Ramon Guthrie (January 14, 1896 – November 22, 1973) was a poet,The Modern Poetic Sequence, M. L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall, Oxford University Press, New York, NY. pp. 9-10, 79, 353, 445-61,462, 470 and 476. novelist, essayist, critic,"Ramon Guthrie as Critic."Irita Van Doren, Ramon Guthrie Kaleidoscope, The Steinhour Press, Lunenburg, Vermont, 1963, p37 painter and professor of French and comparative literature."Epic for a Bad Century," by Alexander Laing, The Nation, February 15, 1971, p. 216. He published five collections of poetry, and two novels, translated three volumes of French nonfiction, edited two standard anthologies of French literature and published numerous reviews, essays and individual poems."An Attempt on Ramon Guthrie's Bibliography," by Alan Cook, Ramon Guthrie Kaleidoscope, The Steinhour Press, Lunenburg, Vermont, 1963 pp. 143-149
Introduction His reputation among his contemporaries, many with extraordinary reputations of their own, is demonstrated by the festschrift honoring him upon his retirement from teaching. That volume, Ramon Guthrie Kaleidoscope, contains contributions by the poets: Dilys Laing, Lou B. ("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 SeldesRamon Guthrie Kaleidoscope, edited by George Diller, The Steinhour Press, Lunenburg, Vermont, 1963 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,"Lyrical Discourse" by Germaine Bree, The Nation, July 7, 1969, p. 24" and his masterpiece, Maximum Security Ward would be greeted in 1970 with critical acclaim"A completely fascinating work one of major character, it is like nothing else in contemporary poetry," Louis Untermeyer, Saturday Review December 5, 1970, p. 28"Ramon Guthrie is a magnificent American poet in his seventies who has been overlooked." Julian Moynahan, the New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1971"The leap of genius in [Maximum Security Ward] begins at that level [of a major poet of the mid century]. ... it is ... a testament that all the reasons for despising and despairing of humanity are not quite enough", from "Epic for a Bad Century," by Alexander Laing, The Nation, February 15, 1971, p. 216. and would receive the Marjorie Peabody Waite award,The papers of Ramon Guthrie, the Rauner Special Collections Library of Dartmouth College, here after: the Rauner. Guthrie and his masterpiece were neglected."Foremost among those practitioners [Whitman, Yeats, Eliot and Pound], we should list the somewhat neglected Ramon Guthrie, whose Maximum Security Award focuses much of its attention upon the poet's private sufferings, physical and emotional." The Modern Poetic Sequence, p. 445 Malcolm Cowley, a major critic of Guthrie's generation, writing 10 years after the publication of Maximum Security Ward, stated of Guthrie and of MSW's reception: "Among the talented writers I have known, the most curiously neglected is the poet and scholar Ramon Guthrie. He started out with the famous writers of the World War I generation, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and others, some of whom were his good friends. His best writing was on a level with theirs."Malcolm Cowley, "Masterpiece From the Rubble,"Quest/80 p. 82, see also The View From 80 by Malcolm Cowley, The Viking Press, New York, NY, 1980 p. 66) 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.""Foreword," by M. L. Rosenthal, Maximum Security Ward and Other Poems edited by Sally M. Gall, Persea Books, New York, NY, 1984 p. vii, hereafter abbreviated as MSWOP
Guthrie was in the middle of the literary ferment following World War I (Ford Madox Ford and Siegfried Sassoon invited him to come to England"Ramon Guthrie 1920-22." by Edmund Meras, Ramon Guthrie Kaleidoscope, The Steinhour Press, Lunenburg, Vermont, 1963 p. 70Exiles Return by Malcolm Cowley, Viking Compass edition, New York, NY, 1956 pp. 172, 174 and 179.) and of expatriate Paris in the 1920s.Drawn From Life, by Stella Bowen, Virago Press Limited, London, 1984 pp. 207-09 where he was conversant with James Joyce and Gertrude SteinMeras, Ramon Guthrie Kaleidoscope p. 72 could stop by Edith Sitwell’s salonAnecdote told to Wendell Smith in 1972. and spend an afternoon with Ezra Pound in the Tuileries during which "all Pound talked about was bassoons."Ramon Guthrie’s papers in the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College 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." Ramon became the most consistent and loyal contributor to the little magazine that resulted from this meeting S4N,Alan Cook, "An Attempt on Ramon Guthrie's Bibliography," Ramon Guthrie Kaleidoscope, The Steinhour Press, Lunenburg, Vermont, 1963 p. 143 which published E.E. Cummings, Hart Crane, and others.Walker Rumble, "Space for Name: Printing a 1920s Little Magazine," in Massachusetts Review, summer, 2007.Norman Fitts, "Right After the War," Ramon Guthrie Kaleidoscope p. 59
