My sister Eleanor, who is the custodian of most of the Bingham family past in terms of documents, artifacts, art and furniture left to her by our parents—quite a burden from my point of view, for a conscientious caretaker—just sent me a battered back notebook, forerunner of the Moleskin, which she had found in the trove.
It contains my long forgotten, carefully printed poems—without smudge or correction—of which this poem, “Icarus,” is an example.
I was astonished to read the inscription: “To Mother and Daddy with love from Sallie Christmas 1956.”
1956! I was a far-from-home seventeen-year-old, beginning to revel in the unexpected adventures and treasures of my sophomore year at college. I would never have expected that I would make a gift of my poems to my parents. The years of alienation that followed the late 1980s sale of my father’s companies in Louisville makes it hard to believe that I was ever such a trusting and sharing daughter.
Well, there it is, as instructive as it is surprising.
These solemn and stilted verses remind me that my models at that time were the male romantics of the 19th century: Shelley, Byron, Keats, Wordsworth. Nothing wrong with those models except for their complete elimination of the female voice or the female experience. I would never have thought of such a thing in 1956 because I was unaware that there ever was such a thing as the female voice. I hadn’t even heard of Emily Dickinson; she was not taught at Harvard, nor were any of the other poets and writers who were female.
I’d like to imagine that this narrow-mindedness is the reason Mr. T has slashed billions from the Harvard federal grants—but of course it was not that.
1956 was the last year I wrote poetry. I was taking a writing course every semester at college, and I was usually the only female, or perhaps one of two, in these self-important groups dominated by assured young prep school graduates, males of course, and opinionated professors like Archibald Macleish, well known at that time. The only time he spoke to me was to correct my pronunciation of a Greek name.
My fellow students, the prep-school boys, were even worse. The first and only poem I read aloud was a lyrical description of fish swimming in a Kentucky stream.
A bad-ass boy opined, to general chuckles, that it was really about sperm swimming up a vagina.
I was mortified. I never spoke in that class again, and I stopped writing poetry until three decades later when two dear friends, both professors at Western Kentucky University at Bowling Green where I was teaching, shared poems of mine and theirs and persuaded me it was worth starting again.
I relate this story because it is difficult for young women who will be heading to college next month how lethal the Ivy League colleges, in particular, were for talented young women for decades. Change when it came may have been short-lived. The white elite lives off discrimination in its many forms, and I am not sure any of these “institutes of higher learning” have been able to suppress that appetite.
After all most of their big donors have probably silenced many women in their personal and corporate lives. It can become a habit.
Thank you
The definition of an asshole is a young man in college. I was one. I spent almost fifty years thinking about the relationship where i proved it, And some too few years back i contacted the woman to ask for forgiveness. It took me a while to find her, but i found her sister and asked if her to let the woman know i wanted to say i was sorry. The woman consented and i told her my purpose was to ask for forgiveness but i was not asking for her to say anything except what she felt like saying if anything at all. I said, it is for me to say this to you, an obligation i thanked her for letting me fulfill. I told her that i cant recall a time that she was unkind, but i knew i was an asshole to her at that time and I hoped I had grown out of it. I elaborated to say that i thought of her kindness every day, each time i put my hands on a guitar, for she bought me my first one at age nineteen. She said, ‘i don’t remember doing that.’
It was the message i needed to hear, that what transpired between us might be forgotten if not forgiven. I write this because you are right Sallie, and while I am not privileged with wealth, working my way through a public college, i was true to my nature, an asshole. In terms of respect for women, i think i have changed gor the better and you have helped me. Your keynote address at the honoring of Wilma Grote who founded a symposium for the advancement of women at MSU spoke of what women do, love. Thank you.
University in the 1950s: Some of us women adhered to the curfews set for women and attended charm class wearing bathing suit and heels. Some of us were actively breaking free.