Tess and Brock try to get on the same wavelength as Edwin Arlington Robinson, also known as EAR, by visiting his birthplace in Gardiner, ME. To get inside the head of the poet they talk with Richard Russo. Russo and EAR share more similarities than their status as Pulitzer prize winning Maine authors—both of their work focuses on growing up in small towns with big dreams. Today, EAR may not be the biggest name, but his work remains timeless in its ability to connect to the inner misfit in all of us.
Tess and Brock try to get on the same wavelength as Edwin Arlington Robinson, also known as EAR, by visiting his birthplace in Gardiner, ME. To get inside the head of the poet they talk with Richard Russo. Russo and EAR share more similarities than their status as Pulitzer prize winning Maine authors—both of their work focuses on growing up in small towns with big dreams.
Today, EAR may not be the biggest name, but his work remains timeless in its ability to connect to the inner misfit in all of us.
Mentioned:
The house:
Tess Chakkalakal is the creator, executive producer and host of Dead Writers. Brock Clarke is our writer and co-host.
Lisa Bartfai is the managing producer and executive editor. Our music is composed by Cedric Wilson, who also mixes the show. Ella Jones is our web editorial intern, and Mark Hoffman created our logo. A special thanks to our reader Merrick Meardon.
This episode was produced with the generous support of our sponsors Bath Savings and listeners like you.
TESS CHAKKALAKAL Literary houses are, like, the Disney Land of literature.
BROCK CLARKE I get the attraction of writers’ houses. It’s a thing you do when you’re extraordinarily bored. Is that thing you experience, though, when going to writers’ houses? Like, do you have the-the version—
TESS Do you know I-what my experience is, like “God, some of these writers were rich!”
[LAUGHTER]
BROCK This is Dead Writers, a show about great American authors and where they lived.
TESS I’m Tess Chakkalakal.
BROCK And I’m Brock Clarke.
TESS A decade ago, I became obsessed with saving Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house in Maine. And I did save it. And I’m still obsessed with literary houses—not just Stowe’s.
BROCK I wrote a novel called An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, because I couldn’t figure out why anyone goes to writers’ homes, let alone tries to save them.
TESS You’d think I’d hate Brock.
BROCK But you’re my colleague. You can’t hate me.
TESS It’s true. That would be awkward.
BROCK So instead of hating each other, we made this show.
SETH LAFFEY I often think when reading Robinson, if you're not really—and I don't say this in any way to be sort of elitist or exclusionary—but it's like, if you're not on his wavelength, you'll never get his poetry. And it's not like—
TESS What is his wavelength? Is his wavelength French, or is it more of the working-class wavelength?
SETH LAFFEY I think his wavelength is Maine, and going back to Maine.
TESS Seth Laffrey lives in Ohio. He is one of the now living people who has thought the most about Edwin Arlington Robinson, the three time Pulitzer Prize winning poet from Gardiner, Maine. Seth spent years digitizing and editing Robinson letters. There are thousands of them. So when Seth talks about Robinson’s wavelength he should know. Here, he takes us to the beginning with Edwin Arlington Robinson’s ancestry.
SETH LAFFEY Because he was descended from Puritans, he was, I think, a direct maternal descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the famous New England poet, and I don't want to get too much into the influences of his ancestry and things like that. But just reading about his childhood, he did grow up—you know, his parents were middle class, thriving, bourgeois, New England Protestants.
TESS As Seth said, they were thriving. At least for a time, when they lived in Gardiner, Maine. Although compared to his brothers, EAR was awkward. Unathletic. As EAR himself later said, he realized while living in Gardiner that, quote, “I was doomed, or elected, or sentenced, for life, to the writing of poetry. There was nothing else that interested me.” He was so word happy that he would sometimes appear at friends’ front doors and shout complicated sounding words at their houses, like “Nebuchadnezzer.” A young man living in a small Maine town shouting the names of Babylonian kings is probably going to have a rough time of it. And he wasn’t the only one. His father’s business suffered during the financial crisis of 1893, and he died soon after. His brothers died of drug overdoses and alcoholism. His mother died of diptheria, days before the publication of EAR’s first book of poetry. It’s a miracle that EAR himself survived all this and that he managed to leave Gardiner, move to New York, and become one of the greatest New England writers—even if you’ve never heard of him.
