I met James Wright at Kenyon in the dark fall of 1948. If there had been no world war nor the chastened enlightenment that had succeeded it in academic circles, neither of us would have been there. Kenyon had been a kind of club for the sons of wealthy midwestern families. Founded by an Episcopal bishop in 1824 on a hill in central Ohio, it was a handsome school of a character that might best be described as homespun Western Reserve overlaid with Oxonian pretensions. You could read in the architecture of the ivied buildings the devout self-satisfaction of early alumni. There were huge oaks and elms and maples to carve out the generous volumes of space in the college park, and a Middle Path down which the fraternity boys sang every Tuesday evening after dinner as they marched off to perform secret rituals in their lodges in the woods. In the flatlands to the east, just inside the curving single track of a Baltimore and Ohio spur, were the hangars where the collegians of the thirties had kept their biplanes. They also fielded a polo team.
Wright came from poor country people who’d lived for generations on the Ohio River. Only the GI bill made college a possibility for him. He’d served in the army of occupation in Japan, and it was there that another classmate of ours, Jack Furniss, who was serving in the same outfit and was planning to attend Kenyon, had persuaded Wright he might do the same. The selling point was poetry. John Crowe Ransom was on the Kenyon faculty and publishing The Kenyon Review from the basement of Ascension Hall.
I too had been drawn to the idea of this small campus at which John Crowe Ransom taught. My high school grades had been erratic but my school, the Bronx High School of Science, was prestigious and Kenyon accepted me. To this day I don’t understand how I had known about Ransom, how I as a teenager could have made this knowledgeable choice and found my way to central Ohio. Perhaps my high school guidance counselor saw in my New York folksinging background the makings of a good Southern Agrarian. In any event here I was, age seventeen, as far away from home as I’d ever been. My father had taken a bank loan to pay my tuition. I needed to make the grades for a scholarship. I was reading Milton and Matthew Arnold. It all seemed so sudden. I couldn’t easily concentrate.
In fact this classically beautiful campus was in spiritual turmoil. Forces were in contention for it. Naturally this was difficult for a freshman to understand who assumes the entire world to be confidently secured, with only himself in irresolute states of longing and confusion.
The administration’s goal to change Kenyon from the second-rate school that it had been was articulated before the war by its new president, Gordon Keith Chalmers, who had pedagogical sympathies with Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago. It was Chalmers who had brought in Ransom, and his colleague on the Review, the philosopher Phillip Blair Rice, as seed for a new, distinguished faculty in the humanities that slowly, duly developed. And the student body was rising to this level: The enlightened postwar admissions policy of the school was to open it up—not only to veterans but to good students from public high schools. None of this came without its costs, however; there was resistance—some of the attitudes and customs of the old school had persisted. But Wright was one of the veterans whose presence on the campus was inevitably challenging the complacent character of the traditional student body, the drinkers and the jocks and the proud C-average second- or third-generation Kenyon men who wore gray flannels and white bucks and school sweaters in the monarchical colors of purple and white. The veterans had brought a nice hard skeptical edge to all of this pretension, and they had a certain authority. They tended to be good students, tough classicists, tough poets, tying into another, slimmer tradition, if it was that, exemplified by the Ransomites of 1940, who had included Robert Lowell and Peter Taylor and their young instructor Randall Jarrell.
But Kenyon now offered its halls to a variety of exotics—Jews and Irish Catholics from New York and Philadelphia, the first two black men ever admitted, foreign students, homosexuals, farmhands, and a fair number of unprepossessing boys given to social afflictions like acne or stuttering. The only thing common to them all was the disposition to do well academically. In fact it was this group, the Independents, as they were called, because for the most part they either could not or did not want to join one of the eight fraternities that ruled the social life of the small college, who were now routinely making the best grades, pulling down all the honors, and graduating into the most prestigious graduate schools.
