Questions and Answers with Marian Janssen
How did you, a Dutch woman, come upon the American poet Isabella Gardner, while most Americans
don’t know her?
It all started in the rare book room of Washington University in St. Louis, where I was doing research
for my book on the literary magazine The Kenyon Review. Holly Hall, its librarian, asked me if I would
like to see the Isabella Gardner collection there, which no researcher had yet looked at closely. For
me, Gardner had been merely one of the few women poets to be published in the male dominated
Kenyon Review, but I enthusiastically accepted because nothing is more fun than to see what no one
has seen before. Learning from hundreds of letters to Gardner, I realized I had been shamefully
inattentive to a poet whose books had been nominated for National Book Awards and the Pulitzer
Prize and whom Sylvia Plath saw as a rival to the title of “The Poetess of America.” Yet, when I first
made Gardner’s superficial acquaintance, she had been virtually forgotten. What on earth had
happened to her, I wondered? Where did she spring from and why had she sunk into oblivion?
Perhaps Isabella Gardner was just not worth reading?
My admiration for her poetry had to overcome my having been steeped in the quasi objective
approach to poetry as preached in The Kenyon Review. Gardner’s first collection of poetry, Birthdays
from the Ocean, had earned glowing reviews in the 1950s because she had clothed naked feelings of
sex, terror, and death in perfectly crafted intense lyric verse, but her other three collections were out of
touch with the poetic fashions by which I was swayed. However, being her self-designated biographer
I had to immerse myself in her poetry, as even her most distanced poems are very autobiographical,
and I was caught. In my book I use snippets of Gardner’s poems because they are the footprints of her
life, and I am happy to find that my very first (Kirkus) reviewer is blown away by Gardner’s “stunning”
poetry.
How did her poetry figure in Gardner’s life?
When I got acquainted with Gardner in St. Louis, I was struck first by the range of her correspondents
in the literary world, from T. S. Eliot to Erica Jong. Also, Gardner called forth inordinate openness in
her friends, who told her about their loves and lusts, their marriages and money problems, their
ambitions and abortions. But the drama of her life encompassed much more than her being the focal
point of an intimate literary circle. Born into one of the first families of Boston, cousin to Robert Lowell,
she was a child of wealth who rebelled against her privileged surroundings. Before she became a
poet, she was an actress on Broadway; she married into the theater world, then wedded a prominent
Russian-Jewish photographer with connections to the mob, who was followed by one of the millionaire
Chicago McCormicks; he, subsequently, was cast aside for the southern writer Allen Tate, who then
deserted her. During her last years at the Hotel Chelsea in New York she was ravaged by the tragic
fates of her wayward children, and struggled with enemies, friends, lovers and the bottle.
As you live in the Netherlands, I suppose your biography is mainly based on published sources?
No way. I have indeed read hundreds of studies dealing with American history and culture, from ballet
to business to poetry, and countless biographies, from Elizabeth Bishop to Ernie Kovacs to Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe, but they merely firmed up my book’s foundation. I derive my intimate insights from
over a hundred interviews and thousands upon thousands of letters, many of them from private
collections, most of them never seen by anybody else. In all, I spent two years in America reading
Gardner related correspondence in archives and talking to family, friends and acquaintances. They
were the best two years of my life.
Why the extraordinary title? Not at All What One Is Used To?
My first choice was Poetry and Passion: The Life and Times of Isabella Gardner, but I decided that
title, though fitting, was too static for Gardner’s inordinately tumultuous life. Then my publisher
suggested “Dead Center of All Alone,” a line from one of Gardner’s poems and the title of the tragic
last chapter, but this does not do justice to the lust for life that is so very much part of Gardner. “Not at
All What One Is Used To” is the title of a Gardner poem in which she describes her life as an actress,
poles apart from her aristocratic background. The title is unexpected, unusual, and as such
emblematic of the drama of Gardner’s life.
If you had ever met her, would you have liked her, do you think?
My feelings for Gardner have rollercoasted over the years. A young, impressionable scholar, I started
out with admiration for this passionate woman and anger at her being sidelined as a poet in the maledominated Cold War period. But after I had read the love and hate letters between Gardner and Tate,,
I felt she was mired in self-pity. Interviews with people who knew her during her last years and
described her as an imperious, nymphomaniacal dipsomaniac increased my moralistic attitude. Then I
became an administrator and put Gardner on the backburner for over a decade. Re-reading the letters
I had gathered, the interviews I had held when I returned to her after my time-out, my admiration for
Gardner came back with a vengeance. Self-pity? Well, perhaps, for a while, but with a philandering
husband like Tate she had much reason to. An alcoholic? Yes, but during her last years, she pulled
herself together and managed to write some great poems again. I don’t think I have mellowed over the
years, but the break has helped me to cut through the surface.
Why should we read this book?
Because it is a super-dramatic, compelling story of a talented actress and most gifted poet, whose
kaleidoscopic life under the weight of her aristocratic parentage and wealth, played out in close
connectedness with a number of central cultural episodes in America. It is a must for anybody
fascinated by American aristocracy and interested in American culture of the twentieth century, from
Poetry Magazine to Virgil Thomson, from William Carlos Williams to Yoko Ono, from Cape Cod to
Ojai, from the Ballets Russes to the goings-on in the Chelsea Hotel in New York. I share the estimate
and confidence of the Kirkus Reviews critic that it is a “long overdue study that will surely spark new
interest in Gardner’s work.”