TESS Would you have called him a popular poet or a poet's poet? What's his cachet?
SETH LAFFEY He seems to be kind of a mixture of both, and that's a good way to put it. A poet's poet or a popular poet. But the funny thing with him is also that he was popular. You're right. He was very popular. I mean, he was a popular American poet. He made money off of poetry.
TESS He might have been one of the few American poets who could actually live off his writing. But that hadn’t always been the case. He had also spent his years broke and drunk in the poorer sections of New York. And it was the places and people he came into contact with then that he kept coming back to in his writing. The poems were rhyming explorations of society's darker sides. He wrote about alcoholics and drug addicts. Poem after poem about these social outcasts. And they're not necessarily admirable people either. Some of his social outcasts are just misers, but you get a sense of poetic compassion. And above all a wry, gallows humor.
MERRICK MEARDON [READING “MINIVER CHEEVY” BY EDMUND ARLINGTON ROBINSON] “Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,/Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;/He wept that he was ever born,/ And he had reasons./Miniver loved the days of old/When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;/The vision of a warrior bold/Would set him dancing.”
SETH LAFFEY Yeah, he lived in New York, and he loved New York. It was—with him, it is like he had to get away from his home. There were a lot of just—and it haunts him, because you could see that poem after poem is about Gardiner, or people from Gardiner, or someplace that could be a stand-in for Gardiner.
TESS So, I mean, it's so weird because Gardiner is almost like a dot on the map. I imagine you've been there.
SETH LAFFEY Yep. No, actually, I never went to Gardiner. I wanted to.
TESS You never went?
SETH LAFFEY Oh, no. When I came up to Colby, I just didn't have a chance. I had to quickly do my work there, and then I had to come back and I haven't had a chance to come up since, but I would like to for sure.
TESS So that’s when I grab Brock, get in the car and drive to Gardiner. You ready to check it out?
BROCK You bet. That’s what we’re here for, to visit the houses, to ask the big questions.
TESS BROCK and I walk up to EAR’s childhood home expecting a house of horrors. But no, it’s about as nice as a house you could want to grow up in if you were a writer, or anyone.
BROCK No one’s here.
TESS Except the dog. Well, if they have a dog, we’ll hear the dog bark.
Hopefully.
BROCK Hey. Hey. Hi. I'm Brock Clarke. Tess Chakkakal. And we're here doing a podcast on dead writers, and you live in a dead writer's home. Did you know this?
HOMEOWNER Oh, yeah, I did. I'm sorry. I’m in the middle of a work meeting and was not expecting.
BROCK That's totally—we didn't call in.
HOMEOWNER Yeah, I'm sorry.
BROCK That's okay.
TESS Yeah. Would you mind if we looked at the sign out front?
HOMEOWNER Yeah, that's fine. You're welcome to, yeah, look around. Yeah, I’m just working from home.
BROCK Totally fine. Yeah. Yeah.
HOMEOWNER [TO DOG] C’mon! C’mon! [TO TESS AND BROCK] Sorry about that. You’re fine to wander around.
TESS and BROCK Thank you!
BROCK [TO DOG] Oh, hi!
TESS Oh. She’s in the middle of a work meeting.
BROCK [TO DOG] You’re—you’re going to come with us.
TESS [TO DOG] You need to go back in.
TESS Young mom.
BROCK Yeah. Okay, she called the cops on us. We need to—
TESS Oh, here we go! [READING] “Edmund Arlington Robinson House has been designated as a registered national landmark under the provisions of the Historics Sites Act of August 21st, 1935. This site possesses exceptional value commemorating or illustrating the history of the United States. U.S. Department of the Interior National Park Service 1972.”
BROCK Here we are. These big—yeah, this is, uh, this is pretty.
