Wallace Fowlie


Wallace Fowlie was an American writer and professor of literature. He was the James B. Duke Professor of French Literature at Duke University where he taught from 1964 to the end of his career. Devoted to teaching, particularly undergraduate courses in French, Italian, and modernist literature, Fowlie influenced several generations of American college students over a six-decade career of teaching. Probably his best-known student is another writer and critic of French literature, Roger Shattuck. Fowlie was also noted for his correspondence with literary figures such as Henry Miller, René Char, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Saint-John Perse, Marianne Moore, and Anaïs Nin. He is best known for his translations of Arthur Rimbaud, which were appreciated by a younger generation that included Jim Morrison and Patti Smith. In 1990, Fowlie consulted with director Oliver Stone on the film The Doors.

Biography

Fowlie discovered French as a high school student in Brookline, Massachusetts. One of the influential events of his adolescence was a visit to Copley Plaza to attend a virtually incomprehensible lecture by Paul Claudel. Recalling the lecture in his memoir Journal of Rehearsals, Fowlie wrote "I felt that a part of my destiny would be to study his poetry and to understand it in French as one, possessor of two languages, might do." In 1928, while in his third year at Harvard, Fowlie traveled to France for the first time. He stayed with the family of Ernest Psichari in Paris, and later wrote his thesis on Psichari, a writer and religious thinker who had died in the first World War. By this time, he had also completed his first reading of Proust, which he described as " the most profound literary experience I have ever had." Over the course of his lifetime, Fowlie traveled to France many times and befriended writers such as Gide, Cocteau, St. John Perse, and Jean Genet. At Harvard he attended the classes and lectures of T.S. Eliot. One day Eliot invited a small group of students to meet a friend of his. This 'friend' turned out to be the poet W.B. Yeats. On another occasion, Fowlie saw Eliot collapse with a violent thud in the Catholic chapel. He helped him up and led him back to his seat. He immediately recognized that Eliot had had a mystical experience.
From the forties onward, Fowlie filled a vacuum in academia. There was room for a great teacher and explainer of significant modern French poets and writers in America and England. For several decades, Fowlie was the pre-eminent critic of French literature in America, something which earned him a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 1947. He published book after book on the great French writers he revered, including Mallarmé and Rimbaud. He was the first translator of Rimbaud in English: his Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters appeared in 1966. This work aligned him with his friend Henry Miller, whose work he championed, and brought Rimbaud to a new generation of fans — and with it the acknowledgment and gratitude of rock stars Patti Smith and Jim Morrison. Morrison wrote Fowlie a letter which he forgot about until his students played him the music of the Doors. He quickly recognized Rimbaud's influence in the lyrics. Then he remembered and retrieved the letter. As an octogenarian, he published Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel As Poet.

Works