This was the group to which Wright and I sociologically belonged and to whose standards we aspired. We had met at the Commons. In those days they put out the food at refectory tables and then opened the doors and got out of the way. There was always a stampede, for the table arrangements inevitably reflected our place in the great chain of Kenyon’s being. Fraternities sat together, or varsity teams, or people who shared one of the more esoteric majors, like theology, and nobody wanted to be caught with the wrong crowd. I went for the unaffiliated table, of course, where the raucous Independents held court, and that is how, inevitably, one day I found myself sitting next to Wright. He was a hulking fellow, not particularly tall but built like a wrestler, with sloping shoulders and a size eighteen neck. He wore army issue fatigue pants and a sweatshirt; this costume he would vary only, as I learned over time, with a pair of stiff new overalls. He had a round face with particularly small features—small mouth, and small eyes encircled with a pair of colorless plastic GI glasses, which he regularly adjusted because his small nose had not a sufficient bridge to keep them up where they belonged. He spoke in a high but richly timbred voice, like a tenor’s. His conversation was intense, opinionated, heavy with four-letter words, but what made it astonishing was that it was interwoven with recitations of poetry. I had never heard anything like it. He would glide from ordinary speech to verse without dropping a beat. It was as if recitation was a normal part of ordinary discourse. Sometimes the lines were appropriate to the subject under discussion, other times not, as if he had been running through them silently in his mind and they just happened to break into his speech, or they had been summoned up from some area of his unconscious and he was merely giving voice to them as a madman speaking to himself. But it all made perfect sense, somehow, and left you awed, because it was a whole system of mind. He knew reams of English poetry from memory and he was helplessly engaged with it. We sat long after the meal was over. He drank coffee and smoked a cigarette, holding it in a peculiarly European way, between the third and fourth fingers of his hand.
I told him about a discussion in my philosophy class. At this time the national presidential campaign was under way between Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey. Most of the class was for Dewey, the Republican. A couple were for Truman. I thought of the late Franklin Roosevelt as the real president and so was rooting for his onetime vice president Henry A. Wallace, an idealist running on a third-party ticket with leftist backing and getting his comsymp head handed to him. The class had for its text Plato’s Republic. We’d been meeting in the basement of the college chapel, the Church of the Holy Spirit. When I spoke for Wallace, everyone in the class looked at me—one of those!—and I told Wright it was at that moment I realized what Plato meant by the cave of shadows. He laughed. Then he said in a low growl, suddenly angry, despairing, that Harry Truman had dropped the bomb not once but twice, which made him a son of a bitch for all eternity, that Dewey was a complacent blockhead, and that Henry Wallace was the only one of any of them worth anything as a human being and that was why he was being crucified.
Then all at once he was chanting some lines from Spenser and he asked me if I didn’t think they were the most goddamn beautiful lines ever written.
—
That was a cold, beautiful autumn and it grew dark earlier every afternoon. I struggled with my new life. Truman was asking all government employees to sign loyalty oaths. Am I wrong or was Kenyon asking its seventeen-year-old freshmen to do the same thing? Why was there compulsory chapel every Sunday morning? And why were freshmen required to wear beanies? This was 1948, there had been the Holocaust and a world war that had killed forty million people, and the same college that published The Kenyon Review expected me to go around with some stupid-ass school cap on my head like an idiot in a Cruickshank drawing. I took my beanie—beanie! the very word in one’s mouth was a humiliation—and stuffed it in a garbage can.
What I admired about my new friend Wright was his invulnerability or obliviousness to such struggles. Somehow it had to do with the fact that he was a poet, which is to say he operated at a depth of feeling originating solely within himself. I sought him out whenever I had the chance. He was the first poet I’d ever met. I had known students who wrote verse, of course; I had written some myself. But it seemed to me now that what defined a poet was that he didn’t stop being a poet between poems. Poetry was not something one practiced but a state of being in which every moment of one’s existence was amplified. You could not be in Wright’s presence for five minutes without understanding what it took to get a true line down on a page—what it had taken Edwin Arlington Robinson, for example, or Frost, or Keats, for that matter. It was an intensity of self-generated perception, a raging, all-consuming subjection to your own consciousness, a kind of helplessness, finally.