TESS It is a nice house.
BROCK It might be the prettiest house we've seen so far.
TESS Big porch. Yeah.
BROCK It's taken care of.
TESS Yeah. Beautiful porch.
BROCK There are people with taste in there.
TESS Lots of light. She’s on zoom.
BROCK There’s a music stand. There’s a dog.
TESS She’s moving because she sees us looking at her.
BROCK In her windows. I mean there are shutters there, they should use them if they don’t want people looking in their house.
TESS Yeah, it’s their problem.
TESS Well, it's a lovely site right on the corner of Danforth and Lincoln Avenue. It's stone—stone pathway. Lots of property, lots of light. Yeah. I mean, BROCK, this would've been a nice place to grow up.
BROCK It would've been.
TESS Why was he so depressed all the time?
TESS Our friend Seth, who we talked with earlier, has a theory about why he would have felt that way in Gardiner.
SETH LAFFEY He felt like he was just so out of the world. When he was writing his early letters in the 1890s before he went to Harvard, and then, when he went to Harvard, it was like he discovered the world. And then it was like he discovered the cosmopolitan nature of a world he'd never seen in Harvard and people and friend groups and circles of people that would discuss common interests and events and things like that. And then I think after he came back from Harvard, it was never the same for him. He could never really, he was always just so miserable there, but he was miserable before going to Harvard. He always felt like an odd duck. Because he thought of himself— he, very early on, he was aware of himself as taking a contrary position to materialistic 19th century capitalism.
TESS To Seth there’s something in EAR’s poetry that could work well as a kind of corporate critique as much today as a hundred years ago. And, in fact, Seth feels like he sees some of those themes and viewpoints on TV,
SETH LAFFEY I think that Breaking Bad is—whether the writers of Breaking Bad, and same thing with Better Call Saul, whether they're aware of it or not, I think sort of these characters, these sort of misfit, broken, American anti-heroes are sort of in the tradition of Robinson. Not directly. But yeah, I think that there is sort of a lineage there in some ways.
TESS So Seth’s talking about lineage. Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul might not have a direct link to EAR but it doesn’t take much work to make the connections. If you’ve seen the show, you’ll remember Bob Odenkirk who plays the protagonist in Better Call Saul, and he also stars in the AMC show Lucky Hank, which is loosely based on Richard Russo’s 1997 novel Straight Man. Whether or not you’ve read that novel you may still know Richard Russo because he, just like EAR was, is also a Pulitzer winning Maine author. So we brought Russo into the studio to talk about Maine, small towns, and all the misfits and misanthropes who live there. And when he gets here, he takes us back to his own childhood on 36 Hellwig Street in Gloversville, NY. A de-industrialized, working class town once famous for making gloves.
BROCK You wrote this book that's a memoir called Elsewhere, which really speaks a lot to what we're thinking about with Arlington Robinson, about writers having to go elsewhere to write about the things they care about. Is this—I don't want to put words in your mouth, but one, what's your relationship with your main subject, which are these small towns? Not your only subject, but one of the—
RICK RUSSO No, no, you're right. That's pretty much it.
[RICK RUSSO LAUGHS]
BROCK Yeah, yeah. So did you feel that—was it calculated that you had to go somewhere else to write about these places? Or did you just happen to be somewhere else and that's when you started writing?
RICK RUSSO Well, the title to that book really comes from my mother in the sense that, from the time that when I was living at 36 Hellwig Street, she always believed that the only way for me to succeed for us was to go somewhere else and wanted to get—she knew that there was going to be some gravitational pull from the place that we were leaving because my father was still there, of course. But so we went all the way out to Arizona, to the University of Arizona. And I think for her, our going out there was like, for me, entering the Witness Protection program.
[LAUGHTER]
RICK RUSSO She believed that success, that any success that I was going to have would be the result of my being able to put away the place that I came from. I was going to become educated. I was going to learn to speak the talk, to speak the language of educated people. And after I had done that long enough and she wanted me to become a college professor, after I had done that long enough, then no one would guess where I was from. And that's how I lived my life with the sense that I really needed to never let people know that I came from, especially Gloversville, New York, and I would say, “Oh, I'm from New York”.
