Adrienne Rich's Long Awakening

Adrienne Rich was desperate in the summer of 1958 - the end of "the tranquilized Fifties," in the words of Robert Lowell. Her body was revolting. Seven years earlier, when she was twenty-two, she had noticed the first signs of rheumatoid arthritis. When she was pregnant with her first child, she developed a rash, and was subsequently diagnosed as having an allergic reaction to pregnancy. She had two young children. To her dismay, she was pregnant again despite her contraception.

Looking back on these days, Rich would refer to herself as "sleepwalking." She was up at dawn with a child every day before turning to endless household duties: cooking, cleaning, supervising the children. There was little time for her to write, and even less motivation. In 1956, she wrote in her journal, "When I receive a letter soliciting mss., or someone refers to my "career," I feel strongly motivated to deny all responsibility for and interest in the person who writes. She was no longer the prodigy who had delighted her domineering father and amazed teachers at her high school, the Radcliffe undergraduate who had won the Yale Younger Poets' Prize, or the Guggenheim Fellow who had infiltrated the male-dominated Merton College at Oxford. She found herself suddenly a wife and a mother who spent her days doing laundry and her evenings attending dinner parties in and around Boston, like many educated women of her generation.

"The experience of motherhood radicalized me," she wrote in an autobiographical essay in 1982. The woman who wrote that essay bore little resemblance to the sleepwalker of the fifties. Since then, Rich had published a dozen books of poetry; taught at Swarthmore College and Columbia University; and won—and received awards for her work., including the National Book Award for Poetry. She had separated from her husband in 1970, shortly after finding feminism, and was now living with a woman, the Jamaican-American writer Michelle Cliff. Rich renounced familiar aesthetics (formal poetry), while critiquing beloved institutions (Harvard) and old friends (Lowell). To some, she was unrecognizable; to others, she was an inspiration.

Who was Adrienne Rich really? Was she the devoted mother, the star undergrad, or the outstanding cook? Or was she the political poet who used any opportunity she had to criticize violence in all its forms? That is the question that scholar and writer Hilary Holladay asks near the end of "The Power of Adrienne Rich," the first biography of the poet, and hopefully not the last.. Holladay asserts in the preface that Rich never felt she had a "definitive identity," and that the lack of a fully formative identity spurred her on to both self-discovery and creative breakthrough. According to Holladay, Rich only ever found security in her artwork. "That is who and what she is," she concludes..

The search for the real Adrienne Rich is a tempting biographical undertaking. But it implies a strange conception of the self, as independent of the social conditions that produced it. The Rich knew this-"I felt myself perceived simply as a pregnant woman by the world, and it seemed easier to perceive myself that way," she wrote in her 1976 study of motherhood as an "institutional"-and that any project of self-discovery was necessarily a project of social and political critique..

Rich was not just talented; she was hard-headed and unsparing. She was a talented, prolific writer, ready to experiment and brave enough to stray from the poetic style that first earned her acclaim. The woman that emerges in Holladay's biography is singular: not just brilliant but hard-minded and unsparing. Her political thinking was always ahead of the curve: she was sex-positive during the height of the anti-pornography movement, anti-capitalist, before that was fashionable. As American feminism unfolded, she stood by with the next, necessary critique, often slamming herself in the process. As a result, she had to put up with people who lacked her introspection, couldn't or wouldn't keep up. She lost friends she had wanted to keep; she was more alone than she would have liked..

Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore in 1929. Her parents thought she would be a boy, so they named her Arnold, a Jewish pathologist from Alabama who had earned a position at Johns Hopkins. Arnold knew early that his daughter would be a genius. He tutored her in his spare time, while Helen, a former concert pianist, homeschooled her and taught her to play the piano.. Adrienne read and wrote by the age of four. She composed her first book of poetry at age six; the following year, she composed a fifty-page play about the Trojan War. (Classics were important in the Rich household: Adrienne used to sit on a volume of Plutarch's "Lives" in order to reach the piano.) Helen wrote in a notebook, "This is the child we needed and deserved.".”

Although Rich reveled in her father's praise, Holladay describes this as her primary goal throughout her young adulthood, she couldn't help but notice how unhappy her mother was living under the thumb of her husband. When Helen moved in with Arnold, he gave her an elegant, black dress of his own design, which she was to wear every day of her wedded life. (The couple called it her uniform.) Rich was sensitive to her mother's sadness and her father's desperate desire for his daughter to succeed. Eczema, facial tics, and hay fever plagued her. She hadn't played much or had many friends. She was happier after enrolling in an all-girls high school in her upscale Baltimore neighborhood, and after giving up the piano, at sixteen, to devote herself to poetry. But her father's disapproval always loomed large over her..

