am never able to solve

decently. I have known that I didn't want more administration, and I have turned down all promotions of that sort. I'm probably getting the habit.

If you'll kindly withdraw-entirely on technical grounds-you'll save me the problem of facing it. Your letter was a most pleasant one, and please thank your colleagues for whatever amiable thoughts about me they may

have had. And special thanks to you for bringing the issue there.

Sincerely yours,

Robert B. Heilman

To WILLIAM MATCHETT, CAROLYN KIZER, HENRY REED

[Seattle, Wash.)

I am pleased to appoint you as members of the first committee on the Roethke Memorial Reading.' Your function will be, as I am sure

1. Roethke died on August I, 1963. 1be Roethke memorial reading takes place eaCh May,

close to the poet's May 25 birthday.

you know, to secure a distinguished poet to visit the campus and give the first of the Roethke Memorial Readings.

The terms of the committee's operations are expressed in a general statement, which has now been put into final form, and in a letter from

Mr. Robert Waldo' to me. 1 am supplying copies of these documents to Mr. Matchett.

1 am designating Mr. Reed to fill that position on the committee which is to be held by the staff member currently in charge of the

course in verse writing. Perhaps there may not be time enough for us to avail ourselves of Mr. Reed's services, but if the Committee is able

to act while Mr. Reed is still in residence, 1 am sure that we will be grateful for his help.

Sincerely yours,

Bob

Bill,

To WILLIAM MATCHETT

{May 19647] [Seattle,

Rolfe Humphries' has just replied to my letter asking him to give me titles for his three public W-A lectures in the spring. He proposes that the first of these be "I Knew Him When"-namely, an account

of the early Roethke, with readings of poems, letters, etc. Do you think this might do for the annual Roethke lecture? 1 ask, not to urge, but just to give the information.

. If you could stop in some time Wednesday, I'd show you the Hum­phries letter and you could see if you had any interest in this.

Also I'd be grateful for any suggestions for visiting poets for next· year.

Bob

2. Waldo, who held various administrative positions throughout his career at UW; was at'· this time director of Planning and Development.

1. HUmphries, a poet and translator of Latin, taught at Amherst College.

Dear Bob, .. ..j

From CLEANTH BROOKS

May 4,1964 [New Haven, Conn.?]

1 suppose you have noticed the kind of cli.lbbing that Red's new novel

has been getting in the various metropolitan publications. Have you read the book? And what do you think of it? Remembering your admiration

for sofue of Red's earlier books, 1 suspect that you think that Flood is much

better than jpe New York Times and Time reviewers feel it to be, and that

you may feel with some of the rest of us that it may be one of his best novels. I know that Dick Lewis thinks it a fine book, and I understand that he

has written the N. Y. Times Book Review to say so. This is something that I should like to do myself, but obviously, because of the known associations,

my gesture would do much more harm than good. If you do admire the

book, it may be that a letter to the N.Y. Times or some other book page is not what ought to be done anyway-perhaps a letter to Random House

. that might be used in an ad, or perhaps simply a letter to Red, who proba­

bly is feeling rather low, though I have not talked to him oflate. Anyway,

you will realize the spirit in which I write and I am sure will not feel that

I am meddling. Now for our own news, which I gather is not news, since Tinkum tells

me that Bloom' has acted as messenger boy in both directions, bringing

you tidings of our going to London and returning with tidings of your doing the same thing. I hope he is correct about your and Ruth's being

there next year-it is one of the things we should most look forward to. It seems odd that we should all have to cross the Atlantic to have a reunion, but we do intend to celebrate it. Will you be working in London, traveling

around, or what? I have undertaken a two-year stint as cultural attache in our London embassy-don't ask me why. I have no idea why I was asked and am not altogether certain that I was wise to accept, but so I have. I

leave here June I for two weeks in Washington before arriving in London about the middle of June. [ ... ] Let us know when you will arrive. In the meantime, all the best to you and Ruth.

Cordially,

Cleanth

1. Most likely Harold Bloom, English professor at Yale University.

Dear Cleanth,

To CLEANTH BROOKS

May 13, 1964

Yes, Bloom gave us the first news about your job as attache-for

three years, he said-and we thought it great. Great for us first, to be

selfish; but 1 found myself really pleased that you were willing to take it on. We are the same age, and yet it shows you so much more flexible

than I would be. You are the kind of person who will do a very fine job of it, and represent "us" much better than most people would. So that

is finally what I am most pleased about. [ ... ]

1 haven't read Flood, in part because 1 am so crowded with office work (I haven't yet read Brooks on Faulkner,' which Ruth gave me as a

Christmas present), but I hope to get to it some time next year. Though I am fearful that I may sound gratuitously hypercritical. I was much

disappointed by Red's more recent novels (I even fear that 1 may not be being very bright about them), and no one would be happier than

I if, as you suggest, he has had a comeback in this. I got a Guggenheim at last-living long enough and trying often

enough. I'm supposed to write a book, and we plan to spend a good

deal of the year in London, of which we were very fond last time, but with some travels: we never got to Greece for instance. [ ... ] We flyover on June 20, put in two weeks in some cheap hotel such as we always

give our trade to, and then hit the road for a while before going to the continent for part of the summer.

Yours,

Bob

1. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country.

Dear Bill,

To WILLIAM MATCHETT

January 9, 1965 [Londo,n, England]

.................................................... Recently 1 got invited to a sherry-and-sandwich affair at which John

Masefield' was given a £2500 award by the National Book League-for services to literature or something like that. 1 was delighted to go and see

what the old boy looked like. He's 86, a more redcheeked, watery-eyed,

somewhat less roundfaced Winston type. After the presentation was made he staggered to his feet, maundered for a second or two in a shaky

way, and I could feel us all (about 35 or so guests, 1 guess) tightening up in the face of a terrible disaster. [But] suddenly he got a grip on himself and with no notes at all did a beautiful 20-minute speech of acceptance.

