{"id":121236,"date":"2018-02-15T09:00:14","date_gmt":"2018-02-15T14:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=121236"},"modified":"2018-02-20T14:57:32","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T19:57:32","slug":"the-epic-and-unsung-vision-of-joan-murray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/15\/the-epic-and-unsung-vision-of-joan-murray\/","title":{"rendered":"The Epic, Neglected Vision of Joan Murray"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following\u00a0is adapted from\u00a0the editor\u2019s introduction to a new collection of Joan Murray\u2019s poems, published last week.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Joan Murray. Photo courtesy of Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat truth, what mystical awareness can be lived,\u201d Joan Murray wrote in a letter to her mother. Like the young Rimbaud, Murray intended to make herself a seer\u2014what she calls, among other figures, the \u201cUnemployed or universal Architect.\u201d She became this architect-seer not, as Rimbaud proposed, by a total derangement of the senses but by building \u201cthe firm reality of a consciousness, consciousness in the never-ending, the great wideness that one must blend withal.\u201d Like Emily Dickinson and Laura Riding before her, Murray belongs to a radical arc of American metaphysical women poets, most of whom still remain unsung. Her untimely death from a congenital heart condition in 1942, at age twenty-four, marked the loss of an extraordinary poet; yet Murray\u2019s poems recalibrate the notion of a life\u2019s work. The tragic facts only underscore the epic achievement of her vision.<\/p>\n

Five years after her death, out of the blue woodwork\u00a0of 1947, her first book of poetry was published as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition with the title Poems by Joan Murray: 1917\u20131942<\/em>. W. H. Auden<\/a>, who had been dissatisfied with the manuscripts he had received as a first-year judge, had reached out to Murray\u2019s mother to inquire about the possibility of publishing her daughter\u2019s work posthumously for the prize. Murray had been a student in Auden\u2019s Poetry and Culture course at the New School in 1940, and her mother countered Auden\u2019s invitation with the accusation that he had killed her daughter by inspiring her \u201cpoetry fever.\u201d But she was devoted to her daughter\u2019s work and eager to see it published, so agreed to the Yale edition with the condition that her friend Grant Code\u2014a poet, Harvard lecturer, and dance and theater critic\u2014edit the collection.<\/p>\n

While Murray\u2019s\u00a0Poems\u00a0<\/i>received mostly laudatory reviews in\u00a0Poetry<\/i>, the\u00a0Saturday Review<\/i>,\u00a0the\u00a0New York Times Book Review<\/i>, and\u00a0The New Yorker<\/i>, it soon fell into obscurity and remained out of print for more than fifty years. I first learned about the collection in 2006, thanks to the poet Shanna Compton, who posted an invaluable pdf of it on the PhillySound blog\u2019s Neglectorino Project<\/em>, a series on neglected writers started by the poet CAConrad. In a note to the pdf, Compton writes, \u201cDespite the untimely death of the author, the flawed editorial work, and the fact that the book has been out of print for decades, Murray has managed to earn something of an underground reputation.\u201d How was it possible that Murray\u2019s poems\u2014with their wild and unwavering authority, their singular metaphysics of a migratory American psyche, one unburdened by any formal or aesthetic \u201cschooling\u201d and the clearest evidence we\u2019ve ever had of the visionary nature of youth, what George Eliot averred of the young Teresa of \u00c1vila whose \u201cpassionate nature demanded an epic life\u201d and who found her epos in poetry\u2014how could these poems be so totally unknown?<\/p>\n

Joan Margaret Murray was born in London on February 12, 1917, during an air raid. She was born to Canadian parents, Stanley Webster Murray and Florence \u201cPeggy\u201d Margaret Murray (n\u00e9e Poaps)\u2014parents who affectionately called her \u201cTwinks.\u201d Stanley, the son of a well-known Presbyterian minister in Toronto, had served in the war with a British infantry regiment and later became a successful portraitist and illustrator. Peggy worked as a traveling diseuse, a monologist who could also sing and dance. At some point, Murray decided she preferred the middle name Vincent\u2014from the Latin\u00a0vincere<\/i>, \u201cto conquer\u201d\u2014and often signed her poems Joan Vincent Murray.<\/p>\n

