The Literary Correspondence of Donald Justice with Richard Stern

In 1944, Donald Justice (1925-2004) stopped over at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on his way to New York City. There, in a library, he recognized the book in the young Richard Stern's (1928—) hands—Louis Untermeyer's Modern British and American Poetry—and struck up a conversation. "Good," Justice intervened. "Like it?" Though young (Justice was nineteen, and Stern sixteen), both were already engaged in shaping their literary personae. An ensuing discussion of the modern poets in Untermeyer's anthology prompted an exchange of tastes, and shortly following, addresses. Their conversations persisted in letters, starting an epistolary friendship that would last until Justice's death in 2004.

The first letter of this series, dated February 5, 1946, reminds one of a page from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Sent by the young poet Justice in response to the even younger Stern's initial attempts at composition, the letter is an early demonstration of his honest, if naïve, aspirations for the poetry he hoped to read and write. His early letters are at once candid and ambitious, as if he were rehearsing in them his role as teacher and critic. Don introduced me to the rigors of composition, wrote Stern years later. Any half-decent turn of phrase or meter fired the generosity. When I finally wrote one fair line, The sun makes shadows of us all, the generosity was like a confirmation. And Stern returned the favor, when Justice sent, as he often did, drafts of poems, stories, novel treatments, and even verse plays. You are my barometer, Justice writes in a letter of October 8, 1956, my sensitive instrument which tells me I am fair & warmer or cool & cloudy. So? Though Justice published relatively little in his lifetime, the energy with which he wrote poetry, discussed, practiced and experimented with it, is apparent in these letters, his intention being, as he put it to Stern, to keep "only the cream."

The two friends studied together at Iowa when the Writers' Workshop was still in its early development. That period, between 1952 and 1954, marks the only pause in their correspondence. After completing his doctoral work, Justice turned down a teaching job at the University of Chicago to take another at the University of Missouri. In his place, he recommended Stern, who remained on the faculty until 2002, when he retired as Regenstein Professor Emeritus. Justice would soon return to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, teaching poetry there for almost twenty years.

The letters that follow, selected from the many written by Justice to Stern in the years between 1946 and 1961, end with the publication of his first volume, The Summer Anniversaries (Wesleyan, 1960), and its critical reception. That same year Stern published his first novel, Golk (Criterion)—evidence, perhaps, of the creative support maintained by their friendship. Early drafts of the poems in Justice's first volume, and in his chapbook, The Old Bachelor (Pandanus, 1951), were sent to Stern for his reactions. They, along with drafts of poems as yet uncollected or unpublished, the opinions expressed and received, and the intimate wit with which they were delivered, bear witness to a writer in the act of inventing himself. More immediately, they are a testament to a friendship whose shared energy and influence were critical in generating the work of both writers.

March 3, 1946|1829 N.W. 46th St.|Miami

Dear Dick,

Don't feel like writing a long explanatory and dull letter just now. I answered your letter once before but never mailed it. In that letter I got involved in justifying my tortuous images so that it ran on for thirteen pages before I tired. A similar error in taste I will now try to avoid.

Since here (in Miami) I've written two fine short stories, several poems; and revised some ancient and recent stuff; but so little of it ever seems to get to the final, satisfying state. This is a terrifying existence, never being able to say just what you mean, and even when you come...