Books: Reed Whittemore: Telling it slant

In an offhand aside, "R," the narrator of "Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet," gives us this tiny catalog of himself:

"More data. He was nearsighted but wore no glasses. He had a medium-grade mind and managed to mix intellectual modesty with sudden arrogance. He was not cut out to be a mathematician, a philosopher or a teetotaler, and some of his friends were as commonplace as he. He preferred to think of himself as a genuine rebel yet couldn't help being polite. Also he was remarkably unobservant, had a poor memory and slept too much. At Yale his grades had been B's or even C's except when he was interested. He had belonged to no fraternity and had been uncomfortable sipping tea among solemn minds at the Elizabethan Club. In poetry he would soon gravitate, though in uniform and surrounded by war, to innocent sonnets about literary characters."

The "data" half-conceals more than it half-reveals about our third-person narrator, Reed Whittemore, and provides us with one clue as to how we might read the whole book. We have to keep reassessing the evidence it provides. This book is written in R's own New Englander's dialect. It is honest, but by God, you have to read closely because it often is very reticent, very nimble and tongue-in-cheek.

This is the only memoir I've ever read told in the third person. It allows great play for the author's considerable wit. He assiduously avoids the confessional and sometimes narcissistic manner that entraps many autobiographers. R, now in his late 80s and living in Maryland, clearly wants to tell us a great deal about himself, his friends and his literary world, but like Emily Dickinson (another New Englander whom he admired) he wants to tell it slant. What meaning do the "facts" of a life have, he might ask, without a design and a personality to make them come to life?

Paradoxically, Whittemore's very canny sense of truth by indirection allows him to probe close to the bone. He can reveal his doubts about himself and his role as a poet with unflinching honesty and without being the least bit mawkish because, in many places, he writes about himself as if he were someone else. As I am not Whittemore and as my task is to introduce him and his book in a shorter space than he commands, I'm sure he won't mind, in this one instance, a little unironic editing of his own catalog, which would go like this:

He has a capacious and extraordinarily flexible literary intelligence. He was one of the finest editors of his time, beginning with Furioso at Yale, which was later reincarnated as the Carleton Miscellany in Northfield, Minn., and whose contributors included Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, Allen Tate, Howard Nemerov, John Crowe Ransom, Arthur Mizener, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur and a host of other poets, critics and novelists who were the defining figures of the era. Many of these became his lifelong friends and admirers. He is one of a handful of poets in the language who can be outrageously funny and serious in the same poem. He is never solemn. He was for a short spell poetry consultant at the Library of Congress. He was, and still is, his own person. He has genuine substance, and he has that very rare thing: style.

For those interested in the literary life, this book, to use a phrase of Wallace Stevens (whom he also admired and published) is "a gorging good." It tells us -- in spite of and because of its glancing indirections -- about the art of poetry, about teaching, husbandhood and fatherhood, about the war and what poets (or at least one poet) might do in a time of war, and much, much else. It tells us about the terrible and continuous Yeatsian choice that all fine poets have to make almost every day between perfection of the life and perfection of the work.

He would deny it strenuously, no doubt, but there's evidence everywhere in these pages -- even if you have to dig for it -- that he strove for both kinds of perfection, and, in this mad world we inhabit, succeeded as well as any man could. Like Garrison Keillor, who in a fine introduction sets us off on our deeper discovery of Whittemore, we are likely to come away from this highly original memoir with a mixture of envy and admiration.

Keith Harrison of Minneapolis is author of "Changes: New & Collected Poems." Long after Whittemore's tenure, he, too, was an editor of the Carleton Miscellany and English professor at Carleton College.