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  • Extending The LadderA Remembrance of Owen Dodson
  • Nathan L. Grant (bio)

“There was a great scent of death in the garden when I was born,” said Owen Dodson (1914–1983) in James V. Hatch’s biography of the poet/playwright/director, Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One. Dodson tells the folk story of his birth in a satchel, as told to him by his father. “I was little and they all loved me,” he recalls, as he devilishly relates the instance as “my first taste of sex.” But a profound irony inheres in this remark, as it does in many made by him; the scent of death in the garden could only distort the flavors of security and love. He always bore tremendous guilt for the stroke his mother suffered shortly after she gave birth to him, her last child. Of eight siblings, only five would survive adolescence, and both mother and father would die before Owen’s teenage years, and within only eighteen months of each other. Their parents loved the Dodson children, and Nathaniel Dodson, Sr., did as well as he could, in poor health and poorer financial circumstances. He and his neighbors in early 20th-century black Brooklyn soldiered on through racism and general privation, carrying with them, in many cases, a strong faith in religion and in possibility. But Owen, a child of tender feelings and the last Dodson, was only sometimes soothed by his God. He was often cynical about his faith, sorely tested as it was by the events of his upbringing, and it often served only as a vehicle for his most tortured negotiations between love and death. For much of the rest of his life, representations of this great conflict would mark his poetry.

Through adolescence and young adulthood, work would be one of Dodson’s gods, and he would serve with diligence and fervor. Through community support, a handful of Brooklyn’s brightest black children gained the opportunity to attend elite schools. At Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, Owen Dodson honed his already evident talents in literature and theater. He learned the art of the sonnet as well as the craft of the stage, and in this milieu he became close to classmates John Ciardi and Edmund Muskie, the former of whom became the noted poet and translator, the latter the U.S. senator from Maine. Owen learned also about humanity, about the terrible price it sometimes exacts, and much about repayment. A young, white, and wealthy classmate, Priscilla Heath, was an early scholarly competitor of Owen’s at Bates, and through a kinship of interests in literature and art, they fell in love and were engaged to be married. But the tragedy of their breakup was based, ironically, not on their racial difference but significantly on Owen’s burgeoning awareness of his homosexuality—a context for which, in 1930s middle America, was far less in existence than was that for interracial unions. Priscilla’s love and bewilderment were sorrows she [End Page 640] bore long after the years at Bates, and perhaps even long after her marriage to someone else.

Owen also befriended the reedy, neurasthenic Glidden Parker, and the two became the very closest school chums. They delighted in poetry, theater, and the life of young college men. Many years after graduation from Bates, Parker committed suicide. Long before this, Dodson, perhaps always having sensed his friend’s chronic spiritual distress, wrote “Sickle Pears,” sensitive lines of pastoral based on the boys’ practice of shaking a favorite pear tree every fall:

In college once I climbed the tree With sickle pears our Greek professor loved. High in that natural world I shook An Autumn down;

A tumble of roughed fruit Bounced onto the cider ground. Fell to my waiting friend.

Together we went on to maple meadows To celebrate the harvest of the year. By chewing sickle pears we won a year: Digesting all he planted thought by thought From early Homer to the precious here.

These verses successfully stave off the melancholy, the tragic; they are reminiscent of happier, more serene times. They also invoke philosophy and its many consolations to serve as the spiritual weapon for...

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