If you have heard him, you know that his speaking voice is not unlike Dylan Thomas's, and besides he has an absolutely Churchillian mastery of well rounded periods and appropriate old Roman vocabulary. It was

a wonderful thing to hear. He was even able to bow to Cleanth, who was at the head table, struggle for and recall his name and the reason for being there, and then to go on with a graceful remark about his feel­

ing himself also a citizen of USA. His literary reminiscences made one seem floating gracefully through the headnotes to a late Victorian, Edwar­

dian, and Georgian anthology. "And then there was Hardy, the master of us all" -somehow in his resonant voice that statement rings out like a

master stroke of perceptive tribute, despite all the ordinariness of the words. And speaking ofliterary characters: we've met, and been enter­

tained by-and have yet to entertain-an aged Colonel Butler (of the Yeats Butlers) who is a nephew of Alice Meynell2 and owns her library: between his literary gossip on the one side (though he's a shaky 84) and his ability to recite, in the most ringing style, endless stanzas of Childe

Harold, he also gives one a tour through the 19th century.

I. Masefield, a renowned poet, fiction·writer, and essayist, had served as Poet Laureate of

England and given numerous lectures throughout Europe and the United States.

2. Meyne\l (1847-1922) was a British poet, essayist, and playwright.

I hope your first year at MLQ has been the hardest! You've done

excellently, and I look forward to seeing it again. [ ... ]

Bob

Someone reports that Robert Fitzgerald is going to pull up stakes

and return to the USA, and that Mrs. F is much disturbed by this.

Henry Reed has been all kinds of fun to be with here.

Dear Eric,

To ERIC VOEGELIN

February 17, 1965 [London, I:inE:landl<=:~

Too soon we shall be running out of time here, and I will not be nearly>~ .

so far along on Tragedy and Melodrama as I had hoped. I'm not sure now·;'.; that attempting to deal with a number of dramas in terms of concepts of ...

genre is a good idea; all I can say for it is that I hoped not to be affixing

labels, but to be using a way oflooking at structure that would be illumi­nating about individual plays. What I think we have here is two basicallr .. different ways oflooking at human personality, and ways that seem to

persist for a good many hundred years; I've wanted to look at enough individual cases to suggest that historically quite alien works are, with­out forcing, amenable to this way oflooking at them. Well, we will see if

anything comes out of it that anybody will print. Incidentally, I've found [Friedrich] Diirrenmatt and [Max] Frisch very interesting; it seems to me that they go way beyond their master Brecht in permitting dramatis per­sonae to function as characters instead of simply as signposts to desired conclusions. Brecht I think is much overrated, but I have to keep my

eye on my own basic rule that you have to be a long way away from the dramatist in time in order to have some sense of whether he is more than topically enchanting, or for that matter, disenchanting. What I would call, in Diirrenmatt and Frisch, the drift from the expressionistic morality

to a valid imagining of character seems to me to be in some way character­istic today; very few people start writing as if they had any interest in char­acters, but they want to prove something about the world or about the force of some element of personality, and they get away from this narrow

objective only, it appears, by accident. It is rather fashionable nowadays, .

to look down on Tennessee Williams, but he has a great deal o~ vigorin presenting his characters, as far as they go, and this very vigor tends to make them go farther than the blueprint perhaps called for. Off the evi­

dence of the plays I think TW is a sick man, but yet the sickness always

feels as if it were about to slip over the line into an offbeat kind of health

that might produce something much larger than appears to be there. I've taken time off from the BM beat only for a couple oflectures.

The one on critic and historian was at the [American] Embassy, the lead­

off in a series that Cleanth has arranged, a series that will end with one by Lionel Trilling, one by his wife, Diane and one by Cleanth himself.

An absolutely icy audience. But Cleanth, fortunately, did think quite well

of it and recommended it to some other people; I'll take him as surrogate for a loud vox populi. We've just come back from Leeds, where I used the Munich public lecture at the U;I here the situation was the opposite, for

the audience responded very well, but no one had anything to say after­

wards. We were glad to see Leeds-made up entirely of the worst parts

of Jersey City, Chicago, and Scranton, Pa., nearly everything ugly and

in the worst 19th century manner. We hope everything is going well at ND [Notre Dame], with only the

beautiful aspects of winter, only the best of students, and not too many

of them.

With very best wishes,

Sincerely,

Bob

Dear Sol,

To SOLOMON KATZ

May 19,1965 [London, England?]

A note from Dorothee Bowie that came in today mentioned the

annual merit-raise rush, and that reminded me that, though absent

1. The lecture was entitled "The Role We Give Shakespeare."

scandalously overbalanced that Jack Korg, who's writing on Ulysses, Eliotj

cubism and the like, reproaches me for writing only on conservative nov­elists. I answer that conservatism is avant garde.

Jim

May I keep CE a few days to look at the less significant articles? My copy hasn't come yet.

From VERNON WATKINS ,. October 9, 1965 Shrewsbury, Wald

Dear Robett and Ruth,

Since the end of August I have not had time to thank you for your verY nice card ofSeattle's floating bridge, which I so well remember from that' . momingwhe~ you took us for the patty for (John Crowe] Ransom. It is

also much on myconsdence that I haven't written to him. Such a great poet, So inimitably himself

Gwen also wanted to write to you, but now I am in the train on the

way to Attingham Park' where I am going to read some ofYeats' poems,. . and theIJ. som~ of mine, before going on to London for three or four days~ .~ On Monday I'll be meeting Pamela Hansford Johnson' (Lady Snow) for the first time, as we've been asked by the B.B.C. to say something about Constantine FitzGibbon's new biography of Dylan Thomas) She was

more or less engaged to Dylan just before I met him at the age of twenty. '. ................................................... .

Beth Bentley sent us the magazine with your fine article on Roethke.4 Seattle is rather like Wales, but I miss very much the drywood trees. [ ... )

Remember us to Henry [Reed), please. I hope he's still in the "Wilson­ian" [apartments]. Our lo\,eto you & will write again soon.

Ever yours,

Vemon

1. Attingham Park is an eighteenth.century mansion located in Shrewsbury.

2. Johnson, a poet and novelist, had been romantically involved with Dylan Thomas in the 1930s.

3· The Life of Dylan Thomas (Boston: Uttle, Brown. 1965).

