His Instrument, His Church, His Friends and Lovers: Tate, 1957–58

I will leave this town, I said, There is the autumn weather— Here, nor living nor dead; The lights burn in the town Where men fear together.

—Allen Tate, “Seasons of the Soul”

Allen Tate had begun during the summer of 1957 to plan his sabbatical year off from the University of Minnesota, 1958–59, which he wanted to spend in England. He wrote Douglas Jerrold, the editor at Eyre and Spottiswoode, who wrote Lord David Cecil, who replied that he “would be delighted that Allen Tate would come to Oxford.” Tate learned in September, however, that Oxford wasn’t on the Fulbright list for the next year; so, if he got a grant to England, he didn’t know just where he would be. Thanking T. S. Eliot for filling out the form for “the Fulbright bureaucrats,” he observed, “Washington has an enormous file on me from the past, including four fbi reports in five years, ‘testimonials’ from you and Herbert Read and others, to say nothing of several electrocardiograms.”

He and his wife, Caroline Gordon, were separated. After they had each, on separate trips in the summer, consulted their psychiatrist in Rome, Caroline decided that it would be a mistake for her to return to Minneapolis; she was staying at Princeton until the spring semester when she would be a visiting lecturer at the University of Kansas.

Tate, J. V. Cunningham, and Hayden Carruth made up the jury that fall for the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award for 1958. They voted to award the Brandeis Medal for lifetime achievement to John Crowe Ransom and a cash award for a younger poet of promise to Barbara Hawes.

Ransom would be retiring in 1958 as editor of the Kenyon Review and asked Tate’s opinion of Murray Krieger as his successor. The Review had planned to make Peter Taylor the editor, he said, “but P. never quite got his own 100% of himself behind the project, and last June, for one reason or another . . . he went over to Ohio State.” Ransom feared that Krieger “might have still too academic a mind, that he wasn’t after all a Writer.” Tate had had Krieger as a student at the Kenyon School of Letters and had gotten him on the faculty at Minnesota; but Krieger was “a critic of criticism.” Tate had read the manuscript of his New Apologists for Poetry: “Krieger didn’t have one poem discussed in there until I made him do it. He had a book about the critics of poetry but no poetry in it.”

Confirmed in his fear, Ransom asked Tate about Randall Jarrell. Tate thought that Jarrell was “so mercurial” he would “attack everybody and praise his friends.” Ransom “had had my doubts about Jarrell himself.” Tate suggested Robie Macauley, Howard Nemerov, and William Jay Smith. Ransom thought Nemerov “was a little foolish in his praise for Lolita” in the Kenyon Review. Nonetheless he invited him and Jarrell to visit the review. Nemerov accepted the invitation but didn’t see himself as an editor. Ransom didn’t know Smith. “It is surprising,” Tate wrote Robert Penn Warren, “how few people of the younger generation—that is, younger than ours—are really qualified to edit a quarterly.”

Tate lectured in early November at Hanover College in Indiana and visited his brother Ben in Cincinnati afterward. Herbert Read came for four days. Tate arranged a joint poetry reading by William Jay Smith and Barbara Hawes in Minneapolis on November 21, 1957, at the Walker Institute of Art; Smith and Hawes had married since Tate knew her as the editor at Chimera. Before they were introduced by Hawes in 1947, Smith had seen Tate in New York from a distance more than once at parties given by Oscar Williams and his wife, Gene Derwood, at their penthouse on Water Street—knowing who Tate was by his large head. One night in September 1947 Smith, Hawes, and Tate went out together; while Tate was charming, Smith thought him “frivolous” because he “didn’t want to talk about anything serious.” Smith and Hawes...