Austin Warren Through His Letters and Books

Austin Warren wrote half a dozen permanent books, reason to honor his memory. Drawing together all his work, I mean to do that, citing not only the work but the letters. More than two thousand personal letters survive, spanning six decades. All are written in his runic hand, and I quailed when I saw it on the envelope. He didn't type, disdaining a mechanical contrivance that intervened between friends. Thanks to his selfless wife, Toni, and his untiring though much tried editor George Panichas, the letters have been deciphered and published. The task was epochal, and must have consumed wife and editor alike. Both are dead now, the latter just as he finished his labor, but the edition is their living monument. If you want to get at Austin's quiddity, you must consult it.

The letters help us know and understand the man he was: not undressed, he was never that, but precisely rendered. Intensely into himself, he was his own best subject. He needed friends who were willing to pay attention as he sought to clarify what he was doing and thinking. Luckily he had a multitude of them, most of whom are encountered in the five-hundred-plus pages of the letters. Often, confiding in these friends, he wears his heart on his sleeve. My introductory remarks mean to bring him on, but the words he chose himself offer the most illuminating comment on his nature. The essays, work of a lifetime, further complicate his portrait. So my remarks present a multidimensional figure—the critic and the man. The two run together while remaining distinct.

Almost every day of his life, from his early thirties to his mid-seventies, he sent a letter or received one. The first letter in the book, to T. S. Eliot, is dated November 1930, the last, to Hyatt Waggoner, June 1986. He preferred to communicate "through the written word, not by the relatively crude encounter of personality." The meeting of minds meant more than the meeting of bodies. I don't suppose that he was sexually indifferent, like his version of Eliot; but there is a frostiness about him, set over against the ardor. My first letter to him, written on a typewriter and typed by a secretary from dictation, made him suspicious. He could smell a rat. Anything less than intimacy wouldn't do, and he let me know it.

We became friends at the University of Michigan where I had been "called" (his word, evoking a clerical calling) to preside over the English department. He, much older than I, was verging on retirement. He had lived a long life; and, toting up the balance sheet, I give it two cheers. His first published book dates from 1929, his last, appearing after his death, from 1996—fourteen titles in all. The academic world, his workplace, didn't read him but awarded him honors. We might call this mouth honor. He rejoiced, as a young man, in a year in London (1930), his annus mirabilis, reading avidly in the British Museum. That got him, as it did me, his education. We could both look back in memory on innumerable concerts and plays, and a long holiday on the Continent. He wrote me about "the exhilaration of it all!" knowing that I had followed in his footsteps. Willing to be taken care of, he leaned on women. When his first wife, Eleanor, died in 1946, Toni (Antonia) replaced her. She saw that the two of them were "ecstatically happy" in a spacious old house in Providence, Rhode Island, the retired professor's last stop.

But they seemed always ill. In his photos on dust jackets, he looks down in the mouth, suiting his physical condition. Acedia—or spiritual sloth—had gotten him in its grip. He called this the besetting "sin" of literary laborers. Hamlet illustrates—replying three times when they ask him where he walks: "Into my grave." Austin in a jaundiced mood was like Prince Hamlet, concluding in his despair that...