Ramon Guthrie's New Poem

There is a great man at Dartmouth: Ramon Guthrie, a poet that many Dartmouth alumni may not know about. His new book, Maximum SecurityWard, is being published this month by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It is a long poem, some 3000 lines, about the same length as Shakespeare's Hamlet.

My connection with Ramon Guthrie goes back to 1939. That fall I went to Hanover on a combined sales and MS trip. I was at that time the editor of the College Department of Harcourt Brace & Company.

I ran into two very promising professors in the French department: George Diller, a fine teacher, and Ramon Guthrie, who was said to be a most creative writer, both in their late thirties. They agreed to prepare an anthology, French Literature Since the Revolution, with Diller doing the footnotes and other teaching apparatus, and Guthrie the comments and introductions. Harcourt Brace published the book in 1942, and it quickly seized its market: third-year college French, a small but worthwhile market. The book sold its 2500 to 3500 copies a year from 1942 on; it is still selling, unrevised. and is regarded as the outstanding work in its field.

I kept more or less in touch, but the next big thing with Guthrie was the publication in 1959 of Graffiti (Macmillan). It was a moderate sales success, but well reviewed. Then in late 1968, he published a remarkable book, AsbestosPhoenix (Funk & Wagnalls), which showed unmistakable signs of genius.

In September of 1969, I happened to be in Hanover about the building of a house in Sharon, Vermont—twenty miles and twenty minutes from Dartmouth— and Guthrie heard that I was at the Hanover Inn.

He telephoned me and suggested we get together. I said sure, where? He said he was at the Mary Hitchcock Hospital but would postpone a trip to the X-ray room (cancer was noted early in 1968) so we could talk. When I arrived in his room, there he was, 73 years old, sitting half propped-up in his hospital bed, with his little white moustache, and we talked. I had known about the long poem he had written; Alexander Laing '25, Ramon's and my great friend, had told me about it.

I asked Alex how good it was, really, and he said, "I think it is great." I said, "You mean for the decade?" "No," said Alex, "I mean great for the century."

At Mary Hitchcock, Ramon said he just needed three or four days free from pain to finish the poem. I said, "Of course, Ramon, you have to get them." When it came time to go, I walked over to his bed and kissed him, somehow the only appropriate thing to do.

Next morning, back home in Ridge-field, Connecticut, I picked up The NewYork Times and, as I do more and more frequently these days, turned to the obituary page. There, to my astonishment, was a story that George Diller, Ramon's collaborator, had died from cancer in France the day before, possibly about the time Ramon and I were talking in the hospital. George had retired from Dartmouth's French department in 1963, about the same time that Guthrie had, and had gone to France, where he was active in placing American students in French universities.

Several weeks later, I had a letter from Guthrie, saying that he would like me to act as his agent and do what I could to forward the MS of Maximum SecurityWard. I wrote and told him I was honored and would work on it. Then apparently he got the creative time he needed to finish the poem, for I had a telephone call from Alex Laing, saying that Guthrie had finished and asking what do we do now?

I said, "Get the MS carefully typed and xeroxed—about twenty copies—and send the bill to me." But the bill never came, for Dartmouth heard about Ramon's progress and appropriated $250 for the job. Good college!

Then, in another two weeks, there arrived at my home at Carefree, Arizona, my photocopy of Maximum SecurityWard, and I spent three days of a long weekend reading it: one of the great reading experiences of my life! I had kept notes and I sent them, together with a statement of my unlimited enthusiasm, to Guthrie. He wrote he was pleased, of course, but mainly he was glad to know through me that the poem was readable, as it surely is, unlike some of our finest modern American poems which make the reader work hard and long to distill the meaning.

Then began my promotion campaign. I sent my copy of the poem to Laurence Perrine, my collaborator on 100 American Poems of the 20th Century, because I respected his judgment and I thought maybe my' judgment might have been distorted by the astigmatism of friendship. When I saw Perrine in Dallas a couple of weeks later, he said he had had time to read only the first twenty pages and he thought it good but not great. So I got the MS back from him and sent it to my old friend, Louis Untermeyer, and asked him to read it all the way through. Upon my arrival back in Connecticut, where both Louis Untermeyer and I live, we got together for lunch and Untermeyer said he was worried about the first twenty pages but he kept on and now believed that this was a great poem, greater for its time than T. S. Eliot's TheWasteland. "Happy but large words, Louis," I said.

I had had other copies sent to Robert Giroux of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and to James Storrow of The Nation. When I went in to talk with Bob Giroux, he had some doubts. Maybe the poem was a bit derivative, maybe it didn't meet the criteria of eternity. I suggested getting reports from people that we both respect: Robert Lowell, John Berryman, John Ciardi, Robert Penn Warren. So we did and when the reports came in, the only doubter was Ciardi, who said the language is not quite up to the ideas. Lowell, Berryman, Warren all said the poem is great and must be published. And Bob Giroux said yes, it's clearly a book for FS&G.

James Storrow of The Nation took home the copy of the Guthrie MS I gave him, on a Friday night, and sat down and read it at one sitting, a thing I couldn't have done, the intensity being so great. He re-read it on Sunday and he too concluded that it's a great poem. And he decided to publish a big piece of it in TheNation, which he did in late April.

Then it occurred to me that this was a work that The New Yorker should consider. So I called Bill Shawn, the editor, and asked him to hear me. He did, asked for two copies of the MS, and finally, with the approval of Howard Moss, his poetry editor, published a sizable portion of the poem in the May 2 issue: The Making of the Bear.

In late May, Guthrie was awarded the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for continuing creative work at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Arts and Letters. Since Guthrie was still in the hospital in Hanover, his good friend, Malcolm Cowley, received the award in his place which carried with it a stipend of $1500. Cowley put the distinguished audience on notice that a new major poet had arrived. Out of this affair came publication of another substantial selection from Maximum Security Ward in a July issue of The NewRepublic. Finally, Howard Mumford Jones, the critic and professor of American literature at Harvard, read the poem and said it is clearly the work of genius.

Now, with book publication coming in December 1970, Guthrie is on his way to being recognized as a major poet of the Twentieth Century.

Only one footnote: In travels through northern Arizona, I ran across graffiti of Marsyas, Guthrie's character, on the mined walls of two early American buildings, circ. 800 A.D. Here were flute players lying on their backs, waving their legs in the air, beards pointed skyward, and playing the hell out of their flutes! Time dissolves before great poetry.