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PARTISAN REVIEW
happy for the first time in my life [after the break-up of her sec–
ond marriage and a personal breakdown]. At peace for the first
time .. . I'm just going to try to keep that way, that is all. I know
it takes work. I have worked and fought for thirty-seven years, to
gain serenity at thirty-eight. Now I have it. And it's not depen–
dent upon the whim of any fallible human creature, or upon
economic security, or upon the weather. I don't know where it
comes from.
In
a sense she did know, writing at the same time that "when one lets
go, and
recognizes
the stream on which we move as the same stream
which moves us within - that it is time and the earth floating our
blood and flesh, floating its own child - and stops fighting against
the kinship, the light flows in; peace arrives ."
This sense of the mixed joys and resignations of maturity is a
note struck before Bogan was well into middle age; it's maintained to
the end. I'm reminded of Virginia Woolfs comment about the mid–
dle and later years of George Eliot: "Youth was over, but youth had
been full of suffering." Not that the suffering ever really stopped for
Bogan, but she used it:
the process of partial disintegration is salutary, and even neces–
sary . .. . A good look into that abyss described by so many–
Pascal, Dante, Sophocles, Dostoevsky, to name a few - but
never really grasped by the mind until experienced by the emo–
tions with some expenditure of blood and tears - such a glance is
all to the good, I am sure. It's just as well to know that the ninth
circle has an icy floor by experience: by having laid the living
hand upon it.
But it would be facile to say that Bogan transcended her re–
current depressions through her art in any simple way. Often
throughout her life she felt empty, dry, despairingly affectless. The
price she paid for her hardwon psychic strength is variously visible in
this biography - for example, in May Sarton's wonderfully reproach–
ful letter to the older woman (whom Sarton loved) about Bogan's
psychic defenses. But the poems show sacrifice even more. A rueful
renunciation of the pleasures of youth is the theme of many ("The
Crows," "Song," "Kept"). The past must be mastered, but present
joys get scanted in the process. To understand the past while reject–
ing its frivolities was a continual challenge for a writer whose in–
herent and cultivated reticence must have been at war with her artis-