The family moved frequently\u2014to London, Paris, and Ontario\u2014until Stanley and Peggy separated in the early 1920s, when Murray was about seven. At age ten, she was sent to live with the Jacksons, her maternal aunt and uncle, and their three children, in Chatham, Ontario, where she spent the rest of her childhood. Despite long stretches without seeing her mother, Murray maintained an intimate bond with her, the two corresponding extensively throughout Murray\u2019s life, sometimes on a daily basis. Her father, though, dropped out of her life and seldom kept in contact.<\/p>\n

Murray suffered her first bout of rheumatic fever when she was eleven, leaving her with a permanently damaged\u00a0heart valve and susceptibility to recurring infections. Her condition required constant vigilance and extensive rest, but Murray was restless. Two years later, at age thirteen, she suffered an even more acute attack, one so severe that death seemed certain according to her doctors\u2014but she survived it.<\/p>\n

Murray\u2019s formal schooling was irregular and incomplete. In the fall of 1929, she and her cousins Jean and Betty Jackson were sent to a local Ursuline convent boarding school, the Pines, which she attended off and on until 1932. That August, at the age of fifteen, she immigrated to Detroit, Michigan, with the Jacksons. In her passport photo she wears a serious, fiercely radiant expression, a blazer and tie, and a slick curtain crew cut. In Detroit, she finished the ninth grade at the Miss Newman School, but her secondary schooling ended there. A letter from Headmistress Newman described her as \u201clovely, modest\u201d and wholly unsuited to a conventional education; with her extraordinary artistic sensibility she was \u201ca soul apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

From then on Murray directed her own studies, focusing on writing, acting, and dance. She often worried about gaps in her education and struggled resolutely to fill them through a rigorous daily schedule and ambitious reading lists that reveal the breadth and depth of her study, as\u00a0reflected in this letter to her mother, which she wrote when she was seventeen:<\/p>\n

I was lying in bed yesterday thinking I ought to be creating something or other, that awful nagging feeling a writer gets, you know when suddenly the idea came that I should write nine dedicatory poems to the great people that I feel I know so intimately, the first five to those who are dead: Duncan, Terry, Bernhardt, Duse and Irving; the other four to Bori, Lily Pons, Barrymore and Le Gallienne\u2014some job, what? The first on Le Gallienne probably breaks all the rules of poetry, grammar, punctuation, etc.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even as a teenager, Murray always kept several dedicated irons in the fire and held high ambitions for her creative endeavors. A notable 1934 side project, The Hills and the Hollows<\/em>, her childhood memoir in blank verse, describes a vision she had at age three of a ring of \u201ctwo-inch miners\u201d that she tried to save from a \u201clizard-sized dragon.\u201d \u201cIt was a vision that a labor-union or communist St. Joan might have had,\u201d she reflected, suggesting the kind of person and writer she aspired to become. Yet Murray\u2019s primary desire at seventeen was to write for the theater and act. She was at work on her first major play,\u00a0The Son of Pan<\/i>, with hopes of the writer-director-actress Eva Le Gallienne, a pioneer of the American repertory movement, producing it. She writes to her mother:<\/p>\n

I care too much about the theatre to wish to clutter it up with any more superfluous drama. Give me a year and I\u2019ll give you a play! I\u2019ll write it all over again. I\u2019ll make it live! Put some strength into it! My main character is too interesting to handle in the manner I have. I should go more deeply into all the characters, make the poetry more unified and carry the play on to an ending truly worthy of the Son of Pan<\/em>. Whether I can do this or not I don\u2019t know. All I know is that I feel much happier at the thought. I mean business!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Murray\u2019s dream to study theater at the prestigious Irvine School compelled her to move to New York when she turned eighteen. She acted and danced semiprofessionally, first with Theodora Irvine and the Irvine Players, continuing later to study theater with Tamara Daykarhanova and Maria Ouspenskaya and to dance with Mikhail Mordkin.<\/p>\n

