End with a Question: Reflections on Judith Kitchen’s Aesthetic and Achievement

Abstract

Judith was an innovator, a gifted experimenter. She started as a poet and moved to the essay because it challenged her, gave her the space to achieve a structural complexity that could afford her mind free play and allow her subject matter to resonate beyond her own life. Her adventurous essays are layered with concentric circles (her own image) of history—or histories— personal within familial within cultural within our larger human fate. Time was her great subject; war was never far below the surface. Judith wouldn’t settle for the obvious or the easy. I can’t count the times she hadme read awork in progress and, when I respondedwith enthusiasm, as I so often did, she replied that a given word, or phrase, or passage I admired was to be stricken as “purple.” Although an influential and admired lyricist, she never let pass an effect for its own sake, amere performance. Her gorgeous writing was wedded to her exploration of truth, her desire to discover the human meaning of things. She sought todevise newstructures capable of lucid complexity. Shewas a pioneer, perhaps the pioneer, in the now fashionable genre of interactive or “creative” criticism. She was always a dialogist, with the reader, with photographs, with history, with literature, with herself. In essays such as “O’Brien and O’Brien,” her personal voice weaves in and around the novels of Edna and Tim, linking their separate wars to each other and to her own history. It was characteristic of Judith to mold difference into something new and rich E S S A Y