Poets, Death, and the Sixties Disorder

It had an autumn smell And that was how I knew That I was down a well. I was no longer young.

—Allen Tate, “Seasons of the Soul”

It was good, Isabella Gardner wrote Doris and Charlie Foster, their friends in Minneapolis, that she and her husband, Allen Tate, were squeezing “all the gayety and people seeing” of their 1962 summer vacation into their twelve days in London—the only people they knew in Florence, the Harry Brewsters and Robert Fitzgeralds, would be away, “and Allen can work.” Arriving in London around midnight on a Thursday, June 21, they found “a summons to Edith Sitwell for Friday at 5:30,” among other messages. They had a drink at noon Friday with Louis MacNeice and lunch with Julian Mitchell, a writer Allen had known at Oxford when Mitchell was an undergraduate. “Poor Edith was in bed with a slipped disk but was gallantly arranged in a pink bed-jacket and served us drinks and malicious wit,” Isabel related. Afterwards they had dinner with Jack and Phyllis Wheelock. Monday was dinner with the Eliots, and the Yvor Richards. They saw W. H. Auden, Graham Greene, Mary McCarthy, and others. They saw performances of School for Scandal and The Tempest. The Spenders gave them a cocktail party: “I finally met Natasha Spender (once Allen’s love),” Isabella reported to her sister-in-law; she “is far younger (41?) than I expected but far less interesting both to look at and to be with. But extremely nice.”

The Joseph Franks were leaving Paris July 1 for Grimaud on the Riviera, where they reserved a room for the Tates beginning on the 8th. (Frank’s second wife, Guiguite, was French.) Florence, alas, had temperatures in the mid-90s. “I can’t look at another masterpiece,” Allen wrote Foster on the 25th, “and Isabella is not as eager as she was a week ago.” That evening they were “dining with the Italian translator of The Fathers—Marcella Bonsart and her husband the critic Alesandro B. All our other Florentine friends are at the seashore.” They themselves were leaving on the 29th for Corfu. “In Corfu there are no museums: only rocks” and the sea. They were arriving in New York August 20 and in Well-fleet August 22.

Writing Mark Van Doren from Wellfleet September 4, Allen added a postscript: “I am depressed by the death of Estlin Cummings. I heard about it only this afternoon.” (Cummings had died on the 3rd.) “Well, one after another.”

They arrived home in Minneapolis the 14th, Allen “fatigued after a long week-end in Princeton.” His classes, he wrote Bill Smith, felt “as if I had never faced a class before.” Red Warren, who had returned to teaching this fall, two days a week at Yale, wrote Tate at the end of November that he was enjoying it, “especially my non-writing course (though in my writing course nobody writes, which is fine).” “Well,” Tate replied, “I’m glad you are enjoying your teaching. I’m so bored with giving the same thing every year that I would be tempted to resign if I could afford it. . . . My writing students write. I must go to Folwell at once to interview three of them who have written three bad short stories.” Garrison Keillor, an undergraduate student of Tate’s in this period, recalled that “in his wonderful poetry seminar he had us write sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, and other classic forms of verse. A wonderful, wonderful education.”

Isabella’s son Dan was with them again; “he doesn’t know what he will do. He wants to be told what to do, but he won’t do what he is told. It is dreadful to think that a boy of seventeen has his future in his hands.”

Tate was to read at the National Poetry Festival at the Library of Congress October 22–24. In a letter from Wellfleet he had withdrawn, citing a near deadline. In fact, looking at the list of participants, he told Van Doren he decided “that you, John Ransom, and I (the Elders) were...