“Donna Hollenberg’s long-awaited biography of Denise Levertov illuminates for us the mind and career of a poet who embodied the passionate idealism and the ideological tensions of America’s last half-century. Hollenberg’s work chronicles the poet’s struggles with family, with other poets and with herself–with scrupulous and sometimes heartbreaking intimacy, revealing but never over-explaining the connections between Levertov’s life and the beauty and subtlety of her writing.”–Alicia Ostriker, author of The Crack in Everything

“[Hollenberg’s] account of the evolution of Levertov’s ‘revolution, ‘ the path of her poetic and political ‘pilgrimage, ‘ is informed and thorough, sympathetic but balanced. This is a book that fills a real need and will be a benchmark in our understanding of this poet and her place in American letters.”–Albert Gelpi, Coe Professor of American Literature, emeritus, Stanford University

“This deeply researched and beautifully written biography provides a fascinating portrait of a major poet and her worlds. The book is indispensable for anyone interested in postwar American poetry in the Pound-Williams line. But Levertov’s story is not only about the growth of a poet’s mind. We follow her through the drama of twentieth century history and cultural change as she calls us not only to ‘taste and see’ but to protest and revolt.”–Bonnie Costello, author of Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life and the Turning World

Donna Hollenberg is a Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She is the author of H.D.: The Poetics of Childbirth and Creativity and the editor of Between History and Poetry: The Letters of H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson and HD and Poets After.

A Poet’s Revolution

The Life of Denise Levertov

By Donna Krolik Hollenberg

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27246-0

Contents

AcknowledgmentsProloguePART ONE. LISTENING TO DISTANT GUNS (1923–1948)1. “The Walls of the Garden, the First Light”: Beginnings (1923–1933)2. “When Anna Screamed”: Levertov’s Response to Nazi Oppression
(1933–1939)3. The Double Image: Apprenticeship during World War II (1939–1946)4. “Recoveries”: Abortion, Adventure, and Marriage (1947–1948)PART TWO. A COMMON GROUND (1949–1966)5. “Dancing Edgeways”: Coming of Age as a Poet in the New World
(1949–1955)6. “The True Artist”: Levertov’s Engagement with Tradition (1954–1960)7. “The Poem Ascends”: Taking a Position (1960–1963)8. “To Speak of Sorrow”: Levertov’s Emergence as a Social Poet
(1963–1966)PART THREE. LIFE AT WAR (1966–1974)9. “Revolution or Death”: Living in the Movement (1966–1970)10. “The Freeing of the Dust”: The Revolution Hits Home (1970–1974)PART FOUR. SLEEPERS AWAKE (1975–1988)11. “A Woman Alone”: Beginning Again (1975–1981)12. “The Task”: Social Protest and Liberation Theology (1982–1988)PART FIVE. RESETTLING (1989–1997)13. “Of Shadow and Flame”: The Re-cognition of Identity (1989–1992)14. “Beauty Growls from the Fertile Dark”: Facing Death (1992–1997)NotesBibliographyIndex

CHAPTER 1

“The walls of the garden, the first light”

Beginnings (1923–1933)

Ilford, Essex, with its two large parks, east and west of the River Roding, isnotable for its semirural setting, yet it is only fourteen kilometers northeastof central London. A spirited six-year-old, Denise Levertov could easily walkthe three blocks from her home at 5 Mansfield Road to the gates of ValentinesPark, with its cultivated lawns and ample plea sure grounds. There, along theLong Water canal, she could wander alone among the stately London plane treesshe grew to love and, seated in a leafy alcove, admire their reflection in thegreen water. Or she could pause in the romantic rose garden and imagine ascarlet bouquet gleaned from its pickings. Best of all, she could sit in a brickalcove at Jacob’s Well and make a wish, poised in reverie before the clearwater. (This wishing well would inspire future poems.) If she wanted to play ina more ancient, wilder landscape as she grew older, she could ride on herscooter farther, to Wanstead Park, with its dense forest of firs and pines, itsmysterious grotto, and its larger ornamental waters. She could pretend to sail”grassy seas in the three-masted barque Emanuela” and undertake daringadventures with a friend. In both parks there were hidden paths amid the hedgesto stimulate her imagination and old mansions to awaken a historical awareness.Accompanied by her older sister, Olga, she could walk in the lush fields andfarms beyond the town’s borders, which were then easily accessible by foot, ortravel deeper into the countryside on the red double-decker, open-topped buses.Unencumbered by a regular school day—she was homeschooled by her mother—Deniseroamed this landscape until age twelve and returned to it frequently thereafterin her work.

