In 1927, in the introductory note to his last book, Winter Words,Thomas Hardy wrote, “So far as I am aware, I happen to be the only English poet who has brought out a new volume of verse on his… birthday”—leaving his age blank in the event that he did not live to see the book published, as he did not. He would have been eighty-eight. I believe Virginia Hamilton Adair is the only American poet—perhaps the only poet—to have brought out her first book of poems at the age of eighty-three. But the singularity of such an achievement would be a mere curiosity if the work did not have substantial literary value. Winter Words, although Hardy’s weakest book, is still better than most poets’ best. And I think many will agree that Ants on the Melon is one of the freshest and liveliest books of verse in years.
A reader may wonder why so accomplished a writer should first offer her work to the public at an age when most poets have stopped writing. It may seem a simple question, but the answer is far from simple.
To begin at the beginning, Virginia Hamilton Adair was born in New York City in 1913 and grew up for the most part in New Jersey. Her parents were well-educated and cultured people; her father, Robert Browning Hamilton, a serious reader and lover of poetry (not yet an endangered species), was a poet himself, and the author of “Along the Road,” a poem that was rather famous in its day—set to music, spoken from pulpits, and quoted through many editions of Bartlett—an old-fashioned lyric, but all the same a skillful and charming one. It goes like this:
I walked a mile with Pleasure.
She chattered all the way,
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with Sorrow,
And ne’er a word said she;
But, oh, the things I learned from her
When Sorrow walked with me!
Virginia cannot remember a time when she did not hear poetry being read aloud or recited. In her earliest memory of a specific work (she is looking through the bars of her crib!) her father is reading to her from Pope’s Iliad, that neglected masterpiece. When she was a little older, he would recite heroic couplets, stopping short of the rhyme word and waiting for her to supply it—a fine game for a budding poet. More important, she was growing up in a deeply literary ambiance, under the assumption that poetry was an intimate and essential part of life and had nothing to do with worldly ambition or celebrity.
Mary Virginia, as she was often called then, was reading on her own when she was four, but pneumonia kept her out of school for three years. From her seventh to her sixteenth year, she attended Kimberley, one of the finest country day schools in the United States, where she had nine years of French with teachers who spoke no English, five years of Latin, plenty of history, mathematics, and laboratory science, as well as a great deal of reading in Greek and Roman literature—and of course, in French, English, and American. At the age of eleven she was writing weekly themes in French and Latin. She had been writing poetry on her own since she was six, beginning with some “impassioned stanzas in defense of Woodrow Wilson, vilified by my Cousin Rose and championed by my father.” A spirited and rebellious girl (she still is), she was often in hot water in school. Assigned to write “on some faraway place,” she wrote,
I should like to rise and go
To the land of ice and snow.
I would take a wicker chair
And sit and watch the polar bear.
The polar bear sits on the ice
Because it makes his rear feel nice.
This received a D-minus and the demand that she make another attempt. Which she did, but first she had to be cheeky—“Is Kentucky far away enough?” But she respected the teachers, who were, as she said, “tough cookies like my mother, no rod-sparer herself.” And she adored her mother.
Her father was an insurance executive, a lawyer whose specialty was surety bonds; every now and then he would run into a fellow vice president and lawyer, also an expert in surety bonds. This was, as the reader will have guessed, the as yet little-known poet Wallace Stevens. When Virginia was old enough to know who the great man was, she was very eager to find out whether the two young lawyers and poets had talked poetry. She asked her father, who replied, “Certainly not.”
In 1929, already a poet with years of practice behind her, she went off to Mount Holyoke, where she promptly won the freshman Latin prize for sight translation. Here too she had excellent teachers, including Roberta Teale Swartz, a fine poet, and her husband, Gordon Chalmers, who was to be president of Kenyon College when I was a student there. (It was the two of them who would bring John Crowe Ransom to Kenyon from Vanderbilt, establish The Kenyon Review, and make Kenyon one of the great centers of poetry and criticism in the forties and fifties.) Another poet on the faculty was Genevieve Taggart. Virginia won several prestigious poetry prizes at Mount Holyoke, and in the process got to know Robert Frost, who was at nearby Amherst, and visiting poets such as Anna Hempstead Branch, William Rose Benét, and Wilbur Snow. (“I wish I could take you home to my boys.” “Gee, I wish you could, Mr. Snow.”) She also met around this time a young Vassar student named Muriel Rukeyser. Her skills in verse were further sharpened by a rigorous year-long course in versification under the exacting tutelage of Ada Laura Fonda Snell, a kind of lab course in which she studied the subtleties of the many different sounds a poetic line can make. She never questioned the necessity of learning the meters and the forms: this was essential preparation for a poet, certainly for a poet of her generation, as it had been for centuries. After graduation, she went to Harvard for her MA—Radcliffe, as it would have been for a woman in those days, though it was indistinguishable from Harvard—and it was at a Harvard Law School dance that she met Douglass Adair.
After she had done two years of graduate work and teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, she and Douglass got married and settled in Washington, where he had been helping to establish the Social Security program. By 1938, he thought that he had enough money to return to school and pursue his main interest, history. He and Virginia moved to New Haven, where he would earn his doctorate in American history at Yale and where their first child, named Robert Hamilton after Virginia’s father, was born. (She has a very funny poem about these years, called “Where Did I Leave Off?”)
