60. Turn: “The Power of Adrienne Rich”, reviewed by Cheryl S.
My holiday gift from Liane Beach (who must have arranged for its delivery from her aerie in deepest Siberia) was a copy of a new biography, The Power of Adrienne Rich (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2020) by Hilary Holladay. The book is both fascinating and disturbing in that its author is writing about the arc of a career dedicated to poetry and to political activism, and we all know how difficult it is to combine the two. Art is often resistant to being used for propaganda, and ideologues in turn may find the arts too weak or too strong for practical ends. Perhaps dear Liane feels that my work (or a dance like the new Visions, which my colleague Sandy has made on me) deserves the largest public forum, in which case political ideas may indeed be part of the mix. (Certainly, the subject of our dance, Joan of Arc, evokes political issues.) Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), a widely respected American poet, came to see herself as a public intellectual-artist and embraced controversy when fighting for social justice. I am aware that certain modern works (Battleship Potemkin, Mahagony, The Three Penny Opera, Hiroshima, Mon Amour) have managed a successful combination of aesthetics and ideology, but I am also conscious how problematic the project can be. Indeed, Rich was often the subject of criticism for using her verse as a pulpit. Beyond such judgment, I read for evidence in the new Holladay volume that would suggest why a poet – a female poet – could find herself turned toward preachment.
The new biography does not indulge in critical assessment. The volume is a kind of career survey awash in triumphalism over Rich’s eventual imputed influence upon others. “Power” does not corrupt herein; if anything, it ennobles and justifies. Rich’s poetry is not analyzed in any depth, and there are few discussions of the change in Rich’s work beyond its subject matter. There is a sense in which Holladay welcomes the poet’s eventual polemical prose writings as easier to summarize than her poems. Rich did not really “confess” to personal motivations in her correspondence with close friends. On the evidence of her written exchanges with intimates and in her public statements, she is regularly categorical in her self-analysis. There is strong evidence that Rich did not look forward to biographical assessment. One sign of such a desire for privacy is the lack of family cooperation with Holladay. Rich was the mother of three sons, and the absence of their testimonies about growing up with a dedicated poet may mean that they have obeyed maternal commands for silence. Holladay does provide full documentation of Rich’s relation to her dominating father, Arnold Rich, and her struggles with rheumatoid arthritis throughout much of her life.
What interested me in the biography was the process over time that took the poet toward giving voice to large social issues and political causes – her “turn”. Her voice became almost Whitmanesque. In my own experience, women artists are often activated by an early grasp of just how limited guides toward success can be in fields usually dominated by men. This realization can lead to an early form of cynicism about any hope of a career beyond housewife. American male poets have also been known to suffer from a sense of isolation and a lack of ready response from native readers. (I am thinking of Randall Jarrell, whose suicide may have been the result of such conditions.) A lack of belief caused by no echo from the big world can lead to a reaction: the need to find social movements to believe in amid general opposition. The big world arrives with a vengeance in the form of Causes and Crusades. Such topics can certainly provide grist for certain poetic mills.
Poets can need regular input in order to be inspired. Input is difficult to arrange when you are a wife and mother. By 1956, Rich had followed her economist husband Alfred Conrad to a small town in Illinois so that he could teach at Northwestern University, while Rich became a housewife and mother to her first child. She is described by Holladay as reading Martin Buber’s I and Thou for consolation. The detail reminds me of a passage by Maurice Small on the privileged deprivations suffered by some poets in isolation: “In the presence of a desert, a prairie, a sea or the sky, in an absolutely dark cavern, or on the summit of a mountain, a feeling of disproportionateness between the man and what he sees overwhelms consciousness. Paralysis of association results.”
