Ramon Guthrie was an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic, painter and professor of French and comparative literature.
Background
Guthrie was born Raymon Hollister Guthrie on January 14, 1896, in New York City, the son of Harry Young Guthrie and Ella May Hollister. About two years after his birth, his father abandoned the family. His mother moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where, beset by poor health, she raised her son and an older daughter in difficult economic circumstances.
Education
Guthrie's formal education was limited by the family's poverty. After finishing grammar school, he started to work at a variety of jobs but managed to attend the Mount Hermon School in Northfield, Massachussets, for part of each year from 1912 to 1915. Later in life, in Toulouse, France, he entered the university, took two degrees in law, and pursued studies in Provençal language and literature.
Career
In 1915, Guthrie's mother's health worsened, and she went to live with a sister near New Haven, Connecticut. He took a job with the Winchester Repeating Arms factory there. Early in 1916, his mother committed suicide in the charity ward of a New Haven hospital. That fall, deciding not to return to Mount Hermon, he volunteered for the American Field Service. Arriving in France in December, Guthrie served as an ambulance driver, first on the western front and later in the Balkans. With the entry of the United States into the war, he joined the U. S. Army Signal Corps and trained as an observer. He saw considerable action during the period 1917-1918, participating in the St. Mihiel and Argonne offensives. Guthrie survived a crash serious enough for him to be awarded a disability pension, and he was credited with shooting down four enemy aircraft and received the Silver Star. Guthrie was shipped back to the United States in the summer of 1919 for convalescence, and his first poems began to appear in Norman Fitts's little magazine S4N, which Guthrie had helped found. With his disability pension as a resource, he soon returned to France, living first in Paris, where he became well known in the American expatriate community, and then in Toulouse. Guthrie returned to America in 1923, the year in which his first collection of poems, Trobar Clus, was published. He soon became part of the New York City avant-garde literary scene, but his search for a job took him to the University of Arizona, where he taught French for five terms. In 1926, he returned to France, partially at the behest of Sinclair Lewis, with whom he had developed a close friendship, and tried to make his living by his pen. Guthrie published two novels, Marcabrun (1926), a historical romance on Provençal themes, and Parachute (1928), one of the first aviation novels. Both enjoyed modest critical successes. He also published a second collection of poems, A World Too Old (1927). In 1929, probably for financial reasons, Guthrie returned to the United States; in 1930, with the help of Sinclair Lewis, he was appointed professor of French at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. From then until his retirement in 1963, except for duty in 1944 and 1945 with the Office of Strategic Services in France and Algiers, Guthrie taught full-time at the rural college, specializing in modern French writers, particularly Proust. During his Dartmouth years, Guthrie returned to France during summer vacations and sabbaticals to maintain contact with French culture, to write, and to paint. A talented amateur painter, he exhibited in shows on the East Coast. He wrote occasional articles on literary topics, including an account of his relationship with Sinclair Lewis, and frequent reviews. He also published translations and textbook anthologies of modern French literature. While teaching, Guthrie did not abandon poetry, although only a little chapbook, Scherzo from a Poem To Be Entitled The Proud City (1933), appeared in print. Numerous unpublished manuscripts attest to his continuous work. He participated in a weekly meeting of poets living in the Dartmouth area, among them Richard Eberhart, Bink Noll, and Dilys Laing. As retirement approached, he put together a rigorously chosen collection of the work of three decades, published in 1959 as Graffiti. Guthrie's most significant achievements as a poet occurred during the closing years of his life, in the context of an unremitting battle against cancer, for which he had a first operation in 1966, and with the Vietnam War, of which he was a fierce opponent, as a backdrop. In 1968, he published Asbestos Phoenix, a collection of moving lyrics, a number of which are evocative of his grief and horror at American involvement in Vietnam. In the fall of 1970, his greatest work, Maximum Security Ward, 1964-1970, was published. Guthrie died in Hanover, New Hampshire, on November 22, 1973.
A commanding figure, yet warm and approachable, his eyes twinkling with humor, Guthrie was an unusually gifted teacher, inspiring numerous Dartmouth students to pursue literary and scholarly careers. He was said to have an uncanny ability, perhaps reflective of his artistic nature, to get into the skin of the authors he discussed and to make their works, their heroes, their ideas, and their sense of art come alive in a unique fashion.
Connections
While in Toulouse, Guthrie married Marguerite Maurney, a Frenchwoman he had met during the war, on April 8, 1922; they had no children.