It was the summer of 1958—the end of “the tranquilized Fifties,” in the words of Robert Lowell—and the poet Adrienne Rich was desperate. Her body was rebelling. The first signs of rheumatoid arthritis had appeared seven years earlier, when she was twenty-two. She had two young children, and while pregnant with the first she had developed a rash, later diagnosed as an allergic reaction to the pregnancy itself. And now, despite her contraception, she was pregnant again, to her dismay.
Years later, looking back on this time, Rich would characterize herself as “sleepwalking.” Most days, she was up at dawn with a child before turning to endless domestic tasks: cooking, cleaning, supervising the kids. She had little time to write and even less motivation. “When I receive a letter soliciting mss., or someone alludes to my ‘career,’ I have a strong sense of wanting to deny all responsibility for and interest in that person who writes—or who wrote,” she recorded in her journal in 1956. She was alienated from her former self—the prodigy who had delighted her domineering father and stunned teachers at her high school, the Radcliffe undergraduate who had won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets’ Prize, the Guggenheim Fellow who had infiltrated the all-male Merton College at Oxford. Suddenly, like many educated women of her generation, she was a wife and a mother, who spent her days doing “repetitious cycles of laundry” and her evenings attending “ludicrous dinner parties” in and around Boston.
As Rich wrote in an autobiographical essay in 1982, “The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me.” The woman who wrote that essay bore little resemblance to the sleepwalker of the fifties. Since her near-“spiritual death,” Rich had published a dozen books of poetry; taught at Swarthmore College and Columbia University; and won—and, on occasion, refused—glamorous prizes, including the National Book Award for Poetry. She had separated from her husband in 1970, shortly after she found feminism, and was now in a long-term relationship with a woman, the Jamaican-American writer Michelle Cliff. As social movements proliferated across the country, Rich criticized beloved institutions (Harvard) and old friends (Lowell), and renounced familiar aesthetics (formal poetry). To some, she was unrecognizable; to others, she was an inspiration.
Which of these women was the real Rich? The dutiful daughter, the star undergrad, the excellent cook? Or the political poet who used every platform she had—and she had many—to criticize violence in all its forms? This is the question that the scholar and writer Hilary Holladay poses in “The Power of Adrienne Rich,” the first biography of the poet and, one hopes, not the last. “Who was she? Who was she really?” Holladay asks near the end of the book. Her question recalls a claim she makes in the preface, where she argues that Rich never felt she had a “definitive identity,” and that “the absence of a fully knowable self”—a “wound,” in Holladay’s words—spurred her on, to both self-discovery and creative success. According to Holladay, the only secure identity Rich ever found was in her art. “That is who and what she is,” Holladay concludes.
The search for the real Adrienne Rich is a tempting biographical task. But it suggests a curious conception of the self, as something prior to and apart from the social conditions that produce it. The ways one is raised and educated, the language one learns, the stories to which one has access: all these create and constrict the self. Rich knew this—“I felt myself perceived by the world simply as a pregnant woman, and it seemed easier . . . to perceive myself so,” she wrote in “Of Woman Born,” her 1976 study of motherhood as an “institution”—and she knew, too, that any project of self-discovery was necessarily a project of social and political critique.
This is not to diminish Rich’s particularity, nor is it to say that she was simply “of her time.” The woman that emerges in Holladay’s biography is singular: not just brilliant but hard-minded and unsparing. She was a skilled, prolific writer, eager to experiment and brave enough to break with the poetic style that first earned her acclaim. As a political thinker, she was always one step ahead: concerned early on with the whiteness of women’s liberation, sex-positive at the height of the anti-pornography movement, anti-capitalist before that was in vogue. Watching American feminism unfold, she stood by with the next, necessary critique, often implicating herself in the process. As a result, she was sometimes disappointed with people who lacked her introspection, who couldn’t or wouldn’t keep up. She lost friends she’d wanted to keep; she was alone more often than she would have liked. If anything, the problem—and the power—of Adrienne Rich was not too little self but too much.
Born in Baltimore in May, 1929, Adrienne Cecile Rich was supposed to be a boy. Her parents had planned to name her after her father, Arnold Rich, a Jewish pathologist from Alabama, who had earned a research-and-teaching position at Johns Hopkins University. Arnold decided early that his daughter would be a genius. He tutored her in his off-hours, while her mother, Helen, a former concert pianist, homeschooled the child and gave her music lessons. Rich learned to read and write by four. At six, she wrote her first book of poetry; the next year, she produced a fifty-page play about the Trojan War. (Classics played an integral role in the Rich household: when Adrienne was small, she sat on a volume of Plutarch’s “Lives” in order to reach the piano.) Helen wrote in a notebook, “This is the child we needed and deserved.”
