Assault on Mount Helicon by Mary Barnard

First published: 1984

Type of work: Literary history/memoir

Time of work: 1914-1981

Locale: The United States and Italy

Principal Personages:

• Ezra Pound, a literary scholar, teacher, translator, and poet
• William Carlos Williams, a doctor and poet
• Marianne Moore, a poet
• James Laughlin, a pioneering American publisher
• Carl Van Doren, a noted American historian

Form and Content

Donald Hall, in the introduction to Remembering Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions (1978), his account of Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, makes the modest claim, “There is a minor tradition in literature . . . [that] derives from curiosity about people we admire.” Hall places his book in the “genre of literary gossip” in an attempt to deflect criticism from those scholars who have tried to separate the written text entirely from the author’s life, but he also asserts that as a writer himself, “this book records a portion of my education”; he goes on to praise Hugh Kenner, “the best critic of modern literature,” who is not “paralyzed by fear of biographical heresy.” Hall’s comments are designed to prepare the reader for a personal response to four major figures in modern literature and for Hall’s description of his participation in their lives. The problem he addresses concerns the degree to which he inserts his own experiences amid his recollections, because the total removal of the “self” that learned from, was inspired by, and even became friendly with a legendary artist would be as great a deception as its elevation to an undeserved central position.

Mary Barnard, whose instinctive modesty is striking, especially among artists whose capacity for self-promotion has been enlarged considerably by modern American society, was faced with the problem of how much of her own life to include when she began to compose a book that would contain previously unpublished letters from Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. At the age of seventy, she realized that some of the prominent people she knew were disappearing “not so much into the grave, which would be only natural, but into unwieldy tomes written by people who never knew them.” Her correspondence had grown out of a desire to learn more about literature, and she felt an obligation to younger readers, who might share her desire to learn about the process of a writer’s life.

When Barnard began to write to Pound, Williams, and Moore, these writers were isolated from the central flow of American literary life and they maintained a correspondence, a lifeline connecting them to a circuit of inspiration and support. The circuit was small enough to admit other participants whenever there was a sufficient demonstration of interest and ability, and Barnard’s open, responsive, and intelligent letters claimed the attention of the people she admired. They recognized that she was the best kind of student they could have, a tie to the next generation when they were denied the possibility of teaching at American universities.

Barnard said that her original intention was to begin her “literary memoir” with the first letters she received from Pound and Williams, but she “realized that the reader needed to know where I started from and how I got to what proved to be my taking-off point.” This realization is crucial to the structure of her memoirs, which are divided into three parts and which follow a threefold pattern of organization. Like most memoirs, the book is a record of a journey, and in this case the course of the journey is the development and cultivation of the poetic perception which eventually enabled Barnard to imagine the creative psyche of Sappho and then to reinvent Sappho’s art in vital, contemporary poetic measures.

In terms of chronology, the book is divided into the years of her early life and education until her graduation from Reed College in 1933, the years from the beginning of her correspondence with Pound through her initial decision to learn classical Greek while recuperating from a serious illness in 1951, and a concluding section covering the years in which she completed her translation of Sappho’s poetry and visited her mentors. Behind this chronological arrangement, however, there is another pattern of organization which controls the narrative progression. It consists of three intermingled paths, including the development of Barnard’s mind so that she might fully appreciate the guidance of her teachers, the reaction of her teachers to their student’s growth, and the creative demonstration of her understanding of what she has learned. This structure raises the poets’ letters from important documents in American literary history to the level of a living testament to the dedication and ingenuity of artists committed to something beyond their own production; it also balances the tendencies of those artists who see themselves always in some kind of competition with their peers.

While the letters Barnard received are extremely interesting, the majority of the book is in Barnard’s words, and its appeal depends on Barnard’s ability to make her life interesting when she is not involved in a literary conversation. There is some flatness when connecting details are related, but Barnard’s own voice keeps the book alive through its decorous tone and its dry, if subdued, wit. The warmth and generosity of her approach is expressed in her dedication: “To my Young Friends,/ Fledglings/ in the Forests of Helicon.” Characteristically, Barnard offered her book, as she seems to have dedicated her life, to the Romantic myth of the young artist, fresh and hopeful and at the onset of an exciting quest. The highlights of the quest are the letters, pictures, illustrations, postcards, and other memorabilia reproduced in the text, but Barnard was successful in creating a narrative of “a feminine climber’s determined and sometimes partially successful assault on Mount Helicon” that a reader will be grateful to join.

Critical Context

During the early decades of the twentieth century, there were two competitive and almost mutually exclusive communities of literary thinkers in the United States. The more influential and better-known, the one which controlled university departments, was predominantly British in its orientation, formalist in its philosophy of composition, and classical in its methods of critical inquiry. The other, almost entirely invisible to the public and with practically no influence in publishing or scholarship, actually surrounded the English tradition, reaching back to multinational literary antiquity and forward to a future embracing the new world. Its approach to composition was not bound by traditional literary expectation, and its critical thinking challenged the concept of a formal confine that awaited the artist’s approach. It was, in Jerome Rothenberg’s words, “a counterpoetics that presents . . . a fundamentally new view of the relationship between consciousness, language, and poetic structure.” Most students of literature during that time were inclined by exposure, influence, and the circumstances of publishing toward the academic tradition. A few, in various unique and unusual situations, were drawn toward the “revolutionary” strain. Mary Barnard, seemingly suited by character, background, and training to follow a conventional literary career, became instead a part of an outlaw network of American artists whose radical sensibility and aesthetic daring and originality finally began to achieve appropriate recognition in the last decades of the twentieth century. Her memoir overlaps both literary communities in that she worked as an assistant for the historian Carl Van Doren, attended library gatherings (such as the Yaddo colony), and knew relatively mainstream figures such as Delmore Schwartz and E. E. Cummings, but her friendship with her correspondents and her contact with publisher James Laughlin, whom she met when he was starting the legendary New Directions press, form the most memorable part of her historical record. Her book is an indispensable account of the thoughts and feelings of several major figures in American literature at a time when they were still struggling beyond the bounds of the defensive, conservative, and self-enclosed world of American letters.

Bibliography

Ammons, Elizabeth. Review in American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography. LVII (March, 1985), pp. 169-173.

Booklist. LXXX, February 15, 1984, p. 840.

Chamish, Elizabeth. Review in The Christian Science Monitor. September 6, 1984, p. 21.

Harmon, W. Review in The Sewanee Review. XCIII (Spring, 1985), pp. 30-31.

Hauptman, R. Review in World Literature Today. LIX (Summer, 1985), p. 59.

Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era, 1971.

Kirkus Reviews. LII, February 15, 1984, p. 179.

Laughlin, James. Pound as Wuz: Essays and Lectures on Ezra Pound, 1987.

Library Journal. CIX, April 1, 1984, p. 716.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. June 24, 1984, p. 12.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIX, May 6, 1984, p. 29.

Pound, Ezra. Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941, 1971. Edited by D. D. Paige.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXV, February 10, 1984, p. 185.

Williams, William Carlos. William Carlos Williams: Selected Letters, 1957. Edited by John C. Thirwall.