4· "Theodore Roethke: Personal Notes,' Shenandoah 16 (1964). Beth Bentley was a poet, editor, and translator living in Seattle.

Dear Mr. Heilman,

From VERLIN CASSILL

February 25, 1966 Lafayette, Ind.

I'm rather abruptly involved in planning a national clearance house­

or auxiliary placement service-whose objective would be to place writers

in college teaching and in metropolitan high schools somewhat more

smoothly and suitably than is now being done. And I'm hastily trying to

assemble good opinion and right reason on both the general andspedfic

problems involved. Hence I'm writing to you-in hope that you'll pass this letter on to the

appropriate staff member if you haven't time to reply (and I know this is

a dreadful imposition, made only on the excuse of a cause that seems both

good and promising to me). The basic idea is to have in New York-as soon as we can get it going,

maybe by next year-an office which would gather data, applications and recommendations on writers who want to teach. It would also extend

contact with English departments which might-whether they know it or not-find that the talents and disciplines of writers, irrespective of

advanced degrees, or any degrees at all, would enrich their program of reading and writing. Obviously the project has about it the aroma of dis­

satisfaction with present Ph.D. programs and requirements for writers who should be teaching. It also comes from the observation that in the great mills of ordinary placement bureaus, MIA horse trading, etc. the

writer often gets shuffled to the bottom of the heap, with resultant waste for him and for education at large .

Here are some questions on which I need a base of advice:

What subjects should a writer teach in college? Creative writing? Fresh­man English? A graded program in advanced composition? Tutorial read­

ing? What? Is he more desirable ifhe should have a specialty in Pope or Fulke Greville?

Should a young writer (or does he have to) consider his teaching a stop­

gap until he touches Book of the Month money? Is a career open-should it be open-to the writer without degrees in the academy? On what should his first job, then his advancement and authority in the department i

depend? Publications? Teaching? Committee work? What sort of creden­

tials might substitute for degrees? Recommendations by teachers, estab­lished writers, editors, agents? To what extent could recommendations of

separate cover. I don't know how well Eliseo will do it, but I shall be

to see him work out the view that in liberalism we have a remarkable

of a new orthodoxy spreading itself under the guise of philosophical dis- .

interestedness. This, I suppose, is an old intellectual fashion; it is weari­

some as a contemporary phenomenon. We have a quite different version, ~:

of a comparable phenomenon going on before our eyes presently: a set ...

of Fundamentalist Presbyterians (backed, apparently, by Bircher money)4~ .

are suing the university to compel it to give up a course in English, "The" .

Bible as Literature." The plaintiffs are making a fascinating two-headed~ , case: (I) the course is really a pressure for faith, and as such violates the;:,:

church-and-state prohibitions of the constitution; (2) the course is under.';·

mining faith by treating the revealed as historical fact. If the plaintiffs" .,. "

were not such dingy people, I rather suspect they would be joined by the~ ACLU et omne id genus,5 who so desperately hope that the Constitution! "i

will put out of business whatever is contrary to their own dogma.

.................................................... . Bob

Dear Bob:

From HENRY REED

June 16, 1966

Before the quarter finalizes, I must at least try to do a few of the many.

things I have left undone. Most heavily on my conscience lies the fact

that though I have verbalized my promise (elicited by your letter of Feb­

ruary IS) not to return and trouble you in the Fall quarter, I have not yet

scribalized it. Please take this as my assurance that I shall not be here in

September; and I hope that with it you will accept my apologies for my

many misdemeanors here during the last nine months: notably an unwar~ rantable amount of grousing and griping, and a quite unpardonably persist­ent effort to discover from my' over-worked colleagues what the (pardon

me) aim content of certain of my courses was meant to be. These trade-

4· At the center of this lawsuit was Professor David Fowler, himself a Presbyterian, who was offering the course. The University of Washington successfully defended itself and "The Bible as Literature" continued to be offered by the English Department.

5. '"All of that sort."

43°

secrets have been, rightly, as I now appreciate, kept from me. IfI am

spared to return here in the Winter, I hope my deportment will ,neutralize

the unfavorable impressions I have caused in recent months; and I will

try to get al6hg under my own steam.

In your letter, you speak much and mournfully of "friends." You will

correct me if 1 am wrong, but 1 think you are either ironizing or being led

into excessive morbidity by your devotion to the novels of the doubtless

admirable Thomas Hardy. You say you have no friends. 1 will merely hint

that you might change your views on this, if you could but see the look

that comes into the eyes of Nelson Bentley' whenever your name is men­

tioned: only the most searchingly-tested cliches could describe it. I would

like you to think about this. I would like you to think about it when you

are digging clams in your delectable asylum at Camano. (You will inev­

itably think of his poems at such moments; but try to think of the man

himself.) I feel I just have to say this. And there is Beth Bentley, too.

Furthermore, you seem to suggest that 1 had declared my intention of

staying here only a year, to them you call my "friends," before actualizing

this idea to you. I must, I feel, archivalize a fact I reminded you of (orally)

on February IS: that you had first mooted the idea of my staying on a sec­

ond year, in November 1965, and that I had at once demurred. I think you

will rememberize this still, since you did so at the time. "Ab, yes," were

your words on that occasion.

As for my friends, I look around me and wonder who they are deemed

to be. I suppose they must be old Andy [Hilen), old Jim [Hall), and Dorothee

[Bowie), who in my first months here seasoned every mouthful oflow­

calluncheon 1 raised to my lips with their assertion that I could not, in

any Londonized existence, earn even a subsistence wage; that here there

was a social security unknown on my native heath; that here I might, at

the mere asking, command my own salary: together with other benefits

in which, as in these, I had, immodestly or otherwise, only a partial belief

It took Ruth to put a stop to this. She urged, 1 believe, that only in Lon­

don could you discover, almost any night of the week. the cultural warmth

of, say, Sir Laurence's performance of Aaron in Shakespeare's beautiful

tragedy of "Othello." As I hope she pointed out, British ham is the best

ham in the world.

