Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur

A Biographical Study

Robert Bagg, Mary Bagg

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781613764589
• Print ISBN:
  9781625342249
  9781625342232
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Wilbur (b. 1921) is part of a notable literary cohort, American poets who came to prominence in the mid-twentieth century. Wilbur's verse is esteemed for its fluency, wit, and optimism; his ingeniously rhymed translations of French drama by Molière, Racine, and Corneille remain the most often staged in the English-speaking world; his essays possess a scope and acumen equal to the era's best criticism. This biography examines the philosophical and visionary depth of his world-renowned poetry and traces achievements spanning seventy years, from political editorials about World War II to war poems written during his service to his theatrical career, including a contentious collaboration with Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman.

Wilbur's life has been mistakenly seen as blessed, lacking the drama of his troubled contemporaries. Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur corrects that view and explores how Wilbur's perceived "normality" both enhanced and limited his achievement. The authors augment the life story with details gleaned from access to his unpublished journals, family archives, candid interviews they conducted with Wilbur and his wife, Charlee, and his correspondence with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, John Malcolm Brinnin, James Merrill, and others.

1

Childhood in North Caldwell, New Jersey

“Back where safety was”

Growing up in North Caldwell in what amounted to a little British colony, it was understood that anything British was better than anything American, at least contemporaneously. Of course we felt that George Washington was better than George III.

—Richard Wilbur, interview by the authors, April 4, 2006

A memory from childhood opens each of the three stanzas of “This Pleasing Anxious Being,” a poem that Richard Wilbur wrote at the age of seventy-seven. In each stanza Wilbur pauses for a moment in the remembered scene and then feels time pulsing him forward, inevitably toward death. As he both presents his life and invites us to explore it through the poem, he quietly asserts his belief that the soul is immortal.

Wilbur renders the poem’s autobiographical facts in vivid detail, often with references to photography and painting, artistic genres that can influence our memories by capturing them and lifting them from their contexts. In the first stanza, for instance, he evokes the chiaroscuro technique in Georges de La Tour’s painting The Nativity, freezing his family (but only for a moment) in a serene but dramatically lit tableau—the dining room on an evening in the mid-1920s:

In no time you are back where safety was,

Spying upon the lambent table where

Good family faces drink the candlelight

As in a manger scene by de La Tour.

Father has finished carving at the sideboard

And Mother’s hand has touched a little bell,

So that, beside her chair, Roberta looms

With serving bowls of yams and succotash.

When will they speak, or stir? They wait for you

To recollect that, while it lived, the past

Was a rushed present, fretful and unsure.

The muffled clash of silverware begins,

With ghosts of gesture, with a laugh retrieved,

And the warm, edgy voices you would hear:

Rest for a moment in that resonance.

But see your small feet kicking under the table,

Fiercely impatient to be off and play.1

British Civility and Southern Manners

How the family came to be in that room—how Wilbur came to grow up in “a little British colony” in a small American town—involved a bit of serendipity.2 In 1923, when he was two, his father, Lawrence Lazear Wilbur (1893–1976), met a British expatriate named Joshua Dickinson Armitage on a golf course in northern New Jersey. The men played their round with an Englishman named Stanley Pigeon, a mutual acquaintance. Pigeon, who spent time aboard a naval training ship with the British poet John Masefield when both were young and whose “extraordinary career doing this and that” included stints as a cowboy and an amateur violinist, had met Lawrence Wilbur while they were both enrolled at the Art Students League in New York.3

Armitage took a shine to Lawrence and offered him and his family, for minimal rent, residence in a handsome pre-Revolutionary-era stone house on Greenbrook Road, part of an otherwise British-style estate that Armitage was building for himself on 450 acres. As Wilbur explained in 2006, “My father and mother, who were always innocent people and willing to be influenced, took him up on it rather quickly.”4 Across the road, on property purchased from Armitage, lived Pigeon and his wife Helen.

Wilbur’s father had left his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, at age seventeen to study at the Art Students League, and he eventually became a freelance commercial artist. Though he never received the public recognition that J. C. Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell, and Howard Chandler Christy enjoyed, he was just as sought after by ad agencies and lithographic companies. His poster commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Red Cross brought fame to Marie Bard, his model for the nurse; her image appeared on a two-cent U.S. postage stamp in 1931.5 By midcareer, Lawrence was receiving commissions for billboard-sized portraits of each year’s “Miss Rheingold” pageant winner, and his illustrations were frequently featured on Saturday Evening Post and Colliers covers.6 As technical advances in photography diminished the work available for magazine illustrators, he began focusing on portraits and landscape painting, glad to escape the four-color limitations of lithography to experiment with casein and watercolor.

