Poetic License: A Memoir

No Regrets

I stood in the wings of a large lecture hall in Chicago in 1958. I was seven years old. My breath quickened against the cinched sash of the smocked dress Gram had bought me for the occasion. I watched my father at the podium. He stood tall and had a broad smile across his face. He turned quickly to find me and I noticed his tie was askew. Earlier, in our hotel room, he’d asked me to straighten it. You do it, Gretch, he’d said. Now, I thought, I must have jostled it off-center when he leaned over to kiss my cheek before taking the stage.

In the spotlight, his oxford shirt was nearly blinding. He smiled out at a thousand fans and gave a wave with his right hand, taking in the admiration. When the applause quieted, he called me out to introduce me. I ran across the wide stage, knowing I wouldn’t slip in my shiny black shoes because Mom had scratched their soles on the sidewalk that morning.

My father was good on any stage—in a big city hall; in a university auditorium; in our living room in Hanover, New Hampshire; or on a rocky beach on Penobscot Bay, Maine, where we summered. He read his poems slowly and well, he told funny and prophetic poem-stories, and he shared his family with his audience. Now, at his side, I stood straight like him, shoulders back, and beamed in the light of his praise, taking in the feel of fame, thinking it was real, and that it might even have something to do with me.

In 1991, I was forty years old, recently divorced, with two children—seventeen and twelve—and running a young executive consulting and coaching company just starting to show promise. I stared out the window above my desk at a double row of tall pine trees, the same species that circled my childhood home across town. They were my focus when I lifted my strained eyes from looking into one of 147 boxes of letters, books, and other documents that made up my father’s literary archives at Dartmouth College, in Hanover. It was a sunny Monday morning, and the collection was being held in a nondescript steel storage building a few miles south of campus.

Friends were surprised I was spending my Monday mornings in a structure we’d all driven by a hundred times and never noticed. With a large overhead door facing a side street for loading and unloading, the warehouse had only a few windows, one of which I could look out of on the woods. The boxes were in storage while the college built its new Rauner Special Collections Library, my father having made this donation to his alma mater several years prior when he and my mother moved into a retirement facility north of town.

Phillip Cronenwett, then librarian for the college, enthused about the gift and his high interest was infectious. He described a treasure trove that included letters to and from nearly every notable writer of the twentieth century. Dad hadn’t been surprised when I’d told him I was interested in reading through his letters; he assumed everyone would be.

My father’s literary career spanned eight decades. He wrote his first poem in 1919, in Austin, Minnesota, when he was fifteen years old, and scribbled out his last around 2000, when he was ninety-six. As poet-in-residence at Dartmouth, he taught generations of creative writing students through four decades. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 and the National Book Award in 1997. He was inducted into the inner circle of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982. He served as New Hampshire poet laureate for five years and as U.S. poet laureate at the Library of Congress under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy.

What was unusual about this collection of more than fifty-five thousand letters, Phil told me, was that, unlike most writers who keep correspondence they’ve received, my father had kept carbon copies of every letter he’d written to the authors as well. Contained within the boxes were decades-long epistolary conversations between famous writers as they celebrated and bemoaned their literary lives. With permission from my older brother, Dikkon, executor of our father’s literary estate, Phil offered me a desk under a window and an opportunity to peruse the boxes in any way I chose.

My father, never known for tidiness, had organized the boxes well. Each was labeled by year and stuffed with folders arranged alphabetically, by author. I could pluck a handful of letters to and from Robert Lowell, say, in August 1962, after he, his wife Elizabeth Hardwick, Dad, and I had spent an afternoon on Dad’s boat, Rêve. Or I could pull my father’s correspondence with Anne Sexton in 1967, the year she won her Pulitzer and I met her at our house in Hanover.