When she was twenty, she met the novelist Helen Anderson, and though they\u00a0saw each other in person only four times, theirs was a marriage of true minds, the kind Murray shared with few others, and they corresponded frequently with a devotional intensity. The friendship with Anderson played a significant part in Murray\u2019s decision to focus on writing and less on acting. At her friend\u2019s suggestion, Murray started writing a novel but became so frustrated with it, she made little progress. She dreamed of joining Anderson and her boyfriend in an artist commune in Oregon and of becoming an ascetic \u201cin a turret or in a desert with a sack cloth and nothing more.\u201d But her mother insisted that Murray\u2019s health was prohibitive.<\/p>\n

By the fall of 1937, Murray felt even more caged by the theater and city life, and continued to plot a move to the northwest or to her native England. She headed back to Detroit without plans and stayed for two years, ever hungry for \u201ccrits\u201d on her stunted novel and for artistic community. She studied part-time at the University of Michigan, where one course in Far Eastern art deepened her interest in Buddhist thought. And then in a short-story writing workshop with Donald Hamilton Haines in the fall of 1938, she found the\u00a0support she craved. Haines encouraged her pursuit of fiction and advised her to delay publishing, advice she heeded. But a critical poetic revelation was imminent.<\/p>\n

Murray had read and written poems since she was a child\u2014A. E. Housman\u2019s\u00a0A Shropshire Lad\u00a0<\/i>was one of her favorites\u2014but reading Yeats when she was twenty-two spurred a conversion. Her transformation was sealed by the spring of 1940, when she moved back to New York and enrolled in W. H. Auden\u2019s Poetry and Culture class at the New School, and then continued her studies with him in the fall in his seminar called the Language and Technique of Poetry. Auden was already a renowned poet at age thirty-three, and Murray found in him a kindred spirit, as she wrote to her mother: \u201cI may ask Auden for crits because our struggles are in many ways alike and we are more of an age. As a creative artist he has not only talked but led. He has used his knowledge.\u201d In the summer of 1940, between semesters, Murray and Auden exchanged many letters and their friendship grew. She worked and reworked her letters to him many times, characteristically using correspondence to formulate her own poetics and thoughts about art. She also continued to send him poems to read. In April 1941, Auden chose Murray\u2019s poem \u201cOrpheus: Three Eclogues\u201d for publication in the magazine\u00a0Decision: A Review of Free Culture<\/i>, the first and only poem published in her lifetime.<\/p>\n

The last three years of Murray\u2019s life were her happiest, and marked by intense creative productivity, as she wrote to a friend in 1941:<\/p>\n

There is the fresh imagination and understanding. I may hit directly to the core of the intellectual intuitive. One almost has to forget that others have thought before one so that the essentials may be alive and not inhibited by the second- or third-hand reaction generally exhaled. The mind of an Unemployed or universal Architect epitomized in the desire to recreate what is desolated, to rebuild; the fact that the spirit exists beside every terrible destruction; that the sensitive but inarticulate line is being put upon innumerable plans while all is in shambles. The characters are of course symbolic. The jungle that the whole thing may or may not pull through is pretty nerve-wracking. But as I have mentioned, I ask myself the question and the rest is inordinate adventure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Murray moved upstate to to the loving home of Elmer and Pauline (\u201cDai\u201d) Newton on Rockledge Road (now Rockledge Lane) in the town of Saranac Lake, New York. She embarked on extensive, solitary walking trips in the northeast, hiking the hills and valleys of Vermont and Massachusetts, often fifteen miles a day, from town to town, stopping to read and to write letters to her mother, and cavorting with other artists and travelers, the like-minded company she had long sought.<\/p>\n