[LAUGHTER]
RICK RUSSO Let them—let people come to whatever conclusions that they wanted to about that. Or, maybe, upstate New York, because there were some beautiful places in upstate New York, like Saratoga Springs that I've written about fictionally. But yeah, that was the whole idea. And I think for a very long time, I accepted that as kind of truth: that I was going to have to…I was going to have to keep this secret of where I was from, lest I be pulled back in. And of course I was pulled back in immediately.
TESS And what pulled you back in? What made you let the cat out of the bag, so to speak?
RICK RUSSO Well, part of it was that my father was still there, of course. And when my parents split up and my mother and I moved to Arizona, my father was still there, and I needed to make money during the summers. That was the only way I was going to school.
RICK RUSSO And at some point during the various times that I came back to New York and worked construction with my father, at some point, I think it dawned on me that this was the place and these were the people that I not only knew most about, but loved most. And really, I guess what I'm talking about really is discovering who you are, because that's just another way of defining who you are. It's just who do you love?
TESS But there's something about going from who you love and who your people are. When you spent those years with your mother being ashamed of that and wanting to keep it a secret to now documenting their lives, I mean, isn't that what your stories—
RICK RUSSO That's what they all…
TESS You're—you're not just loving them, you're telling the world about them. And this is what brings us to Robinson's work. Obviously, it's him sharing this, really, this hatred for Gardner, Maine, having grown up there and moving to New York, going to Harvard for a couple of years, and then he couldn't let it go. But it was kind of like, for him, it was a love-hate thing. And I guess that's the same as the shame-love, where you have to get over your shame of where you come from in order to write about it. Or do they go hand in hand?
RICK RUSSO Well, no, for me, once I got past that and realized that these were the people that I cared most about, there wasn't any—never any shame in it.
TESS Stories about everyday people in everyday situations weren't really in vogue when Russo started out as an author. EAR was writing at the height of modernism and Russo at the height of postmodernism. Those are two genres of writing that weren't really EAR’s or Russo’s style. They had to find their voices elsewhere to find a way to write about the places they came from.
BROCK So Carver and Yates have the sort of small town—there's a kind of small town grimness to both their work. But I think of your work as very funny, and, I mean, there are moments of humor in Carver, too, and some in Yates, not a lot for me at least.
RICK RUSSO But you wouldn't describe them as comic writers.
BROCK No. So I wonder if this is just your sensibility, or if there's something in the places and the people you write about. So the kind of small town approach I always distrust is that these are lives of grimness, and they're just fated to be grim, and we have to do them justice by being really earnest about them. This is my little hobby horse. But you don't seem to have that approach at all.
RICK RUSSO No.
BROCK And so you could talk about, because, you know, these are often places in the decline, their heyday was in the early 20th century, and then it's just been
[BROCK WHISTLES TO MIMIC THE SOUND OF PLUMMETING]
BROCK That's the sound of plummeting that I'm just making for the podcast, but I don't get that sense when, even though the lives of the people in the stories and novels are in rough shape, I don't ever feel that there's a kind of grim fatalism to the work itself. And I'm wondering if you're conscious of this.
RICK RUSSO Oh, very, very conscious of it. Very conscious of it BROCK. I mean, I—as dark as things get, the humor becomes that much more essential. The same reason it’s essential in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which goes to the deepest, darkest parts of the American character: ignorance; racism; violence; all those things that we don't like to think of as part of the American character, but is present. If you're going to go to those places and readers are going to follow you, they damn well better be laughing all the way. And that laughter, that laughter, comes from the part that from, one, the world is a funny place if you care to look. But it also comes from optimism, I think.
BROCK Yeah, I mean, I agree personally. I mean, part of this is that I actually think that Robinson's a funny writer. Yeah.
RICK RUSSO Yeah! “Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn.”