But Rich’s wasn’t a happy childhood, or at least not entirely. Though she enjoyed her father’s praise—Holladay identifies this as Rich’s primary goal up through her young adulthood—she couldn’t help but notice how unhappy her mother was, living under her husband’s thumb. It was assumed that Helen would give up her concert career after she married. When she moved in with Arnold, he presented her with a modest, long-sleeved black dress, of his own design, which she was to wear every day of her wedded life. (The couple called it her uniform.) Rich intuited her mother’s sadness and her father’s desperate need for his daughter to succeed. She was plagued by eczema, facial tics, hay fever. She didn’t play very much or have many friends. She was happier after she was enrolled in an all-girls high school in her upscale Baltimore neighborhood, and after she gave up the piano, at sixteen, in order to commit herself fully to poetry. But the prospect of Arnold’s disapproval always loomed.
Rich entered Radcliffe in 1947, and described Cambridge as “heaven.” She made close friends, found a serious boyfriend, took courses with F. O. Matthiessen, and became acquainted with Robert Frost. She wrote poetry daily, for an hour after breakfast. During her undergraduate career, she had poems accepted by Harper’s and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her greatest triumph came in 1951, during her senior year, when her first book of poems, “A Change of World”—the manuscript that won the Yale Prize—was published. W. H. Auden, the prize judge, wrote the foreword, in which he praised Rich for writing poems that were “neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs.”
Paternalism aside, the description is a fair gloss on Rich’s early work. The poems in “A Change of World” show a deference to the male masters: Frost, Yeats, even Auden himself. (“The most that we can do for one another / Is let our blunders and our blind mischances / Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion” calls to mind Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” in which he puts it more simply: “We must love one another or die.”) Some of the verse emerges from personal experience—the “you” of the emotionally complex poem “Stepping Backward” is a female college friend and, Holladay argues, an early love interest—but it is deliberately detached, rarely using feminine pronouns. In the early fifties, Rich recalled in 1984, “a notion of male experience as universal prevailed which made the feminine pronoun suspect or merely ‘personal.’ ” Working on a poem that would be included in her second collection, “The Diamond Cutters” (1955), Rich transformed the figure of the tourist—a stand-in for herself—into a man.
At the time, Rich was intent on being two seemingly incompatible things: the ideal fifties woman, beautiful, feminine, with a successful husband and adorable children, and a world-historically important poet, the kind who would, in her father’s words, “leave things behind . . . that will blaze their way into the minds of men after you’re gone.” Her life would be perfectly ordered, even if it required uncommon discipline. During her years at Radcliffe, she wrote that she “pitied old maids, damned sterile feminism, saw in marriage the frame for my whole conception of life,” even while she was enjoying a string of dazzling achievements.
Rich began to question the importance of marriage when she broke off an engagement and won a Guggenheim to fund her studies at Oxford. But then she met Alfred Conrad. “Alf,” a graduate student in economics at Harvard, was an intelligent, “virile” Jewish man with a dark past, by the standards of mid-century America. He’d married a dancer and choreographer who had suffered from mental illness and been institutionalized. Rich went abroad to study soon after their meeting, but the couple corresponded regularly. Arnold Rich did not approve. In “For Ethel Rosenberg,” a long poem from the eighties about family strife, Rich writes of receiving, during her time in England, “letters of seventeen pages / finely inscribed harangues” from her father. Their relationship never healed; for the first time, Rich decided to disregard his desires and follow her own. She and Conrad were married on June 26, 1953, shortly after her return.
One could see Rich’s decision to marry Conrad as her first rebellion against the patriarchy. But leaving one man for another is hardly an emancipation. Conrad respected his wife’s intelligence and creative potential, and Rich recalled him as “a sensitive, affectionate man who wanted children and who . . . was willing to ‘help.’ ” Nevertheless, “it was clearly understood that this ‘help’ was an act of generosity; that his work, his professional life, was the real work in the family.” The couple followed his job prospects, moving first to Evanston, Illinois, where Conrad took a job at Northwestern; then returning to Cambridge when Harvard offered him a position; then, in 1966, moving to New York, where Conrad, who had not earned tenure at Harvard, took a tenured position at City University.
During these years, Rich was responsible for raising their three children, often with some household help but otherwise alone, since Conrad tended to travel for research. She struggled, and she felt ashamed for struggling. When a young, ambitious poet named Sylvia Plath visited her, she advised Plath not to have children. (After giving birth to her third child, Rich had her tubes tied. “Had yourself spayed, did you?” a nurse asked after she woke from the surgery.) Rich found she could write only late at night, after the children were in bed, often with vodka to help her wind down from the day. “The Diamond Cutters” was the only book she produced during the first nine years of her marriage. Later, she said that she regretted publishing it at all.