Not everyone can take a Walden. Not everyone, like a Henry James, can uproot and transplant to a richer clime. Paranoia, distrust, and anxiety can be the result. Philosophers can inhabit a cave. Poets generally cannot. By her third pregnancy, Rich was reported by her friend, the poet Robert Lowell, to be subsisting on Benzedrine and Simone de Beauvoir, this despite the eventual residence of Alfred and Adrienne at Harvard where he manned a new teaching post. The mid-1960s saw the pair move again to the West Side of Manhattan so that “Alf” could take a position at the City University of New York, where husband and wife became deeply involved in civil rights causes, especially Project SEEK, which worked for increased educational opportunities for minority students. Rich herself taught workshops and courses at Swarthmore, Columbia University, and eventually at City College. She and her husband identified themselves with the New Left while handling heavy course loads. One of the weaknesses of Holladay’s book is the absence of testimony on what Rich was like as a teacher. What she assigned in readings, what instructions (or the lack thereof) were given to students who wished to write poetry, and comments on her effectiveness in the classroom. This jobwork was a major part of Rich’s contribution to our society, and it is a shame to see it scanted.
What may be hard to fathom for some younger readers today is the world of political activism generated in the late 1960s and the pressure this produced on a sensibility with a poetic gift. (I notice that the young poetess Amanda Gorman, who delivered the inaugural poem at the recent ceremonies in Washington, D.C., has just been signed by an agency, IMG Models. Maybe some political engagement among the young is becoming literally fashionable?) Perhaps Rich was inspired by the political gestures that Robert Lowell and others had made over the preceding years in disagreement with the military decisions of established powers in D.C. Rich claimed that her work with SEEK made her a part of the urban New York environment. Her husband’s involvements with the open admissions project led to his concern that he would alienate his employers. At one point, Adrienne herself discovered an irrational fear of subway stairs. She then began seeing a psychiatrist while simultaneously seeking out leaders in the women’s liberation movement. Here may have been a real climax in the long arc in her thought toward political engagement.
Perhaps the “turn” was indeed a new development in Rich’s life and work, or perhaps poetry itself had been an early crusade which she happily joined as a youngster and now employed to adult ends. One immediate result was a possible contribution to the mental problems of her husband. Claiming the need to find a separate living situation in order to continue her activities as a poet, Rich moved out of the family apartment and found lodgings of her own. In October of 1970, Alfred committed suicide. As we all know, suicide can seldom be explained from simple motivations. It probably takes a lifetime to arrive at such a decision. But after her husband’s act, Rich had to consider the possibility that her own commitment to political causes and her absence from his side might have contributed to Conrad’s chosen end. Just before his death, “Alf” had complained to a friend that Adrienne had “gone mad” from her new interest in women’s lib.
The disconnected wife and mother of the 1950s had become the committed activist by the late 1960s and beyond. How does the change manifest itself in her poetry? Following the publication of The Diamond Cutters, the poet placed her metaphoric gift under scrutiny. Casual comparison in conversation and in the more refined forms of metaphoric thinking in poetry could hide unconsidered prejudice or callous disregard of social injustice (for example, the exploitation of workers in the diamond mines of South Africa). Metaphor as sickness. Paralysis of association, indeed.
We travel quite a distance from lines in 1951’s “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”
Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chilvaric certainty.
to the ones in 1981’s “Grandmothers: Granddaughter”:
Born a white woman, Jewish or of curious mind
--twice an outsider, still believing in inclusion—
in those defended hamlets of half-truth
broken in two by one strange idea,
“blood” the all-powerful, awful theme –
what were the lessons to be learned? If I believe
the daughter of one of you – Amnesia was the answer.
The critic Helen Vendler raised the question of Rich’s growing reliance on prepared categories of thought in place of the poet’s brief to invent new ones. Perhaps Vendler had descried a distrust in Rich’s work of the “irrationality” of poetic effect. And there was the question over time of the writer’s search for identity. Poet. Mother. Lesbian. Late-life student of Jewish culture and history. Some of Rich’s followers would have applauded such serial redefinition of self. But other readers could be confused by the poet’s need for conventional alliances. Here was identity politics practiced by an artist before the term was in general use.
Rich was an artist in a society – America – where public life was influenced by a militaristic atmosphere during and after World War II. A Cold War atmosphere inevitably prioritized masculine values. Women – and some artists – had to find a way to exist despite general lack of government support or respect for the “influence” of cultural values on the daily rites of survival and social advancement. From a certain point of view – and this may have been Rich’s perception – it was a matter of the powerless held captive by the powerful. What else to do than to turn one’s poetic gift toward redress? Other artists may have been able to find a niche to produce work and inspire some sign of acceptance. By joining groups and forging bonds with existing movements, Rich may have sought an “echo” from the public.