Beginning in the mid-1920s Guthrie became an important emotional and literary support of Sinclair Lewis.Sinclair Lewis, Rebel From Main Street, Random House, New York, 2002, pp. 308, 308-11, 318, 322, 324, 328, 340, 348-49, 375, 410-11, 423, 426-27 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."George Seldes, "De Havilland Fours and Sinclair Lewis," Ramon Guthrie Kaleidoscope, p. 87
Life
1896-1916: Early years of poverty and labor
14 January 1896, Raymon Hollister Guthrie is born in New York CityThe text of this biography is taken, with permission of its author, Sally M. Gall, from her biographical note, “A Tentative Ramon Guthrie Chronology,” which is an addendum to the poetry in MSWOP, p. 205-210. Minor changes in the text have been footnoted and the poems she cites from it have also been footnoted but the narrative is Dr. Gall’s who says of it, “Much of this biographical information comes from the poet himself, whose memory delighted his friends with its creativity and genius for self-revision.” When other sources of information are known they have also been footnoted. (he claimed his birth certificate said 13 January but his mother said 14 January) to Harry and Ella May Guthrie (née Hollister). Supposedly named after a singer, Raymon Moore, he later discards both the “y” and his middle name. He has an older sister, Eleanor, probably born in 1889. In 1898 or so Harry decamps with another woman and vanishes from sight. (Guthrie said his father eventually remarried and that he saw him only once again, in 1905, for a few minutes. He believed his father died in 1910 in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent another's suicide by gas.) Years of grinding poverty follow. 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. Due to her poor health the children probably spend a brief period in an orphanage when Guthrie is about five (despite his mother's Connecticut relatives). After completing grammar school, Guthrie is unable, for financial reasons, to accept a scholarship to the Hartford Art School. He works at odd jobs and in the Underwood typewriter factory and flunks out of night school. From 1912 to 1915, however, he manages to attend the Northfield Mount Hermon School (in Massachusetts) for part of cadi year. Several of his poems appear in The Hermonite. (Sec "The Archangel Michael” MSWOP p. 103 for Mount Hermon's evangelical flavor.) In 1915 Mrs. Guthrie has her first stroke and moves in with a sister near New Haven. Guthrie goes to work for the Winchester Repeating Arms factory in New Haven, at this time busy filling war orders. He works on the night shift straightening draw punches. After another stroke early in 1916 his mother commits suicide in the charity ward of the New Haven Hospital. (See “Fiercer Than Evening Wolves” MSWOP p. 111 for details of this early period.)
1916-22: War and coming of age in France
Guthrie decides not to return to Mount Hermon in the fall and instead enlists in the 10th Connecticut Field Artillery. (Eleanor, whom Guthrie remembered as given to temper tantrums, has married. She and her brother are essentially estranged from 1916 on. Guthrie said she later married Lt. Col. Charles Wallington Furlong and was a friend of Mary Baker Eddy.) 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. Returning to France, Guthrie joins the U.S. Army's Aviation Section Signal Corps and trains as an observer. (He said he was afraid the war would be over before he could complete training as a pilot.) He walks away from a spectacular plane crash, which results in bouts of amnesia (see “ ‘Visse, Scrisse, Amo’ ”MSWOP p.183 ) and various nervous disorders, among them acusis—intolerance of loud noise—and acute attacks of anxiety and panic. (The crash is severe enough to entitle him to a disability pension.) 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. Guthrie and his pilot, the only survivors, are forced to watch the other planes shot down (see “Death with Pants On”MSWOP p. 158 ). Fortunately, their machine gun is working, and Guthrie shoots down two enemy fighters and survives to become a successful formation leader and to shoot down two more. He is awarded two citations, one of them the Silver Star. While serving in the army he discovers Paris and his future wife, Marguerite Maurey from Nancy. At the end of the war he takes a course in French civilization at the Sorbonne, but in the summer of 1919 he is shipped back to the States. After several hospitalizations (see his novel Parachute, based on a hospital for convalescent airmen in Cooperstown) and a few months’ work as an insurance investigator, he returns to France. His poems appear in Norman Fitts's little magazine S4N (which Fitts had founded along with Guthrie, Stephen Vincent Benet, Roger Sessions, Thornton Wilder, and others), and in Paris Review: The Illustrated American Magazine in France. He studies political science at Toulouse under a disability pension, earning two special degrees for foreigners, the license and doctorat en droit, in 1921 and 1922; but he continues his literary studies and poetry, including translations from the Provençal.
1922-29: The flourishing of a poet-novelist-translator