This post is a continuation of this series and a follow-up to this earlier piece.
Summer, 1956. My mother was six years old somewhere in an Illinois cornfield and my father was four in Texas, which meant watching out for the bricks the twisters blew through windows and Being Well under the auspices of his Mammaw’s Christian Science, her undoctored well-believing.
Summer 1956 and in Massachusetts W.S. Merwin was resuming U.S. residency and gathering his thoughts from where he’d left them scattered all over Europe. He was getting to know Robert Lowell and, in the words of the Academy, “seeking a more American vernacular and turning inward.” This vernacular quest and inward turn led him, as ever, toward the universal, for in the summer of 1956 The Kenyon Review published his poem, “The Nine Days of Creation”: “The first day of Creation / All things, love, alone were, / Darkness the lonely creature; / Clove us then Love with good light / For two can be together, / And partly we were bright, / Each other so to look on“”
Summer 1956 and somewhere between the church-spires of Princeton and the corn-spears of Iowa Theodore Holmes was praying for rain: “The beauty of a bouquet of flowers; the puddle in the lower parts of our being / Out of which our love drinks; that on a sunny day, if we listen, we might hear / Gathering the offertory beneath a hollow ringing in its steeple“/ I am content to rise as dust beneath the farmer’s shoes of my love / Here, where, though there is no rain, the clouds rise and fall with each step we take.”
Summer 1956 and at Yale, David Slavitt was studying, listening to the radio, and recording the “nostalgic obscenity” of his great grandfather’s decline: “No one knows what he’s thinking of. / Nobody knows if he’s thinking. / Reciting the names that have come of his love, / he sits in the sunshine, blinking.”
Summer 1956 and in Milledgeville, Georgia, Flannery O’Connor was writing the story of Mrs. May and her two boys and Mr. Greenleaf and his two boys and his wife’s “prayer healing.” O’Connor was thinking about the strangeness of bulls and the fatality they stand for. She was saying, how many are the ways we raise ourselves to action, how brief the time in which we have to move.
Summer 1956 and in Gambier, Ohio John Crowe Ransom was defending the “strange music of English verse” against a generation of critics so “phlegmatic” as to “assume that the authority of the meters is passing, or is past.”
Meanwhile, The Kenyon Review was developing its new Fellowship program, designed to nurture the talents of such promising young writers as the aforementioned Flannery O’Connor and W.S. Merwin, as well as such luminaries as Howard Nemerov, Richard Ellman, James Wright, J.F. Powers, and Elizabeth Spencer. The times were momentous and the heroes were many, but only “Four Fellows” could be chosen. These happy few became, for their year of selection, the Guardians of the Three Rings of Literature: the ring of Poetry, the ring of Fiction, and the ring of Literary Criticism. Their stipends were uniformly $2,700 or $4,000 if they were married–and for this small sum the heroes traversed the untold vastnesses of Middle Path.
There can be no doubt. Summer 1956 was the greatest issue of all.