Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell
UNIV. OF CHICAGO PRESS, $3.75
THIS “Correspondence of a Friendship,” edited by Harley Farnsworth MacNair, is a self-confessed work of affection. Mr. MacNair tries to combine data on a poetic collaboration with the records of a friendship between his wife, Florence Ayscough MacNair, and Amy Lowell. Amy Lowell, as usual, was either overbearing or silent. As a result the correspondence includes material on the friendship that is irrelevant to the collaboration, and material on the collaboration that is only indirectly connected with the friendship. And several of Amy Lowell’s letters to Harriet Monroe have a bearing on neither.
Without an introductory biographical and critical commentary on Mrs. Ayscough, her relationship with Miss Lowell, and the curious poetic enterprise they launched together, the reader must decide for himself where the value of the correspondence lies. Whoever reads the LowellAyscough letters for their intrinsic appeal as letters will hardly escape the feeling that Amy Lowell is working her translator professionally, as a spiritualist works a medium.
There is little of the personal rapport that inspires the correspondence of an Emerson and a Carlyle. So, in the absence of a colorful interchange of personality and intellect, the letters are significant for the light they throw on Amy Lowell and her poems from the Chinese.
As a primary source, much of Mr. MacNair’s volume will be indispensable for studying the literary achievement of Fir-Flower Tablets, where Amy Lowell rendered in her polyphonic prose those pictographie attributes of Chinese poetry which captured her fancy as an Imagist. It will also be appreciated by those who seek in the marginalia of poets and in books like The Road to Xanadu an insight into the processes of making poetry.
But students will find the lack of any index, and of most of Florence Ayscough’s translations from which Fir-Flower Tablets was composed, more provoking than provocative.
LAWRENCE SARGENT HALL.