Upon entering Radcliffe in 1947, Rich described Cambridge as "heaven." She made close friends, found a serious boyfriend, took courses with F.O. Matthiessen, and became acquainted with Robert Frost. She wrote poetry every morning for an hour after breakfast. Her greatest triumphs came in 1951, during her senior year, when her first collection of poems, "A Change of World"-the manuscript that won the Yale Prize-was published. In the foreword, W. H. Auden commented that Rich's poems were "neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs..”

In spite of the paternalism, the description is a good summary of Rich's early work. In "A Change of World," Auden shows respect for the male masters: Frost, Yeats, even himself. (“The most that we can do for one another / Is let our blunders and our blind mischances / Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion” calls to mind Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” in which he puts it more simply: “We must love one another or die.”) Some of the verse emerges from personal experience—the “you” of the emotionally complex poem “Stepping Backward” is a female college friend and, Holladay argues, an early love interest—but it is deliberately detached, rarely using feminine pronouns. In the early fifties, Rich recalled in 1984, “a notion of male experience as universal prevailed which made the feminine pronoun suspect or merely ‘personal.’ ” Working on a poem that would be included in her second collection, “The Diamond Cutters” (1955), Rich transformed the figure of the tourist—a stand-in for herself—into a man.

At the time, Rich was intent on being two seemingly incompatible things: the ideal fifties woman, beautiful, feminine, with a successful husband and adorable children, and a world-historically important poet, the kind who would, in her father’s words, “leave things behind . . . that will blaze their way into the minds of men after you’re gone.” Her life would be perfectly ordered, even if it required uncommon discipline. During her years at Radcliffe, she wrote that she “pitied old maids, damned sterile feminism, saw in marriage the frame for my whole conception of life,” even while she was enjoying a string of dazzling achievements.

Rich began to question the importance of marriage when she broke off an engagement and won a Guggenheim to fund her studies at Oxford. But then she met Alfred Conrad. “Alf,” a graduate student in economics at Harvard, was an intelligent, “virile” Jewish man with a dark past, by the standards of mid-century America. He’d married a dancer and choreographer who had suffered from mental illness and been institutionalized. Rich went abroad to study soon after their meeting, but the couple corresponded regularly. Arnold Rich did not approve. In “For Ethel Rosenberg,” a long poem from the eighties about family strife, Rich writes of receiving, during her time in England, “letters of seventeen pages / finely inscribed harangues” from her father. Their relationship never healed; for the first time, Rich decided to disregard his desires and follow her own. She and Conrad were married on June 26, 1953, shortly after her return.

One could see Rich’s decision to marry Conrad as her first rebellion against the patriarchy. But leaving one man for another is hardly an emancipation. Conrad respected his wife’s intelligence and creative potential, and Rich recalled him as “a sensitive, affectionate man who wanted children and who . . . was willing to ‘help.’ ” Nevertheless, “it was clearly understood that this ‘help’ was an act of generosity; that his work, his professional life, was the real work in the family.” The couple followed his job prospects, moving first to Evanston, Illinois, where Conrad took a job at Northwestern; then returning to Cambridge when Harvard offered him a position; then, in 1966, moving to New York, where Conrad, who had not earned tenure at Harvard, took a tenured position at City University.

During these years, Rich was responsible for raising their three children, often with some household help but otherwise alone, since Conrad tended to travel for research. She struggled, and she felt ashamed for struggling. When a young, ambitious poet named Sylvia Plath visited her, she advised Plath not to have children. (After giving birth to her third child, Rich had her tubes tied. “Had yourself spayed, did you?” a nurse asked after she woke from the surgery.) Rich found she could write only late at night, after the children were in bed, often with vodka to help her wind down from the day. “The Diamond Cutters” was the only book she produced during the first nine years of her marriage. Later, she said that she regretted publishing it at all.

But out of that era’s challenges came some of Rich’s most potent poetry. “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” the title poem from her 1963 collection, repurposes images from domestic life to show how they might be used for—and transcended in—art. The poem begins with housework: a “nervy, glowering” woman, washing the dishes, deliberately scalds herself with the dishwater. She thinks of her mother, whose mind is now “mouldering like wedding-cake,” and resolves that she will be “another way.” This means escaping from oppressive masculinity, figured here as a “beak that grips,” as well as overcoming the burdens of traditional femininity: “the mildewed orange-flowers, the female pills, the terrible breasts.” The poem is full of cages of all kinds: a “commodious steamer-trunk,” a pantry, a birdcage, a vault. The way to escape such enclosures, Rich suggests, is to be an artist: not a woman who sings the words of men but one who composes her own song.