In “A Map of the Western Part of Essex in England,” a poem she wrote afteremigrating to the United States in 1947, Levertov adds depth and nuance to theemotional importance of this region:

the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves,Roding held my head above water when I thought it wasdrowning me….

Wanstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry.

Levertov’s birthplace provided a fundamental refuge from danger, an interest inthe past, and a lasting penchant for imaginative transformation. As a child,Denise could not articulate the source of that danger, but she certainlyintuited it, for, in the poem above, she links herself with her parents, whowere themselves outsiders and immigrants in England. Estranged in a newenvironment, she now understands their predicament in her childhood. A sense ofhazardous alienation lingers here, but Levertov does not dwell upon it. Rather,she reinforces a primary kinship with the places and people she loves, and sheinvests her childhood home with the remembered sweetness of a golden age: “thewalls of the garden, the first light.”

Priscilla Denise Levertoff was born at 9:15 A.M. on October 24, 1923, at 24Lenox Gardens, in the town of Ilford, Essex. She was the youngest of threedaughters born to Beatrice Adelaide Levertoff, née Spooner-Jones, an artisticWelsh school teacher, and the Reverend Paul Philip Levertoff, a scholarlyRussian Jew who had converted to Christianity and been ordained as a priest ofthe Church of England. Her parents had met in 1910 in Constantinople, where hermother was teaching in a secondary school run by the Scottish Church and herfather was lecturing as a visiting scholar. They were married in England, livedin Warsaw and Leipzig before and during World War I, and settled in England soonafter the war ended. Their first child, Philippa, born in 1912, lived only sixmonths before dying of a respiratory ailment. She was buried in Leipzig, wherein 1914 their second child, Olga Tatjana, was born. Nine years later, Denisearrived, the only one in her family born in England.

Cultural heterogeneity and personal loss marked the lives of Levertov’s nuclearfamily. Her parents (especially her father) were “exotic birds” in this ordinaryEnglish thicket. They had endured religious persecution, expatriation, familytragedy, and war, which could have crippled people with fewer intellectual andspiritual resources. Downplaying their privation, Levertov lauded theseresources: not only were they all writers, her mother sang lieder and her sisterwas a fine pianist, and Denise emphasized the impact of the household’s foreignatmosphere upon her evolving identity. Even though she grew up with a passionfor the trees, churches, and wildflowers of rural England, she viewed herself asan outsider: “Among Jews a Goy, among Gentiles … a Jew or at least a half-Jew… among Anglo-Saxons a Celt; in Wales a Londoner … among schoolchildren a strange exception.” This sense of anomaly continued into adulthood—Levertovoften felt English, or at least European, in the United States, whereshe was usually considered American, and American in England—but it did notinhibit her artistic development. Her family had given her such confidence that,though “often shy,” she “experienced the sense of difference as an honor, as apart of knowing (secretly) from an early age—perhaps by seven”—that she was “anartist-person and had a destiny.”

What were the attributes of the members of this family who invested the childDenise with such inner strength, despite their own earlier suffering? What cluesto her future do we find in their backgrounds? A richly textured robe of familylegend envelops each of them.

* * *

Paul Philip Levertoff was a traditional patriarch. Both his perceptions of theworld and his emotional attitudes derived from the Russian Jewish shtetl inwhich he was born and raised. In that world, as a boy of exceptionalintellectual ability and linguistic talent, he was devoted to the divinelydecreed obligation to study Scripture, a duty and a joy that offered “a means ofescape from dark reality,” whether it be domestic troubles or religiouspersecution. He also had a “bold heart” and a rebellious personality. As hegrew into manhood, his theological studies carried him beyond the Pale ofSettlement, areas in Eastern Europe in which Jews were allowed to live, and awayfrom the mainstream of his people. After he read the New Testament, he becameconvinced that Jesus was the Messiah and embarked upon the project ofreconciling the two faiths. For the rest of his life, he considered himself aJewish-Christian.

