On the Talmud and life – Ange Mlinko in LRB:

“Adrienne Rich’s poems speak so strongly to the current zeitgeist (dating from, say, the Occupy movement through #MeToo to Black Lives Matter) that it’s astounding – no, instructive – to realise they were written twenty, forty, fifty years ago:”

(…)

“‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction.’ ‘“Identity” became a synonym for “safe space” in which alikeness rather than difference could be explored.’ Elizabeth’s Bishop’s poem about Billie Holiday, ‘Songs for a Coloured Singer’, is called out for appropriation in 1983: This is a white woman’s attempt – respectful, I believe – to speak through a Black woman’s voice. A risky undertaking, and it betrays the failures and clumsiness of such a position. The personae we adopt, the degree to which we use lives already ripped off and violated by our own culture, the problem of racist stereotyping in every white head, the issue of the writer’s power, right, obligation to speak for others denied a voice, or the writer’s duty to shut up at times or at least to make room for those who can speak with more immediate authority.
Was it Rich who first interrogated the nefarious word ‘masters’ in the 1990s (‘Not How to Write Poetry, But Wherefore’) or our reverence for ‘genius’ in the early 1970s (‘The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message’)? She seems to have anticipated ‘self-care’: ‘I dreamed I called you on the telephone/to say: Be kinder to yourself.’ It has all come to sound trite and overworked. But the woman who helped put this language into circulation published her first full-length collection of poems in 1951. By the time she died in 2012, Rich had published 24 books of poetry and was a public figure, progressive intellectual and activist with a more passionate following than most American poets can ever dream of. Hilary Holladay’s biography – the first – is pleasingly economical, condensing more than eight decades into four hundred pages. It is admiring and sympathetic, but occasionally cocks an eyebrow. Its timing couldn’t be better, as the full range of Rich’s concerns – which expanded over the decades, from pacifism and racial justice in the 1960s to feminism and queerness in the 1970s to antisemitism and Marxism in the 1980s – has dominated public discourse in the wake of the Trump years. It is also a study in the professionalisation of American poetry, and its imbrication with the meritocracy, since the mid-20th century.”

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“Arnold Rich was the ‘spoiled darling’ of a Jewish immigrant from Austria-Hungary (né Reich) who married the Mississippi-born daughter of a Bavarian immigrant. They were prosperous and assimilated Southerners in Birmingham, Alabama and instilled in Arnold a repulsion towards his Jewish origins, which would cause a rift with his daughter when Adrienne chose to marry another man with the initial A: Alfred Conrad (formerly Cohen) in 1953. In 1925, Arnold married the Episcopal Helen Jones from Atlanta and designed a long-sleeved black crêpe dress for her to wear as a uniform. Helen gave up her concert career, although she continued to play the piano every day. Holladay sees an unspoken contest that Adrienne’s mother lost from the start: ‘Looking from one to the other, the young Adrienne threw her lot with Arnold Rich, the more powerful parent, the one with the study filled with books and antique maps, a microscope and stacks of manuscript pages.’ Her relationship with her sister, Cynthia (the ‘beauty’), was distant, even after Cynthia started campaigning for women’s rights and came out as a lesbian. Market competition, injected into the fragile, shallow rooted nuclear family, sowed lifelong division.
In addition to the hothouse home-schooling, European vacations were ‘a mainstay of her childhood ... She was comfortable travelling first class and dressing in a formal gown for dinner aboard an opulent ocean liner.’ Such luxury was not an end in itself: edification was. When as a teenager Rich attended a private school, ‘her favourite feeling was “that of having accomplished something”’; her motto, ‘Noblesse Oblige’.”

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“Rich’s worldly success illustrates the clubbable hortus conclusus that was – and still is – the Ivy League. A Change of World isn’t one of the great First Books (just compare it to Bishop’s North & South, published only five years earlier, though Bishop was almost twenty years older). Even the anthology favourite ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’, ‘lucid and well made’ as it is (Holladay’s is not a critical biography and her glosses are brief) is as schematic as it gets: here is the put-upon wife, the autocratic husband, the tiger and wedding ring and ‘feminine art’ of needlework encumbered with symbolism. True, Rich wasn’t the only poet parroting Frost and Yeats and Auden in those days. Nearly all the young poets of the age strove for formal competence: Lowell, Merwin, Plath and even Frank O’Hara wrote reams of quatrains and sonnets before breaking out into free verse, seemingly all at once, as if to the Muses’ baton. During his tenure as judge of the Yale Younger Poets prize, Auden was frequently unenthused; in 1947, he awarded it to his former student Joan Murray, who had died five years earlier. Submissions in 1955 were so dismal that he privately asked John Ashbery and O’Hara for manuscripts (Ashbery’s Some Trees was the winner).
Rich and her fans have bristled at some of the condescending praise her early books received. Auden’s introduction to A Change of World (1951) characterised her poems as ‘neatly and modestly dressed’; reviewing her second book, The Diamond Cutters (1955), Randall Jarrell called her a ‘princess in a fairy tale’. This period provides the foil to what came later – Rich’s radicalisation – and thus serves the larger allegory of her life: the princess wakes up and spits out the poisoned apple, the meritocratic reward of ‘excellence’. She engaged in self-criticism of her own early work (‘formalism was part of the strategy – like asbestos gloves, it allowed me to handle materials I couldn’t pick up barehanded’) and railed in later years against the ‘tokenism’ that had singled her out.
But it was not only men who aided Rich and wanted to see her succeed. Holladay lays out the queasy contradictions: Although Rich later complained that she had been made a token in the male literary establishment, she could have pointed out that the publication of her second book was largely a women’s project. Without White’s name providing Rich with an entrée, who knows but that Harper might have rejected the book, just as Harcourt Brace, Knopf and Yale had done.
It was also hard to rail against tokenism without insulting any woman who had triumphed over adversity – Alice Walker or Audre Lorde, for instance. In 1974, when the three of them were among the nominees for the National Book Award, Rich hatched a scheme to denounce this ‘patriarchal sham’: If one of them was awarded the prize, the winner would read a statement that rebuked the male-dominated awards hierarchy while championing the cause of all women. She implied or perhaps stated outright that of the three of them, she was the most likely to win because she was white. On the chance that one of the others did win, she was asking Walker and Lorde to spurn the honour and the one thousand dollar prize – income they may have wanted to keep ... Seen in this light, her high-minded proposal carried with it a large dose of presumption: first, that she would win; second, that a joint statement from all of them was necessary; and third, that they should imperil their professional standing to validate a point she wanted to make.
You have to be accustomed to winning prizes, and quite certain of your place in the pecking order, to grandstand like this.”

