RICHARD WILBUR'S CAMBRIDGE YEARS, 1946–1954

Abstract

1 R R I C H A R D W I L B U R ’ S C A M B R I D G E Y E A R S , 1 9 4 6 — 1 9 5 4 R O B E R T B A G G When most of the U.S. Army’s 36th Texans division shipped from Marseilles to Newport News in mid-October 1945, Sta√ Sergeant Richard Wilbur remained behind with the occupation forces in Germany. The army had transferred Wilbur, without explanation, from his post as code technician to the automatic weapons unit of an artillery battery – a position for which he was completely untrained and unqualified. This delay in his return home might have been a superior’s retaliation for twenty-one feisty columns Wilbur had published in The T-Patch, his division’s newspaper, one of which expressed bemusement that a major would wear riding boots and carry a crop and a pearl-handled revolver in the absence of horses or enemies. With happier abruptness, he was sent to Marseilles in midNovember to board a troop transport, and on the 29th he was honorably discharged from active duty at Camp Edison, New Jersey. That same evening he arrived at a Manhattan hotel, where his wife, Charlee, was waiting. When asked years later to name the hotel, he confidently remembered that it was the Plaza. Charlee corrected him. The hotel, near Times Square, charged by the hour, and she had brought her own bed linens; such accommodations 2 B A G G Y were all Charlee could book in a city swamped with returning G.I.s. Not surprisingly, Dick looked drained and pale to Charlee despite his relief and joy at being home – alive, intact, and in her arms. He was still thin, 160 pounds on his 6 foot 2 inch frame – though that was an improvement on the 153 he had weighed when reporting for active duty in 1943. When the couple arrived the next day at his parents’ home in North Caldwell, New Jersey, two-year-old Ellen was in the front yard, playing in the snow. Wilbur bent down to gently introduce himself to his daughter – he hadn’t seen her since the army granted him ‘‘compassionate leave’’ for a few days after her birth. Over the next six weeks in North Caldwell, he began to recover, not only from post-traumatic stress following eighteen months, exposure to explosives and the unrelenting demands of swiftly decoding crucial messages, but also from months of frustration at being kept in Germany when he’d been fully entitled to return home (he had accrued ninety-one demobilization points; eighty usually earned immediate discharge). Surrounded by understanding family and friends, and soon caught up in academic life, he recovered energy and composure. Wilbur’s transition from war to graduate study seemed e√ortless from the start. He was much better read in both literature and politics in 1946 than when he had graduated from Amherst in 1942. In the downtime between war’s mundane duties and its moments of terror, Wilbur would borrow from the Armed Services Library, which by 1945 o√ered troops over thirteen hundred titles, both classic and current. He browsed and often bought from bookstalls while on leave in Paris and London; Charlee regularly shipped him titles he requested by V-Mail. A volume with a selection of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry and notebooks made an immediate impact ; after acquiring it, Hopkinsesque compound words – ‘‘comicaldelicate ,’’ ‘‘priestgoat,’’ ‘‘muchtouched,’’ and ‘‘lightshifting’’ – appear in the poems he composed in all caps on his sigaba code machine. Wilbur’s indignant and impolitic commentaries on cultural and political flashpoints in the 36th Texans’ division newspaper – which had renewed with increased élan the aggressive journalism he practiced while editor of The Amherst Student – laid R I C H A R D W I L B U R ’ S C A M B R I D G E Y E A R S 3 R the groundwork for his vivid academic prose style at Harvard, as well as for his poetry. Both set him apart. Wilbur, Charlee, and Ellen arrived at 22 Plympton...