The power of Adrienne Rich A biography

Hilary Holladay

Book - 2020

"The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award-winning poet"--

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BIOGRAPHY/Rich, Adrienne
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Subjects
Genres
Biographies
Published
New York : Nan A. Talese / Doubleday [2020]
Language
English
Main Author
Hilary Holladay (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xvi, 478 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780385541503
  • Baby genius
  • The patriarch and the woman in the black dress
  • Kingdom of the mind
  • The girl who wrote poems
  • The making of Adrienne Rich
  • Toute la gloire
  • Cleopatra of Oxford
  • The unborn self
  • Bursting with benzedrine and emancipation
  • Pessimistic optimist
  • Like this together
  • What the autumn knew would happen
  • Brilliant, mad, human, and irreplaceable
  • A woman of the 1970s
  • The book of myths
  • In the name of all women
  • I know my power
  • Hyacinths rising like flames
  • My true university
  • Anger and tenderness
  • Words that blew our lives apart
  • Citizen poet
  • I am my art.
Review by Library Journal Review

Holladay (American Hipster) conceives of a comprehensive and richly told biography of award-winning American poet and activist Adrienne Rich (1929--2012). Synthesizing a treasure trove of Rich's letters, journals, testimonials, and published writings to chronicle a complicated and impactful life, Holladay takes readers through Rich's unorthodox and at times turbulent upbringing, her early years of professional and academic success at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, her frustrations as a mother of three young sons with a demanding family life, and her later years as a prominent feminist activist and writer in New York and California. Holladay shows Rich's relevance today through mining meaning from her poems, which reflect both an earlier time as well as our current political moment, and help to tell the story of her life, which Holladay interprets through events happening to the poet at the time she was writing certain poems. VERDICT Exceptionally well-researched and detailed, this is a definitive portrait of Rich that will be welcomed by aspiring writers and poets, Rich scholars, and devotees of 20th-century American poetry.--Sarah Schroeder, Univ. of Washington, Bothell

