Jean Valentine: This-World Company

For Jean Valentine, Out of Thirty-five Years

ALAN WILLIAMSON For Jean Valentine, Out of Thirty-‹ve Years Much has been written, by now, about Robert Lowell’s “of‹ce hours” at Harvard in the 1960s. Really more an informal workshop , they were held on Wednesday mornings in a windowless seminar room in Quincy House. They were half a secret, since there was no published source for the place and time. Their constituency ranged from Lowell’s best undergraduates to already well-established poets, in Cambridge for a day or, as in Jean Valentine ’s case, a fellowship year. Looking back at the of‹ce hours from more than thirty years’ distance is bound to be a matter of Proustian surprises: who didn’t become famous, who did, and in what way. The Yale Younger Poet, our arbiter of verbal elegance, who only published one more book. The cutthroat agent who would transform the publishing world in the 1980s, but who then wore a long scarf ›ung around his neck, every inch the poet. Lowell teased him for at once dismissing , and resembling, Shelley. The beautiful schizophrenic from Virginia, who showed up every year or so and brought, I felt, a dose of Lorca’s duende, that edge between being and nonbeing, the group badly needed. Jean Valentine wrote a poem about her: The wind, the Virginia rain, touch your face now none of us at this table could, frail gleam, glass face without a back. I remember Jean as a quiet, smoothing, mediating presence “at this table,” in that roomful of jostling egos, all too eager for “Cal’s” attention and approval. I know from what she has said later that it 159 was a troubled period in her life, but that didn’t show. Or perhaps it showed in the quietness itself, the sometimes almost inaudible voice, in someone who after all moved in the same sophisticated New York circles Lowell himself moved in, and might have shared their self-assurance. Lowell loved the poems she was writing then, which went into her second book, Pilgrims, and on one occasion compared them to Plath’s Ariel. One could see why; though less tough (in both senses, resilient and aggressive), they had the same perfectly attuned ear to how the world impinged on one nervestrung sensibility. Pilgrims seems to me now, without minimizing its more ultimate adumbrations, one of the best books written about couples in the 1960s. Believing in emotions, and in a sustaining community, but not, in the last analysis, in traditional arrangements, they are bewildered when they “f[ind] themselves alone, / their ‹rst force gone. / No law.” They are, in very truth, like pilgrims in a New World, “alone in the ›are / of their own selves.” Others have written about this collective history, but few are as compassionate as Jean Valentine about the nostalgia for more settled times, for home and childhood, that pulled constantly against erotic and existential doubts: —Does he love her? She loves, he loves, they love the old stories of the snow and the look of the house. Together so. (Door in the Mountain 78) The things of childhood—conjugations, “old stories,” nursery rhymes—are this book’s constant touchstones for the unreachable way-things-ought-to-be. “Visiting Day at School” begins, as many 1960s poets might have begun, in ambivalence, dislike of of‹cial American values warring with reluctant affection for some of the people who espouse them: The tall, good, raw-boned, wrong teacher teaches wrong glory the children shuf›e back from dumb (Door in the Mountain 92) But the poem turns magical when the speaker tries, hopelessly, to envision the children’s entire future as if it could be one with the 160 metaphors of fairy tales, as if Freud’s “reality principle” did not have to be learned: Jane, see the line the days ›ew, quick bird, down around the thumb, almost straight, through all the king’s gold, back. (Door in the Mountain 92) The book runs its course through parenthood, brief erotic idylls, therapeutic struggles, separation, and divorce. But it is always in the expression of intense longing, longing at once “to be good” and to be happy, that it strikes its unique poetic note. Its religion—because it is, in all its overtones, a deeply religious book—lies in the very hope that two people could, somehow, pose the ultimate questions together: high in a sudden January thaw or...