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PARTISAN REVIEW
LES POETES MAUDITS
POETS IN THEIR YOUTH: A MEMOIR. By Eileen Simpson.
Random
House. $5.95.
THE LIFE OF JOHN BERRYMAN. By John Haffenden.
Routledge
&
Kegan Paul Ltd. $22.50.
ROBERT LOWELL: A BIOGRAPHY. By Ian Hamilton.
Random House.
$19.95.
A MINGLED YARN: THE LIFE OF R. P. BLACKMUR. By Russell
Fraser.
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. $19.95.
Candid biographies of the recently dead are a relatively
new fashion. "What a set!" cried Matthew Arnold when he read
about the goings-on of the Shelley circle, and he didn't know the half
of it. Berryman, Lowell, and Blackmur, together with others who
figure largely in all these biographies (Jarrell, Schwartz, the
generous and malicious, astute and silly Allen Tate) constitute
something like a set. They all believed with unquestioning fervor in
the supreme importance of poetry, but they also believed with equal
fervor in the importance of the poet. They expected to have
biographers. Lowell told Eileen Simpson of his worry lest he and
Berryman should fall into the hands of some "hideously young"
biographer who would get them all wrong. Getting them right would
obviously entail the representation of the quality Lowell called their
"all-outedness," the risks, follies, and wickednesses entailed upon
them not only by their madness but by its collaborator, the myth of
the
poete maudit
and the faith that went with it, expressed in Ber–
ryman's statement that "the artist is extremely lucky who is
presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill
him."
The lives of such men cannot be written without the collabora–
tion of survivors, and these survivors are bound to have suffered a
good deal; but evidently they also believe that the poets should be
got right, so that a prolongation of pain or the memory of it may be
compensated for by the accuracy of the portrait. That they should
permit, indeed make possible, this matching of the man who suf–
fered and the artist who created suggests new ideas of decorum, for
the old hagiography called for exclusions; the new includes all, or
nearly all, even the humiliating details that somehow enhance
modern heroism.
