A Critical Friendship: Donald Justice & Richard Stern, 1946–1961 ed. by Elizabeth Murphy (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Critical Friendship: Donald Justice & Richard Stern, 1946–1961 ed. by Elizabeth Murphy Willard Spiegelman (bio) Elizabeth Murphy, ed., A Critical Friendship: Donald Justice & Richard Stern, 1946–1961 (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 296 pp. Going through A Critical Friendship, one may wonder who will read and profit from this collection of letters tracing the opening chapter in a lifelong friendship between poet Donald Justice and novelist Richard Stern. I can think of several audiences for this slim volume, fewer than 200 pages of letters between men who met in 1944 in Chapel Hill, when Stern (1928-2013) and Justice (1925-2004) were still teenagers. Readers, friends, and fans of the writers, to start with; students of post-War American culture; and anyone interested in how a writer finds himself by finding both his voice and his audience, his best reader, his alter ego, his mirrored self. Their epistolary relationship was made possible only because the men lived apart from each other for decades, following their student years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In today’s age of cheap telephone rates, Skype, and Facebook, correspondence like this looks like a piece of technology as remote as vellum. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and it also—until two decades ago—made collections of letters an inevitability, especially for aspiring writers starting out, flexing their intellectual muscle, eager for approval, success and, most necessary, soul mates. This volume covers 1946–1961, the year of the men’s first books, Justice’s The Summer Anniversaries and Stern’s Golk. Before their maiden speeches, during their literary apprenticeship, we have evidence of academic adventures—at Stanford, Iowa, Harvard, and elsewhere—and their initial forays into the marketplace, their attempts at getting published. First came rejections, then encouragement, nibbles, and, finally, acceptances. The volume has its drawbacks. Above all, neither Justice nor Stern can engage us with the same intensity, far-ranging intellect, passion, powers of observation, and wit of—to take a few of the obvious examples—Keats, Byron, Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill (whose letters, when eventually published, will set the bar very high for everyone else), and even Amy Clampitt. Justice and Stern are not, as young men, great epistolary stylists. It’s unclear whether future volumes are in the offing, but it will be interesting to see, if so, whether they will develop our sense of the Justice-Stern relationship. The Elizabeth Bishop-Robert Lowell letters are the gold standard for this kind of thing. But Justice and Stern have the energy, fervor, and strong opinions of youth in their favor. (At one point, almost halfway through the book, Stern announces: “We are getting old. I can vote now, and don’t deserve to.”) They exchange hopes and fears, manuscripts, literary gossip, but little in-depth speculation or soul-searching. They were probably not aiming for this; they had more mundane matters on their minds. But we can be grateful to have a window on a particular moment in our literary culture. The men, and some women, from the “greatest generation” had returned from World War II; the GI Bill was opening the most expansive chapter in American higher education; [End Page 417] schools of literary thought and taste were developing across the country, matching the building of campuses; fellowships abounded. The so-called tedium of the Eisenhower decade had many advantages for artists. “Everyone has a Fulbright,” writes Stern to Justice in 1950. Someone should write an extended cultural history of American writers abroad, circa 1946-1960. Consider: the Continent had been off-limits to tourists for the better part of a decade. Writers like Lowell, Merrill, Clampitt, James Wright, and Adrienne Rich were finally able to visit the places that had filled their minds and formed their tastes as students, and artists-in-the making. Both Stern and Justice went abroad during these years, Justice less happily. They wrote to each other about these experiences. And they moved across this country as well. Stern went to Harvard, briefly, Justice to Stanford, then both did time in Iowa City, where Justice spent much of his later professional life. Professors of literature should think twice about complaining of...