Indeed, if Holladay’s book reveals something striking in Rich’s career, it would be the presence of support systems among women’s liberation groups and lesbian social circuits. For example, Rich fell in love with her female psychiatrist at one point (the Twenty-one Love Songs were the result), and discovered that she was fulfilling a private function which Susan Sontag had met previously. (Rich and Sontag also had a brief sexual alliance of their own.) Holladay reveals that one of the ways that the shared psychiatrist regularly bonded with her lovers was through a mutual love of opera. Tickets to the Metropolitan Opera brought women together via season subscription.
The new biography can therefore be read as an apologia. We observe in detail the support systems provided by an urban culture as Rich takes up and then abandons each new cause. She will fight the good fight and then join yet another movement. No wonder Holladay uses the word “power” in her title. (Rich also employs it in her poetry.). We see such a quality in its various guises. The religion of art, of gender, of militancy, of political might-makes-right, of belief itself as a minority pursuit in a disenchanted, pagan world. We read in Holladay about the personal, exclusionist tactics of one female poet: she became at least briefly what Holladay terms a “separatist Lesbian”.
At a poetry reading at Bryn Mawr College in 1975, Rich invited questions from her audience, but when a visiting male student from Haverford College raised his hand, Rich announced, “I’m sorry but I don’t take questions from men.” Rich had just survived the breakup of her first Lesbic affair of consequence, and now her self-conception appears to have demanded that she cease dialogue with the opposite gender, at least at public readings. Holladay suggests that the gesture was supposed to inspire her female audience to new efforts toward achieving gender equality. It also reads like a dramatic version of grandstanding – a form of condescension toward both male and female members of the public. Holladay titles the chapter in which she deals with this incident, “I know my power, 1975-1977”, and the biographer passes no judgment. But today’s reader has to sense a certain pomposity in so public a categorical rebuke, and to be led to find Rich’s poetry guilty of an equivalent inflation.
If it is difficult to reach any kind of final image of Adrienne Rich as a “person” after reading the Holladay biography, it may be because Rich saw her own character as infinitely revisable, a work in progress. I suppose it was offered as a kind of readable text, which – as the French have taught us – can be seen as allowing many kinds of interpretation, many signs. This is an inevitable challenge to a biographer who would want to leave behind some profile of her subject after much research. Perhaps Rich wished finally to be seen as an enigma, to others as well as to herself. This would begin to explain the use of the abstraction “power” in the title of Holladay’s book. It’s like the use of “the Force” in the Star Wars movies. Apply such words to anything, and they acquire an almost mystic eminence. Perhaps that is what Adrienne Rich aspired to – some sense of approval. Her father famously coached her from infancy to become a celebrated writer. Hilary Holladay has confirmed the achievement of that childhood ambition.
Master Raro says that Rich’s turn to political themes reminds him of the career arc of Jean-Luc Godard and that “Diving into the Wreck” is the poet’s Weekend. I’ve decided to tell Liane Beach that I found her gift to be interesting. After all, I can be just as ambiguous as Adrienne Rich, even though I am not a celebrated choreographer – as yet. I do not see my inner self as serial, but I suppose my social “profile” might appear to be something like a text to certain acquaintances. The French have a penchant for theory, or theory allied with art-making, and that may be what Liane finds in my work. A choreographer is all too much at the beck and call of social change in the world. Even Balanchine claimed to admire Stravinsky’s career-planning skills, fixed as Mr. B was to the arduous administration of a performing arts company. I am not as yet in that kind of demanding position, but I do feel all those buffeting winds of change that put pressures upon what I can imagine and realize. I must develop powers of resistance to many such influences. “Interesting” would indicate sufficiently my aborning curiosity about alternative, or attractive, aesthetic possibilities.
An email to Yakutsk is required. Pressures, pressures.
C.S.
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