RICK RUSSO “He thought and thought, and thought, thought about it…and kept on drinking.”
BROCK Yeah!
[LAUGHTER]
BROCK It's that last thing: kept on drinking.
RICK RUSSO It's that last—that last line…
MERRICK MEARDON [READING “MINIVER CHEEVY” BY EAR] “Miniver cursed the commonplace/ And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;/ He missed the mediæval grace./ Of iron clothing.//Miniver scorned the gold he sought,/But sore annoyed was he without it;/ Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,/And thought about it.// Miniver Cheevy, born too late,/ Scratched his head and kept on thinking;/ Miniver coughed, and called it fate, / And kept on drinking.”
TESS Unlike the failed people in his poems who just keep on drinking, fate had something else in store for EAR. In 1904, he received a letter that would change his life.
PAT BURDICK This is from the White House, and it's dated March 27th, 1905. [READING] “Dear Mr. Robinson, I have enjoyed your poems, especially the Children of the Night, so much that I must write to tell you so. Will you permit me to ask what you are doing, and how you are getting along? I wish I could see you. Sincerely yours, Theodore Roosevelt.”
BROCK It's such an interestingly intimate letter.
TESS It is intimate!
BROCK Yeah, and they don’t know each—they had never met.
TESS Patricia Burdick is Colby College’s special collections librarian. She manages the Edwin Arlington Robinson Collection there that includes all the books he owned when he died, some of his old glasses and photos, and even some really odd, twelve inch long, white pipes that a friend has doodled on. But this letter is one of the collection's most prized possessions. It’s from President Roosevelt to EAR. Pat tells us that they hadn’t met when he sent this note. But the president had gotten a copy of EAR’s poems from his son, Kermit, and really loved them.
PAT BURDICK Roosevelt admired his poetry and then went out of his way to give Robinson, I think, quarters in the custom house in Boston, so that he had a place to write, a quiet place to write. So he really did try to help this poet early on in his career.
TESS From that time on, things really changed for EAR. He wasn’t just recognized by the president but included in the inner circle of New York’s literary scene and loved by critics. He won three Pulitzer Prizes for poetry. Three. No one else has ever done that. Pat has laid out all of the three Pulitzers on the tables for us to look at. And we see a small but significant typo: one of the Pulitzer citations says that he’s “Edward”, not Edwin Arlington Robinson.
BROCK The reason I was harping, not harping, mentioning the—
TESS You were harping.
BROCK Maybe I was harping a little bit. I mean, this is someone who won three Pulitzers, which is just remarkable that one of them gets his name right. Seems perfectly suited to how kind of—I mean, this is praise down in the mouth. He was often, as a poet or if he's a poet who plays with grandeur, but there's always, for instance, booze lurking at the end of a poem as in Cheevy. And there are a number—so this seems perfect that he's got this great honor, the thing that we all dream of, even if they get his name wrong. In some ways, that couldn't have happened to a better poet. Like, It seems like they have the right poet to whom this would happen.
PAT BURDICK Well I do know, working with Scott, that Robinson really hated his name.
TESS Pat is talking about Scott Donaldson, a biographer of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and other literary giants, including EAR,
PAT BURDICK And he used to pronounce it in these very heavy syllabic ways that showed that he felt it was a ponderance, that it was this long name, started with Edwin…
TESS And that's why he went by EAR? I mean, people called him that, right? His friends called him EAR.
PAT BURDICK I think he preferred the initials because of this dissatisfaction with the name.
TESS There is something about that—what's it called? Is that an acronym? That's an acronym, right? That the acronym for his name is EAR, and he's a poet who has an ear.
BROCK You're really stretching, aren't you?
TESS I mean, you know, there is something kind of poetic about putting that all together.
BROCK It's right though. He has that first name that—I called him Edgar” by mistake in the car on the way up here. So it's not just me, it's also the Pulitzer Committee.
TESS And also the Pulitzers he won, there's nineteen—this one's for nineteen. I've never seen a Pulitzer certificate, so this is kind of exciting for me that I'm looking at one right here.
