Only subscribers may read this in its entirety. What follows is a free preview, truncated midway through.
In 1930, at the age of thirty-two, and in response to an increasing depression that would eventually result in hospitalizations in 1931 and 1933, Louise Bogan, who had long been in the habit of keeping a journal, began using it for a new purpose. Describing the impetus for this change, her biographer, Elizabeth Frank, has written that Bogan “recognized that she was in the grip of an emotional and creative crisis, and, despising passivity, felt that the task ahead was nothing less than total artistic and psychic reconstruction. First and most important, she would teach herself to write all over again.” Not having been introduced to Rilke’s poems yet, for that influential encounter was still almost five years away, Bogan would not have known how much her own reconstruction would resemble his when he came under the influence of Rodin and set out deliberately to move away from the highly wrought Romanticism and allegorical density of his early poems, to making poems out of careful and scrupulous observations of the immediate world, resulting in the New Poems, in 1907 and 1908.
During the 1920s Bogan had kept a journal but it had been destroyed, along with most of her other papers and letters from this period, in a fire that leveled the country house she shared with her second husband, the writer Raymond Holden. This early journal, however, was of a different sort than the one born of her depression. Bogan’s description of it indicates what she felt she lacked as a poet and writer at the time and what she hoped her new journal might lead her to. Bogan writes, “The diary kept in Vienna in 1922 was without any real descriptive power. Then, I could only describe through a set of symbols—poetically, lyrically. Straight rendering completely baffled me; I remember this. So inner, so baffled, so battered—even at 24—that I noticed practically nothing; or if I did notice it, I could not put it down (in prose) with any directness.”
In teaching herself directness of style, or “straight rendering” as she called it, Bogan hoped to find “the awkwardness of maturity and truth, in a style as hard as a brick.” The language of symbolism, which she referred to as “the language of dream,” was a mode she no longer wanted to employ. It had cut her off from the difficult truth of her experience and permitted her to live on the fierce energy of her talent and ambition, but at the age of thirty-two, she found herself feeling dead and empty. Her reinvention began in simplicity: “I saw the clear afternoon, casting the shadows of chairs one way in the room, so that the season was as clear within a house as out of doors. The shadows had the time of day written into them, as well as the look of autumn.”
After a year of forcing herself to pay attention to the ordinary things around her, Bogan felt she had made good progress on her reconstruction. “I cannot yet put down all the truth as I see it,” she writes, “but I shall train myself and sometimes this thing will come out truly, in detail, alive possessed, understood, first; thereafter written out. My own angers, my own despairs, therefore—and all the matters before which I now fall silent.”
In this self-appraisal we hear a confidence of accomplishment that will rise and fall over the decades. In order to restore her belief in herself as a writer and to help her pass through the “dead areas” of work and feeling, Bogan will continue to seek out the unobserved space her journal offers. In a 1953 journal entry, twenty-five years after her initial “reconstruction,” she reconfirms her commitment to the power and necessity of “straight rendering.” Bogan writes, “And I think the only thing to do, in these dead areas, is to put down something that one has noticed, and not experienced actually. A bird’s-eye or mouse-eye view. Told with the most careful detail and feeling for truth. Then the truth will be bearable, because the truth always comes out quite queer. It sounds so distorted and improbable that the writer’s interest is kept, in spite of himself.”