Again, you may mis-estimate as friendship the emotions of those of

I. UW English professor and one of the founding editors of Poetry Northwest.

431

your subalterns you see from your window, deep in umbrella-covered con"" verse on the way to Annex One (or, in some cases, to Annex TWO).2 But,

rest assured: these are not friends. They are merely frail remnants of

humanity best described in the dramatist's phrase as "huddled together

a horrid amity of misfortune." He was, I am sure, referring to the shared experience of them that have been instructors of Freshman English. '

In short, dear Bob, I think there is only one kind of friendship: the".·

kind, based on merriment and gratitude, that I have toward you and Ruth;.

Ever,

Henry

Dear Henry,

To HENRY REED

[June 1966]

Would that it were not my last day in tabernaculo and that I had the

hours to develop the fullness of thought, the copiousness of word, and fi.

the meticulousness of style requisite to make even a partial reply to yours). of the sixteenth-that eloquent, that richly allusive, that alternately sar- .

donic and amiable, that often downright mysterious (in its replications to matters of which the very words, as repeated in yours, now escape

the memory), that ominous in its aspect of a demolition charge, that comforting in its aspect of the saving parachute hastily extended to elevate in rescue those likely to sink forever under the blasts of the charge referred to in the previous phrasis, that gifted, contrapuntal,

polytonal, variable winded epistle, that apologia pro vita sua cum argu­mentum ad homines, that peccavi cum bulla excommunicationis, that ex altis clamavi' cum plaintiff's final address to the jury, that preparation;' .

of ultimate outer darkness for the recipient by making clear to him that his sole friend and admirer is NB [Nelson Bentley], but that final trans-

2. Parrington Annexes One and Two were temporary English office buildings at the Uw.

1. The interspersed Latin and English reads, "That 'defense of his life with its ad homines argument,' that" have sinned with a writ of excommunication: that" shouted from on high' with plaintiff's final address to the jury .... " "Corpus amicitiae" is literally "body offriendship, ii .. but here it probably means cadre of friends. "Censor morum" means "Censor of character."

432

mutation of Inferno into the higher ranges of Purgatorio by admitting .

to the recipient that his corpus amicitiae does include a second ~oul, that of the generous host, the often amiable, the oftener witty, the gaily ironic,

the languidly pedagogical, the urbane censor morum, the gentle shep­

herd of his flocks and colleagues, Henry the tuneful Reed.

Yours,

Bob

From ANDREW R_ HILEN

August 27, 1966

Dear Professor Heilman:

Shaw Island, Wash.

I am afraid that our friendship must now be terminated. In reading

your edition of Jude the Obscure' I was horrified to discover on page 155 that you had assigned Longfellow's "Excelsior" to the year 1842 . At first I thought this was merely a careless error (and I am used to forgiving

careless errors in critics); but then I remembered distinctly having once shown you the manuscript ofVol. n of the Longfellow letters wherein it

is clearly stated that the poem was written in September 1841 and pub­lished for the first time in Ballads and Other Poems in December 1841.

So I can only conclude that you have mischievously inserted this error

to embarrass me personally. I wish I could think otherwise. But I cannot.

Yours truly,

Andrew R. Hilen, Jr.

Dear Professor Hilen:

To ANDREW R.HILEN

September 2, 1966 [Seattle, Wash.]

Now that all is over between us, I feel free to make several

observations.

1. Heilman edited the Standard Edition of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (New York:

Harper and Row, 1966).

433

The first of these is that when you suggest that I inserted an error to embarrass you personally, you of course are showing severe signs of paranoid megalomania. I suggest that you consult with Professor

Bums, a noted analyst who has been of service to various individuals in the graduate division.!

Secondly, your letter of severance makes it possible for me to reveal . that I have won two wagers with myself The first was this: that I could·

make a minute change of one figure in the irrelevant year of a minor

poem by a minor poet quoted in an insignificant context, and that some­one would be petty enough to find it and try to make a scholarly issue of it. The second, and more important bet: that the person who made

an issue of the pointless difference between 1842 and I84I would never pay the slightest attention to a critical introduction, fifty pages in length,

full of weighty theory and acute literary analysis-a prolegomenon, indeed, without which the volume itself would be incomprehensible­

would, in other words, prefer a quibble to a major self-enlargement. That it should be you who enables me to win these wagers does not

surprise me; but that I should win them at all is in itself a melancholy fact.

I invite you to change your course before it is too late.

Sincerely yours,

Robert B. Heilman

Dear Ruth & Bob:

From ELIZABETH BISHOP

October 1, 1966 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

I have been meaning to write to you, of course, ever since I got back, and even have carried your island address about with me for that purpose. But I seemed to do a great deal of moving around these first weeks and then I was sick for a while up in Minas where I went to see about my OLD house .... Now things have settled down a bit and the stage of cultural shock is over again. Elections are the 3rd here; I just hope we are not in

I. Probably Wayne Bums, UW professor of English, whose combination of Freudian and

contextualist criticism attracted a group of graduate students the faculty regarded as "Bum sites."

434

for some sort of "counter-revolution," but so far the city seems calm enough. All the University students have been on strike for over a month,

though classes just started again this week. This has been another cultural

shock for th~'hew Fulbright Profhere this year, who has had absolutely nothing to do .... Some TV speakers urge the students to stay out; some

urge them to go back-but try as I will, and read the papers, I can't seem

to get back into the murky stream of events here, and no one can seem to

explain them to me, either. I miss Seattle a lot: some of my students, the Varsity Cleaners, the Uni­

versity Food Shop, the Un. Book Shop, and my friends .... I do wish I'd seen more of that part of the world, but suppose I did manage to see quite

a bit. I have one recommendation to make-if ever you fly south, NEVER

change planes in Mexico City. It was a scene of terrible confusion, in the middle of the night, with no porters, and all us "emigrants," or whatever

we were considered to be, locked into one bare cold room with a broken

water-cooler for two hours. Brazil seems really efficient in comparison­and at least the people are usually good-tempered and polite. (There were

also 2 brass bands playing in the airport in Mexico-I think movie stars

were arriving .... ) My cats recognized me after all those months and came running, and

the Siamese howling, in a most gratifying way. Tobias is now almost 15 and I think I should find a replacement for him but I'm afraid it will have

to be a Brazilian cat again-the customs are getting more difficult about

bringing in live pets, it seems. [ ... ) I am planning to leave Brazil for about six weeks-{)n the 9th or lOth of

this month, going first to Amsterdam and then for two weeks or so to Lon­don. I hope I'll find Henry [Reed) there, although I haven't heard a thing from him so far-perhaps he is now introducing iambic pentameters to the