Armitage was originally a Yorkshireman. Born circa 1866, he had immigrated to Boston’s Beacon Hill from Manchester, England, bringing along his wife and a servant. On the 1890 U.S. Census he listed his occupation as a fabric designer. He held the patent for oilcloth and subsequently owned successful textile and paint-manufacturing operations in Newark, New Jersey, and in New England. By the early 1920s, Armitage, now a widower, was populating his North Caldwell “farm” with a community of British relatives, friends, and business associates, including the Nashes (his niece and her florist husband), a lawyer named Habberton, and other kindred spirits.

Armitage maintained that he had left England because of its landed gentry’s disdain for men who made their fortunes “in trade.” That may have been the only upper-class prejudice he rejected, for he retained the British aristocracy’s Tory politics, which he naturalized into reflexive, anti-Roosevelt republicanism. Nonetheless, the people who lived in their various separate dwellings on the estate were, in Wilbur’s words, “decent, attractive, civilized, kind, and gay,” and living there suited his open-minded parents. Armitage, known as “Uncle,” presided over his domain as if he had been born to the manor he had created, and young Dick Wilbur came to believe “that if the British did it, it was better.”7

The Armitage estate was a multifaceted and instructive environment in which to grow up, and it offered Wilbur his first glimpse of adult society. The grown-ups organized cocktail parties and dinners, played bridge, lawn-bowled, and competed at tennis, although Uncle himself never appeared on the court. Wilbur describes that court, which was across the dirt road from the Wilbur house, as “rather strange.”

[Armitage had] laid it out in the wrong direction so that the sun was always in someone’s eyes. It was surrounded by Japanese honeysuckle which flourished there and was very deep so that every ball that went over the fence took a lot of cussing to retrieve. I’ve never seen a surface like that since. It was fine gravel, so that one had to drag and roll between sets; it became very dug up by people’s sliding on it. But nevertheless it was not a bad court, and it was a very important center of the farm for everybody involved.8

On Sundays Wilbur attended church and, in season, played tennis. “The flavor of both was remarkably similar,” he remembers. “The rules for behavior [on the court] were very strict, and it was a very high-minded sort of game.” His early religious education, however, was somewhat less intense.

We did say grace at dinnertime. I don’t think we did for lunch, and it was never a long one, . . . probably a brisk saying of “For what we are about to receive let us be thankful.” My father would never have been the one to say the grace. He’d been raised in a Presbyterian church, but not much raised. He didn’t care for the piety. He’d go to an Episcopal church down in Montclair sometimes at my mother’s insistence, and he’d come away saying, “Luke White [the pastor] seemed to talk sense this morning.” He wanted people to talk sense and therefore had a resistance to a lot of religious talk. On some Sundays when my family was otherwise occupied I was taken by the head gardener of the farm to a nearby Baptist Sunday school, where we sang marvelous, rousing hymns and were given little tracts illustrated in terrible colors.9

The social spirit on the farm was cordial, inclusive, and respectful, though there were disruptions. One evening during the crisis that surrounded the abdication of King Edward VIII, Armitage declared that thrice-married Wallis Simpson was little better than a common whore. Fuming at his insult, Mrs. Habberton shot out of her chair. Declaring, “Uncle, I cannot stay at this table any longer,” she abruptly left the room. The Nashes, who took a romantic view of Edward and Wallis, were distraught as well. The issue “caused a real division” and “broke up the universal admiration of England” held by most on the farm.10

But civility returned and prevailed, especially when Armitage’s celebrity friends visited. Uncle arranged one afternoon for Wilbur’s mother, Helen, to invite Sir Thomas Lipton, the tea-company and America’s Cup magnate, to her home for some late afternoon refreshment. On bidding goodbye he complimented her, saying she was as charming as an English hostess. She replied, “And you, sir, have the manners of a southern gentleman.”11

Helen Ruth Purdy Wilbur (1892–1981) was the daughter of a prominent Baltimore newspaperman, Clarence Melvyn Purdy, who worked for most of his career at the Baltimore Sun, moving through its ranks to become the city editor. Helen often spoke about her childhood memories of H. L. Mencken, one of the paper’s eminent contributors. When he came to dinner, his laughter “began at the door and never stopped until he left.”12 Clarence Purdy, whom everyone at the paper fondly called “Pop,” took his grandson Dick to the Sun offices to shake hands with Mencken and the columnist Frank Kent as well as with the cartoonists Edmund Duffy and Richard Q. Yardley. The experience influenced Wilbur’s involvement with his school newspapers and led him to consider becoming a journalist.