BROCK Twenty-five
TESS Twenty-five. And it says, “The Trustees of Columbia University”. I also didn't know that The Trustees of Columbia University was the one who handed out this award.
BROCK I only knew it when I got mine.
TESS Right.
BROCK Yeah, right. You wouldn't know.
TESS Are you serious right now?
BROCK No, I'm not serious.
TESS Geez, deadpan BROCK.
TESS [READING] “To all persons to whom these presents may come greeting, be it known that Edward”—that's the typo—”Arlington Robinson has been awarded the appeal of reprising letters for The Man Who Died Twice, the best volume of verse of the year by an American author in accordance with the provisions of the statues of the university governing such a award. And this is on the third day of June in the year of our Lord, 1,925. And that one is for what year, Brock?
BROCK Twenty-two.
TESS And the one behind you?
BROCK Twenty-eight.
TESS So these are the years that Pound and Elliot and Hemingway and all those big dudes are writing, which we know about. Those names are as familiar to us as Wonder Bread, I guess you might say.
BROCK Close. Yeah.
BROCK Robinson died in 1935 at the age of 66 from cancer. And it was like this obsession with writing about outsiders and forgotten losers became a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not that he is a loser. No one can take away those Pulitzers or the fame he had in his life, but it seems like time has sort of moved on without him. Back when Richard Russo was in school, he was taught EAR. But when we ask Pat if students at Colby College read EAR we get a quick “no.” No one has taught EAR there in years.
BROCK The last time EAR really got his dues was probably in 1964 when Simon and Garfunkel included the song “Richard Cory” based on EAR’s poem “Richard Corey” on their hit album Sound of Silence. It’s a catchy song about an unnamed worker who's envious of the factory boss, Richard Cory and who at the end of the poem kills himself. This is where we would play Richard Cory for you, if we could afford the rights. You know the one we’re talking about, right?
[HUMMING “RICHARD CORY”]
BROCK Tess, do you have any regrets?
TESS I’m not answering that question.
BROCK Do you have any regrets about this episode?
TESS Yes. I regret that we weren’t able to get into EAR’s house.
BROCK Because you blame the owner.
TESS Yes, I blame the owner.
BROCK C’mon, she seemed nice. We showed up unannounced. Strangers bearing audio recording equipment knocking on her door, riling up her dog. She was working from home. She was on a zoom call. We were lucky she didn’t shoot us.
TESS There are obligations to the public when you live in the childhood home of a three time Pulitzer Prize winning poet.
BROCK Maybe she doesn’t know.
TESS There’s a plaque on the front of the house.
BROCK Maybe she only goes in the back door.
TESS It really was a pretty house, Brock.
BROCK A house too pretty, maybe, for a poet named EAR.
TESS A poet who won three Pulitzers.
BROCK And whose name was misspelled on one of them.
TESS A poet for whom things didn’t work out even when they seemed like they were finally working out.
BROCK And who then did the only thing he knew to do about it.
TESS Poured himself one too many whiskeys?
BROCK Yes, and then he moved away and wrote a poem about the pretty town called Gardiner, Maine.
TESS Yeah, isn’t there a poem about that? Why don’t you read a few lines from “The House on The Hill”, Brock?
BROCK [READING “THE HOUSE ON THE HILL” BY EAR] “They are all gone
away,/The House is shut and still,/There is nothing more to say.//Through broke
walls and gray/The winds blow bleak and shrill: They are all gone away. //Nor is there one to-day/To speak them good or ill:/There is nothing more to say.”
TESS You have listened to Dead Writers with me, Tess Chakkalakal.
BROCK And me, Brock Clarke. Our managing producer and editor is Lisa Bartfai.
TESS Cedric Wilson has created our theme music and mixed the show.
BROCK Ella Jones is our web editorial intern. Thanks for listening.
TESS And a very special thanks to our generous sponsors, Bath Savings, and listeners like you.
BROCK You can find more information about the writers, their books, and their houses at our website on MainePublic.org. Thanks for listening.