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2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
AMMONS AMONG NORTH CAROLINA FRIENDS a review by Eric C. Walker Emily Herring Wilson. “When I Go Back to My Home Country”: A Remembrance of Archie Ammons. R.A. Fountain, 2019.
ERIC WALKER, a North Carolina native, is a Professor Emeritus of English and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at Florida State University. He has taught classes at Florida State University since 1984 and specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature. His current research focuses on adoption studies for a book on Romanticism and adoption. His book, Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen After War (Stanford University Press, 2009) was awarded the 2009 SAMLA Studies Book Award. EMILY HERRING WILSON’S books include The Three Graces of Val-Kill (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Two Gardeners: Katherine S. White and Elizabeth Lawrence: A Friendship in Letters (Beacon Press, 2002), and North Carolina Women Making History (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). She is a recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature and the John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities. She lives in Winston-Salem, NC.
“No Species of Writing seems more worthy of Cultivation than Biography.” With this 1750 declaration and his subsequent Lives of the Poets, Samuel Johnson lofted literary lives – often very uneventful – to the front of modern biography. Johnson’s own life would soon become the most famous example of his own theory, with the publication of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson in 1791. But before Boswell published his big book, numerous personal accounts of Johnson appeared in the wake of his death in 1784, such as his close friend Hester Thrale’s Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, published in 1786. Emily Herring Wilson’s new book about A.R. Ammons, “When I Go Back to My Home Country”: A Remembrance of Archie Ammons, offers a fascinating new event in this venerable tradition, which for other modern American poets includes books such as Peter Brazeau’s Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered and Helen Muir’s Frost in Florida: A Memoir. Ammons, a native of Columbus County, graduate of Wake Forest College, longtime teacher of writing at Cornell University, and a primary voice in twentiethcentury American poetry, died in Ithaca, NY, in 2001. In advance of his Cornell colleague Roger Gilbert’s biography, Wilson, a key North Carolina friend of the poet and his family in the last three decades of his life, frames her book as a rich “remembrance” of Ammons: “This is my story of a friendship and my
story of a poet, A.R. Ammons. Everybody called him Archie” (11). The Wilson and Ammons families became fast friends during Ammons’s sabbatical year at Wake Forest University in 1974–75; Wilson’s husband Edwin, who was Provost, had taught Ammons at the old Wake Forest campus in the wake of World War II. The friendships forged during that year grew and flourished for the next quarter century in abundant visits, residencies, and road trips back and forth between North and South, lovingly and vividly recounted and memorialized in these pages. Johnson’s 1750 Rambler essay on biography describes the method for Wilson’s book: “the Business of the Biographer is often to pass slightly over those Performances and Incidents, which produce vulgar Greatness, to lead the Thoughts into domestick Privacies, and display the minute Details of daily Life.” Such quotidian focus yields the great interest of Wilson’s book, as readers overhear Ammons often initiate “a conversation about teeth – cavities and crowns – Archie’s subject of first resort” (53) and hear about a Winston-Salem neighbor’s cat named Napper Tandy, part of the scene as Ammons crosses the street to read new poems. This narrative harvest is richly counterpointed by an abundance of photographs throughout the book, which stretch from Ammons in childhood to an image of Emily and Ed Wilson with Ammons’s sister Vida in 2017. I’m especially fond of an