In 1943, after a couple of years at Princeton University and the birth of their second son, Douglass III, the young couple moved to Williamsburg, where, except for a year in Seattle, they would live for the next eleven years. Douglass was a professor of history at William and Mary and editor of the prestigious William and Mary Quarterly. Virginia, from time to time, taught literature there. She was not shy about publishing poems, and during the thirties and forties a number of good magazines opened their pages to her, among them The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic and The Saturday Review of Literature. If asked why she did not take the natural next step of publishing a book, she would most likely say that she was much too busy looking after a household and caring for the children—three of them by now, a daughter, Kappa (now Mrs. Robert Waugh), having been born their first year in Williamsburg—not to mention stints of teaching and the almost daily composition and revision of poems. There are things more important than a literary career.
But the reasons are somewhat more complicated, as she will readily acknowledge. Looking around, she could see how a young poet, having established a reputation, might then find herself hemmed in by the expectations of readers, who would want the same kind of poems they had found so charming in the first book or the second, and she was too jealous of her independence to trade it for the auction of publication and a passing renown. She wished to write exactly what she pleased and how she pleased, and believed she could more easily enjoy that freedom outside the official literary world. Then, too, she knew enough of the world to see how badly people longed to be known and how they suffered when they were not, how a small fame fed the hunger for a larger, and how painful and corrosive both hunger and fame could be. She wanted none of it. As with Borges, her values and sensibility had been formed to a large extent by her father. He wrote “for fun,” as did her mother; one year he read all of Chaucer aloud and even wrote a few poems in Middle English. The house was full of the countless poems that he drew from his deep memory. He lived to be ninety-four and was for more than eighty years both her chief audience and a continuous example of how poetry can sustain a life. There was never any question in her mind that what matters is the health of the spirit, not the acclaim of the great world.
So, with no regret and without making a big deal of it, she chose the private life and the vocation.
In any case, no one had offered to publish a book of her poems, and she knew that sending out poems and books would expend valuable time and energy. She simply went on writing her verse, reading, thinking, and, as always, living with the gratitude and appetite and youthful openness to experience that she has never lost.
In 1955, Douglass, who by this time had published brilliant work and was regarded as one of the most distinguished historians of his time, was offered an appointment at the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California. He and Virginia and the children moved here, and here she has been ever since. She went on looking after her family, writing poetry, and giving the occasional reading. She taught too, first intermittently at local colleges such as Pomona and La Verne and eventually full-time at the California Polytechnic University in Pomona, where she taught for twenty-two years.
In 1968 occurred the great trauma of her life. Without any warning, Douglass went into the bedroom one evening and shot himself. That a man with so rich a life, a famous scholar and much-loved teacher, gratified by a happy and vibrant marriage and three bright, healthy children, should end it in such a way was, and is, incomprehensible. In the years following, Virginia came to terms with this loss as she did with almost everything, by writing poems. She poured her grief and anger and loneliness into elegies, bitter and plangent by turns, tender and inconsolable. Several have been included in this book.
Now on her own, she earned her living by teaching, and it was during the seventies, while bucking for full professor—she had never gotten around to finishing her PhD—that she began to publish in the magazines again, but, true to form, once she had been promoted she stopped sending poems out. It seemed more trouble than it was worth.
In 1982, I invited her to give a reading at Pomona College. I had never met her but had seen one or two of her poems somewhere and thought it would be a good deed to feature a worthy local poet. Although she was already beginning to lose her sight, she read her poems to a large audience, some of them old friends, most of them students and townspeople who knew little or nothing about her. It was a triumph, one of the best literary events we had ever had at the college, and I doubt that any of us had realized what a marvelous poet she was. It was that evening that our friendship began and I first suggested to her that she ought to think about a book. A few years later she agreed, and we settled down to the work of choosing from among a great number of poems (though a small number of all she had written) some eighty-five or ninety that would give a vivid sense of her life and of the world and times she has lived in, as well as the range of her interests and poetic style. It was clear that she had no interest or belief in the possibility of eventual publication; as far as she was concerned, the whole reason for the work we were doing was the enjoyment of doing it. And indeed it was a pleasure for both of us, the many months we spent sorting through sheaves of manuscripts, revising, culling, editing, trying to find an order that would add up to a book that was something more than the sum of its parts. When the book was done, we went on spending many evenings together, conversing and joking, she reminiscing or talking about poetry, I reading aloud or reciting to her, for she was by now completely blind, Marvell—her great love—or Gavin Ewart, Louise Bogan, Donald Justice, or drafts of my Borges translations, and sometimes I read to her her own recent poems, rough as they were, composed in utter darkness on typewriter or yellow legal pad. And long before anyone showed any interest in Ants on the Melon, we were talking about putting another book together and what a lot of fun it would be. And it will be.
The reader will already have read many of these idiosyncratic, witty and moving poems, with their unusual variety of subjects and forms, and hardly needs me to explain how good they are or why. They speak eloquently for themselves, and for the person who made them. It remains for me only to say how grateful I am for the happy accident of fate that led our paths to cross and brought me the friendship of this remarkable woman.
—Robert Mezey
Claremont, California