From Philistia to Bohemia

PRIVATE COLLECTION by Jean Starr Untermeyer. 295 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

At 13, after a family quarrel, Jean Starr decided to commit suicide. When she opened her bedroom window in Zanesville, Ohio, she was afraid to jump and compromised by trying to beat out her brains with a hairbrush. This serio comic vein runs throughout her new book, which describes a lifelong love affair with art and with artists, "those people who have been most meaningful to me."

Parading Lions. After the abortive suicide, the gawky adolescent girl was sent to a boarding school in Manhattan, where she soon met and married Louis Untermeyer, the brother of a schoolmate. Louis was then working as a salesman for his father's jewelry firm, but like Jean, he dreamed of escaping from Philistia to Bohemia. Both succeeded, Louis becoming an anthologist, poet, critic, and a man of many marriages--five in all, two of them to Jean. She plunged into music, poetry and the keeping of a salon, where she paraded such lions as Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound and Siegfried Sassoon.

Private Collection has some fine portraits as well as a flood of gossipy and sometimes penetrating anecdotes. Here is tough-minded Amy Lowell, smoking the cigars that shocked Boston in the early 1920s. As a teenager, Amy wrote in her diary the frank confession, "I am fat, ugly, inconspicuous and dull: to say nothing of a very bad temper." As an adult, she intermittently feared revolution and would declaim at dinner:

"How many nights when I sit writing in my library, nobody awake in the whole house but me and my Winky [the cat], I think I hear intruders--and I grasp my revolver, ready to shoot. I feel these things, and I will fight. I am the last of the Barons . . . the last of the Barons!''

Gruesome Exit. Jean's most traumatic and rewarding chore was the difficult translation into English of Hermann Broch's masterwork The Death of Virgil. Begun almost accidentally, it took years, and required her learning German almost from scratch and suffering almost as many birth pangs as the author himself.

What emerges from Jean's book is the fact that a poet's life is infinitely more dangerous than that of a steeple jack. Of her poet friends, nearly a dozen killed themselves one way or another. Elfin Elinor Wylie did it by burning the candle at both ends; Vachel (The Congo) Lindsay made a more gruesome exit by drinking a bottle of Lysol.

Jean Untermeyer displays a persevering but uneven personality, one dedicated to passion and sensibility but continually drawn to the comforting but humdrum virtues of a tidy housewife. Her prose reflects this dichotomy, ranging from the limpest of cliches to flights of intuitive perception, as in her lines about Sylvia Townsend Warner: "Yet all is not wit, though it springs out from her as pointed as a prow. There is wisdom, as final as a proverb."

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