Eskimos at the North Pole, for all I know. I have had nine, I think, letters from my nicer students and found that very cheering indeed-{)ne man,

aged 45, sent me his first poem, and it wasn't bad, either. And one girl from the writing class has sold three and is to be in an anthology-so maybe it all did some good; I hope so, because in recollection I feel I learned much more than I taught. Thank you for all your kindness to me, which I feel I repaid

very poorly, and I do hope I shall see you again one of these days. [ ... ) .

Affectionately yours,

Elizabeth

435

lunch, and serving us tea and chocolate [ ... ]. It was a very fine experi­

ence to meet you and then also to meet your most channing husband as. a bonus. We will always cherish our first, and probably our last, visit to .

a kibbutz. That name, so welllmown in the States (and probably better

lmown than the thing), now will have a substantial meaning that will give

new body to all reports from Israel. The visit was really the highlight of our:. four days in Israel-the only one where the intrinsically interesting thing

came along with the human touch, with the special touch of the humanity;

of distinguished people. It was all very gratifYing-a sort of glimpse into

the heart of your very brave country, which otherwise we had to infer from.;. the externals which are naturally all that is available to a tourist. ..

I like Zembavel's poems very much, most of all, perhaps, "Vine." Z.

has an instinctive hold on images, and they almost always occur in sur­prising verbal collocations that make one re-read immediately to see if

his own current of feeling is matching the imagistic progression. Of the leading articles in Arid I liked especially Rosenfeld's;' warned about

jargon, I was happy to find less than I expected. Buber' surprises me with a kind of heaviness that seems not to go with the image of him

that I derive from hearing friends talk about him. The piece on the art museum3 is very interesting, and the reproductions indicate a level and

spread of talent which a priori one would think improbable in a relatively small community. So one learns more about the kibbutz, or at least this kibbutz. I have still a number of things to read, and I look forward to

them. Incidentally, the journal is a beautiful physical object, a pleasure to look at. It is pleasant when what we call "culture" does not come in

an ascetic gauntness that seems to make it a duty rather than a reward. Ideally I would have liked to finish Arid before writing to you, but

I did not want to defer this letter longer. The rest of our traveling left us little time, and you will understand that I did not want to inflict my

handwriting on you again. Our first days in London have been one con­tinual rush of introductory settling-in busyness. [ ... ] One note on our travels: matching Bin Harod, the new world, as a high spot, was a frag­

ment of the ancient world, Ephesus (which our boat-stop in Izmir gave

1. 1be articles Heilman refers to appear in Arid: A Review of Arts and Letters in Israel 28

(I97I), a special issue dedicated to "Aspects of a Rural Culture." Henry Rosenfeld's essay was "1be Culture of Kibbutz Ein Harod: An Anthropological Perspective."

2. Martin Buber, "An Experiment 1bat Did Not Fail.' 3. Zusia Efron, "Art Museum in a Kibbutz."

506

us time to drive to), at least a partial substitute for the missed Persepolis ..

I've wanted to re-read Paul to the Ephesians, but this flat of a scholar in

Romanticism contains no Bible. I hope that your liking of England was sufficient to tolerate a state­

ment of our own great pleasure in being here again. It would be fine

if we could see you during the year, though, alas, we could introduce

you to nothing at all, not to mention something that would match a

kibbutz. Our best greetings to you.

Most sincerely,

Bob

Dear Red,

To ROBERT PENN WARREN

February 13, 1972 London, England

I have just pulled off one of the best absent-minded tricks of recent

years: in getting organized in our new quarters went through files and

there discovered your letter oflast fall, amiably waiting, but totally unac­lmowledged or anything else. I say "files" as if I had a five-drawer cabinet traveling with us instead of only a batch of folders supposed to contain

different typeS of materials and to keep me clearheaded about them. Somehow one whole handful ofletters just got away from me. I have the

awful feeling that being superannuated out of administration-a job which just 25 years ago this year you were, I think, the major instrument

in my getting-is going to cast me back into a woollymindedness for which a given kind of job for a time was a partial therapy. Anyway, you will have forgotten this, but I can't bear not to remind you of it: you were going to send me a book, and I'll be happy ifit ever comes. By "ever" I mean I

think you ought to punish me with a sentence of two years of waitfulness. ....................................................

One of the first things I did, after we settled down, was write a piece

for the Brooks Festschrift.' Lewis Simpson told me that this idea had

1. "Cleanth Brooks: Some Snapshots, Mostly from an Old Album," in The Possibilities of Order: Cleanth Brooks and His Work, ed. by Lewis P. Simpson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

University Press, I976).

originated with you, and I am glad that Lewis picked it up. I asked him 0 •

whether I could do a kind of reminiscent, personal piece with emphasis ' ..

on LS U days, and he approved it. But since I sent it to him, two months

ago, I've had only a very brief acknowledgment of receiving it. Since Lewis is usually prompt and chatty, I'm hoping this doesn't mean he

doesn't like the job and is trying to find a nice way of saying so.

Instead of ski-ing we go indiscriminately to the theater-obsessive voyeurism, Henry Reed calls it. Daytimes I spend some hours sitting

in the BM waiting for thoughts to zoom in from the great void. It was

easier when I was only retouching some pieces for a collection of "edu­

cation essays" that George Core at Ga. Press is going to bring out.'

If you get to London at all during the year, please let us know.

