Planning a Jean Garrigue Reader

This post was written by NYPL Short-Term Fellow Roger Mitchell. Mitchell, Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University and former director of Indiana University's Creative Writing Program, is the author of numerous books of poetry and recently completed work on a biography of Jean Garrigue.

Fifty years after her death, Jean Garrigue (1912-1972), one of America’s most admired poets in the mid-twentieth century, is not well known. I thought that a biography, which I have just completed, ought to be supplemented with a Jean Garrigue Reader. This would show the world the variety and complexity of her writing by adding to her best poems her accomplishments in prose. She won a national short story contest in 1944 judged by John Crowe Ransom and the staff of The Kenyon Review and underwritten by Doubleday. Doubleday, unfortunately, wanted her to write a novel, as did most of the other commercial houses in New York. She tried for ten years, but the novel was not a form that fit an imagination fed on the work of Keats, Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Theodore Roethke. Several parts of her novel, however, did make excellent stories. The other prose forms she excelled at were the letter, particularly the travel letter, and in the case of her piece titled, "Chartres," the travel essay. She was also an excellent critic of books of her time.

J.D. McClatchy’s edition of Garrigue’s Selected Poems of 1992 can be said to have begun a review of her best poems, but selections from her letters, essays, reviews, and stories need to be set beside them. The long letter Garrigue wrote Josephine Herbst about Colette’s funeral in Paris is an obvious choice, given Garrigue’s high regard for Colette. Garrigue wrote a travel essay as an undergraduate at Butler College for that school’s literary magazine which deserves consideration. Called “Guethary,” it describes the Basque community in Guethary, a small seaside resort in France where Jean lived for six months with her sister and brother-in-law in 1932. The Basques fascinated Garrigue as a self-contained itinerant group that lived outside the established societies of Europe. [1] She would make a similar move in her life in 1940 when she moved to Greenwich Village. Garrigue’s great achievement in the travel essay would be “Chartres," published in the magazine ARTS in December 1958 and later included in her book of prose poems, Chartres and Prose Poems (1970). [2]

Fiction was a vexed subject for Jean Garrigue. She read it, she wrote it, and she won a national prize for it. The winning story, “The Snowfall,” was published in The Kenyon Review in 1944. She had published another story the previous year in The Kenyon Review, “Mr. Haszka.” It drew a strong personal response from Jackson Mac Low, unknown at the time but destined to become one of the best experimental poets in America. [3] “The Snowfall” was republished in Anchor in the Sea: An Anthology of Psychological Fiction (1947), edited by Alan Swallow and published by The Swallow Press and William Morrow & Company. Commercial publishers wanted novels. She was already writing one in 1944, but this new interest spurred her on to finish it. All who read it praised parts of it highly but never thought the whole of it convincing. Parts of it were published as stories twice in Botteghe Oscure, twice in Quarterly Review of Literature, and once in International Literary Annual, edited by the English novelist and poet, John Wain. Jean’s genius as a writer lay not in the slow growth of consciousness in a complex social fabric but in the immediate sensations of the shorter lyric poem.

The Garrigue Papers in NYPL's Berg Collection contain unfinished and unpublished stories and essays. Among the most interesting is a manuscript on Rimbaud, a four-page paper written in the fall of 1942 or spring of 1943 when she was a student at Iowa. Garrigue was thirty that spring. To hear the mature poet praising Rimbaud invites us to think of Garrigue as esthetically informed and, to a degree, adventurous. “We accept his perceptions for what they are; we are grateful for them because they are another vision of the world, and we are aware that there are as many visions of the world as there are phases of human time.” Garrigue was not a Surrealist in the overt manner of Rimbaud or Breton. She was waving, as she said, “the Romanticist’s red flag, for I am asking for free expression of individual points of view, and Rimbaud is a classic example of the romanticist suffering his romanticism, suffering of his freedom to reject or smash the idols.” [4]

Jean returned to Europe in late September 1953, settling first in Paris. She had last seen it when she was 20 and living with her sister and brother-in-law. Writing Josephine Herbst almost daily, she said, “Oh the wonders I have beheld! The Old World is Our World. Our new world.” One of the first wonders was Paris’s famous graveyard, Pere Lachaise, which she described in great detail. Out of it she wrote one of her best poems, “Soliloquy in the Cemetery of Pere Lachaise,” later published in Poetry and given one of that magazine’s annual awards. The following spring she wrote Josie a seven-page letter/essay about her journey by bus down from Florence where she had spent the winter to the city of Rome. [5] Two poems were made out of its well-observed details. Another travel essay, also unpublished, shows Jean’s loving attention to the plain lives of ordinary people. Titled “Study in Day Coaches and Busses,” she says of herself, “I am part of the plebian backwash on the day coach.” The list of characters contains an old Kentucky gentleman whose “grandmother was a Squaw Indian”, “an insane man on the bus, a violinist,” and certain women she observed. “There is always something marvelous and amazing about the brusk camaraderie of these women.” [6] Everywhere she traveled, here or abroad, her eye searched for people who led ordinary lives and seemed, however careworn, untroubled. At the other end of the spectrum, Garrigue’s interest in “The Eternal City” had much to do with Rome’s role in the Italian Renaissance. Rome was also where she and Stanley Kunitz planned to start making a life together in 1954. It lasted eight months, but in those months she would visit the site of Keats’s death, the water gardens of Villa d’Este about which she wrote one of her great operatic poems, and meet Allen Tate at The American Academy in Rome. Tate, briefly a lover, would years later ask her to write a critical monograph on Marianne Moore for the University of Minnesota Press.

