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John Hollander is one of our most resourceful and prolific men of letters. Over the past twenty-five years he has published more than a dozen books of poetry. The first of them, A Crackling of Thorns, was chosen by W. H. Auden in 1958 for the Yale Series of Younger Poets; the most important of them is Spectral Emanations: New and Selected Poems, published in 1978; and the most recent—it coincides with his winning the Bollingen Prize—is Powers of Thirteen, which appeared in 1983. He has also written three books of literary criticism and three books for children; edited several anthologies and textbooks; is the author of articles about artists from Thomas Cole to Saul Steinberg; and has devised libretti set to music by Milton Babbitt, George Perle, and Hugo Weisgall. All along, he has been active as scholar, teacher, and lecturer, first as a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard from 1954 until 1957, later at Connecticut College, Yale, and at Hunter College, where he taught for eleven years before returning to Yale in 1977 as professor of English.

This interview was conducted in a brick neo-Georgian house in New Haven, on a handsome street just far enough away from the university for there to be large shade trees and comfortable distances between neighbors. (Since then Hollander has moved to the country and grown a beard.) At one end of his living room was a Steinway whose lid was stacked with music: the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Scott Joplin rags. At the other end, a fireplace over whose mantel hung an oil sketch by John Martin for one of his Paradise Lost mezzotints: Raphael instructing Adam and Eve. Nearby, a brazed sheet bronze abstract relief from the early sixties by his second wife, the sculptor Natalie Charkow. Some of her recent work was around too: haunting stone carvings of reclining couples.

During most of our conversation we sat in this room, on either end of an overstuffed, slipcovered sofa, a tape recorder and a pitcher of iced tea between us. At one point, though, in order to verify a quotation, he hurried upstairs to his study. I followed after him, through the gallery his front hallway and stairwell had become, trimmed with drawings by John Flaxman, John Varley, and Sir George Beaumont, and by a cluster of anonymous seventeenth-century artists. The study itself was bare of pictures, bare of anything but a writer’s paraphernalia. Hollander apologized for its clutter. The desk and his battered Olivetti manual were heaped high with letters, notes, drafts, journals, review copies, and student papers. Nearest the typewriter were dictionaries, and Hebrew, Greek, and Latin texts. Close by, on shelves that ringed the room, were books on gardens, philosophy, music, art, and mythography. Open on his desk were copies of Emerson and Ruskin.

Hollander is a man whose body gives the impression of more height and bulk than it actually has. His face is dominated by its features, his hands dart as he speaks, and his head nods. It is not his appearance—though there is a slight resemblance—so much as his manner that suggests a latter-day Dr. Johnson. His forceful personality can be gruff or ingratiating or contentious. His memory is prodigious, his interests encyclopedic. He has a voracious appetite for every kind of knowledge in all its details, and an equally compulsive desire to share what he knows, at times with a disconcerting finality.

 

INTERVIEWER

The born poets always seem to have made themselves up, and that starts with the conviction that one is a poet. Does that tend to happen at a certain time in one’s life?

JOHN HOLLANDER

It differs with different people in different generations. When I was in high school I only wanted to be a humorist and a journalist. 

INTERVIEWER

Were you any good at being a humorist?

HOLLANDER

Yes, I think I was. I wrote the humor column for the school newspaper, The Science Survey, at the Bronx High School of Science. I didn’t start out wanting to be a poet, or writing poetry. All poets start out by imitating other writers, but the first writer I wanted to copy exactly was S. J. Perelman, and after him James Thurber. Someone should write a little essay on the importance of Perelman not only to comic but also to very serious writers.

INTERVIEWER

Was it his wordplay that attracted you?

HOLLANDER

It was that, it was the fact that he himself had really come out of the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses. It’s quite true. He had confessed this on more than one occasion. You might observe that his comic routines were pretty much from that episode, in which an idiom suddenly becomes literal: “She sent him groveling. He came back with a basket of fresh-picked grovels.” I loved that, and wanted to do that. By the time I got to college at Columbia, I still wanted to be a journalist, and I went out for the newspaper and shared the top number of column-inches of news and features material for a freshman that year. And then I got distracted.

INTERVIEWER

Distracted by poetry?

HOLLANDER

That’s right. Oh, I’d always written verse, just to learn about the various forms. And I was translating some poems of Baudelaire as an act of literary piety. And then I started writing poems of my own.

INTERVIEWER

A freshman in college, then. And, let’s see, sixteen at the time? Did the idea of your being a humorist make the notion of your becoming a poet more acceptable to your friends? Or, what would you have thought of the decision?

HOLLANDER

Oh, I would have thought it pretentious and silly, and written it up in my column as a joke. I later learned that when Auden was an undergraduate he felt that if one was a poet then one’s outward personality ought not be “poetic.” In a sense, when I started writing poetry I insisted on this too.

INTERVIEWER

Allen Ginsberg was a close friend of yours at Columbia in the late forties. How did he influence you?

HOLLANDER

Ginsberg was my poetic mentor, very generous and considerate of my early work. At college he was my close poetic, rather than literary, friend. That is, we talked about the minute particulars of form as if mythological weight depended upon them; and about the realms of the imagination. Not about style, or about “the artist in society”—those were literary matters. 

INTERVIEWER

What was the undergraduate literary life at Columbia like in those days?

HOLLANDER

Most of my classmates at Columbia then were veterans several years older than myself, and they educated me as much as my teachers. Louis Simpson, Daniel Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, all somewhat older than I was, were all writing poems of what seemed to be vast sophistication; and in 1949 I met Richard Howard, whose talent and literary energies seemed prodigious. Of the faculty, Mark Van Doren was a crucial presence for those of us writing verse, a presence itself fabulous to the degree that precept and example were interwoven in it. Also Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, Moses Hadas, Meyer Schapiro, the legendary Andrew Chiappe—these were some of the teachers who mattered most to the minority of undergraduates in those days of a literary inclination.

INTERVIEWER

Was there a formal literary society?

HOLLANDER

Not really. The Columbia Review, with its tiny office in John Jay Hall, was something of a center. Many of the generally literary, rather than specifically poetic, undergraduates who were published there—Joseph Kraft, Norman Podhoretz, Robert Gottlieb, Jason Epstein, Byron Dobell—ended up in journalism or publishing. But it was Ginsberg who was my guide through literary modernisms—French symbolist poetry, surrealism, the world of the poète maudit generally.