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Chapter 1 Baby Genius Adrienne Rich's first volume of poetry was published when she was six years old. Bound in a stately blue cover by Joseph Ruzicka Bookbinders of Baltimore, Poems begins with "The Tree" and ends with "Evening Star."1 The thirty-seven poems in the book are well put together; the sentiments sincere, if conventional. Borrowing Emerson's famous response to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, one might have said with a smile to the child author, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start."2 Adrienne Cecile Rich's father, Dr. Arnold Rice Rich, had arranged for the book's publication, and the foreground for her nascent career had begun taking shape in the months leading up to May 16, 1929, the day she was born at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Dr. Rich, a rising pathologist at Johns Hopkins University's medical school, had decided his firstborn would be a genius; he would make a project of it. All eagerness when the baby arrived, he came up with her distinctive name. Though not the hoped-for boy, she would have a given name beginning with A, like Arnold. He chose Adrienne (pronounced with a short A and equal emphasis on each syllable), a tribute to Adrienne Lecouvreur,3 a renowned French actress of the eighteenth century who died mysteriously at age thirty-seven. Possibly Arnold Rich and his wife, Helen Jones Rich, had seen the 1928 film about her, Dream of Love, starring Joan Crawford. Adrienne's middle name honored Arnold's sister and only sibling, Cecile. A few days after the baby's arrival, Arnold wrote to his father-in-law: "Miss Rich is gradually assuming a human appearance. I think that she is going to be quite a girl and I hope that we shall make you proud of her. Rumor about here has it that she was born speaking Greek and Sanskrit fluently, and with a most unusual and polished pianistic technique, but I assure you that that is all somewhat exaggerated."4 No one had to wait long before the proud and determined father's jesting hyperbole gave way to a series of astonishing facts. Dr. Rich made a second job out of tutoring Adrienne during his free time, and Helen Rich, a pianist and composer trained at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, began teaching her music as soon as the toddler was able to sit upright at the piano and extend her plump little hands to the keyboard. When Adrienne was three, Helen wrote in a notebook, "This is the child we needed and deserved."5 By four, the solemn, rather testy child with the round cheeks and penetrating dark eyes was dictating stories and playing Mozart with a prodigy's ease. The poems would soon follow. Her father transcribed her stories in a book containing a blank page opposite each of a dozen fanciful illustrations. With her parents hovering close by, Adrienne composed the stories over a period of several months. The first, titled "The Kitty Story," is dated "March 31, 1933 at 12:05 midnight"; the last, "The Fish Story," was dictated on May 18, 1933, two days after Adrienne's fourth birthday. On that date, Dr. Rich took pains to write a note at the beginning of the book, which he addressed "To Adrienne in Later Years." His daughter had written her first name in capital letters, with backward n's, on the cover of the book and the title page. But since the stories were in his precise, highly legible script, he didn't want her to doubt that they were her original creations. Her advanced vocabulary, he told her, "can readily be traced to your passion for fairy stories, several of which Mimi has read to you every day for a year." Her mother ("Mimi") treated her to a steady diet of poetry, mythology, and fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. Adrienne also listened to her mother read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Dr. Rich also wanted the adult Adrienne to know that as a young child she would ask her mother to define unfamiliar words. "And so my dear, you may accept the contents of this book as being a faithful mirror of the workings of your own child mind, completely unsullied by any vulgar parental attempt to make you appear more accomplished than you actually were by helping you with little suggestions or by slyly inserting improving words or phrases." At the bottom of this letter of validation he signed himself "Your Father," with a period at the end.6 Once she was grown and writing hundreds of letters each year, Adrienne Rich often put a period after her name--a distinctive touch she evidently picked up from her father, her first literary mentor and the person who shadowed her youthful progress every step of the way. In her fourth year, she learned to read and write. By five, she was practicing her handwriting every day by copying out passages from Blake and Keats, among other poets her father wanted her to know. Describing her assignments in the third person, the adult Rich wrote: [H]er father sets her a few lines of poetry to copy into a ruled notebook as a handwriting lesson. . . . ​She receives a written word in her notebook as grade: "Excellent," "Very good," "Good," "Fair," "Poor." The power of words is enormous; the rhythmic power of verse rhythm meshed with language, excites her to imitation.7 This was the way Arnold Rich wound the clock of Adrienne Rich's mind. Looking back on her early years from the vantage point of middle age, she said, "It was in many ways a privileged childhood. It was also a childhood under a lot of pressure because my father was a very intense, very complicated man."8 Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with whom she would later identify, she had her father to thank for her early indoctrination into the literary life. But both poets suffered as a result of their fathers' controlling ways. If she'd been the rebellious sort, Adrienne might have turned her attentions elsewhere just to spite her father. But she genuinely enjoyed writing and the praise she earned for it. In a letter dated September 17, 1935, her maternal grandmother, Mary Gravely Jones, wrote from New York to her daughter: "Don't forget to send me more of Adrienne's poems, and be sure to save them all."9 On the same day, she wrote to the widowed Hattie Rich, who stayed half the year with Arnold's family: "I am deeply interested in Adrienne's poetic outpourings, I do hope Helen is keeping every one of them, I thought the ones she sent me remarkable, because they were so clearly pure poetic inspiration. The unfolding of her intelligence is certainly an interesting study, and I feel sure that we will have cause for great pride in her achievements, whether it be music, literature or poetry."10 Her unusual upbringing became the subject of some of the adult Adrienne Rich's most revealing and emotionally complex poems and essays. In a 1993 essay, she described the excruciatingly advantaged world of her childhood: "My parents require a perfectly developing child, evidence of their intelligence and culture. I'm kept from school, taught at home till the age of nine. My mother, once an aspiring pianist and composer who earned her living as a piano teacher, need not--and must not--work for money after marriage. Within this bubble of class privilege, the child can be educated at home, taught to play Mozart on the piano at four years old. She develops facial tics, eczema in the creases of her elbows and knees, hay fever. She is prohibited confusion: her lessons, accomplishments, must follow a clear trajectory."11 What appeared to come easily, even naturally, was the result of enormous pressure she could never escape, even when her physical symptoms sent clear messages of distress to her doctor father and her seemingly attentive mother. For the rest of her life, she would look back in wonder, grief, and fury at the strange mix of privilege and unacknowledged suffering that defined her childhood. Once