Another “eternal” site of Jean’s sense of her origins was Greece, and in 1962 she was finally able to visit its sacred sites. After a cold winter in London, she took a train, as she wrote Josie in another of her epic travel letters, “over the alps, down to Venice, to Trieste and then all the length of Jugoslavia to finally” Athens. [7] Athens she found “ugly,” a heavily industrial city, but the Acropolis was “glorious.” In truth, the Greece she went to see was not Athens but the mythic sites, Delphi and Mount Parnassus, home of the Greek Muses as well as the Delphic Oracle. While doing her poetic duty, something else caught her imagination. “After the severe sublimities of Delphi, after much rugged desolation of heights and ranges not to be inhabited that we passed by boat and train, this supremely milk and honey land, rich and green.” [8] Greece gave her a living replica of pastoral, which is to say pre-industrial, beauty.

Jean reached a third site of her origins, Les Garrigues, in southern France also in 1962 when she spent two months at the La Napoule art colony near Cannes. Les Garrigue is a large area of scrubland on the lower slopes of the French Alps which gave Jean’s family its name. Toward the end of her stay, Jean met a woman at La Napoule who spoke good French and agreed to take a trip with her up along the River Var. They stayed the night and next day hiked up some steep rocky terrain to a village that had neither, school, store, nor electricity. It fit the pre-industrial dream Jean had of the life she longed for. Out of this experience, she wrote one of her best poems, “Pays Perdu,” or lost country. Buried deep in the Garrigue papers is a letter written to “Shirley” (no last name given). This is the woman with whom she took the hike. The village itself was called “Lacs,” one meaning of which is “trap.” In thanking Shirley she wrote, “That village in the mountains…yes, truly a piege [tr. trap]. A piege for those living there. It being too sweet, however hard, however forbidding, to leave. A trap for those who visit it. It signifying a kind of dream-womb, a place one might die living in but which one might die to live in.” [9]

A Garrigue reader would also bring out Jean’s extensive reading, the virtual earth in which her own writing grew, spurred on by her teachers at Shortridge High School, Butler College, and The University of Chicago. It is not just that she reviewed many books. Reviewing was first a source of occasional income, but she was also able to choose poets whose work helped shape her own. Among her contemporaries, she reviewed Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, James Dickey, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Eberhart, and among earlier generations, Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken (twice), William Carlos Williams (twice), Dylan Thomas, and of course Marianne Moore (twice). She reviewed for the best journals, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Saturday Review of Literature, Poetry, Commentary, and in 1964, The New Leader made her their staff Poetry Critic.

Her literary interests and knowledge were not limited to reviewing current books. In 1954, while living in Paris, she spent weeks at La Bibliotheque Nationale researching material for a literature course she titled “Woman as Leader, Rebel and Writer,” a course she taught a year later at The New School. One New York publisher tried to persuade her to write her course notes into a book. Garrigue’s principal efforts as critic she devoted to Marianne Moore and Emily Dickinson, writing a 40-page essay on Moore and a 4-page condensation of Dickinson’s importance for Atlantic Brief Lives: A Biographical Companion to the Arts (1971), edited by Louis Kronenberger. Both of these essays took a year or more to write, in each case expanding into a book-length manuscript before she reduced them. She wrote an incisive review of Elizabeth Bowen’s Early Stories for the short-lived journal, Tomorrow. [10] The Radcliffe Institute recognized her teaching ability by offering her a second year as a Fellow and asked if she would also teach a course for them. She agreed and planned a seminar on Dickinson, Moore, and Wallace Stevens but at the last minute declined the extra year. Two years later she taught the course to undergraduates at the University of Washington. Her papers have extensive “reading notes” for the poets she cared for most, Thomas Hardy for one, a man who succeeded in being both novelist and poet.

It needs to be mentioned, too, that Jean Garrigue wrote several plays, inspired most likely by the plays of the poet, Richard Eberhart. My feeling is that only one of them is a success. It is called “The Day” and seems to have been written in her years of spending time at Woodstock, New York, i.e., the mid-Forties.

[1] Louise Garrigus [Jean Garrigue’s pre-professional name], “Guethary,” Mss. (Butler College, May 1934), 21-23.
[2] Garrigue to Josephine Herbst, T.L.S., Josephine Herbst Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
[3] Jackson Mac Low to JG, TLS, 18 April 1944, Jean Garrigue Papers, Box 37, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
[4] Garrigue, “On Rimbaud,” ms. essay, Garrigue Papers, Box 67.
[5] Garrigue to JH, T.L.S., 9 March 1954, Josephine Herbst Papers. A copy of this letter is among the Garrigue Papers, Box 67.
[6] Garrigue, “Study in Day Coaches and Busses,” Typed ms., Garrigue Papers, Box 42.
[7] Garrigue, to JH, T.L.S., n.d., Garrigue Papers, Box 26.
[8] Garrigue to JH, n.d., T.L.S., Garrigue Papers, Box 26. Garrigue broke off this letter and returned to it as she was about to leave Greece.
[9] Garrigue to “Shirley”, T.L. n.d., Garrigue Papers, Box 28, “Misc. Correspondence”. My search for Shirley’s full name continues.
[10] Garrigue, “Early Stories by Elizabeth Bowen,” Tomorrow (June 1951), 59-60.