Ramon Guthrie
Ramon Guthrie (January 14, 1896 – November 22, 1973) was a poet,[1] novelist, essayist, critic,[2] painter and professor of French and comparative literature.
("Bink") Noll, Phillip Booth and Tristan Tzara; the critics, Malcolm Cowley, M. L. Rosenthal and Irita Bradford Van Doren; the artists, Stella Bowen, Alexander Calder, Peter Blume and Ray Nash and the journalist, George Seldes[5] plus some two dozen other contributors.
However, even though Germaine Bree wrote of his penultimate collection, Asbestos Phoenix, that "[It] alone would place Ramon Guthrie among the major poets of the mid-century,[6]" and his masterpiece, Maximum Security Ward would be greeted in 1970 with critical acclaim[7][8][9] and would receive the Marjorie Peabody Waite award,[10] Guthrie and his masterpiece were neglected.
"[12]) Another major critic of the 20th century, M. L. Rosenthal, chose Maximum Security Ward and Other Poems to be the first volume in Persea Book's Lamplighter Series of significant modern poets because he felt that Guthrie had been neglected and ought to remain in print.
Rosenthal said of Guthrie that he had been ignored "For no good reason, really -- only the familiar general indifference to the real thing and identification of publicity with reputation.
"[19] In the summer of 1919 at the Café des Tourelles in Paris he joined Norman Fitts and nine others including Stephen Vincent Benét, Roger Sessions, and Thornton Wilder in what became "S4N Society."
[23] George Seldes claimed "Of all the persons on whom Sinclair Lewis relied most from 1927 onward, either for help in his work, or as a sounding board for ideas, or as a critic, a commentator on pieces of future novels he would act out spontaneously, the chosen one was Ramon Guthrie.
Mrs. Guthrie moves to Hartford and supports her children with difficulty, running a boarding house, working as a dressmaker, Christian Science practitioner, and manicurist, etc.
Guthrie goes to work for the Winchester Repeating Arms factory in New Haven, at this time busy filling war orders.
In December, however, he sails for France as a volunteer with the American Field Service and is an ambulance driver with the Eighth Army on the Western Front for several months and then with the Armee de l’Orient in the Balkans.
He walks away from a spectacular plane crash, which results in bouts of amnesia (see “ ‘Visse, Scrisse, Amo’ ”[28] ) and various nervous disorders, among them acusis—intolerance of loud noise—and acute attacks of anxiety and panic.
He is assigned to the Eleventh Bombing Squadron and participates in a disastrous raid over La Chaussee in which an incompetent major sends the planes aloft with machine guns out of order and without a fighter escort.
He writes poetry, follows courses at the Sorbonne in Old French and Provençal, is rumored to have become one of Otto Rank's patients, and participates in the literary and artistic life centered in Montparnasse.
(See “Ezra Pound in Paris and Elsewhere,” [30] “Montparnasse,”[31] and “For Approximately the Same Reason.”[32] ) The Guthries return to the United States in 1923, also the year of his first collection of poems, Trobar Clus (the first book put out by the S4N Society).
during World War II in France and Algiers as liaison with the French Resistance (for which he is also cited)—see “Fragment of a Travelogue”[35] and “For Approximately the Same Reason”—Guthrie teaches full-time at Dartmouth College (Hanover, New Hampshire), specializing in Proust.
He makes his home across the border in Norwich, Vermont, and returns to France as frequently as possible during vacations and sabbaticals, often to paint rather than write.
His scholarly enterprises include occasional articles, among them discussions of his close relationship with Lewis; a number of reviews—especially for the New York Herald Tribune Book Review; the preparation of two anthologies (with George E. Diller): French Literature and Thought Since the Revolution (1942) and Prose and Poetry of Modem France (1964); and two 1947 translations: The Republic of Silence, compiled by A.J.
In 1933 The Arts Press (Hanover) brings out his Scherzo from a Poem To Be Entitled The Proud City; in 1938 he writes his long, anti-Fascist, unpublished poem “Instead of Abel”; he participates in the Thursday evening meetings of poets living in the area (among them Richard Eberhart, Bink Noll, Thomas and Vera Vance, and Alexander Laing and—especially—his wife Dilys); and he puts together the manuscript of Graffiti (1959) for M.L.
He vehemently opposes the war—see “Some of Us Must Remember”[37] and “Scherzo for a Dirge”[38] —and in 1965 returns his World War I Silver Star to President Johnson in protest.
He is well enough in 1967 to give some readings in France and to spend time at Yaddo, but is very ill at the beginning of 1968 and starts a course of cobalt therapy.
Alexander Laing raises a subscription from Guthrie's former students and other supporters so that Emile Capouya accepts Asbestos Phoenix for Funk & Wagnalls in January.
(See “Boul Miche, May 1968.”[40] ) Back home he races to correct the galleys of Asbestos Phoenix before undergoing surgery to remove his colon, which has been severely damaged by the cobalt treatment.
Despite the dangerous operation and massive transfusions, he recovers enough to see Asbestos Phoenix in print and to return to Paris in the summer of 1969, but there he hemorrhages badly and ends up in the American Hospital.
(See “The Dutch Head Nurse.”[41] ) He is shipped home in such poor condition that he is not expected to recover, but with Maximum Security Ward not quite finished he insists on being taken off pain-killers so that he can complete it.
But by June 1971 he is well enough to attend the Dartmouth commencement ceremonies, during which he is elected an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa and receives the Litt.D.
22 November 1973, Thanksgiving Day, having finally succeeded in getting himself released from the hospital but not from his unrelenting physical and mental torment, Guthrie takes an overdose of phenobarbital.
[a chapbook], Hanover, N. H., The Arts Press, 1933 Asbestos Phoenix, New York, Funk and Wagnal, 1968 Maximum Security Ward, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970; Doubleday Ltd, Toronto, Canada, 1970; and as Maximum Security Ward: Poem on the Point of Death, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, England, 1971 Maximum Security Ward and Other Poems, edited by Sally M. Gall, New York, Persea Books, 1984 Marcabrun: the chronicle of a foundling who spoke evil of women and of love and followed unawed the paths of arrogance until they led to madness: and of his dealings with women and of ribald words, the which brought him repute as a great rascal and as a great singer.
"The ‘Labor Novel’ that Sinclair Lewis never wrote: the curious and revealing saga of the phantom project that carried his greatest literary hopes," New York Herald Tribune Book Review, vol.
"Marcel Ayme: he throws rocks at sacred cows," New York Herald Tribune Book Review, August 13, 1961, p. 7.
"Some aspect* of baroque architecture (on a theme by Francesco Gemi- niani, born in Lucca 1667, died in Dublin 1762)," Greensleeves, vol.