Wright always carried with him the verses he was working on, in stiff black clamp binders, three or four of them under his arm along with his books. He was never without his work. He seemed to have hundreds of verses and to be subjecting all of them to reconsideration all the time. You’d find him at the Village Inn, sitting alone with a cigarette and a cup of coffee, or in front of a beer at Jean Valjean’s, and he’d be hunched in a booth revising a typed draft in his round, grade-school hand.
We did not share any classes. He was a semester or so ahead of me and already at the point of doing only electives. He was taking five or six courses rather than the usual four, not only because he needed to graduate before his GI benefits ran out, but because he had an enormous appetite for literature. He was a prodigious student. He was learning Anglo-Saxon, German, and French. And a language was not just something to take an exam in, it was a music you heard. He discovered in the library a collection of 78s of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf renditions of Schubert lieder; he became a Schwarzkopf addict, listening by the hour. He would emerge from the library and stride down the Middle Path. Du holde Kunst, he would sing, in wieviel grauen Stunden, / Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt, / Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb entzunden, / Hast mich in eine bessre Welt entrückt!, this farm boy from Martins Ferry, Ohio, rolling along in his wrestler’s gait. He was not susceptible to ordinary judgments.
As the year went on, I found a collegial stance that suited me—or perhaps it was a sense of myself in my generation: I was wary not only of the school’s Anglophilic customs but of life itself. There was a war now in Korea I supposed I’d end up in. I became one of those who could read or play ball or drink beer or shoot pool or go into the nearby town of Mt. Vernon to find girls or even study, dispensing to each thing a careless measure of sincerity. Life, whatever that was, was ahead of me—as it was for all of us. There was a kind of metaphysical suspense in our collegiate lives. But Wright seemed beyond that. He seemed to be fully realized for what he was. He had no degrees of sincerity. There was nothing provisional about him. He was the sole, whole, inevitable Jim in every situation, formal or informal, alone or in a crowd, the same helpless poet in all events.
—
In February of 1949 the oldest of the three dormitories, Old Kenyon, burned to the ground one Saturday night just a week before I was to move into a room there. The worst of the fire had occurred in Middle Kenyon, the section of the old building reserved for the unaffiliated students, who had been housed there to make a kind of fraternity in spite of themselves. Nine students were missing, all of them from this group. Like Wright I had been living in temporary barracks the college had set up in the adjoining village of Gambier to accommodate the swollen postwar enrollment. On Sunday morning I went down to the campus and stood looking at the gutted building. You could see the sky through the windows. A mist of blue smoke rose from the ruins. It was very cold, very quiet. Nobody seemed able to move. We heard that the dean of men, Frank Bailey, had rescued several students and was himself in the hospital. At noon the president of the college, Gordon Chalmers, convened everyone at the Commons and called the roll for the entire student body. When someone did not answer to his name, Chalmers asked for friends and acquaintances to stand and try to recall when they had seen him last, in the hope that he had left campus for the weekend. The exercise was futile. Seven of the nine dead students were Jewish. One was Hispanic-Indian.
What was so terrible was not that anyone had deliberately started the fire—that had not been the case—but that it had nevertheless struck so as to reveal to us all how awfully the college still mirrored the society at large.
Students who’d been made homeless doubled up in the other dorms. Students returned from the hospital wearing casts on their arms, or with bandaged heads. Dean Bailey resumed his duties on crutches. The following fall, with Old Kenyon being rebuilt stone for stone, I moved in with the de facto fraternity of Independent survivors now situated in the shingled Alumni House in the village of Gambier at the edge of the college park. It was a raucous year, all of us living in such close quarters in tiny guest rooms. Wright was one of us but he could not afford to live there. From his arrival at Kenyon, he had lived apart even from the people who lived apart—he simply would not be hostage to the frenzies of dormitory life. We invented all manner of games—roof ball, mailbox ball; we redesigned for the front porch city sidewalk games from our childhoods, like boxball; we played three-dimensional tic-tac-toe, bridge; we ran intricate touch football games, or Frisbee pie-plate Olympics; and on rainy days we argued philosophy and literature as if arguing were a sport. I think we were making an alternate college. It was as if the lines had been drawn; some sort of battle for Kenyon’s soul was under way, or for our own, although no one would have thought this was the case. The boys who had been most severely injured or closest to the nine who had died were the most antic of all.
