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A
Friend in Need, a Friend Indeed: Edward Cifelli, in
his John Ciardi, A Biography, does
what a biographer is supposed to do.[1] He has captured the spirit and essence
of his subject. Nearly the whole man is there: the braggart who constantly
boasted of being the richest poet in America, the super-overachiever, the
workaholic, the public orator and dictatorial director of the Bread Loaf
Writers’ Conference, the loving but seldom-present father who was what the
social workers these days call an “enabler,” one who conspires to enable
another person or other people to continue in self-destructive behavior, as
Ciardi certainly did with his children, perhaps in an attempt to make up for
his non-presence, either physical or mental, while he rambled around America
and the world making money or sat alone in his study pouring out columns,
poems, articles, lectures, book after book. If my thumbnail
sketch leaves a negative taste on the tongue, it is a deliberate effect,
intended to mirror what I think may be the effect of Cifelli’s biography on
the reader. I can hear that reader saying, “If this is what he was like, then
Ciardi deserved to speed downhill, out of control, after his heyday in the
1960s. He was clearly out of touch with the times, a personality that mirrors
all that was worst about the generation of World War II ex-GIs who came home
to make cozy, unthinking success of things.” But that’s
essentially a false impression of John Ciardi. What I miss in the biography
is a sense of his sense of humor. It is utterly true that he did all the
things Prof. Cifelli says he did, but Ciardi did them drolly, with an air of
self-deprecation and satire. He knew he was acting the boor, but he hated
boors, and he let you know it. Cifelli properly notes that Ciardi had many,
many friends, but the reader may have a hard time understanding why they all
loved him so much, so long, and so deeply. I would have liked to see more
anecdotes in this book, such as this, for instance: At Bread Loaf in 1961
Robert Huff, Richard Frost and I shared one of the little cottages near
Treman Hall. I don’t remember what we were doing one night that aroused the
ire of some women who lived in another cottage close by, but they had
complained to John that we were making too much noise. John came by—it must
have been after ten p.m.—to do his duty and tell us to quiet down. When he
had fulfilled his function as policeman, he sat down with us to chat. Soon he
began to recite limericks, most if not all of them original, from his
prodigious memory, just as Cifelli has described Ciardi’s doing on other
occasions. All those present became, over the course of the next several
hours, hysterical to the point that our sides ached. We were making much more
noise with John present than we had been making before he arrived. I have no
idea what the women did, or how they managed to get any sleep at all that
night. It is true, too, as
Cifelli points out, that there was a hierarchy at Bread Loaf, but it was much
more malleable than it appears to be in this book. That same year, as one of
the Poetry Fellows, I was expected to put in time at Treman Hall with the
faculty and the other Fellows. Scholars, such as A. R. Ammons, who were a
step below, were not allowed in, nor were the Waiters or the conferees of
various types, including Contributors and Auditors. The evening that
Robert Frost came by, he was seated in an armchair with a shawl over his
knees on one side of the room. The rest of the room was filled with people
drinking cocktails and hob-nobbing, but none of them appeared to be even
glancing at Frost—it was as though he weren’t present. I hovered near the
line of demarcation, gazing longingly at Frost. I heard him ask, sotto voce, “Won’t anybody talk to
me?” Ciardi noticed, came over to me and said, “Robert’s feeling lonely. Come
and talk to him.” He took me over and introduced us, and I sat down with two
women, one of them an editor, to chat with the great poet. During the course of
the conversation I told Robert that a namesake of his was at the Conference,
the young poet Richard Frost who was attending on a Danforth grant, not one
of the official Conference fellowships; thus, he was barred from Treman. I
asked Ciardi if it would be all right if I brought Dick in to meet Robert,
and Ciardi gave the okay. I went and got Dick and a copy of my First Poems, recently published, which
I gave Robert as a gift (I was too shy to inscribe it to him) after I had
introduced Dick. They exchanged pleasantries, decided that they weren’t
related, and Dick left after an interval. Then Ciardi came by
again and said, “Robert, the Waiters want to sing a song for you.” Robert
said, “All right,” and Ciardi waved the young people in from the front door
where they were clustered. They came in, gathered around us in a semicircle
and sang, to the tune of “Hernando’s Hideaway,” “Whose woods, these are, I
think I know. / His house, is in, the village though. / He will, not see, me
stopping here, / to watch, his woods fills up with snow, Olé!” Those are some of the
reasons I had for loving John
Ciardi, who was an unstuffy, funny son-of-a-bitch who would do absolutely
anything he could for you if he liked you and if you needed help. Cifelli in
his book notes that after that same conference he gave the broke Miller
Williams and his wife money to get back home. It was the least he could do
since he had talked Miller into coming to Bread Loaf in the first place. That
two hundred dollar investment was one of the best Ciardi ever made, and he
made many—he wasn’t called “Lucky John” for nothing—for after Ciardi’s reputation
had run down to a trickle, Miller kept it alive as publisher of the
University of Arkansas Press, a position that was the direct result of the
contacts and friendships Miller made at Bread Loaf that year, for at the time
he was a high school biology teacher. Within the next year or so Miller made
the transition to teaching college English, and Williams in 1997 retired as a
Distinguished Professor. It is Arkansas that published Cifelli’s biography,
the edition of Ciardi’s The Collected
Poems that Cifelli also edited in 1997, and many other books including
Vince Clemente’s John Ciardi: Measure
of the Man (1987). Even on the public
rostrum, which is mainly how he made his money, Ciardi could be very funny in
the midst of a serious lecture. In Cleveland in the early ’60s he was giving
a talk at John Carroll University. He was doing his famous discussion of
Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” in which he pointed
out that the form of the poem was an interlocking rubaiyat which should have
ended by circling back, in the last quatrain, to the first stanza to pick up
the main rhyme again. Instead, Ciardi said, Frost broke the form, and in
breaking it made the poem a hundredfold more effective than it would
otherwise have been had he maintained the requirements of the rubaiyat. The house was packed.
