142
PARTISAN REVIEW
been to the poet's intimates, yet unsensationally. Everybody, in–
cluding the author, comes very well out of this book; it is a model for
all such new-style candid biography.
This poet had good friends and understanders, who coped with
the weird emergencies and with the opposition of sensible people–
policemen, soldiers, academics. They had immense trouble per–
suading the professors at Cincinnati that behavior they regarded as
suitably splendid and poetlike was really the beginning of mania. In
Rio, in Salzburg, in New York, and in London, they got him out of
trouble and into the hospital. They lived with all his impossible self–
contradictions, until too frightened and exhausted to go on; but that
rarely happened because of all the feelings he inspired, the deepest
was a sort of reverence. Hamilton, a cool writer, makes that intelligi–
ble.
Blackmur was a more mother-haunted figure, and also prone
to sickness, though his illnesses were physical. Mr. Fraser calls him
"our best American critic, a good poet, and a great man," adding ex–
pressly that there was hokum mixed in with the greatness, but not
minding about that. The claim seems questionable. There is cer–
tainly some fine criticism, but there is too often a sort of virtuoso
straining for effect, an aesthete's reluctance to "succumb to the
platitude of statement." Blackmur's avoidance of statement gives his
style a mannered quality, as if the ordinary, in the process of its con–
version into epigram, had simply disappeared into a verbal mist.
Fraser knew his subject very well, and it is probably because of
that, and out of real admiration and affection, that he himself writes
in a somewhat mannered and self-conscious style. I found that this
quality in his narrative enhanced the sense that in life as well as in
art Blackmur was always trying to be something he wasn't quite .
The effect is rather lowering . Fraser has many oddities to chronicle,
but none of the disastrous and hilarious episodes that occur so often
in the lives of Berryman and Lowell. Blackmur had a sense of his
own vocation as a poet, perhaps a great poet, and stands in the same
tradition as the others but without their confidence; he was boastful,
but never with the sometimes hateful splendor of Lowell or the occa–
sional vulgarity of Berryman. His vanity and pretentiousness have
the air of compensations for a feeling of inadequacy, as in his worry
about not having a Ph.D. He made, it seems almost consciously, a
bad marriage.
"It
is only parts of men and women that are married,"
he gloomily observed . For him, as for the others, 'university teaching
