Long love and constant spirits: an interview with Richard and Charlee Wilbur - Interview

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Jeffrey S. Cramer

Edna Healey puts it this way in her Wives of Fame: "Often there stands a wife, invisible and forgotten, whose name is not recorded on the tablets of bronze and of whose famous husband it is so frequently said, `I didn't know he had a wife.'" The poet's wife may be critic, agent, editor, secretary; she may be muse, inspiration, stimulus, and she is often the private partner of a public life.

Willa Muir, the wife of Edwin Muir, once told Richard Wilbur that his wife, Charlee, was the perfect poet's wife. It was a life she seemed almost destined to live.

CW: It just so happens that I come from a family of some literary interest and performance. There were three generations on my father's side of Congregational ministers. Among those my grandfather, William Hayes Ward, was editor of the New York Independent magazine. It was, as well as a church organ, a highly respected literary journal, comparable to today's New Yorker. Reviews, poems, short fiction appeared there by some of the best people of the time. He was Frost's first connection with poetry and my great-aunt, Susan Hayes Ward, his sister, who was poetry editor of that magazine, encouraged Frost. My father, Herbert Dickinson Ward, was a novelist and a writer who was married first to the American novelist, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Out of this background I came to adolescence, imagining by the age of eleven, that I would marry a poet, specifically one who had gone to Amherst, as my father had. I wrote this down on paper. I said his name had to be Richard because at that time I was absolutely addled with love of Richard the Lion-Hearted, and then I specified poet, not writer. There was enough literary aura in my early life to make me believe, before I even met Dick, that I wished for the life that I later chose.

That meeting took place in 1941 in a house at Smith which, some claim, is haunted by the ghosts of thwarted lovers, Lucy Hunt and General Burgoyne.

CW: It was a strange blind date. A friend of mine in my house at Smith was going out with one of Dick's roommates. Brooks suggested to Dick that he ask me out. I knew who Dick was a year before I met him. I had heard interesting stories about him. He was becoming and did become, in his junior year, editor of the Amherst newspaper, the Amherst College Student, and also Touchstone contained drawings and pieces by Dick. I was working on the Smith Monthly as poetry editor, so I had heard of him. I knew nothing of him personally, but I gathered from friends that he was different from his contemporaries and that he was shy.

Our meeting was arranged and this is what happened: I was in Sessions, an eighteenth-century house on Elm Street. In those days when a date arrived he was ushered by a maid into the living room, which was called the Fusser's Parlor. The girl who was being asked out would be called by telephone. I walked into the Fusser's Parlor where I found six stiff men sitting awkwardly on straight chairs. When I walked through the door Dick stood up and came over to me. I had never seen him before and he had never seen me and yet we walked out to the street hand in hand. We walked down Elm Street to an old hotel, The Draper, in the middle of Northampton which had a beer place on the ground floor where many students went on dates. We sat down, ordered a beer, and the first words Dick said to me were, "If you could live anywhere in the world, right now, what place would you choose?" I replied by saying, "Let's both put our answers on these match cases and exchange them." We did, and both of us had written down "New Orleans." That was an unsettling coincidence.

"Yes, it was very much like that," Richard says referring to his wife's account of their first meeting, "and extremely sudden. I felt happy to be with Charlee right away and had no wish to leave her."

It had to have seemed almost portentous for the young woman who felt in her heart that she would marry an Amherst poet named Richard, but the impression that she was in any way influenced by her adolescent fantasies is quickly corrected.

CW: It was his mind that I was first attracted to. He didn't fit any prescribed pattern or imaginative expectation of mine. He was very young, uncertain socially, and strangely dressed, not of the times at all. I didn't find him unattractive. I helplessly fell in love with his mind first. Later, I felt a sense of recognition, but the quickness and richness of his mind fascinated me right away.

Richard, self-characterized in many places as a shy young man, has described his early Amherst days as a time of dressing horribly, drinking too much beer and leading a disorderly existence. Looking back now, he still agrees. "That's a fair description of my freshman year or part of my sophomore year," but it was soon to change. "Charlee, without being at all coercive, civilized me, put me in order."

Although committed, getting to the altar and being married are not necessarily synonymous. "Who knows when a man and a woman are truly married?" Richard asks in "A Speech at a Ceremony." "Some, I think, are married before they ever come to the altar, while some, though pronounced man and wife, arrive at that condition late or never ..."