One of those present (besides my wife and myself) was a woman named “Yetta
Blank” (that was really her name), one of those whom Cifelli in his biography
characterizes as an “arm-grabber.” John recited the first two lines of the
last stanza of Frost’s poem, then the third line, “And miles to go before I
sleep.” He paused dramatically, looked at the audience and said rhetorically,
“Now, how would you have ended that poem?” Yetta Blank leapt to
her feet and called out, “And now I lay me down to sleep?” In the hall, dead
silence. Ciardi leaned across the podium, rested on his forearms, lanced her
with his gaze and said, “You really think so, huh?” Bedlam. I don’t know how
many minutes it was before order was restored, but it is the funniest moment
I can recall at a public program, and I have spent a lifetime attending
them. If it is objected
that the inclusion of more such incidents (Cifelli does include some) would
have unconscionably lengthened the book, then my reply is, cut out some of
the many catalogues of Ciardi’s itinerary. They are not exhaustive, but they
give the impression that they are. One can only begin skipping and scanning
when they arrive periodically throughout the book. On October 8th 1997
my wife and I went to dinner at a local restaurant with one of our former
colleagues at SUNY Oswego, a professor of music. When she asked what I was
doing at the moment, I told her I was reading the biography of John Ciardi.
“Who is he?” she asked. I could hardly believe she didn’t know. When I told
her about the poet’s many books, his magnificent translations of Dante’s
great poems, his television program, his “Manner of Speaking” columns in, and
his poetry editorship of, The Saturday
Review, his radio program on PBS, his books of poetry, of etymology, of
children’s verse, his directorship of Bread Loaf, she just shook her head.
Then I said, “Don’t you recall that huge flap about Anne Morrow Lindergh’s
poetry?” That, finally, rang a bell, but evidently not a very loud one. John Ciardi was born
in 1916 and educated before World War II, first at Bates College which he
entered in 1933, and then at Tufts, to which institution he transferred
eighteen months later. Edward Krickel, writing in his book John Ciardi (1980), said that at Tufts
Ciardi “found in John Homes, just the teacher one insane adolescent had been
starved for.” Krickel further observed, “It is a turning point in the
development of every budding young intellectual or artist when he finds his
first real master. And he is lucky if
in his full maturity he can recall the experience with gratitude. Holmes was
the first such experience for Ciardi, as Roy W. Cowden of Michigan was to be
the second.” Ciardi was loyal to
his friends, in particular his early teacher at Tufts John Holmes who wrote
personal poems in formal structures. Holmes taught this approach to John
Ciardi and to his other pupils at Tufts and elsewhere, including Anne Sexton
and Maxine Kumin, who became known in later years as members of the
“Confessional” school of poetry. Like them, Ciardi learned from Holmes how to
write the autobiographical poem that told a story or sang a song, but Ciardi
was never a breast-beater like Sexton or Sylvia Plath. Nor was Holmes who,
during his lifetime, was largely ignored, although a few people (such as
yours truly) paid him the compliment of remarking upon his classical New
England control over his egopoetic subject matter. Holmes’s Selected Poems was published
posthumously, with an introduction titled “A Man’s Voice” by John Ciardi, in
1965. In it Ciardi wrote, Certainly it is a
freshet that carries forward the poems of The
Fortune Teller [1961] . . . despite what I feel to be the
willful intensity of the title poem. It is still fact that speaks. The instant
the voice finds fact to say, it says more than fact. “Order Clearly Asking”
might serve as that voice’s description of itself and of its purpose: “It is
not style. The design is in the materials.” Holmes was known as a
remarkable teacher, but despite his devotion to craft, he too, like Ciardi’s
contemporaneous close friend Richard Wilbur and the anathematical Beats, held
the creative process in mystic awe and didn’t want to scrutinize it too
closely. In Ciardi’s Mid-Century
American Poets (1950) Holmes wrote, The fact is that I
do not really want to know how and why I write, and I had rather keep my ways
and means to myself. A miner, a carpenter knows what he has to work with, and
