Nemerov, Howard

(b. 1 March 1920 in New York City; d. 5 July 1991 in University City, Missouri), poet, teacher, novelist, critic, and recipient of numerous major literary prizes; poet laureate of the United States.

The oldest of three children of Gertrude Russek and David Nemerov, Nemerov was raised in a New York environment of servants, private school, and childhood summers in Deal, New Jersey. His mother’s family owned Russek’s, an elegant department store of which his father became president. His parents were also philanthropists. Nemerov’s younger sisters were Diane Arbus, the noted photographer for whom he later wrote a memorial poem (“To D___, Dead by Her Own Hand,” Gnomes and Occasions, 1973), and Renee, a sculptor. Raised in an affluent but sometimes troubled family, Nemerov was a high achiever in academics and sports at Fieldston, a notable Ethical Culture Society school in the Bronx, from which he graduated in 1937. Entering Harvard College, he continued to excel but felt that as a Jew he was not fully accepted. This underlying feeling of estrangement along with depression lingered through most of Nemerov’s life despite his eventual national recognition and many prestigious awards, the first of which was the Bowdoin Prize (1940), for an essay on Thomas Mann that received Mann’s praise. During this same period some of his short stories were published in the Harvard Advocate.

After graduating from Harvard in 1941, Nemerov flew fifty missions with the Royal Canadian Air Force (1941–1944) and another fifty-seven with the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force (1944–1945). He was a fighter pilot who became a “flying officer” in the RCAF, a first lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. These experiences are reflected in numerous poems, including those in “War in the Air,” the second section of War Stories Long Ago and Now (1987), in which the poem “Models” speaks of survivors who “aged decades in a year.” With his nineteen-year-old English bride, Margaret (“Peggy”) Russell, whom he married on 26 January 1944, Nemerov spent a short time writing in New York City. Then from 1946 to 1948, he taught English to returning GIs at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. He also became associate editor of the literary magazine Furioso in 1946. Nemerov’s long academic career was centered on small, avant-garde Bennington College in Vermont (1948–1966) and larger, urban Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (1962–1991), where he became Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor (1976–1990). Nemerov was also associated with the University of Minnesota (1958-1959), Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia (1962–1963), Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin (1964), Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts (1963, 1966–1968), Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts (1969), and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut (1983).

Simultaneously, Nemerov’s writing was published in such periodicals as The Virginia Quarterly, Poetry, and Story. Of his more than two dozen book-length publications, about half are poetry. The first of these, The Image and the Law, with its poems of death, appeared in 1947 to the mixed reception that marked most of his early work. Some of Nemerov’s other volumes of poetry are Mirrors and Windows (1958), the winner of the Blumenthal Prize; New and Selected Poems (1960), which contains Nemerov’s favorite and longest poem, “Runes”; The Blue Swallow (1967), which won the first Theodore Roethke Memorial Prize; and The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1978), which was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1978 and the Bollingen Prize in 1981.

Beginning as a poet evocative of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, Nemerov wrote increasingly about nature and was often compared to Robert Frost. Yet he was a sophisticated observer of the contemporary American scene. Known as a superb craftsman able to write in any form and meticulously attentive to language, Nemerov was praised for his intelligence and wit. His writing embodied the apparent contraries of aloofness and romanticism, erudition and simplicity, serious concerns and humor. Calling himself a “writer of fictions in verse and prose,” Nemerov also wrote three novels, The Melodramatists (1949), Federigo; or, The Power of Love (1954), and The Homecoming Game (1960). The last, dramatized as a comedy by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, also served as the basis of the 1960 film Tall Story. Another of his works, the slim autobiographical Journal of the Fictive Life (1965), is a Freudian analysis of himself and the writing of fiction. In it he explains, “My passion is to know. And since I cannot know I must imagine.” Nemerov also authored two short story collections A Commodity of Dreams (1959) and Stories, Fables, and Diversions (1971); two verse plays, Endor (1961) and Cain (1962); many essays; and a considerable amount of criticism.

Among Nemerov’s many prominent awards were a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant (1961) with election to that body in 1965, a Guggenheim Fellowship (1968-1969), an Academy of American Poets Fellowship (1970) with chancellorship from 1976, as well as election to both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and more than a dozen honorary doctorates. Another significant honor was the National Medal of Arts awarded at the White House (1987). A consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from 1963 to 1964, Nemerov was named poet laureate of the United States for 1988-1990, the third recipient of this office.

A reserved, tall, good-looking man with close-cropped hair (though he sported a mustache as a pilot), Nemerov was considered a demanding yet supportive teacher. He and Peggy were married forty-seven years and had three sons—David, Alexander Michael, and Jeremy Seth. He died of cancer; a private family funeral service followed, with burial in St. Louis. At the memorial service in Graham Chapel of Washington University, the poet Richard Wilbur spoke the eulogy. There are memorial plaques at the University and in the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

A prolific man of letters, Nemerov was a poet whose perceptions, moral concepts, and imagination were expressed with clarity and wit. A teacher and versatile writer who “wore his intellect lightly,” Nemerov received many awards for his contributions to literature.

A collection of Nemerov’s papers is at Washington University in St. Louis. His Journal of a Fictive Life (1965, 1981 with a new preface) is a Freudian self-analysis with reflections on writing and imagination. Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus, a Biography (1984), includes details of Nemerov and his sister’s childhood and family life. Some full-length books are William Mills, The Stillness in Moving Things: The World of Howard Nemerov (1975), an analysis of his themes, vision, language; Ross Labrie, Howard Nemerov (1980), a biocritical study; Diane L. Potts, Howard Nemerov and Objective Realism (1994), a study of “the influence of Owen Bar-field,” a British philosopher with whom Nemerov corresponded for more than twenty years. A chapter by Miriam Marty Clark in Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets: A Biocritical Sourcebook (1999) assesses Nemerov’s family background, literary themes, and critical reception. Obituaries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 7 July 1991).

Rachel Shor