One summer day in 1941, Murray returned to Saranac Lake from a solitary walking trip in Vermont with a fever and was taken to General Hospital. What seemed to be a fever caused by an infection from a blister instead turned out to be a general infection spreading from her heart. Murray spent the last five months of her life between the hospital and her home at Saranac Lake. She was nursed by her mother and Dai, and visited often by the Jacksons, especially her cousin Jean. Murray died on January 4, 1942. Following her wishes, Peggy, Dai Newton, and her cousin Jean Jackson spread her ashes at the foot of the pines at Saint\u00a0John\u2019s in the Wilderness Episcopal Church in Paul Smiths, a hamlet north of Saranac Lake, reciting her untitled poem that began: \u201cIt is not I who am sleeping in the rock under the wood.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the Yale edition fell into the dustbin of history, it wasn\u2019t until John Ashbery<\/a> published an article on Murray in the October\/November 2003 issue of\u00a0Poetry Project Newsletter\u00a0<\/i>that her work began to be noticed again in poetry circles. (Ashbery had also mentioned Murray in passing as a \u201ccentral poet\u201d in his book\u00a0Other Traditions<\/i>, published in 2000.) In February 2014, Mark Ford\u2019s superb essay \u201cJoan Murray and the Bats of Wisdom\u201d appeared in\u00a0Poetry\u00a0<\/i>magazine. In it he describes a trunk full of Murray\u2019s original manuscripts supposed to have been lost in transit when Peggy sold her own papers, along with her daughter\u2019s, to the Smith College archive in 1968. Ford inquired about the trunk and it was subsequently found, complete with a dent in its side, which corroborates the lore of its falling off the delivery truck. But what it contained was still a mystery as the materials had not been processed. Ford\u2019s momentous homage to Murray and the bolstering promise of the trunk electrified me with purpose. I visited the archive at the Sophia Smith Collection in September 2014, and had the rare and exhilarating privilege of being the first to go through the new acquisitions, the long-lost papers of one of my favorite poets.<\/p>\n

The new materials comprise a tremendous addition to her already astonishing output: the hundreds of pages of missing original manuscripts of poetry; several hundred pages of letters that unlock her previously scant biography and include her correspondence with Auden, as well as reflections on her poetics; about a dozen stories, at least one of which looked like a novella or the novel that she had abandoned, as well as a few short plays in various stages of completion; and the unfinished memoir of her childhood. Lastly, and perhaps the most singularly fascinating manuscript, was an almost four-hundred-page multi-genre autobiographical work that Grant Code compiled from all the materials listed above and dedicated to Peggy. Most if not all of Murray\u2019s biography that I\u2019ve pieced together comes from this text that Code titled\u00a0A Faun Surmising<\/i>.<\/p>\n

In his editor\u2019s note for<\/span>\u00a0the 1947 edition of Murray\u2019s poems, Code accurately describes the papers that Murray\u2019s mother passed on to him as a \u201cconfusion: pages of prose mixed with pages of verse and scarcely two pages of anything together that belonged together.\u201d And yet, it is a well-known saga of women\u2019s literary history that editors have \u201cimproved\u201d or \u201ccorrected\u201d their original\u00a0<\/span>writings according to their own agendas and perceptions of public taste. Code was well aware of this issue, writing in his note: \u201cI am opposed to the practice of trying to \u2018improve\u2019 the work of poets, as was done with the poems of Emily Dickinson. The important thing is to preserve exactly what the poet wrote.\u201d<\/p>\n