“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” represented both a formal and a thematic leap for Rich. The poem is longer and looser than her earlier work. She cites women writers—Emily Dickinson, Mary Wollstonecraft—and parodies the masculine tradition (Baudelaire’s famous line becomes “ma semblable, ma soeur”). The poem is decidedly feminine, replete with images uniquely horrifying to women readers (“She shaves her legs until they gleam / like petrified mammoth-tusk”), and several stanzas include the first person, the “I” that Rich had once been reluctant to use.

It took Rich three years to write the poem and six years to publish the collection. She was disappointed with the critical response. The book was initially ignored by the Times, which had warmly reviewed her first two collections, and criticized harshly in The New York Review of Books. Her father hated it, too: he called the poems “sordid, irritable and often nasty” and believed many were “too private and personal for public consumption.” “I knew I was stronger as a poet, I knew I was stronger in my connection with myself,” Rich recalled in 1975. And yet this stronger self was precisely what her male critics couldn’t tolerate.

Alesser poet, or a less resolute person, might have caved. Rich, undaunted, pursued her new path, not yet knowing where she would end up. In “Necessities of Life” (1966), her poetic line became shorter, her tone brisker, her images simpler, though no less striking for being so. (“The Corpse-Plant” transforms a small indoor garden into something existentially terrifying.) She used the lyric “I” consistently and wrote about her domestic life with greater intimacy and specificity. The poem “Like This Together,” dedicated to Conrad, portrays a moment of trouble in their marriage:

“Son, this precious tax loophole was passed down to me from my father, who received it from his father, and now you must guard it with your life.”

Wind rocks the car.

We sit parked by the river,

silence between our teeth.

Birds scatter across islands

of broken ice. Another time

I’d have said “Canada geese,”

knowing you love them.

A year, ten years from now

I’ll remember this—

this sitting like drugged birds

in a glass case—

not why, only that we

were here like this together.

The taut lines, the strong and repeated stresses, the monosyllabic words (“wind,” “sit,” “ice,” “why”) all conspire to communicate the stasis of the scene. The couple can’t speak of their troubles—the ambiguous “this” that sits between them—nor can they leave them behind and fly off like southbound geese. The poem is haunting, powerful. It shows how far Rich had come.

There were several factors that pushed Rich in this new creative direction. One, surely, was the publication of Lowell’s “Life Studies” (1959), which won the National Book Award and inaugurated a poetic movement that critics called “confessional.” (Plath, W. D. Snodgrass, and Anne Sexton would all be associated with the movement, though Rich rejected the label.) By the mid-sixties, writing about one’s marital problems or one’s struggles with mental illness—formerly taboo subjects for lyric poetry—was accepted and even acclaimed. Rich had become friends with Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in the late fifties, right around the time she decided to change her life. “Adrienne Rich is having a third baby . . . and is reading Simone de Beauvoir and bursting with benzedrine and emancipation,” Lowell wrote to his friend Elizabeth Bishop in 1958. “We like her very much.” He supported Rich privately and publicly. In a letter from 1964, he wrote to her, “You go on exploring and accumulating more resources. It seems you more and more have worked out a style of your own.” He reviewed “Necessities of Life” positively in the Times Book Review.

If Lowell encouraged Rich to follow this new path, feminism helped her stay on it. She began forming ties with other “independent-minded New York women,” as Holladay refers to them, in the late sixties and early seventies. While teaching in the cuny system, Rich met Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde; the last would become a lifelong friend. She also began spending time with Robin Morgan, the poet, activist, and future editor of the feminist anthology “Sisterhood Is Powerful.” Morgan recalled Rich as “a well-meaning, liberal white lady” who was, at the time, “not a feminist.”

That soon changed. In 1970, just weeks after making a proclamation that she was going to do significantly less cooking, Rich wrote to the poet Hayden Carruth, a close friend, that she was leaving Conrad. They were still mired in marital trouble, and Rich was fed up with trying to get her husband to speak openly with her. (The 1971 poem “Trying to Talk with a Man” depicts a similar dilemma.) She planned to leave the children with Conrad and find her own apartment. In an earlier letter to Carruth, she’d chastised her friend for how he treated his wife, then copped to her new political orientation: “If this sounds like a Women’s Lib rap, baby, it is.”