Helen Wilbur was lively, literate but not learned, and a perfectionist. She was also an expert whistler who encouraged her eldest son’s eclectic enthusiasms, from cartooning to shortwave radio. Nonetheless, her driven nature backfired periodically. When Dick and his brother Lawrie were very young, she was sidelined by exhaustion after a miscarriage. Wilbur’s wife, Charlee, who got to know her in-laws intimately (she lived with them while her husband was in the army during World War II), described Helen as “strong of will but not of body . . . and it turned out later that she had blood sugar problems with attendant fatigue.” Charlee also sensed that the cloistered ambience of the farm, where the Wilburs lived in the midst of people who had more money than they did, exacerbated Helen’s aspiring social desires and compounded the stress of running the household.13

“Tears,” a poem that Wilbur never included in any of his books, suggests that his own sense of the animosity among social classes remained acute at least into his late twenties. The poem begins with a sarcastic description of the rich, with all the “burdens” their possessions and privilege entail: “The straight old men with scalloped skulls who bear / The Atlas weight of eighty years of ease.” In the last stanza, after categorizing them as ignorant, insatiable, and unappreciative, the poet can only hope they get to experience what they’ve missed:

Pale porters of our wealth, who may not see

The least magnificence with grateful eye,

O takers of our ease, sad spenders whom

The world can tease but never satisfy,

I wish you other lives beyond the tomb,

Of hunger, loss and sweet anxiety.14

Wilbur recalled reading “Tears” in North Caldwell at a lawn party hosted by Helen Pigeon in 1948, about a year after his first book drew critical acclaim. The poem failed to upset his parents’ moneyed neighbors or the friends and Armitage family members who lived on the estate in various rental or sale arrangements. They seemed to be telling themselves (with some truth, according to Wilbur) that they weren’t “that kind” of rich while at the same time commenting to others, “Isn’t that Wilbur boy a wonder?”15

Richard Wilbur and his mother, Helen Purdy Wilbur, winter 1922. Courtesy of Richard Wilbur.

The Wilbur’s eighteenth-century stone house, venerable enough to be counted among those where George Washington had spent a night, had small rooms by 1920s standards. Before Uncle’s tenure, in the days when the estate was primarily a farm, a large kitchen had been added in the rear to feed the hands. The Wilbur family employed live-in household servants during the boys’ childhood but never more than one at a time, so the accommodations were ideal.

One black servant made a lasting impression on Wilbur. “Raymond was a pretty good cook, and when not cooking would whip on a cap and become chauffeur, and then appear in another rig as a butler. I remember him with delight,” he said. “He had an amorous setback at one time. A new [child’s model] typewriter had been given me and on it he typed, for the sake of a ‘true confessions’ magazine, I suppose, a story called ‘My Stolen Love’ [that] was never published. But he ruined my typewriter in the process.”16

Helen’s upbringing in Baltimore, a city with a strict black-white dividing line, complicated to some degree the Wilbur family’s easy relationship with their black servants. Once, when Helen and Lawrence were away, the servants on the farm gave an unauthorized party. During the gathering someone showed Dick how to pare an apple so that the peel would fall away in an unbroken, spiraling strip. When he demonstrated this trick to his mother, she responded with suspicion about the circumstanc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1. Childhood in North Caldwell, New Jersey
• 2. Amherst College
• 3. World War II, Stateside and in Italy
• 4. World War II in France, Germany, and England
• 5. Religion and Wilbur’s War Poems
• 6. The Cambridge Years
• 7. Claiming Molière for His Own Native Tongue
• 8. Prix de Rome
• 9. Candide and Other Broadway Misadventures
• 10. In the Circle with Lowell, Bishop, and Jarrell
• 11. Keeping a Difficult Balance
• 12. Overstressed and Overmedicated
• 13. Key West Winters
• 14. Life without Charlee
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index