The boxes spoke to who Dad was as a literary person; he corresponded with dozens—perhaps hundreds—of writers, friends, editors, critics, and publishers, as they did with him. Through that correspondence, he served as glue between large swaths of writers. As a little curly-headed girl, I’d watched him write some of those letters, his shoulders muscled forward as he typed on his Smith Corona in his study while I knelt on his desk, peering into its guts. I loved the sound of black ink smacking white vellum and the syncopation of the little hammers as his fingers flew across his keyboard, ending each line with a solid thwap of the return bar. I noticed how he lined up his left margins and where he typed addresses on his #10 envelopes, addresses marked to important editors, since the letters were headed to New York and London. I marveled at how he could grip one of his teeth-grooved pipe stems between his canines while simultaneously telling me who was coming for dinner that night. Sometimes I’d get antsy and stand on the desk in my bare feet to gain stature, before bending over and practically falling into the typewriter, blood rushing to my head, making me feel giddy. Okay, Gretch, Dad would then chuckle, I can’t very well finish this letter with your head in my way.

Now, I was looking at his letters with the eyes of a woman, a woman who had both adored her father and been betrayed by him. My back tensed, my neck strained, and my brow complained as hours flew by. Furrowed with concentration, I blew dust off old pages and removed rusty paper clips from the original letters of Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, and Wallace Stevens. I’d spent my early life inhabiting the poetic periphery of these men, tugging at their pant legs for attention. I had no idea how many days or months I’d have to be in the world of Dad’s letters, as I had no plan, just a lot to learn. On my first day in the storage facility, I’d set aside eight hours and got through three cartons. With 144 to go, I couldn’t see out to a finish line.

The 1990s had opened with too much death—the death of my nineteen-year marriage; the death of my beloved, 101-year-old grandmother; the death of my mother-in-law, with whom I shared respect and admiration; and the death of my extraordinary mother. It continued with the death of my daughter’s Alaskan husky pup, given to her to balance the losses she and her older brother had already endured. The death of that puppy was unimaginable. It broke our hearts when our hearts had already been broken too many times.

Sitting at the desk, I had only questions. Questions about the stories my parents told, some of which hadn’t squared with my own lived experience. Questions about my father’s self-centeredness and his affairs with women outside his marriage. Questions about his tribe of writers, the wonderful—and wacky—men, mostly, who inhabited our living rooms, claiming airspace I would have liked for myself and who, despite their progressive politics, through the 1960s and ’70s, when I was coming of age, had already assumed my older brother would be the next-generation Eberhart writer. My father was eighty-seven the year I got started on his letters, and my relationship with him was guarded. I saw him regularly, as he lived only thirty minutes from my home, but I kept my distance emotionally, as I had for decades.

We all must square the gifts and harms from our original families—better done, I wager, before leaving home, not in our forties. I hoped I’d find in my father’s letters bits of family history I hadn’t known, strands of evidence that might support a coherent story of him. Confused by the outward symbols of our privilege—our homes, travel, my father’s friends, life on elite college campuses—alongside my inner loneliness from his inattention, his neglect, I didn’t know what would surface.

I came from a family of storytellers, of mythmakers, a family perhaps a little too in love with itself. Both parents were superb entertainers; they regaled their visitors with righteous descriptions of their friends, their original families, their children, their hired help, their connections to kings and presidents, a chance encounter with a drunk cousin on Main Street or a store clerk in Boston who happened to read Yeats. I loved their stories. Everyone did. Repeated regularly, a story drawn out by Mom or Dad, or the two together, was funny or poignant and sure to pack a punch. Over cocktail parties in living rooms and on island beaches in Maine, stoked with bourbon and gin, tossed and tumbled, their tales calcified into myth—myths of improbable beginnings in Minnesota and Boston, of wealth created and sometimes lost, of ten-day blizzards and first-row tickets to the theater, of the highest levels of literary achievement and the bastard critics who didn’t understand. These accounts seemed special, and I felt special in their reflection. Joining their legion of admirers, I subscribed fully.

Dikkon, five years older than I, inherited their skills. He could spin an adventure as tight as a new ball of string—epic, swashbuckling inventions of pirates and maidens on the high seas, of musketeers and flagons. He could carry on for an hour, even as a teenager, spellbinding my cousins Kate and Susan Butcher and me as we rolled ourselves in moth-eaten blankets under the stars by a fire on the beach in Maine. Go on! we implored, and he did. I envied all three members of my family their talents, their way of tossing reality to the wind in favor of wild imagination. My family of origin held in high esteem anyone with those skills. By the age of ten, I could recite my father’s CV, I’d heard it so many times, but by my late thirties, I’d begun to question some of the accounts. All I ever wanted to know was what was real.

