ABSTRACT
AT AN ACADEMIC CONCLAVE in the late forties, “peculiar little oddments like R. P. Blackmur” offended Louise Bogan in her poet’s soul, and it pleased her to hear that Richard was “on the way out at Princeton.” His colleagues or some of them had put the word around. He confounded them, though. Wanting a permanent place in the academy, he used every weapon he could lay hands on. Stories circulated about “his unscrupulousness and dirty academic politics.” Leslie Fiedler was fed on these stories by Francis Fergusson and Robert Fitzgerald, when the three of them taught with Richard at the Indiana School of Letters. “Without the proper credentials,” Richard at Princeton “had to fight for his life.” He wasn’t “above using brass knuckles when he had to, or sacrificing a friend to save himself.” He wasn’t above flattery either, and one critic said how his judgment was vitiated by “an excess of charity” toward colleagues who occupied the seats of power. Saul Bellow in his novel Humboldt’s Gift preserves a fossilized caricature of the rough and subtle politician. “To become professor without even a BA … it speaks for itself.” This is one version of Blackmur on the rise.