Rich was optimistic about the separation, and told Carruth that she thought moving out was “an act for both of us, in the long run.” Conrad apparently felt differently. Not long after their split, he rented a car, drove up to Vermont, where the family had a vacation house, and shot himself in a meadow. Rich, distraught, wrote to Carruth that Conrad’s suicide seemed “a choice which he made in order not to have to make other, living choices”; she did not feel responsible, but at times that belief wavered. Morgan later recalled that, shortly afterward, Rich asked how Morgan could blame Ted Hughes for Plath’s suicide and not blame Rich for Conrad’s. “I think that it was one of the first times that I ever used the phrase ‘false equivalence,’ ” Morgan said. Rich was not entirely convinced.

Rich, who had been married for seventeen years, mourned her losses while relishing her newfound freedom. Her therapist, Lilly Engler, had a brief love affair with her; it was her first engagement with a woman, and it would inspire the book "Twenty-one Love Poems" (1976), which Holladay describes as Rich's "literary coming-out as a lesbian." (The poems focus on her lover's body, including her "travelled, generous thighs," "powerful tongue and thin fingers," and more intimate regions.) Susan Sontag, dubbed the "Dark Lady of American Letters" (and one of Engler's former lovers), with whom she sparred in print before sleeping with her. She put quite a lot of time and effort into the book that became "Of Woman Born." And, despite her loneliness, she wrote to a friend that she was enthralled by feminist theory and on the lookout for "true femaleness" in life and art.

Rich's life is at a crossroads, according to Holladay. It was a moment of great intellectual, sexual, and creative inquiry for Rich, and it yielded some of his most enduring work, notably the 1973 poetry collection "Diving Into the Wreck." It was also the start of a protracted period of personal reflection and re-evaluation. Rich began to comprehend how her life was shaped by social and historical circumstances thanks to the influence of feminist theory and friends like Lorde and Morgan. She was not just a gifted writer and a precocious youngster; she was also Southern, Jewish, from a wealthy family, the embodiment of white privilege, and a woman whose voice had been silenced.

Heterosexuality was not a natural or voluntary choice, but rather a must. "My personal world view, which I carried as a conviction of my own uniqueness, like so many young people, was not original with me, but was, rather, my untutored and half-conscious rendering of the facts of blood and bread, the social and political forces of my time and place," she later explained in a 1984 essay.

Rich's big project was a retrospective review of this type. Her purpose was to "re-vision" her history, a term she coined, rather than reject or disavow it. "The process of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of engaging an old work from a new critical orientation," she defined the notion in a 1971 lecture. Rich's art, like her life, her country, women's history, and the poetic tradition, was constantly re-imagined. Rich reflected on Marie Curie, the physicist who never stated that she "suffered from radiation sickness," as if admitting so would negate her scientific triumphs, in the 1974 poem "Power," which displayed Rich's new tendency of leaving space between words in the same line. The poem concludes with a conundrum about Curie's predicament:

"She died    a famous woman    denying

her wounds

denying

her wounds    came    from the same source as her power"

Rich also began re-imagining her literary foremothers, women writers who had defied the odds and thrived in their fields, despite receiving little critical acclaim. She wrote on Elizabeth Bishop and Charlotte Bronte. "Vesuvius at Home," a 1975 article on Emily Dickinson, is regarded as a classic of feminist literary critique. Rich dug through the trash of the past, dismissing obsolete ideas and salvaging what she thought could be useful in reexamining the canon, much like the speaker in "Diving Into the Wreck."

Rich had a sense of consistency as a result of this exercise, even while she altered tremendously. She didn't shed previous identities in the same way that dead skin does. Instead, she viewed them as if they were fossils, which she needed to retrieve, conserve, and research. Rich's vision of self-formation was eloquently summarised in the title of her 1971 book, "The Will to Change." Change was not a fluke or a stroke of luck; it was something you worked hard for. Because she perceived herself as stable but unfixed, Rich was a "unapologetically strong woman," as Holladay characterises her.

Throughout the biography, Holladay marvels at Rich's ability to complete a 180-degree turn quickly and confidently, though not always with admiration. She moved from being a frightened daughter to a strong woman, from being a heterosexual housewife to a lesbian, from being a close friend of Lowell's to being one of his harshest critics. (Rich accused Lowell of "aggrandized and brutal masculinity" and "bullshit eloquence" in a 1973 review.) Holladay writes with palpable compassion of the wayward men who made up the Beat literary movement in her first biography of minor Beat writer Herbert Huncke. She criticises Rich for her "lifelong pattern of trashing places she formerly lauded," such as Harvard, and points out that Rich has been known to turn on individuals who have helped her achieve success. She implies that Rich was inconsistent or, worse, disloyal at times.

