Without Saying

Richard Howard was born in Cleveland in 1929. He is the author of 13 volumes of poetry and has published over 150 translations from the French including works by Gide, Stendhal, De Beauvoir, Baudelaire and De Gaulle. He has edited the Library of America's edition of the Travel Writing of Henry James. His honors include the Pulitzer Prize.

Few American poets are as urbane as Howard, whose dramatic monologues, verse epistles, and, in this book, voice-mail messages in the personae of famous modernist writers and artists, odd historical figures, and their and his friends have been amusing and bemusing readers for five decades. This collection begins with a set of letters about the 1904 attempt to effect a luncheon meeting of Henry James and L. Frank Baum and ends with Hugh Walpole’s memoir of Edith Wharton’s machinations to get James the Nobel Prize, which he apparently never noticed, though he understood at a glance what Walpole’s brief murmurings with a theater usher portended: sex, of course, which Howard reminds us underlies the social facades and undergirds the identity of even the desperately cultivated, from preadolescence (“School Days”) to burgeoning manhood (“Pederasty,” the translation of sonnet by the teenage Proust) to looming senescence (“Mind under Matter”). And so high culture meets the stuff of gossip, to discover that betimes they are twins. In any event, as Howard presents them, they’re utterly, intelligently delightful. --Ray Olson