Robert Creeley A Biography by Ekbert Faas University Press of New England, 513 pp., $35 POOR ROBERT CREELEY. Few poets can have led a drabber or more justly disgruntled life, winning a position at the very top of the B-list of his generation–only to be rewarded by a biography riddled with betrayals. Born in 1926, Creeley was blinded in his left eye at the age of two and lost his father soon thereafter. The family income plummeted from Dr. Creeley’s $30,000 a year to Nurse Creeley’s $3,000. In grade school he had to wear canvas straps to correct bad posture, and his glass eye would fall out from time to time. Despite frequent absences due to illness, his grades were just good enough to win him a scholarship to Holderness, a New Hampshire prep school, where he scraped through with an average sufficient to leverage his way into Harvard in 1943. He didn’t play sports, was in poor health, smoked incessantly, and was a precocious drunk. From this inauspicious beginning, Robert Creeley continued on a level course. For decades, all his victories as Beat poetry’s coolest cat were in literature’s equivalent to the Special Olympics, and the biography he has now received from Ekbert Faas is perhaps no better than he deserved. Even so, “Robert Creeley: A Biography” must be reckoned the oddest authorized life ever authored. It is as little flattering to its subject as the picture of Dorian Gray, detailing Creeley’s every wart and blemish: the petty spites, lifelong envies, vengeful adulteries, sneaky betrayals, and chronic alcoholism. Further, Faas does this in a style that is the literary equivalent of barroom maundering. Here is Faas’s account of Martin Seymour-Smith, one of Creeley’s many benefactor-cum-mortal enemies: “Interim relations of a more business-like kind had confirmed Creeley’s sense that Martin was the most deceitful, malign, and tale-bearing little prick imaginable. . . . Rather than from his father, a plain, sober, serious, and likable sort of man, Martin’s problems derived from his mother. Acting the fading lily but a bitch at heart, she had trained her son to pay her all the expected compliments, and in the process jammed his head with deceit, contempt for honesty, and similar attitudes. What a hell of a mess she had made of Martin’s brain!” An accompanying press release offers the lame excuse for such rant (and there is much of it, some unquotably more foul-mouthed) that it represents “a formally experimental narrative technique to capture the energy and chaos of Creeley’s early life. Having steeped himself in Creeley’s own letters and other writings, Faas has drawn on the poet’s language and distinctive modes of expression to convey the poet’s own subjective experience.” In other words, all the barbarities and solecisms can be blamed on Creeley, whether or not Faas has troubled to use quotation marks. THE BIOGRAPHER PERFORMS ANOTHER, more notable disservice in simply dispensing with the last thirty-five years of Creeley’s life and work. He does not merely dismiss the many volumes of poetry Creeley published after 1966, but denounces them: “Creeley’s recent touting of the commonplace as the closest, yet admittedly trite analogue to the stripped-down, de-anthropomorphised objectivity of the earlier work points to a more general lapse into the sentimentally self-reflective and banal. Being ‘devoid of originality or novelty; trite, trivial, hackneyed,’ to this older Creeley has become a badge worn with pride or at least ostentatiousness.” Has any authorized biographer ever offered such expressions of ill will? One final insult is the inclusion, as a kind of appendix, of the memoirs and diary of Creeley’s first wife, Ann MacKinnon. Its more than one hundred artless pages–a quarter of the book–are a welcome corrective to Faas’s scurrilous and helter-skelter chronicle, which suggests that Creeley had married Ann for her money, a $185-a-month trust fund. Seen through Ann’s eyes, the marriage was not all abuse, neglect, and infidelity, but just the usual set of 1950s whiskey-soaked tales of wine and roses, with the difference that it was conducted not in suburbia but among the penniless expatriates of Majorca. The wonder of Creeley’s life is that he parlayed an exiguous literary talent into a secure position in the literary canon. Faas chronicles the literary politicking that helped Creeley achieve that end–the logrolling and petty revenges in the world of little magazines; the alliances among the Bohemian Establishment of the 1950s, especially with Cid Corman, Charles Olson, and Kenneth Rexroth (whose wife Marthe ran off with Creeley); his association with Black Mountain College just as it went belly-up in 1954. However, in all these key matters, other authors have given more persuasive accounts. For Creeley’s affair with Marthe, Linda Hamalian’s “Life of Kenneth Rexroth” is much to be preferred, as is Tom Clark’s biography, “Charles Olson,” while Martin Duberman’s “Black Mountain” gives a far more reliable account of that omphalos of the anti-establishment. What Faas cannot account for, because he ends his book in 1966, is how Creeley’s reputation was solidified after he first came to prominence in Donald M. Allen’s landmark anthology, “The New American Poetry 1945-1960.” There does not yet exist a knowledgeable and nonpartisan literary history of how the counterculture became canonical. That the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” should go at auction for multiple millions, as it recently did, is surely the capstone. But that such a book as Faas’s “Robert Creeley” should be published at all is no less astonishing. A PERSON MAY LEAD A THOROUGHLY reprehensible life and yet have written things worth reading. That was true of Villon and Rimbaud–and it is also true, to a much lesser degree, of Robert Creeley. His one novel, “The Island,” is of interest now only for its fictionalized portraits of real-life figures, and that interest has faded almost to extinction, since the only characters with any lingering cachet are the ones based on Robert Graves and Creeley’s own egregiously flattering self-portrait. His shorter fiction is flat-footed, and his critical pronouncements are typical Beatnik boilerplate. I can’t resist offering a specimen of the Creeley ars poetica: “The means of a poetry are, perhaps, related to Pound’s sense of the increment of association; usage coheres value. Tradition is an aspect of what anyone is now thinking–not what someone once thought. We make with what we have, and in this way anything is worth looking at.” So, Creeley must be valued for his poetry–or scrapped for it. I confess that at the time of “For Love” (1962) and “Words” (1967) I had a high regard for him as the heir to William Carlos Williams’s minimalist aesthetic and the author of such zeitgeistful poems as “The Dishonest Mailmen”: They are taking all my letters, and they put them into a fire. I see the flames, etc. But do not care, etc. They burn everything I have, or what little I have. I don’t care, etc. The poem supreme, addressed to emptiness–this is the courage necessary. This is something quite different. But rereading Creeley’s poetry in connection with Faas’s biography I have become skeptical. I begin to think that the ones who benefit most from a policy of scrupulous minimalism are those who don’t know how to decorate: Paint the walls white, strip the floor, furnish the bare space with futons and pine-plank bookcases–and maintain an enigmatic silence by which one may come in time to have a reputation for depth. For all that, Creeley does offer something to chew on. Helen Vendler, writing in 1977 in the Yale Review, has given the most just, if hedged, appreciation of what that something may be. Creeley, she suggests, “remains so much a follower of Williams, without Williams’s rebelliousness, verve, and social breadth, that his verse seems, though intermittently attractive, fatally pinched. . . . In Creeley . . . things are wasted, faded, faint, trembling, wavering, blurred, darkening; the scale is miniature, the dimensions fragile.” Faint praise, but posterity is not likely to offer any more fulsome. This is a product whose date has expired. Thomas M. Disch is the author of two books of poetry criticism: “The Castle of Indolence” (1995) and the forthcoming “The Castle of Perseverance: Job Opportunities in Contemporary Poetry.” November 5, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 8