By the year I started looking through Dad’s letters, a dissonance about who my father was had lodged between my ears and eyes, a dissonance too jarring to ignore. One warm, blue-sky fall day in 1995, the fourth year of reading in the collection, I took my notes outside and spread them out on a picnic table, along with my lunch. The air that afternoon smelled different, with the aroma of pine pitch. While tourists mob New England for its maples and oaks dressed in royal ruby and gold, I’ve long loved the smell of pitch hardening on the trunk of an evergreen, pausing its growth as it gathers itself for winter. My mother had died the year before, at eighty, after living forty years with epilepsy. My father, at ninety-one, was hale and still writing. Hesitantly, I’d begun putting my own thoughts on paper, mostly about Dad, but about Mom, too. I still felt no right to question my father, to poke at the edifice that had grown up between him and me. I finished my sandwich and thought it was time to remind him of what I was up to. It was a quick trip to where he lived, and a beautiful afternoon for a drive through Hanover.

To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit? Dad asked. Seated in his green wingback chair, he pointed for me to take a seat next to him. He leaned toward me—a lean I’d seen many times when he tipped his weight and attention toward a famous writer and got pulled into literary conversation. I turned away from him and looked out the window at the fading afternoon sun.

I’m trying to figure things out, Dad, I said, my mouth dry. "I’m trying to figure you out. So I’m writing about you. His wide eyes encouraged me. I’d like to read you a piece."

I’d never shared anything I’d written with him, not even as a kid; he’d just never seemed interested. That day, he looked riveted, which shouldn’t have surprised me, since he always was his own favorite subject.

Speak slowly, Gretch. I want to hear you, Dad said, propping his hands on his knees to listen, while leaning closer to me. I’d written a piece about his childhood years in Austin, Minnesota, an innocent enough starting place. I read slowly, enunciating and emphasizing words, emulating his reading style as best I could.

What’s it like to have me write about you? I asked, after finishing.

Why, marvelous!

I’ll never get through all the boxes, Dad. You kept so much!

My father smiled, unabashed at being called out as the pack-rat of our family.

Will I find any surprises? I asked.

Dad paused for several seconds. Well, if you do, won’t that be interesting?

He raised his bushy eyebrows, eyebrows a friend of his had once called ferocious because his thick tufts went every which way. As a teenager, his raised eyebrows seemed flirtatious to me.

When you look back at your long life, Dad, do you have any regrets?

My father took his time considering my question. Time enough, I thought, to scan nine decades. Time enough for me to scan a line of white birch trees outside his room, their yellow leaves fluttering in the breeze. I thought of Frost’s poem about birches and of Frost himself sitting in the green leather chair in our living room in Hanover with his thick thatch of white hair. A chickadee hopped from branch to branch, creating quite a poem itself.

No, he said finally.

Really? I thought. I had so many regrets.

Is there anything you don’t want me to say? I asked.

No, my father said. Your only job as a writer is to tell the truth.

Poetic Space

When I was a little girl, I sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor in the living room of our house in Hanover, back pressed against my mother’s bare legs, listening to Dad read his poems. His words wafted on the slip of his pipe smoke and crowned his bald head. Sometimes I imagined his words escaping through the open window behind his chair where a spring breeze blew them through the trees and across the Connecticut River to other states of mind.

Our living room was full of people, always full of people. Visiting writers and literary critics, neighbors who lived on our short street, handpicked college seniors from my father’s popular poetry seminar, Mom’s friends from her downtown pottery class. And Gram, my only living grandparent, if she was visiting from Cambridge. The long, rectangular room in Hanover could seat twenty, thirty in a pinch. Students, and Mom and I, sat on the floor. My parents collected friends in bunches the way I gathered Queen Anne’s lace from the meadow near our summer place in Maine. Their friends came to hear Dad’s latest poems or to request their favorites, occupying our living room like he was their guru. All our eyes were on him. It was his voice that mattered. Even our dachshund, Star, circled her tail three times and quieted on the floor beside me.