So it was a somehow transformed school in my sophomore year. I think of the whole year as a kind of spring, the trees in constant leaf, and a soft, sweet breeze smelling of haymows coming up from the central Ohio farms. It was now apparent that Wright had become for many of us a kind of older brother; he aroused an almost universal respect that was unheard-of in our critical society. There were actually several fine undergraduate poets in residence—Robert Mezey was one—but Wright was their model, central to them all. He had had some verses accepted for publication in The Kenyon Review. For an undergraduate poet, that was akin to a Nobel Prize. He roomed off-campus in the home of Professor Timberlake, with whom he was reading Beowulf. He was the kind of student with whom a professor would associate. Later he would stay with the family of Professor Hanfman, his German teacher. He was absorbing everything he could of European language, art, music, but without giving up an iota of his midwestern self. He sang lieder, but he loved bawdy army songs too, and one in particular, “Sam, Sam, the Shithouse Man,” he taught to several of his entourage so that they made an entire chorus going their satirical way down the Middle Path.
Now I will speak of this entourage, because it is essential to an understanding of Wright at Kenyon. Something had happened, some shift had occurred in the local Zeitgeist—a favorite word of ours—some apolitical assertiveness had arisen that had not been there before the fire, a tiny countercultural blaze of its own burning, probably without our awareness. In James Wright’s case this was a new sociability of a very specific kind—the cultivation and celebration of the outcasts and pariahs of the college.
Of course he had always been a great audience for collegiate nonsense. Our witty classmate Billy Goldhurst, for example, did very funny imitations of Bogart and Cagney and liked at odd and inappropriate moments to perform scenes from films from the past—as for instance Raymond Massey’s rendition of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, while we stood behind him and hummed “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” louder and louder, of course, until he had to shout the lines to be heard above our singing. Wright loved this sort of thing. He remembered gags, jokes you had told, lines you came up with, and quoted them back to you weeks later. He broadcast them around the campus. He relished the imitations we did of our teachers—“Pappy” Ransom’s soft Virginia dialect, for example, or the way Phil Rice mumbled his incredible lectures while picking shreds of cigarette paper off his lower lip, or the fey lisp of the elderly, somewhat rotund French scholar known to us as “Fauncy,” or the almost salivating delivery of one of the European history professors when he came around to his famous lecture on the anatomical peculiarities of Elizabeth I.
Of course students have always irreverently celebrated their professors among themselves. What was noteworthy was the audience Wright made himself for this kind of horseplay. Because he took such appreciative and not particularly discriminating enjoyment from every stupid routine we came up with, we fell into the habit of performing for him and acting like clowns whenever he was around.
I know I felt this tendency within myself. I was not a college poet, I had found new loyalties outside the English department—in the theater and in philosophy—and so perhaps had a sharper sense of the poetry scene at Kenyon than I might have had as an insider. Besides the genuine poets such as Wright and Mezey, there were several poetasters, pretenders who had none of the talent but all of the requisite sensibility, and I remember having my fun one day, consciously going for the laugh, walking with Wright and some other friends in the late autumn, when I suddenly rushed into a pile of raked leaves and kicked them into a cloud and stood in this rain of leaves and raised one limp-wristed hand and said with the tremulous delivery of Blather Bunthorne in Patience, “Look, look, the leaves are falling!” And of course, for weeks afterwards that was Jim’s greeting to me: “Look, look, the leaves are falling!,” followed by his brassy laughter. He never forgot a thing. He had a library of quotes from us all—as subject to the recall of his prodigious memory as any verse in English, from Piers Plowman to Robert Service.