Yours,

Bob

Dear Eric,

To ERIC VOEGELIN

March 21, 1972 London, England

After your article on the Turn came out,' I sent a copy to John Sisk at Gonzaga, a Catholic writer who has seemed to me brighter than aver­

age. He liked it, read more EV, USed you in a recent piece "On Intoxica­tion,'" and has sent you (if he followed my request) a copy of it. He has also sent me a Xerox of a NYTBRl which attributes influence by you to Flannery O'Connor, a first-rate Southern Catholic fiction-writer who

died of some terrible disease a few years ago. You've probably seen this, but, just to be on the safe side, I enclose the copy that Sisk sent me.

2. The Ghost on the Ramparts and Other Essays in the Humanities.

1. "A Letter to Robert Heilman" and "Postscript: On Paradise and Revolution." 2. Sisk's article appeared in the.February 1972 issue of Commentary. 3. Francis Sweeney, review of Sister Katherine Feeley, Flannery O'Connor: Voice of the Pea·

cock, in New York Times Book Review, February 13, 1972. Feeley calls attention to the influence ofVoegelin's Order and History on O'Connor's thinking.

508

The year's been a rather good one, though I am way behind schedule

on comedy, and the present [medical] stoppage is doing me no good. [ ... ]

Our best to you both, .'-.}

Bob

Dear Bill,

To WILLIAM MATCHETT

[March 23, 1972J [London, England]

On principle I think it is highly unfair to the writer of a good letter,

such as yourself, to answer him almost immediately and thus deprive him

of the prolonged social credit that he can enjoy (Ruth's and my term for

it) through indefinitely remaining unanswered. I hope that you will under­stand that the promptness of my reply is not due to inherent nastiness

or to my finding new ways to work off the unpleasantness that used to be released by administration, but is due rather to the fact that, even after

13 days in hospital and 4 out, I am still good for little but letter-writing. Hence correspondents are really getting it in the neck. Forgive me.

Your letter was full of all kinds of interesting information. I am

immensely saddened by this new [heart) attack of Charlie Watkins, an atrocious piece ofluck for any relatively young man, but somehow the worse for Charlie just now when, after being understandably much

troubled by problems of role and identity, he seems to be finding him­self. It is so good that you got Jim Wright signed before he won the big

award; I'm delighted both that he will be there and that he won it. I Lewis Simpson speaks well of his work. Nothing you say about [Richard] Eberhart surprises me; as a self-entrepreneur, he's fascinatingly naive.

Despite Henry Reed's defeated man's tendency to be acid about practi­cally everybody, I do relish his name for Dick-"Rubberhart." Finally, it is very good news about the Roethke reading fund and the likelihood

of its becoming permanent: if Bagley [Wright] takes an interest, we are in.2 Looks like good work, at least of a preliminary sort, by Sol.

1. Wright signed to give the Roethke Memorial Reading in 1972; the award Heilman refers to is most likely the Melville Cane Award granted by the Poetry Society of America.

2. Bagley Wright was a Seattle investor and patron of the arts.

(last year when I tried to tap the Bloedel Foundation [ ... ] for a possible

$75,000 to buy the Elizabeth Bishop papers-DB [Dorothee Bowie] as

influential contact with E. B.-I failed utterly.)

I've tried to allow a minimum of space for a report on myself, that

most fascinating subject likely to usurp all of a letter. I began feeling

some abdominal oddities in Dec, hoped it would go away, and resisted

taking it seriously at least until I should have got us moved Feb I. Three

quacks, as Andy calls them, were for surging [sic]: this time I delayed

until after DB's scheduled visit, but went into SS John and Elizabeth

the day after her departure (it was mostly an accident that I fell into

papist hands). "Mr" Mulvaney removed the appendix, re·engineered

a Z·curve in a bowel, and did some miscellaneous trimming. In facing

all this in a foreign port, I was greatly encouraged by favorable reports

on local hospitals by Judy [Matchett] and Tinkum Brooks. The place

is antique, but the Irish nurses were wonderful; aside from feeling

foul, I had a charming time. I am rather depressed by my slow pick­

up of energy; still not good for much more than a half day out of

bed, alas ....

Ruth's and my best to both of you.

Sincerely,

Bob

Dear Lewis,

To LEWIS SIMPSON

May 5,1972 London, England

I am delighted to have your letter of April 29; needless to say, I am

much pleased that you think that the essay as a whole will do and that

it gives a decent and interesting picture of Cleanth. I

Now as to the American Studies passage, of course I knew that you

had some connection with the field, but the last thing I wanted to do

I. "Cleanth Brooks: Some Snapshots, Mostly from an Old Album."

510

was to offend you or inadvertently arouse an understandable professional-'

defensiveness. I thought that I was covering myself entirely by the phrase

"only by very exceptional minds, and by them only after long, hard think­

ing and herdit assimilation of the facts." I thought that this would make

entirely clear how I felt about people like yourself, all achieving Ameri­

canists ofVoegelinian spread (if not cast) of mind, the kind of thing

Cleanth and Red and what's-his-name at Yale are doing in their book

on American (which. I judge will be more "Studies" than pure literature)

(and after all my own essay on "American Dreams" covers a lot more

than literary water front). 2 But it appears that I took too much for granted,

and so I am p~oposing a revision which will make this statement of faith

more explicit, & thus weight the passage as a whole a little differently.

On the other hand, I do not want to delete the remarks about Ameri­

can studies because I have rather strong convictions* <LM: Of many

years development; not a flash fire> on the subject. It is highly relevant

here, for it is one of the developments hostile to the Brooksian kind of

thing. I am not worried about any nominal connections Cleanth may

have had with A. S. organizations; even ifhe differed, which I doubt,

he wouldn't feel abused, and he would, I think, say I might have my

say (however benighted). I hope that any troubledness of your own about the passage as a

whole will be adequately allayed by the more precise hedging which

I have introduced. But if we still have a difference of opinion on this­

well, friends live with this occasionally. But I shouldn't at all object to

your having your public say by introducing a footrtote or a paragraph

in the general introduction which you will doubtless write, saying that

in this matter you think I'm a bit off base. Anyway, please let me know. I like to get things tucked away, or at

least as much settled as possible.