If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness, my father would read, his well-worn book in his outstretched hand, his eyes closed, When everything is as it was in my childhood / Violent, vivid, and of infinite possibility.

Madness? Violent childhood? Possibility? I didn’t know what the words meant, but I felt their importance in the sadness I heard in his voice, or, later, in his sudden delight at their brilliant beauty. I absorbed the rhythm and cadence of his lines, leaning toward him on the uplift of a phrase I especially liked and back against my mother’s legs when he finished. It didn’t matter if I understood or not—his words were like friends I could count on. They were ever-present, my constant, repeated over and over, when asked for and even when not. Poetry was the daily music of my childhood.

If my father cocked his eyebrow at me, I felt like I was the only one in the room. When he stared off into the slippery ether, it was as if he’d handed me a slice of poetic space, space in which I could think and feel. Surely, he was telling me, time given over to the reciting of words strung out on a page was the only sustenance we really needed.

Sometimes I’d squirm my bottom and try to indent the cool hardwood floor. Or I’d grab Mom by her ankles to straighten myself. She’d wrap her arms around me and whisper, Sit still, Gretch.

No one else’s father held court in this way. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to make a fuss or a demand. He enjoyed telling us where and when he’d written a poem, and why. He confided in us about his personal anxieties. He was in conversation with us, only he was doing all the talking.

At Undercliff, our summer cottage in Maine, my father sat on the small lawn giving way to the big sea and tried out stanzas on his writer friends. Down East Maine has long attracted artists and writers to its rocky shores. Philip Booth and Robert Lowell—who we called Cal—summered across the bay in Castine. Dan Hoffman was a neighbor on Cape Rosier. My father gathered those three with him as a poetic quartet to test their verses on each other while their wives—Elizabeth, Margaret, Liz, and my mother, Betty—formed their own foursome, walking the beach while commiserating about the wounded souls of their writer husbands. I hung around the poets and watched the ice melt in their jelly glasses of bourbon while passing the cocktail peanuts.

My father’s oxford shirt was rolled up past his elbows, frayed from another teaching year, his nose covered in zinc against the August sun. I climbed on his lap as a little girl, and he flexed his biceps, Popeye-style, making me giggle. See how strong I am, he said, unabashed at doing this in front of his friends. That’s from dragging boats up and down the beach all summer.

Poetry conversations with groups of his peers usually ended with a series of questions Dad posed—about the meaning of life and death, the insanity of the latest war, the politics of our current president, and the weather on Penobscot Bay. He listened to Phil and Cal and Dan, but rarely concluded anything; such decisiveness would have thwarted his enormous curiosity. He preferred rehashing the same questions year after year and keeping his options open.

I doubt it ever occurred to him that one thing a father can do for his daughter is to help her interpret the world in which she must live. Instead, he preferred to live in his own world, the one he told us through his stories, the one enhanced each summer by the sea and wind, his daily cocktails, and his deep inquisitiveness. The world we really lived in, the big world outside our family homes was a great, poetic mystery to Dad. Its interpretation—I’d need to figure that out on my own.

Cartwheels and Smoke Rings

In 1956, when I was five years old and Dikkon was ten, we moved into a large white colonial with dark green shutters at the dead end of a short street in Hanover, New Hampshire, named Webster Terrace. From there, my father could ride his bike one mile to the Dartmouth campus, where he’d been hired as its poet-in-residence, following his predecessor, Robert Frost. Mom gave directions to new acquaintances she met on Main Street by telling them our home was the deadest of the dead end. The house was perched on a narrow glacial esker high above the Connecticut River; tall white pines ringed the large backyard. In autumn, when the maples and oaks that dotted the steep riverbank dropped their leaves, we could see across to Vermont. As Frost famously quipped, The best thing about living in New Hampshire is that you get to look at Vermont. He could have said that when sitting with Dad in our octagonal wooden gazebo, large enough for six more poets and cantilevered over the bank at the edge of our lawn.