Inevitably, in his role as a patron of humor and irreverence, Wright began to attract the weirder students of the community. By our junior year he was associating almost exclusively with the social pariahs, the great offenses to collegiate style and decorum, as rowdy as they may have been. And these were either Middle Kenyon Independents, from the despised of that elegant, outcast group, or campus loners like himself—eccentrics, boys with odd gifts, like tendentiousness, or an encyclopedic knowledge of inconsequential things. They might be students who were physically filthy, and whose eyeglasses were encrusted with dirt; or con men, the shadowy few who seemed to be living at Kenyon with no visible connection at all to academic studies; or fantasists and drunks; or the very shy—he loved the very shy. He loved them all, and I would see him walking down Middle Path while swirling around him, performing without question, was one or more of this repertory company of clowns that he had gathered to himself. He was their audience, laughing uproariously at their antics, bringing them into flower, giving them courage or at least some sense of having, from his recognition of them, a place in the college community.
So that was the entourage. Of course I was by this time not entirely in sympathy with the whole idea. I wondered what Wright was up to. If there was a political dimension to it all, it escaped me. Some of the more outlandish of these boys were simply fools; there was no other word for them. They were just not as funny as he made them out to be. When they were with Jim, I tended to avoid him—go the other way when I saw them all coming. I felt, possibly to my discredit, that he might be unconsciously patronizing them, that apart from his genuine preference for their company, he might be finding a kind of sustenance from it, not entirely to his honor.
There were all sorts of reasons, even at a school as small as Kenyon, for friends to lose close touch with each other. I had in my junior year moved to the heart of the campus in the reconstructed Old Kenyon, fireproofed now with tiled floors and painted cement-block stairwells. I was a full-fledged, intensely serious philosophy major, studying alternately with the members of the best two-man philosophy department in the country, Phil Rice and Virgil Aldrich. A star school actor and veteran, Paul Newman, had gone on to Yale Drama School, and so I found myself landing some good roles in the Drama Club productions—Joe Bonaparte, in Odets’s Golden Boy, for example. Theater took up an immense amount of time, as did an affair I fell into for a while with a young woman from out of town who had come to act in one of the campus productions. And so I was in my own way living the collegiate life; I was making Kenyon mine with as many claims to my school as the most traditional fraternity boy, establishing myself as each of us had to do, undergoing the crucial, assertive process of self-definition in a constant stream of ideas and feelings.
In the world outside, what were called “atomic spies” were being arrested every week, and the ominous ideology of the cold war had achieved national consensus. Time magazine was calling those of us in school the silent generation, which should have been some indication to me that something was already in dissent born—that some small secret transmigration of the nation’s soul had been effected and was waiting to reveal itself. Meanwhile I did not entirely appreciate Wright’s perhaps most bizarre follower, a fellow named Frank LeFever. I will describe him in his apotheosis, and it will become apparent how prophecy eludes even those most receptive to it. LeFever wore shredded blue jeans cut off at the knees in the warmer weather, and T-shirts with great looping holes and hanging flaps. He never bothered to have his hair cut, so that it hung long and shaggy down the back of his neck. His facial hair too was untended, so that he looked rather oriental, with a wispy brown beard and mustache. I believe he favored workshoes without socks and sometimes affected a single earring, like a Portuguese fisherman. I had no idea what his academic credentials were, but he was Wright’s constant companion and lived to entertain him. It was LeFever who stood up at a reading by Robert Frost in Rosse Hall and in front of the whole college shouted, “Mr. Frost, was that a real poem, or did you just make it up?” A nimble fellow, he liked to climb up on the roof of Old Kenyon at night and lope like Quasimodo along the ridge and howl at the moon. All this was a cause of great merriment to the now small company of two or three hardcore rebels who followed James Wright wherever he went. LeFever had a reedy voice that gave sly implications to whatever he said, even in the rare moments when he was serious. But for the most part he knew no restraint. He was disposed to indiscriminate mockery, whether the target was appropriate or not, and so was barely tolerated by most of us as a perpetual adolescent, a kid who didn’t know when to stop. But Wright encouraged every alienated impulse it was in LeFever to express and was his sponsor and patron in this time I speak of, 1951, a good dozen years before the dropout spirit as well as the self-display of hair and dress of the hippie movement took hold and became a countercultural phenomenon of the 1960s.
