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Miriam: The Text Is Herself

2022; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/bio.2022.0035

1529-1456

Ellen G. Friedman,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

MiriamThe Text Is Herself Ellen G. Friedman (bio) I may have first met Miriam Fuchs in M. L. Rosenthal’s seminar in poetry when we were both PhD students at New York University, perhaps in 1976. During those graduate school years, I drove into the city from the Long Island suburbs where I lived and met Miriam at the library before our evening class. In the spring, I brought her lilacs from my garden. I was a wife and mother of two little girls, and she was a single woman with an apartment in Gramercy Park. I wonder how many people reading this tribute knew her in her twenties before ovarian cancer began to do its damage? She had a head full of dark brown curly hair, a size-four body, and eyes that were the blue of irises. Miriam’s apartment, which she owned, was a NYC one-bedroom in which the so-called bedroom was just big enough to fit a double bed and nothing else. By the time I met her, she was an orphan. Miriam lost her father when she was young, and soon after she received her BA from SUNY Buffalo, her mother died of an ovarian cancer associated with BRCA, the gene mutation that Miriam also inherited. The charismatic Rosenthal was short and round and an extreme advocate of New Criticism. He regarded the poem as a self-sufficient and sacred object divorced from any context, including the author function. For him, the critic was a kind of priest who had access to the holy meaning of the poem. While we were in his class, Rosenthal addressed a recent shutdown of the university by student protesters by saying that poetry was a higher calling than any political action. His views were so extreme: he told us that he would aim to judge a lampshade made of human skin by its aesthetic value. He had truly drunk the new critical Kool-Aid. He would present his graduate seminar students with an unnervingly opaque poem that none of us recognized. Just the poem appeared on the handout, without an author’s name or a date. As about a dozen of us sat around a seminar table, Rosenthal called on us by last name, one by one, and asked us to interpret a line. When we failed, he told us what the line meant and then went on to the next line and next student. His brilliant interpretations silenced even the bravest among us. This experience with Rosenthal became a cautionary tale I told my students about the limits of New Criticism. In contrast, Miriam and I were both drawn to the contextualized literary text. [End Page 143] Click for larger view View full resolution Miriam Fuchs in New York City, 1980. Photograph courtesy of Ellen G. Friedman. Click for larger view View full resolution Cover of Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction (Princeton UP, 1989). [End Page 144] Although our interests overlapped, she was particularly attentive to the author’s life and biographical textual resonance, while I was drawn to the play of historical forces, especially involving gender relations. She joked that she was in the yenta school of literary criticism. We made a good team for our book Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, published in 1989. Miriam was an exceptional researcher—patient and dedicated. Many on our list of experimental women writers were obscure or unknown, and information about them was hard to find. Miriam pursued leads about a writer until she nailed down the information. Reviewers were impressed. One of them quipped, “The closing ‘Selective List of Women Experimentalists’ runs eighteen pages, and undergraduates who doubt that their instructor has ‘read everything’ can run a devastating quiz” (“Brief Mention” 519).1 Miriam moved to Hawai‘i as we started this project. Because she was the one who left and I had two kids, Miriam took the six-thousand-mile plane ride so that we could work together. She lived with me for a month or more at a time. We enjoyed being together, though Miriam would explode into hysterics and tears once or twice a week. Anyone who knew her...