The five houses on Webster Terrace comprised a close-knit, 1950s-style neighborhood. Each home had unique features, and I quickly figured out the best use for them. Neighbors, whose back doors faced the short street, welcomed us kids at any time. Every father was a Dartmouth professor, and all the moms stayed home. The Maslands owned the only TV, so we watched Bonanza after school while Mrs. Masland fed us the richest and creamiest tomato soup, which, Mom learned after I’d raved about it, was Campbell’s in a can, the same I had at home. It just tasted better at the Maslands’. Mrs. Hennessey, who had become Mom’s best friend and lived next door to us, doled out fluffernutters, which I preferred to the apples and raisins my mother gave us. At the Ehrmanns’, I learned enough German to understand Gram when she said things like Danke schön or eins, swei, drei, vier. Mom gave over our front yard for an adult-free zone of kids’ play, after helping us tear up the grass so we could convert it into hills and rivers with our trucks and bulldozers, replicating the contours of Vermont and New Hampshire, while she taught us about glacial erratics. Mom didn’t care about the mess as long as the Webster Terrace kids felt welcome. Dikkon and I were taken into the gang and our family was thereafter named The Ebs.

Dad, who fussed over navigating the muddy mess with his visiting writers, reserved the backyard and gazebo for entertaining, while I used the yard to perfect my cartwheels. That yard, reined in by the tall white pines and edged by my mother’s flower gardens, formed a perfect cartwheeling gymnasium. As my short legs catapulted me, my arms reached for the ground and my curly hair circled my head like sun rays. I turned cartwheels outside on that lawn, on the hardwood floor of our living room between readings, and all the way down Webster Terrace. The first thrust would ignite my flame. I’d leap and turn, building momentum, over and over, stretching my arms, thrusting my legs, sucking in my belly, holding my breath. I turned cartwheels in my summer pajamas and in my winter mittens and boots. I turned them in the cheap red swimsuit from Rockdale’s Clothing Store in Lebanon that dyed my torso a one-piece red. The exact distance from one end of my parents’ lawn to the other was six circles. After that, I’d fall into my mother’s flowerbed.

Gretchen Eberhart, don’t you trample my geraniums, Mom called to me from the kitchen porch one day when I was six. She was pinning laundry to our clothesline and pulleying it out over the dried-up mountains and valleys in our front yard.

Okay, I said, and started again.

My father sat in the shade of the pines, tugging on a pipe. Half-watching, he suddenly noticed me and asked, Can you do more? I could. I would do them all day long and into the night if they got his attention. Dad’s delight fueled me. Back and forth across the lawn I went. Cartwheels made me feel free.

My acrobatics would show up in my father’s letters to his friends, like the poet Dudley Fitts. In 1956, shortly after we moved to Webster Terrace, my father wrote to Dudley, Gretch is full of blond brisk fun. Sometimes his friends would write me back directly, like the anthologist Oscar Williams did when I was ten. Gretchen, will you marry me when I grow up? Dad exaggerated my cartwheels, as he exaggerated everything we did, turning my simple childhood fun into high art.

Five Webster Terrace was our fifth home in as many years. Every fall, Dad found a new job on a new college campus and my brother would have to join a new school and make new friends while Mom and I tagged along. My first year was split between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Seattle, where my father took his first college teaching job, at the University of Washington. Our home was a small, single-story, ranch house without shade, in a development full of young professors. As if to compensate for the sterile, bulldozed development, we had a big view of Mt. Rainier out our back door. The next year we moved into faculty housing at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where my father was Wheaton’s first-ever visiting professor. That spring he received a citation from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, which came with a check for $1,000 (this would be $9,000 today).

We spent my third year in Storrs, Connecticut, where my father taught at UConn and my parents became friends with fellow English department colleague Pete Dean and his wife, Dorothy. In Storrs, we lived in a two-story row house of faculty apartments that shouldered up to huge slabs of rock left over from construction, which gave us the same kind