I don’t claim prescience for the poet. The political character of this esoteric fraternity of his founding probably escaped him, as it did me. But he was their audience and urgent friend, and they all laughed a lot. He brought out the glories of their incongruous presence on campus and made a culture of their displacement, and with his brassy laughter and academic prowess was a shield for them all. More to the point was the necessity to him of their friendship—I see that in retrospect. It is odd, I suppose, when speaking of a poet, to suggest that there were times when he relied on somebody else to express what he had to say, but I believe it to be so; another voice was required, as in blasphemous counterpoint, some sort of anti-poetry being called for, some vulgar carelessness of all ambition and achievement, including, or especially, his own.
That inner entourage are today rather impressive members of society—of course. LeFever is a well-regarded neuropsychologist in New York. Another, Dr. Eugene Pugatch, is an eminent neurologist—and so on. There is in their example some possibility that the wildest excesses of youthful spirit are truly in service to the ideals of the culture. Not that the Kenyon administration believed this: a year or two after the last of the veterans had gone through, and by the mid-fifties, when Ransom was on the verge of retirement and Phillip Rice had been killed in an automobile accident, those of the irrepressible cadre of Wright’s old pals who still were in school were strongly encouraged to leave. And within a few years the right wing at Kenyon had regained its position and admissions policies began to go back to what they had been before the days of Ransom.
—
Not until my senior year would I finally see the root source of James Wright’s life and work and begin to understand the immensity of his effort. He invited me to Martins Ferry one cold winter weekend. We hitched a ride into Mt. Vernon and caught a bus that made its circuitous way southeast along two-lane roads, where people waited with their valises at the crossings, and horses stood in the snowfields beside bales of hay. Wright’s sole living relative in Martins Ferry was an aunt. She was a gracious and very humble woman, clearly made uncomfortable by the collegiate ambience we brought with us. The house was quite small, a worker’s one-story cottage in a street of them. Our sleeping arrangements consisted of the parlor floor beside the wood stove, with newspapers for blankets. In the morning we went to a diner for breakfast and then crossed the river into Wheeling, West Virginia, where we attended an afternoon concert of the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra, sitting for a dollar each in the almost empty wooden balcony of a hall where there seemed to be more people playing on stage than listening in the audience. It was not an event I would have chosen for myself—the child of music-loving parents in New York who had made him a familiar of Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House. But I was incredibly moved. How hard these people played, and how they struggled to do well, and how well they did, and what a profound isolation it was to long for beauty and grace in the industrial heartland of the United States.
Wright at Kenyon had to struggle to make it his. He was carrying within himself such enormous contradictions—this dirt-poor Ohioan set down in the intellectual park of a historic private college, this poet alive in the constitution of a football lineman, this irremediably midwestern American in unslakeable thirst for the language and culture of Europe. Despite his academic successes he was an embattled student. He had the greatest respect for Ransom, of course; possibly he revered him. I have no way of knowing, but I assume he showed a lot of his work to the older poet and received the benefit of Ransom’s just and serenely disinterested critical taste. But I cannot imagine that the relationship was close or that it was comfortable for either of them. They were too different as poets and as men. It is my impression that in the year Robert Hillyer served as a visiting professor of English, Wright seemed in his nature to prefer this less fashionable and more romantic poet—at least as a teacher or as a person with whom he could talk.
The Martins Ferry boy was never happy with the New Criticism—something the rest of us practiced at Kenyon the way at Ohio State they played football. (I remember my sense of achievement when I produced a fifteen-page paper on the eight lines of Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.”) As a poet he felt a simple, instinctive aversion to the precisions of textual analysis and the culture of possibly self-satisfied intellectualism that it represented. But as a student he would need to lend himself to the dominating ideals of scrupulous critical speech, the way of talking about the poem that gave it its just due apart from who had written it and when it had been written and what aesthetic/historical principles it gave evidence of. So here was another conflict that had to be accommodated on a constant, daily basis, almost as one would have to deal with physical impairment. I reiterate that Wright had no levels of response other than disproportionate. Once he submitted a poem to the school newspaper, The Collegian. After it was accepted and put in type, he decided he didn’t like the poem after all and did not want to “stand by it,” as he told the paper’s editor. I happened to be present at the time. He wanted the poem pulled. The editor refused, saying it was too late, and in any event he, Wright, might be the poet, but not necessarily the best judge of the poem’s quality. Wright roared and leaped across the desk. I had to grab his arms and pin them back to keep him from killing the poor pale editor, a thin fellow who walked with a slight limp, as it happened. I shouted for the editor to get the hell out of there, which he hastened to do—I couldn’t have held Wright much longer; he was as strong as an ox. Afterwards, when I tried to calm him down, I found that, for my trouble, I had now been associated with an unforgivable affront. My friend would not talk to me for several weeks.