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“Holladay claims that Rich loved Conrad and tried to support him, but she also admits that ‘Adrienne was a volatile woman who experienced deep depressions and sometimes indulged in screaming fury.’ A portrait emerges of a woman who had broken relationships with her parents and sister, whose comrades-in-arms often fell by the wayside (Lowell, Levertov, Hayden Carruth), who ‘refused to feel obligated to return favours ... which could make her seem cold and ungrateful’. Carruth’s wife, Rose Marie, remembered the meadow where Conrad killed himself as the site of an infamous picnic, where an increasingly abrasive Rich announced that ‘she planned to give away her pots and pans’ and ‘do a lot less cooking’.”

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“It’s this that makes her so relevant today – when otherwise comfortable people live in thrall to newsfeeds and phone alerts. Rich’s Collected Poems is a century’s compendium of emergencies, telegraphed in proper nouns: Mississippi, Harpers Ferry, Jaurez, Catalonia, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Central America, Lebanon; ‘Appomattox/Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma’; ‘Beirut.Baghdad.Sarajevo.Bethlehem.Kabul. Not of course here.’ Helen Vendler wrote dismayed reviews of Rich’s work, excoriating the stereotypes, the bombast: ‘One longs, reading Rich’s A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, for the poem to take an unexpected byway, to reverse itself, to mock itself, to question its own premise, to allow itself, in short, some aesthetic independence. In Rich, the moral will is given a dominating role that squeezes the lifeblood out of the imagination.’ But one doesn’t read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort – unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal. Yet Holladay reveals the extent to which actual, first-hand suffering also informed Rich’s aesthetics: diagnosed in her early twenties with rheumatoid arthritis, she struggled with bouts of debilitating pain and underwent successive surgeries, including one to screw a metal ‘halo’ to her skull to relieve pressure on the spinal cord. She suggests that Plath’s unkind description of Rich in her twenties – ‘little, round & stumpy’ might be explained by the steroids Rich took for her condition. It was surely a blow to her pride: ‘Once, when Cynthia asked her about the affliction, Adrienne responded by screaming at her never to bring up the subject again. The disease was a sign of weakness she could not bear to discuss with her sister.’”

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“Small wonder, then, that what brought Rich to her knees – her doomed love affair with her psychoanalyst, Lilly Engler, in 1974 – holds such fascination: She found in Engler the deeply attentive partner she had craved for so long. No matter that her desire for her therapist was a classic case of transference; no matter that Engler was a mother and father figure wrapped into one. She was Jewish, Viennese, well educated, and well travelled – a reader of literature, a knowledgeable lover of classical music and a revered psychiatrist with a sophisticated clientele.
Engler, more than a decade older than Rich, had also been Susan Sontag’s lover and was an insider in the Manhattan cultural elite. This was Rich’s first same-sex affair, and it marked a swift and wholehearted transition from the ‘hopelessly heterosexual’ woman who ‘craved an intellectual man’ to the committed radical – and for a time, separatist – feminist.
But it couldn’t last. Engler was closeted; in the 1970s, her career depended on it. Nor was a doctor-patient relationship a solid ground on which to build. In less than a year, they had separated. Rich wrote ‘Twenty-One Love Poems’ to commemorate their romance; by the time it appeared in The Dream of a Common Language, Rich had entered into a partnership with the Jamaican-born writer Michelle Cliff and for a long time, everyone assumed it was for her.”

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“‘Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles,’ she wrote in 1982: ‘white, Jewish, antisemite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, feminist, exmatriate Southerner, split at the root – that I will never bring them whole.’”

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“She had made a Talmud out of her life,’ Holladay suggests, ‘the multiple meanings of which demanded endless study, debate, and interpretation.’ But the image that sticks with me is of Adrienne Rich at home in Santa Cruz, recently liberated from the metal halo, tending to a collection of cacti.”

Read the article here.

Morality and imagination should not exclude each other but moralizing can be a tedious endeavor and easily become the enemy of any kind of imagination. (Identity as authority.)

Most fascinating is her ‘her doomed love affair’ with psychoanalyst Lilly Engler, who happened to be Susan Sontag’s lover as well. Viennese, Jewish, well-traveled and a psychoanalyst, what else do you want?

After the “The Dream of a Common Language” tending cacti in Santa Cruz, life as a Talmud in between.