“BUT I GOT MY REVENGE ON THAT BOY. ABOUT SIX MONTHS LATER THIS POEM CAME TO ME?”: SIGNED LETTER BY POET RICHARD EBERHART

EBERHART, Richard. Typed letter signed. 5 Webster Terrace, Hanover, New Hampshire. March 13, 1964. Three pages, measuring 8-1/2 by 11 inches, printed on rectos only. $250.

Typed letter by Richard Eberhart to Addison Barker in regard to Eberhart’s poem “The Horse Chestnut Tree.”

Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Richard Eberhart wrote to fellow poet Addison Barker in response to Barker’s questions about “The Horse Chestnut Tree,” including a partial transcript from a never-aired BBC interview with Denis Donoghue:

“Dear Mr. Barker,

I am glad to tell you about The Horse Chestnut Tree. It was written in 1948 I think; I note it was first sent out in that year. The house is still the family house of my wife’s mother, Mrs. Charles H. Butcher, at 117 Lake View Ave., Cambridge 38, Massachusetts. My father-in-law died some years ago. My mother-in-law is in her mid-seventies, very able. Just last Christmas was held another annual dinner with about twenty-five family members and friends partaking. The tree is still there. You may be interested to know that when I told the story of this poem at Concord Academy this winter to hundreds of enthusiastic youngsters who kept me reading and talking for an hour and a half after the usual period they had the idea of putting up a plaque on that tree. They insist that come spring or summer a delegation will appear at grandmother’s house and nail a memorial tablet on the tree. I thought this quite enterprising of them, and wouldn’t put it beyond the young to bring it off.

Last August the Irish critic Denis Donoghue came to visit us on the coast of Maine. He had a commission from the London BBC for a ‘conversation’ or interview. We talked for three hours one morning looking out at the sea. Unfortunately the tape recorder did not work correctly; the BBC could not use the tape. However, I salvaged the words from the tape and have a long typescript of the interview.

Here is the part on your poem:

(D) But, also you are probably working on an assumption which I believe to be valid; namely, that if you are a Christian your words will have a Christian resonance or intonation no matter what you do about it. But if you use a term like ‘human’ or ‘forgiveness’, these terms will pick up a kind of Christian inflection, the Christian feeling will come over in the words anyway. ‘The Horse Chestnut Tree’ is a humane poem, and it has no specific Christian reference, but it moves very comfortably within a Christian setting, wouldn’t you agree?

(E) Well, I’m not so sure about that. It depends upon how you read it. It says here in one line toward the end, it says that we are ‘outlaws on God’s property.’ Now this is more nearly an Old Testament poem than a New Testament one. It’s more a Hebraic idea behind this poem than a Christian one.

(D) Do you mean it to be like ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment,’ asking questions of a God indifferent to our purposes?

(E) Yes. Let’s read this and see. Incidentally, there is a story connected with this. This poem was written after the War when we were living in Cambridge, I think it was written in about 1948, and was based on a real happening when troops of wild Irish boys, adolescent boys, would rush down Lake View Avenue in the fall, every fall it happened, and they would come into my father-in-law’s garden and break down his great horse chestnut tree and throw sticks and stones and they were really very destructive. My father-in-law was getting rather old and I was feeling very strong, and I said one day I would take over from him and I would handle the situation. The boys were ruining the tree. So, I rushed out and grabbed one of these fellows by the shoulder. I had every feeling that I knew what I was doing and that what I was doing was right, and I grabbed this strong lusty sixteen year older and he immediately shouted in a loud voice ‘Police, Police.’ So, I confess, I went back into the house, I gave it all up. I thought the Irish were now in cahoots with the police, they had it all under control. These boys didn’t care anything for paitalism or for private property. But I got my revenge on that boy. About six months later this poem came to me, in a way that many of these poems have, it welled up into consciousness in a moment of meditation, say, six months later, or sometime in the winter, in my study. This is one of the poems that I can adduce as having been given to me, because I wrote it all, and I don’t think I changed a line–certainly not a line, maybe a word or two, but not more than a word or two. I like this idea, that a poem when it is ready to be born may be born whole. It comes and there it is. But let’s see what it says.

(read poem)

(D) I remember when reading this poem, and often in the meantime, in the phrase ‘outlaws on God’s property’, I see what you mean by saying this has an Old Testament ring. But it seemed tdo me that you were invoking a certain feeling, that we do not hope to take possession of God.

(E) Well, yes, I’ll go along with that. It is a poem of adoration, isn’t it? I mean, ‘the great flowering world unbroken yet’, it adores this idea, and the world will still be there no matter what man does about it. (etc.)

Remember that this was an unrehearsed interview so the language is somewhat off-hand.

I also tell audiences that the boys, however little they were aware of it, were actually Plato’s lovers of the beautiful. They were actually aestheticians, although they probably did not know the word. Their motive was to hold in their hand, or carry in their pockets a round, shiny horse chestnut. There was no idea of use so they subscribed to Plato’s notion of the beautiful as useless. The poem develops analogies as you can see.

Maybe that’s not the whole story but a good deal of it, which I hope you will enjoy.

PS My grandfather Eberhart was a Methodist minister for 50 years or more in Iowa. He and my grandmother were both graduates in the first class to graduate from Grinnell College. He lived to be 87, she 92 or so.

PS Since I forgot to use your envelope here is something further. There were several poets around then, Lowell, Merrill Moore, May Sarton, John Ciardi, Dick Wilbur, John Holmes, and others. We would meet every month or so, read our new poems and have them torn apart. I usually do not tell this to audiences as I am fond of Ciardi but I think he made a great critical mistake. When I read this poem at Holmes’ John said, Yes, Dick, this is a good narrative poem, but you should leave off the last nine lines. He wanted it only as a straight narration. If I had left them off I am sure the poem would never have got into one anthology. But that was the way he felt that night. I recall driving Dick Wilbur back from John Holmes’ that night. We allowed as how we enjoyed the rigorous criticism of our lines but mutually confessed that we would be damned if we would change a line of ours for all that. RE”

An unusually detailed insight into the background of the work of an honored American poet, in fine condition.