What other way could a sensible lady have negotiated Rich's life's tremendous fluctuations? Rich wasn't a rebel, but she was a radical. She fit in during the 1950s—"a normal boy-crazy coed," as Holladay put it—and it wasn't until the 1970s that she became a feminist and out lesbian, when conditions had altered enough to make both identities, if not acceptable, at least socially legible. She was also never one of "the mad ones" extolled by Beat writer Jack Kerouac in 1957 while Rich was spit-up-free. In both words and deeds, she was attentive, considerate, and cautious. She once wrote to Lorde, explaining why she wouldn't sleep with her, "I am sincerely monogamous and appreciative of others' coupledness." Rich persevered with Cliff for 36 years after meeting him, despite Cliff's drinking, her own developing arthritis, and the challenges of an interracial relationship.

Rich was never a mad genius like Lowell, Ginsberg, or Plath, but he did become something else in the public imagination: the enraged feminist, eager to annihilate the people or systems she despised. By the mid-eighties, she had a lot of respect—she was a professor at Stanford and had won a lot of awards—but she wasn't completely adored. She made her political views known as early as 1973, urging Lorde and Alice Walker to protest the National Book Awards "on behalf of all women." Meanwhile, her approach on the page had become almost factual. "An Atlas of the Difficult World," published in 1991, begins with a photograph of migrant workers harvesting pesticide-streaked strawberries and goes on to discuss spousal abuse, genocide, and lynching. Helen Vendler, a critic who had formerly felt a bond with Rich, was dismayed by her development. In a review of "Atlas," Vendler said, "She believes it is the poet's duty to bear witness to, and to protest against, these social problems." Rich's closest pals concurred. "I have no idea what happened," Hardwick admitted. "She was swept away too far." She purposefully made herself unattractive and penned those ludicrous poetry."

Rich, on the other hand, had come to consider politics as an integral component of the poet's "vocation": "not how to compose poetry, but why." She described art as a "liberative language" that "connects the fragments within ourselves, linking us to those like and unlike ourselves" at its best. Rich's overt politics appeared unlovely, even unpoetic, to those who saw the lyric poem as a respite from the bustling external world, a time to deal with internal paradoxes. Rich, on the other hand, had always felt compelled to write every day in college and to work late as a young mother; it was this sense of urgency that had drove her to write every day in college and to stay up late working as a young mother. She would not have stated she had changed her mind about the meaning of a poem if asked, but rather that she had begun to perceive it more clearly. The Rich that emerges at the end of Holladay's storey is like a speeding locomotive. To accuse her of being inconsistent is akin to accusing a train of leaving one town and arriving in another.

Nonetheless, Holladay's criticisms have merit. We get a sense of what it was like to perceive one's life as a kind of palimpsest, to work by constant modification and adjustment after reading Rich's work. It's both awe-inspiring and tiresome at the same time. Rich added a footnote to the title poem from "The Diamond Cutters" when it was republished in "The Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970," stating that the poem "does not take responsibility for its own metaphor" of diamond mining, despite the fact that she was unaware of the miners' exploitation at the time. (Fair enough, but it's difficult not to sigh.) She may also be very serious about herself. Rich stated in "Hunger," a poem dedicated to Lorde, "I stand condemned by all my convictions." Rich became a closed system, difficult to penetrate for critics and even friends, because she was willing not just to recognise wrongdoing but also to blame herself of it without prompting. This is why Vendler was put off by Rich's feminist work: it was the self-aggrandizement and certainty, not necessarily the convictions themselves, that bothered him. In a review of "Of Woman Born," Vendler commented, "Her contemporary myth is not provided as provisional." "Instead, the most recent version of events is presented as the final word." Why was Rich so certain she'd been incorrect before, and now she was positive she was correct?

That assurance can be interpreted as pride, but it can equally be interpreted as hope for a better self and a better world. In a later essay, Rich stated, "Poetry is not a resting on the given, but a questing toward what could otherwise be." I attended one of Rich's final public readings in Cambridge in 2008, four years before she died. I was late, and I could just make out a short woman with close-cropped hair, dressed completely in black, sitting in a high-backed chair from my vantage point at the back of the audience. She appeared weak, like a wounded bird, but her voice was so powerful that I had to take a step back. The crowd—mostly women of all ages—was deafeningly quiet; it was as if we had gathered in church or in sorrow. Some hurried up to Rich after the ceremony concluded, asking for her signature, but I felt the need to be alone. I walked home through Radcliffe Yard, following the same paths Rich had taken more than fifty years before as a student. She'd left, turned her back on the town, but she'd also returned, unapologetic. She had told the crowd that she was still alive and writing, despite rumours to the contrary.