In adulthood, Levertov saw this “bold heart,” the “certainty of wings” for thesoul, as the essence of her father’s personality. In her poem “Wings in thePedlar’s Pack,” and in her essay “The Sack Full of Wings,” she compares herfather with Marc Chagall, his contemporary. Both men saw, as children, “an oldpedlar … carrying a big sack over his shoulder,” trudging along the streetsof Orsha, her father’s hometown, or through the city of Vitebsk, Chagall’sbirthplace, which he made famous in his painting “Over Vitebsk.” This figure mayallude to the Christian, anti-Semitic image of the Wandering Jew, who, inmedieval legend, taunted Jesus en route to the Crucifixion and was then cursedto walk the earth as a beggar until the Second Coming. Paul Levertoff’s Hasidicbeliefs, imbued with the ardor of ecstasy inherited from his rabbinic ancestor,”the Rav of Northern White Russia,” contravened this noxious stereotype. He knewthat the pedlar’s sack contained “wings which would enable people to fly likebirds,” and he later interpreted that knowledge to incorporate the Gospel ofJesus as the Messiah.

Paul Philip Levertoff was born in Orsha, Belarus, a town south of Vitebsk on theDnieper River, to Saul and Judith Levertoff. His birth date is unclear: onesource states October 12, 1875; another states October 14, 1878. He preferredthe latter. His birth name was not “Paul Philip,” a Christian name. In a letterin Hebrew, his father, Saul Levertoff, employs the Hebrew-Yiddish name “Feivel,”which was probably Paul’s given name. His family were originally Sephardic Jewswho emigrated from Spain to Russia after the Spanish Inquisition and thereintermarried with other Jewish families noted for their piety and learning.According to family legend, he was a descendant of the founder of ChabadHasidism, Rabbi Schneur Zalman, who was his mother’s uncle. The family thushad strong Hasidic roots, part of Paul’s heritage that he never rejected. Hecherished an inherited copy of his great-uncle’s central treatise, The Tanya.

Hasidism was one of two major social currents within Eastern European Jewry.Founded by Rabbi Israel Ba’al Shem Tov (known as the Besht), Hasidism was apopular communal mysticism that arose in Poland in the eighteenth century, anddespite bitter opposition by the traditional rabbinate, spread rapidly. TheBesht “emphasized the importance of prayer and obedience to the Law above thestudy of the Law,” where such study degenerated into mere intellectual exercise.Contrary to classical Jewish philosophers, the Besht also taught that divineprovidence extends not only to every individual but to every particular in theinanimate world as well, a view not unlike that of the pantheism of the Romanticpoets whom Denise Levertov came to love. Further, “in the tradition of theKabbala, the Besht taught that the end of Divine worship is attachment to G-d(devekuth), which is essentially a service of the heart rather than the mind.”Since God cannot be understood rationally, it is by means of emotionalcommitment and obedience to the divine will that the human being can comeclosest to his Creator. Hence the Besht emphasized the “intention of the heart(kavannah) in the performance of the Divine precepts…. Above all, the Beshtendeavored to instill the quality of joy into Divine ser vice.”

Dancing and singing are intrinsic to Hasidic religious worship, with specialtunes for various occasions, such as the religious festival of Simhat Torah,which celebrates the completion of reading the Pentateuch. Hasidim may alsodance after seeing their beloved rebbe face to face, honoring his leadership.Olga Levertoff fondly remembered that, in her childhood, her father oftenrejoiced upon reuniting after a separation from his family by dancing with her.In tune with his childhood, he sang a Yiddish-inflected nonsense song—”Yachiderálum,pûzele, mûzele”—in accompaniment. The Hasidim even dance inmourning, in loving memory of the deceased. In this context, as in Levertov’spoem “In Obedience,” written after she learned that her father “rose from hisbed shortly before his death to dance the Hasidic dance of praise,” dancingallows a free expression of grief, which often includes guilt, and takes onebeyond these feelings. As Levertov wrote, “Let my dance / be mourning then, /now that I love you too late.”

Hasidism spread across political borders. By the nineteenth century, half of allEastern European Jews had joined its ranks, although different Hasidic groupsinterpreted the principles of the Besht idiosyncratically. Schneur Zalman wasknown for his intellectual enthusiasm. He insisted on the three pillars of”wisdom, understanding, knowledge” (which in Hebrew form an anagram for Chabad),and eventually became the leader of the Hasidim of Belarus. By the latenineteenth century, when Paul Levertoff was born, the breach between the Hasidimand their rabbinic opponents had been healed, and the Chabad branch had come torepresent the ultra-Orthodox position in Jewry.

