A Past Master Passes in Review

Reed Whittemore has been profoundly involved in the literary life of this nation for well over sixty years. Some of his first published work—poetry, of course—appeared in the Sewanee Review (spring 1946). The five poems had been sent to Allen Tate by Arthur Mizener (Whittemore wrote them while serving in the U.S. Army in Italy). Two of these poems, “Black Cross” and “White Cross,” derive from the author’s wartime experience: “I would like to dispense with certain sorrows, / Having no room for unessentials / Like a German death, and travel light, / A better soldier than I am.” The rueful tone is characteristic of the author’s complicated view of the human condition and his place in it.

Whittemore’s first book of poetry, Heroes and Heroines, including these poems from the SR, was soon published. Furioso, an important little magazine that he had founded in 1939 with James Angleton and others while they were undergraduates at Yale, would continue until 1953; and he founded another such periodical, the Carleton Miscellany (1960–64), while teaching at Carleton College. His account of these and other such magazines appears in Little Magazines, published in the University of Minnesota Press’s pamphlets on American writers. His memoirs buttress his little history of little magazines, an enduring item for anyone interested in this complicated subject.

Later, after being the literary editor of the New Republic (1969–73), Whittemore would found and edit still another periodical, Delos (1988–92). Of course during the forty-odd years he was actively involved in editing periodicals he was also deeply committed to the academy, teaching not only at Carleton but also at the University of Maryland for long periods and elsewhere on an occasional basis, including the University of the South. In addition to a considerable volume of poetry, he was writing a great deal of prose, forging various books of biography, including a life of William Carlos Williams (Houghton Mifflin); Pure Lives: The Early Biographers; Whole Lives: Shapers of Modern Biography (both published by Johns Hopkins); and Six Literary Lives (University of Missouri Press). His considerable achievement in literary biography is more than enough for most critics and scholars to establish an academic specialty or field.

Throughout this long period of regular accomplishment Whittemore’s fortunes have abruptly gone up and down with astonishing regularity and often with no rhyme or reason. He has weathered vicissitudes almost too painful to recount, especially the death of a son. His critics have waxed and waned about his various books. It is a good thing that Reed Whittemore doesn’t take anything with utmost seriousness, especially himself. In this long and engaging book he is often not on center stage, and he usually appears in the third person, not the first, as is de rigueur in the Age of the Self. Whittemore has been self-effacing and almost selfless as he has contributed mightily to the Republic of Letters for nearly seven decades.

Against the Grain limns that record of honorable achievement. It can be read in many ways, especially for the people such as Angleton and Mizener as well as Richard Eberhart, Howard Nemerov, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, and W. C. Williams who play important roles; as a history of literary life in the United States from 1939 to the present; as the autobiography of a writer accomplished in biography; and so on. As Whittemore’s life passes in review against the background of literary life in general during his time, we stand and salute this veteran of World War II and of many literary skirmishes and battles since.