Best luck,

Bob

2. The book was American Literature: The Makers and The Making, ed. by Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren (New York: SI. Martin's Press, 1974); Heilman's essay was "The Dream Metaphor: Some Ramifications," in American Dreams, American Nightmares, ed. by David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970).

511

Dear Bob,

From EDWARD ALEXANDER

February 12, 1993

Did you read about the guy who was holding down two full-time

jobs-at Minnesota and U ofNC, Charlotte-simultaneously, fiying

back and forth every week between Mpls. and Ne? Of course it's a per­sonal scandal, but few people see what it reveals about the profession:

1. We now learn that there really is something for which you can be fired;

2. this must be the only profession in which you can meet the demands of two positions simultaneously (and win a Distinguished Teaching

Award into the bargain) without working up a sweat.

Best,

Eddie

Dear Eddie:

To EDWARD ALEXANDER

April 21, 1993 [Seattle, Wash.)

My sitting where I did at the Heilman' lecture was for the reason

that always makes me sit there: hoping to be able to hear by being in close. Fortunately Heilman was the most audible lecturer I've listened

to in years. 1 did not beat it out before the questions, as 1 usually do (I never can hear the questions, and, when 1 can, they seem only to be rival essays sometimes only dimly related to the lecture) because 1

wanted to have, so to speak. a family chat with the guy. It turned out that he had in some way identified me as a person who once wrote about Shaksper, and he had intended to phone me during his visit. So we had a brief amiable chat as possible cousins. His punch line was, "My family

could never have been Lutheran, but yours might have been Jewish." It took me so long to get next to him that 1 was very late at the reception;

I. In 1993, Samuel C. Heilman gave the Samuel and Althea Slroum Lectures at UW.

not wanting alcohol, and finding no non-wine to drink, 1 hogged it on

fruit, while chatting with Mimi Schor and the Pascals, and occ,!sionally exchangjng greetings with "Cousin Sam." (I told him 1 actually had an "Uncle Sam," and he said he did too.)

1 assume that your hasty departure meant disapproval of the

discourse. 1 found it quite interesting, in part no doubt because 1 could hear it, but mainly as an account of one aspect of the secularization that

characterizes our times (and in this case accompanied, 1 infer, by some­

thing that might be called de-ethnification). But 1 would welcome your

comments, to which, no doubt, 1 would be inclined to yield. But please don't trash a Heilman totally.

Yrs,

Bob

Dear Bob,

From WESLEY WEHR

April 23, 1993 [SeattIe, Wash.)

[ ... ] Your description of Henry Reed certainly has him down pat. ... Gary L.' and 1 used to see Henry, who was probably just about the most self-indulgent man I've known. Others, of course, would come to mind

later, but Henry would still be right up there on top. His snobbery struck me as being his defense against a world which was more than he could handle, a voluptuary who was watching his options dwindle, and who had

gotten into the inexcusable habit of resting far too much on his fading laurels in a world where you're only as good as your last performance.

Along came Elizabeth [Bishop], a phoenix in the art of rising out of the ashes of her own fires ... and Henry needed Elizabeth to give him a sense of still being a part of LITERATURE NOW ...

Yours,

Wes

I. Gary Lundell, reference specialist at UW libraries.

739

Mailer. Norman. 731

Malamud. Bemard. 28. 359-60. 376-80

Mann. Thomas. 174.317. 336. 650. 653 Masefield. John. 417

Matchett. William. 413-14. 417-18. 458.

497-98• 50 9-IO• 534-35. 542-43. 682 Mathews. Jackson. 180. 192. 218. 243. 295.

345. 560. 750 McCuIlers. Carson. 280. 286

Melville. Herman. 369. 552-53 Metzger. Lore. 19

Miller. Jo Hillis. 709 Miller. James Eo. 366

Milosz. Czeslaw. 676--17

Mizener. Arthur. 214. 318. 383-85 MLA (Modem Language Association). H.

16. H2. H3. 186. 228. 243.291. 293.464.

471.491.57°. 573. 574. 597. 651• 658- 61•

736 .753.757. 773 Monk. Samuel Ho. 26. 130. 138. 150. 218.

294-96.302-4. 313-14. 579-81

Montaigne. Michel de. 698

Moore. Marianne. 282. 638

More. Po Eo.7

Morgan. Frederick. 344-45

Mudrick. Marvin. 493

NAS (National Association of Scholars). 70I.

757 Nemerov. Howard. 470. 528-29. 655-56.

676--17 New Criticism. 6. 7-9. H. 15-17. 24. 29. 35.

41.42.47.54.184. 2H. 222. 236• 297.

392• 572. 678. 681 Nichols. Jack. 708

Nietzsche. Friedrich. 729. 756

O·Connor. Flannery. 286. 303-5. 508

O·Connor. William Van. 54-55. 64-67. 73-76.82-84.23°.3°4.314.388-89

Odegaard. Charles. 334. J5I-52• 383-85. 397.

512• 515. 533-340 745 Olivier. Laurence. 247

O·Neill. Eugene. 39

Oppenheimer. Jo Robert. 23-24. 293.3°2. 687

Orwell. George. 740

Ozick. Cynthia. 695. 730. 753

Padelford. Frederick Mo. 14. I05. 466. 467.

751-52 Paglia. Camille. 726

Parrington. Vernon L.. 3. 14. 21.24. 105--1. 109. H2. 167. 299. 699.751-52

Partisan Review. 16. 177. 226. 369. 371. 706

Pascal. Naomi B.. 547-50 • 739

Pascal. Paul. 679.739

Percy. Walker. 530. 631-32. 645

Peyre. Henri. 85. 87-88

Phi Beta Kappa. 24. 42. 300. 316. 465. 568.

696.733 Pinsker. Sanford. 496-97. 636. 696. 762-

63 Podhoretz. Norman. 721. 727

Poirier. Richard. 57°--11. 5730 642• 713. 736 Porter. Katherine Anne. 58. 60. 246. 396.