The Levertoff family was prosperous. Despite pervasive anti-Semitism, the czarhad awarded Paul’s father, Saul, the status of “Hereditary Honorable Citizen,” aclassification that customarily applied to influential or very wealthytownspeople. He is listed in one source as a “sometime Principle ofTheological College, Poltava.” The Levertoff family claimed relationships bymarriage to several wealthy Jewish business families in Saint Petersburg,including the Poliakoffs (bankers) and the Günsbergs, who acquired titles. SaulLevertoff read and spoke Russian as well as Yiddish and Hebrew, and he was agood mathematician. He was acquainted with the local Christian intelligentsia,with whom he conversed, and as Levertov wrote in her unpublished “Notes onFamily,” “Most unusual for a pious Jew, he seems to have read some Russianliterature—Tolstoy for one.” Thus, he probably was receptive to the ideas ofthe Haskalah, a second important Jewish movement in Eastern Europe.

About the same time as Hasidism was born in Poland, the Haskalah originated inGermany. The followers of this movement, the Maskilim, encouraged Jews “toabandon their exclusiveness and acquire the knowledge, manners, and aspirations”of their national homelands. They emphasized the study of biblical Hebrew andof the poetical, scientific, and critical parts of Hebrew literature, ratherthan the Talmud, and they opposed the superstition they associated withHasidism. In turn, they were denounced as destructive heretics in Russian Jewishcommunities, where they were accused of hastening assimilation. By the mid-nineteenth century, when the Russian government began to introduce seculareducation among the Jews, the tide turned toward the Maskilim, and at the end ofthe century, all the new movements in the modern era grew out of the Haskalah.Jewish nationalism, and even Orthodoxy, adopted elements of its legacy.

Both Hasidism and Haskalah existed in the context of the greatest threat to theJewish world, a particularly virulent wave of anti-Semitism that pervadedRussia’s political factions after Jews began to live outside the Pale ofSettlement. Among the radical Left, Jews were portrayed as “Western urbanforeigners who live at the expense of the Russian people.” Among conservatives,Jews represented “the West, introducing modernism into Russia … andundermining the old order.” Ironically, the reforms of Czar Alexander IIexacerbated this situation, as Jews were granted new economic powers. Accordingto the anti-Semitic press, which the government encouraged, the “Jewishexploiting leaseholder of the old type, who served the Polish aristocracy,” wasnow the “new Jewish capitalist,” who inflicted damage in his modernmetamorphosis. The Jews of Russia were deeply disillusioned by these sentiments,but they could not stop their escalation. The pogroms that broke out in 1881,after Czar Alexander was killed, were a virulent culmination. Further, under therule of the next two czars, Russian nationalism identified itself with theRussian Church, and religious persecution continued to assume brutal and anti-Semitic forms.

This was the turbulent, dangerous world into which Paul Levertoff was born andfrom which he extricated himself. Not surprisingly, he seemed to have fewchildhood memories. Typical of Orthodox Jews, he was one of many children. Hespoke with emotion of one “little sister … who died at an early age,”Levertov recalled in “Notes for Nikolai.” Later, after Paul’s own first childdied in infancy, his wife, Beatrice, thought his deep depression revived thisearlier loss. Paul also remembered that one “much older sister … had gone tostudy medicine in Zurich,” which Denise interpreted as meaning that she musthave been among the “enterprising young proto-revolutionary women [Peter]Kropotkin writes about so movingly in his wonderful Memoirs.” Every year, whenDenise was a child, a “certain delicious apple called Cox’s Orange Pippin” wouldremind her father of the shtetl garden, where similar apples grew. He alsorecalled that when “the ice was breaking up in the spring he and other boys usedto jump from ice floe to ice floe for a ride down-river—very dangerous and ofcourse strictly forbidden.” Denise treasured this memory, in particular, becauseshe loved to think of her “studious” father, who “seemed so sedentary,” being soaudacious.

Like other boys of his time and place, Paul Levertoff began to study the Torahand Talmud at a very early age. He was taught by his father and in a traditionalHebrew primary school (cheder). He first encountered the New Testament and Jesuswhen he was eight or nine, on the way home from playing with friends. Levertovlater recalled this family legend as follows:

As he trudged homeward my father’s eye was caught by a scrap of printed paperlying in the gray, trampled snow. Though he was a playful, disobedient boy …he was also … a little Talmud scholar, respectful of words; and he saw at aglance … that this paper was not printed in Russian but in Hebrew. So hepicked it up and began to read. Could it be a fragment of Torah? Never beforehad he read such a story about a boy like himself who—it is said—was found inthe Temple expounding the scriptures to the old, reverent, important rabbis!

He took the rescued page home to show his family, but instead of praising Paul,his father became very angry. He tore the page into pieces, thrust the piecesinto the stove, and told his little son “to avoid such writings,” but did notexplain why. The child was, of course, “awed to see written words destroyed—Hebrewwords,” and his curiosity was awakened about the boy in the story.
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