Robert Fitzgerald’s youth in Springfield All but a few members of the Springfield High School Hall of Fame are not in the least bit famous in Springfield. In the English-speaking bookish community, however, one of those anointed is celebrated. Robert Stuart Fitzgerald’s reworking into English verse of the Aeneid, The Odyssey and The Iliad are not only admired but loved. When not re-imagining the ancients’ tales in colloquial English, Fitzgerald taught and wrote poems. Both are callings distinct from being a poet or a professor, and he excelled at each.
I summed up his life in this paper in 1994, and it would be silly to try to improve on it. Dead at 74 in 1985, Fitzgerald was a teacher when students still wanted to learn, entered his middle age at a time when writers could still afford to live in Italy, and spent much of his early manhood drinking and suffering for Art in Manhattan at a time when living on that island was worth doing no matter what it cost.
Writers can be difficult people to befriend, but Fitzgerald seemed to have the gift. His papers at Yale include letters from William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, James Dickey, T.S. Eliot. Allen Ginsburg, Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Archibald Macleish and Ezra Pound. His intimates included The New Yorker’s Joe Mitchell and William Maxwell. To James Agee he reportedly functioned as a literary conscience, and his introduction to Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge — still praised as one of the best guides to that storyteller’s work — was one of the least of his encouragements to her.
To those who know both Fitzgerald and Springfield, the most remarkable thing about Fitzgerald is that he grew up in Springfield. Born in 1910 back East into a genteel, if not wealthy, family of lawyers, Fitzgerald lived from ages 5 or so to 18 in a frame house at 215 East Jackson St., on land now occupied by the Illinois attorney general’s offices in the shadow of the Statehouse. (The reporter in him, if not the patriot, would have been offended by Wikipedia’s assertion that he grew up in Chicago.) He continued to visit the house until 1934, when his grandmother died and the house was sold.
Fitzgerald’s grandfather had been a successful merchant in Springfield. “The coffee, tea, whisky and groceries Fs,” as Vachel Lindsay once identified them, were Roman Catholics and Fitzgerald was schooled at St. Agnes from 1921 to 1924. He went on to Springfield High School, there not being a Catholic alternative before Cathedral Boys High School opened in 1930.
Upon graduating from SHS in 1928 at 17, Fitzgerald was judged too immature to cope with the college life, and was sent to the Choate School for a year to ripen enough that Yale might digest him. He ended up at Harvard, where, foretelling his career, he took honors in English and Greek. He would return as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard University from 1965 to 1981.
It had been taken for granted by his family that Fitzgerald too would go on to law school but by 1933, he recalled, “the wherewithal to go to law school had vanished.” Graduating in the midst of the Depression, one took jobs one could and his was on a newspaper. He eventually found his way to Time magazine, a raft which has kept many a sinking wordsmith afloat over the years.
It is difficult in reflecting on such a life to not ask what it is that a Fitzgerald or any famous son or daughter owes to her hometown. What part of his success owes to Springfield and what part to genes or Fate or milk every day for breakfast? The same questions intrigued Fitzgerald, too, and he answered some of them in reminiscences he wrote for the New Yorker in the 1970s and reprinted in the 1993 collection, The Third Kind of Knowledge.
One of the most interesting things about reading about Fitzgerald’s Springfield boyhood is how little Springfield figures in them. He mentions the Statehouse — he had a wonderfully grand walk to and from grade school at St. Agnes (then at Capitol and Pasfield), cutting through the Capitol each way — but nothing about the shops or the parks or the entertainments. We see him practicing his drop kicks, but not quarterbacking in the big game for the Senators. His world was indoors, in the rooms containing books “which contained the far away and the long ago.” There lived Henry Esmond and Ishmael and Jim Hawkins and, compared to their exploits, watching the trains roll past on the Third Street tracks was dull stuff.
He took long walks to South Grand and back up Fifth Street. On one of these jaunts one winter, he unexpectedly felt a “new sense of everything,” an experience he then supposed to be religious “though uncertainly related to faith or doctrine” and later relied on as an aesthetic criterion. A poem that worked, for example, recreated that sense of strangeness in the reader. There was nothing about Springfield that excited this sense of mystery, rather something inside the boy.
The city intruded on Fitzgerald decisively at school. It was Fitzgerald’s father, not a schoolteacher, who first showed him the Greek alphabet. And it was at Choate, not Springfield High, that the future translator met Dudley Fitts, the classics master who
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Editor’s note
Lola Lucas of Springfield, longtime columnist for the Enos Park Banner,
writes that the old saying “throwing your hat over a fence” means
taking a risk, making a leap of faith. If you had only one hat and
tossed it over, the fence had to be climbed. She gives the example of
the Enos Park Neighborhood Improvement Association and the Greater
Springfield Chamber of Commerce fighting the Third Street rail
corridor, and hiring expensive lawyers to do so. Buying a home in a
neighborhood with a rough reputation is another. Her recent bout with
cancer and chemotherapy is yet another example of throwing her hat. “My
next fence to climb is to get to the other side from ‘patient’ to
‘long-term cancer survivor,’ ” she writes. Best wishes, Lola, and happy
Thanksgiving. –Fletcher Farrar, editor Cover photo is by Ginny Lee.