what he can do. Poets don’t know; at any rate, I don’t. As an additional
handicap to my deliberate ignorance, I teach college students how to write
poetry. This year-in-year-out gamble is sometimes good for them, sometimes
for me. They get the thrill, which I deprecate, of studying poetry with me,
an actually published poet, and they get a certain amount of useful suggestion,
and not very much severity. I always mean to be severe, and never am. In
his practice, Ciardi made up this deficiency of his teacher, for he could be very severe. However, this curious
example of American poetic double-think, which is far from being
idiosyncratic in Ciardi, Holmes, and Wilbur, was the official policy of Bread
Loaf Writers’ Conference even before Ciardi became its Director and Defender
of the Faith. I think it is one of the reasons why Ciardi’s reputation as a
teacher diminished so quickly in the 1970s: “It is impossible to teach
‘creative writing’; therefore, it will not be taught (Bread Loaf Writers’
Conference is not a school), but technique will be discussed.” The Beats and the other activists of the
1960s agreed with the first half of this “formula,” but they were more
consistent in refusing to teach “technique” either. The split mind of Holmes
and Ciardi, it was clear to the younger generation, was hypocritical—either
you can teach writing or you can’t; if you can’t, then you must go all the
way and abjure craft and formalism. It was a conundrum that Ciardi was unable
to resolve, and it led to his becoming more and more irrelevant as time went
by. It would have been much better for him if he had not temporized, if he
had said, “True, one cannot teach talent, but one can, indeed, give the young
poet tools to use in his or her craft.” In the two years
preceding his unexpected death in the spring of 1986, John Ciardi published
two books of poetry. The Selected Poems
appeared from Arkansas in 1984; it was Ciardi’s first showcase collection since
the 1955 As If: Poems New and Selected,
and it contained work from that volume as well. The following year, 1985,
Ciardi published a book mainly made up of lyrics. He didn’t find it necessary
to invent new prosodies or forms in order to speak colloquially yet
musically—the old forms did very well in The
Birds of Pompeii, just as they had done for Ciardi’s Bread Loaf colleague
of many years, Robert Frost. When Ciardi wanted to
be subjective he understood that he had to sing in order to keep the reader’s
attention, as in the prophetic “At Least with Good Whiskey”: She gave me a drink
and told me she had tried to read my book but
had had to put it down because it
depressed her. Why, she wanted to know, couldn’t I turn my
talent (I raised my glass) to happier things?
Did I suppose it was smart to be forever
dying? Not forever, I told her,
sipping; by actuarial tables ten years should
about do it. See what I mean? she hurried to
say—always that terrible sadness. Well, maybe, I
said. (This is good whiskey, I said.) But ten years, plus
or minus, is not much time for
getting it said—do you see what I mean? which leaves me too busy to make a
hobby of being sad. He
didn’t have ten years. The one incident that
most clearly showed how far from his palmy days as a public figure John
Ciardi had fallen took place after his death, at a NEMLA meeting in Boston in
1987. There was to be a session on Ciardi during which Vince Clemente’s book,
John Ciardi: Measure of the Man,
was to be published by Arkansas. At that time both Vince and I were employed
by branches of the State University of New York, and we had both been invited
to a conflicting SUNY Writer’s Festival in Binghamton where we were to read
and where Allen Ginsberg was to be the featured guest. Vince chose to go to
Binghamton to read his poetry instead of attending the NEMLA convention to
be present at the birth of his book. I sat with Judith and her family while
X. J. Kennedy read the main paper of the session. Aside from those people who
were officially a part of the program or were associated with the University
of Arkansas Press, I was the only member of the audience other than the
Ciardis. Judith turned to me and said, “I guess it’s a good thing the family
came.” Despite my cavils,
Edward Cifelli has produced a thorough and well-written book. I hope it goes
a long way toward reestablishing the reputation of one of America’s most
readable poets. State
University of New York at Oswego |