And he was as often as not in some, unfair to him, combat with a teacher. He came to Kenyon already well read, but he went through books almost as though there existed within him a panic that could be stilled only by more and more reading. As an older student, a veteran, he assumed an adult status that his teachers were happy to endorse; at the same time it raised their expectations of him. I remember this characteristic problem came to a head on the occasion of his senior thesis, which turned out to be a 385-page book on Thomas Hardy. Despite its size and its ambition, and the fact that he’d done something truly colossal for an undergraduate, the manuscript was found wanting and returned to him for revision. Wright’s reaction to this verged on the suicidal. He did end up reworking the thesis and it was accepted in its revised form, but the experience remained shattering to him—some sort of institutional rebuke to his pride, his appetite for literature, his capacity for work, his claim of a place at the High Table for James Wright of Martins Ferry, Ohio.
—
Here this little memoir of Wright at Kenyon properly ends. We were graduated in the same class, 1952, though he had in fact finished all his requirements a semester earlier. My memory picks him up a few months later in New York, where he stopped en route to his Fulbright in Vienna. He was with his new wife, Liberty. A few of us were boarding in a railroad flat on West Ninety-second Street that was the home of the Goldhurst brothers, Richard and Billy, both of Kenyon—the same apartment where some years before, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac used to hang out. James Wright was on his way to Europe in his old army lace-up boots and fatigues and a jacket too small for his bulk. He held the inevitable cigarette between the wrong fingers and carried his hard black notebooks filled with new poems. He read to us in his tenor voice; I think he actually trained his voice to a lower pitch as he moved on in his career as a reader of poetry. He left an extra pair of shoes behind, which he then petitioned us to mail to him, and we eventually did, but not soon enough to be kind. Thereafter I saw him less and less frequently, I am terribly sad to say. I followed his publications with immense pride, but no astonishment. All of us at Kenyon had known he was the real thing. But I did regret it when in my view he seemed to be sucked into the tiny swamp of professional poetry in the United States. The poets in all their flailing intensity could really keep each other gasping. I did see at this or that reading the continuous attraction he had for loyal followers, for an entourage. But by then I understood the necessity for it, and American poetry’s awful surrounding silence.
One evening years ago, James Wright came to visit me in New Rochelle, where I had settled with my wife and children. He stayed overnight and did not sleep well—we heard him cry out from time to time. But in the morning I found him sitting at the breakfast table reciting poems to my three children. He sat in his boots and trousers and ribbed undershirt with a glass of bourbon in front of him and a cigarette in his hand, and because my elder daughter’s name is Jenny, he gave us “Jenny Kissed Me.” And while these three little children stared at him and slowly chewed their cornflakes, he went from Sidney to Donne to Pope to Thomas Gray, and while my wife in her bathrobe was making their peanut butter sandwiches for their lunch bags, he came up in history through Browning and Tennyson, and eventually got to the German poet, Trakl, and recited, as I blinked and drank my coffee, a poem about German decadence, and it was not yet eight o’clock in the morning.
The last time I saw my friend he was in Mt. Sinai hospital in New York, terribly ill, terminally ill, and he could no longer speak. He had a grommet in his throat to maintain the tracheotomy that would allow him to breathe. His mouth was packed with some sort of medicinal batting. He had been remarried for many years to Anne Wright. She was there with him and handed him a clipboard with a pad. He wrote something and handed it to me. I could feel his eyes as he watched my face for my reaction. I read in the same round grade-school hand I remembered: “The leaves are falling.”
(1990)