4540 715. 795 Posnock. Ross. 713. 736 Pound. Ezra. 13. 720

Rabkin. Norman. 709-10

Rahv. Philip. 369--10

Ransom. John Crowe. 9. 81. 84. 87. 90. 94.

98. H2. 168. 175. 176. 184.381.423. 424.

439. 444. 718

Raval. Suresh. 675

Ray. Veme. 170-72

Redford. Grant. 275. 285

Reed. Henry. 18.4°7.413-14.418.424.

430-33.435. 5°8.5°9.739 Rexroth. Kenneth. 331-32

Rich. Adrienne. 675

Richards. I. A.. 17. 152-53. 282

Rivers. Elias L.. 498-99

Rodman. Selden. 307-9. 312. 313. 315 Roethke. Theodore. 14. 26-30. 181-83. 212-

13. 222. 227. 273. 244-45. 315-20. 330.

333-34.340-44. 360. 363-6 4. 367-69.

372.375-77.394.4°9.413-14.436.439.

443-45.449.458

Rosenmeyer. Thomas. 648. 710

Rubin. Louis Do. 349-50. 492. 753-54

Said. Edward. RBH interview of. 773

Sale. Roger. 31-32. 517-18

Salmagundi. 718. 729. 765 Schapiro. Meyer. 704

794 ...., Index

)

Schmitz. Henry. 22. 23. 51n57. 2H. 212. 257.

258.259-65.342.451.459.687 Schneider. Elizabeth. 472

Schorr. Mimi. 739

Seager. AIIan. 29. 182. 334. 717. 724-25 Sewanee Review. H-12. 17. 70. 229. 395. 421.

514. 523. 534. 58!. See also Tate. AlIen;

Core. George

Shakespeare. William. 15-16. 22. 24. 28• 45-

48. IOl. 247. 280. 323-25. 328• 339. 353·

376. 412-13.429. 431. 464. 466• 597. 598. 615. 631. 6p. 640. 656. 669. 681-

82. 706. 720. 767 Shapiro. Karl. 26.730 82. 130. 205. 244. 245. 293

Sherburn. George. 16

Sherman. Stuart. 7

Simon. John. 20

Simpson. Lewis. 507. 5IO-H. 538• 539. 587.

603. 605. 656

Simpson. Louis. 406--1

Singer. lsaac Bashevis. 574. 716

Sisk. John. 508. 557. 584. 610. 667. 697-99.

7°1-2.7°5-7.7°9-12.717-23.727-33.

744-45.751-52.755-56.758-59.763-65 Southern Agrarians. 12. 44. 741

Southern Review. 8.39. 572• 579. 645. 658• 7060 See also Brooks. Cleanth; Warren.

Rohert Penn

Sowell. Thomas. 745

sports. 49. 66-67. 315. 621. 623. 722

Stange. Go Robert. 577--18. 713

Stegner. Wallace. 370-71

Stein. Arnold. 17. 18. 142-43. 335-40• 354-

55. 4 IO- 12• 445.463.497.56 9.57°.597.

692-93.7340 735 Stein. Roger. 732

Steiner. George. 558.755-56 Stepto. Robert. 32. 476-88

Stevick. Robert Do. 463. 494. 535. 659

Stirling. Brents. 15. 34. 459. 693 Stoke. Harold. 568. 602. 604

Stoll. Eo Eo. 147

Tate. AlIen. 8-9. 12. 16. 26. 69-71• 77. 81.

84-85. 95. 215-18. 220. 3°3-6. 381- 82•

394-95.4°9.465. 491. 562• 658 . 7°4. 713.7540 See also Sewanee Review

Thieme. Frederick. 28.34°-44.356-58

Thomas. Dylan. 18. 214. 219. 221. 227. 228.

281.282.3°9.313. 3P. 417. 424 Tillyard. Eo Mo Wo. 294. 295.3°2. 309. 316

Treadgold. Donald Wo. 515-16. 563. 576-77.

633-34. 668-69. 680-81.745-46

Trilling. Diana. 419. 522. 712. 736

Trilling. Lionel. 21. 24. 30. 71. H8. 218.419.

423.537.57°.5730 619.712.735-36 Trollope. Anthony. 753 Turn of the Screw (lames). 24.45.94. II2.

122. 126. 160. 248. 353. 381. 401. 404.

464.495 Twain. Mark. 392. 513. 699

University of Minnesota. 13. 26. 169.23°

University of Washington. 13-35. 2H. 245.

265.34°-43.554.717.724.749 University of Washington Press. 39

Updike. John. 727

Van Doren. Mark. 70. 71-72

Vidal. Gore. 668

Vivas. Eliseo. 272. 353. 365-66. 385-86•

456-58. 518. 559. 720 Voegelin. Eric. 9-H. 131-33. 136-37. 159-61•

173-75. 216-17. 225-26. 248-49. 251-53. 284-85.310-12.321-27.33°-31.348-49.

37°.4°3.4°5.418-19.428-3°.445-47. 460. 495. 508-9. 5H. 569. 582. 666.

681.698.699.729.758.764-65

Wagoner. David. 444»1. 497. 769 Warren. Robert Penn. 7-9. 13. 17. 26. 57-6 3.

68-69. 77-81. 85-86. 88-90. 93-94-

96-I02. Ho-12. 129-31. 133-34. 137-39.

141-46. 149-52. 158-59. 162-63. 165-67.

184-85.192-93.238.247.327-3°.353.

439. 452-54. 461• 5°7-8• 513. 522- 23. 525-26. 545. 56 9. 589. 592-93. 596-97. 599-601. 620. 645. 681. 692• 70 3. 705.

714 Watkins. Charles Ao. 32-33. 487-89. 509

Watkins.Vernon. 18.424. 443-44

Webb.Eugene.681

Wehr. Wesley. 739 Wellek. Rent\ 16. 87. 165. 168. 183-84. 195·

2°5. 215.257. 473. 547. 754 Welty. Eudora. 645. 715

Index ...., 795