Code\u2019s effort to \u201cprepare the poems for publication,\u201d however, competed with his desire \u201cto preserve exactly what the poet wrote.\u201d He made frequent changes to grammar and diction in order \u201cto make the meaning and syntax clear.\u201d The punctuation he added is far more numerous and regulating of syntax than in even Murray\u2019s most revised poems, where the punctuation became much sparser. Perhaps misreading Murray\u2019s fluidity and innovation, he shaped single-stanza poems into quatrains and changed neologistic compounds like \u201cgreyskirts,\u201d \u201ctallgaunt,\u201d and \u201csummer-wheat\u201d into two words or hyphenated them. Furthermore, because a clear final draft was rarely evident, Code\u2019s approach was often to combine \u201cthe best of all versions,\u201d merging drafts and supplanting the preferred variants, and to add titles to poems that Murray had left without them. He also omitted more than eighty poems considered \u201cincomplete, fragmentary, or immature,\u201d granted with some pressure from Auden to do so.<\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s hard not to admire Code\u2019s tireless efforts to present what he thought would be the best version of Murray\u2019s work. Most of her poems exist in multiple typed drafts with no indication of their order of composition or of a preference for one version over another. What look like obvious spelling errors, typos, and formatting inconsistencies\u00a0abound, sometimes making the text or handwritten edit over the text illegible. Given the absence of a final typescript, trying to understand Murray\u2019s composition process automatically becomes open to interpretation.<\/p>\n

After studying Murray\u2019s papers\u2014alive with her slanted scrawl\u2014I discovered that the differences between the drafts of each poem weren\u2019t significant enough to alter a single one.\u00a0Instead, I considered each individual poem in its relation to the drafts and to the patterns of edits I noticed among all of her poems, and I selected for publication that which appeared to be furthest developed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though Murray was a self-professed perfectionist, she distinguishes between a\u00a0lesser \u201cneatness\u201d and \u201cbalance.\u201d The latter signals an erotic feat\u2014when divisions inherent in one\u2019s self intertwine. Her quavering lines\u2014whether in scrawls, doodles, or poems\u2014are drawn in heat. Her margins, like her poem\u2019s churches, are filled with devils that look like monks (or vice versa) chained and doubling as if in sex magic. Her spiritual architecture is \u201cUnemployed\u201d and \u201cuniversal\u201d\u2014free from the \u201csecond- or third-hand reaction generally exhaled,\u201d the doors of perception cleansed. To be vulnerable to both continual destruction and creation and still participate in the work of the building spirit is Murray\u2019s invincible realization as a poet. And the luxuriance of her uncontainability is there, in what is left unfinished, hanging utterly in the balance.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Farnoosh Fathi is the author of\u00a0<\/span><\/em>Great Guns<\/span> (Canarium, 2013), editor of <\/span><\/em>Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems<\/span> (NYRB Poets, 2018) and founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She lives and teaches in New York City, most recently at Stanford Online High School, Poets House, Columbia University, and the Poetry Project.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Adapted\u00a0from\u00a0<\/em>Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems<\/a>,\u00a0<\/i>courtesy of NYRB Poets.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following\u00a0is adapted from\u00a0the editor\u2019s introduction to a new collection of Joan Murray\u2019s poems, published last week.   \u201cWhat truth, what mystical awareness can be lived,\u201d Joan Murray wrote in a letter to her mother. Like the young Rimbaud, Murray intended to make herself a seer\u2014what she calls, among other figures, the \u201cUnemployed or universal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1388,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[32855,32853,29242,29442,32854,32852,32846,6432,32844,32841,5234,20348,32849,32856,32848,32843,3628,32842,32400,32857,32847,4558,32851,32845,2160,32850],"class_list":["post-121236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-a-review-of-free-culture","tag-a-shropshire-lad","tag-a-e-housman","tag-caconrad","tag-decision","tag-donald-hamilton-haines","tag-eva-le-gallienne","tag-george-eliot","tag-grant-code","tag-joan-murray","tag-john-ashbery","tag-mark-ford","tag-neglectorino-project","tag-other-traditions","tag-phillysound","tag-poems-by-joan-murray-1917-1942","tag-poetry-magazine","tag-saranac-lake","tag-smith-college","tag-sophia-smith-collection","tag-st-joan","tag-st-teresa-of-avila","tag-the-new-school","tag-the-son-of-pan","tag-w-h-auden","tag-yale-series-of-younger-poets-competition"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Epic, Neglected Vision of Joan Murray<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Joan Murray was an English-language Rimbaud, a visionary young woman poet in the vein of Dickinson and Brooks. 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