it was set in motion, the interdependent machinery of instruction and accomplishment would never cease. Her mother taught her the basic lessons a child learns in the early grades of school (except for math), and her father pushed her ever harder in literature, history, and writing, when he wasn't at Johns Hopkins teaching medical students or conducting research. At the age of seven, she completed a fifty-page play titled "The Trojan War." Another early play is titled "Suicide, an Allegory in One Act by Altis Spenth." By age eleven, if not before, she was typing her own stories on a manual typewriter. In deference to the weighty keys, she pounded away with her index fingers.12 At these times, deep in her thoughts, she was rehearsing the activity that would consume her for a lifetime. Always, it seemed, she was doing what one parent or the other wanted her to do. When she wasn't writing stories or poems or plays, she was seated at the piano, practicing classical music. In "Solfeggietto," the first poem in Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988, she shows how distant she felt from her mother and how little pleasure she got from the lessons both her parents insisted on: Piano lessons  The mother and the daughter Their doomed exhaustion  their common mystery worked out in finger-exercises  Czerny, Hanon The yellow Schirmer albums  quarter-rests  double-holds glyphs of an astronomy  the mother cannot teach the daughter because this is not the story of a mother teaching magic to her daughter Side by side I see us locked My wrists  your voice  are tightened Passion lives in old songs  in the kitchen where another woman cooks  teaches  and sings He shall feed his flock like a shepherd and in the booklined room Where the Jewish father reads and smokes and teaches Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, the Song of Songs The daughter struggles with the strange notations --dark chart of music's ocean flowers and flags but would rather learn by ear and heart  The mother says she must learn to read by sight  not ear and heart13 The magic of the household lies in the kitchen, where the family cook, likely based on Annie Bowie, a black woman who worked for the Rich family for many years, sings Christian hymns, and in the study, where the "Jewish father" pores over several poetic books of the Old Testament. They teach by example, through their love of spiritually inflected song and literature. Although Rich's father did not practice the faith of his ancestors, he was a lover of poetry and knowledge of all kinds. There is no hint of love or warmth coming from the mother toward her young daughter, who would clearly rather be with her father or the woman singing in the kitchen. J At age sixteen, Adrienne decided she wanted to make a career out of writing, not playing the piano. It was a wrenching decision because she knew she was an extremely talented musician. In her journal, she wrote as if for posterity that she'd been immersed in music ever since birth: weekly performances of chamber music at home, her father often playing violin or viola, her mother playing piano and composing music, and her own daily piano lessons ever since she was three years old. She worried she might regret passing up a career as a successful pianist, but there was a major sticking point. She just didn't love it the way she thought she should. Her mother believed she could fix that by practicing diligently and perfecting her technique. Adrienne didn't see things that way and felt it was time to announce her full commitment to writing. In her journal, she recalled a long-ago dream in which her piano suddenly transformed into a desk. Although young Adrienne typically scoffed at prophetic dreams, this one was right on the mark. Since about the age of twelve, she'd wanted to be a writer, not a musician.14 A writing life was not just what she desired, however, but what her father had in mind for her. In this, he seems to have set himself in competition with his wife. While her mother pushed Adrienne to practice the piano, he spent hours every day tutoring her in writing. Though overbearing, he was by far the more charismatic and engaging parent. As an adult, Adrienne recalled that he spoke "with driving intensity," though she never knew what he was feeling.15 Once she had declared her plans to be a writer, her literary ambitions intensified. In a later journal entry the summer she turned sixteen, she wrote with relish of the mountain of writing she had done from childhood through the present--poems, letters, journals, diaries, essays, and partially drafted plays and novels. She imagined that if she ever became a prominent author, someone would publish a three-volume set of her juvenilia featuring a facsimile of her handwriting and a photograph of her as a child. But if she died without achieving greatness, surely all her papers would be burned in a backyard bonfire after the funeral.16 She was joking, sort of. There was no doubt in her mind that she was a writer; the question was, Would she become an important one whose words would outlive her? She knew better than to aspire to mere fame, what her high-minded father considered a gauche and meaningless measure of success. Her identity was so bound up in her achievement that she expected no one to keep her juvenilia, though clearly precious to her, unless it contributed to a greater understanding of her as an illustrious author. And since her father was the one pushing her to write, it was his opinion that truly mattered. If she failed to become a notable writer, Arnold Rich, or some avatar of him, would be the one stoking the flames of the trash pile after her death. At sixteen, full of adolescent hubris leavened by caustic wit, she could not imagine a middle ground in which her intrinsic value was distinct from her posthumous literary reputation. Decades later, long after he had died, Adrienne Rich gave her father credit for his heavy hand in her formative development. "The message I got was that we were really superior," she wrote. "[N]obody else's father had collected so many books, had traveled so far, knew so many languages. [. . .] My father was an amateur musician, read poetry, adored encyclopedic knowledge. He prowled and pounced over my school papers, insisting I use 'grown-up' sources; he criticized my poems for faulty technique and gave me books on rhyme and meter and form. His investment in my intellect and talent was egotistical, tyrannical, opinionated, and terribly wearing. He taught me, nevertheless, to believe in hard work, to mistrust easy inspiration, to write and rewrite; to feel that I was a person of the book, even though a woman; to take ideas seriously. He made me feel, at a very young age, the power of language and that I could share in it."17 This was heady brew for a child, and Adrienne Rich drank it for many years without question. Yes, she could have become an accomplished pianist, but her mother never had a chance at winning the familial battle for Adrienne's artistic soul. No one could compete with the narcissistic genius of Arnold Rich, certainly not the subservient wife who quietly met her husband's every need while stifling her own talent and desires. In her long-sleeved black crepe dress based on a pattern her husband designed for her, Helen Rich was present but barely visible. Dr. Gerald Spear, a family friend and colleague of Dr. Rich's, remarked years later, "As for Mrs. Rich, as well as I knew her I am embarrassed to say I cannot provide a detailed enlightening description other than to say she was charming."18 Nancy McGaha Composition Director North Market Street Graphics 317 North Market Street Lancaster, PA 17603 (717) 392-7438 * fax: (717) 397-8037 nmcgaha@nmsgbooks.com * nmsgbooks.com Excerpted from The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography by Hilary Holladay All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.