[Maxwell was an American novelist, short story writer, and editor. In the following review of Journey around My Room, a volume edited by Ruth Limmer, he calls Limmer's work "a labor of love" and comments on Bogan's life and career.]

At two different periods in her life Louise Bogan kept a journal, most of which was published in the New Yorker, in the issue of January 30, 1980. Drawing on this, and on her letters, poems, stories, literary criticism, and conversation, Ruth Limmer has made a narrative mosaic that she calls the autobiography of Louise Bogan [Journey Around My Room]. Autobiography presupposes the writer in the driver's seat. It is a handling over, by the writer, of his or her life, and it stands or falls by its candor, which is felt in a personal way. If the handing over is done by someone else, then it is a different literary form—in this instance a species of anthologizing.

In her introduction Miss Limmer admits Journey Around My Room is not the autobiography Louise Bogan would have written had she chosen to.

A stage manager, not the playwright, has decided on the scenes and acts and on how to arrange and light the script. These are not her choices of prose or poetry, not her sequences, not her chapter divisions. But the book always speaks in her voice and is true to her experience as she revealed it.

A better analogy would have been the dramatization of a novel; one recognizes the action and often stretches of dialogue, but the shaping hand is the dramatist's and the nature of the work is inevitably altered when it is lifted from the printed page and given to actors to speak.

Miss Bogan's poetry, her criticism, her journal, and the best of her very few short stories all have an identifying quality. They are formal, crystalline, without self-indulgence or self-pity, and well beyond the small, the merely personal. They have arrived at a kind of perfection, and I do not think time will separate them from it. Her journal appears to have been written not for publication but as a way of dealing with certain abiding emotional conflicts, which she approaches again and again and turns aside from just as she is about to clear the hurdle. It is not a failure: the thing she failed to say, the story she could not bring herself to tell, is somehow there in that tense preparation and turning aside at the last moment. It is an extremely moving document.

Miss Limmer's collage has been done with the utmost care, and is clearly a labor of love. It is made up almost entirely of wonderful writing not easily come by. Such as: "In their cage at evening, in the zoo, one hippopotamus, with his great low hanging ponderous face, nuzzled the side of another. What if tenderness should be lost everywhere else, and left only in these creatures?" And:

As I remember my bewilderment, my judgment can do nothing even now to make things clear. The child has nothing to which it can compare the situation. And everything that then was strange is even stranger in retrospect. The sum has been added up wrong and this faulty conclusion has long ago been accepted and approved. There is nothing to be done about it now.

And "The dreadful thing about north rooms: not that there is no sunlight in them now, but that there has never been sun in them … like the minds of stupid people: that have been stupid from the beginning and will be stupid forever." And "Above these objects hangs a Japanese print, depicting Russian sailors afflicted by an angry ocean, searchlights, a burning ship, and a boatload of raging Japanese." It is enough to make an ordinary writer wring his hands.

The title of Miss Limmer's book is the title of Louise Bogan's most remarkable short story, which is in turn borrowed from the "Voyage autour de ma chambre" of Xavier de Maistre. The editor has broken up the story into six parts that are placed, in italics, at the beginning and end and elsewhere in the book. It may not occur to many readers to read the italicized paragraphs continuously, and so discover the masterpiece of story-telling they are confronted with. For that reason, I wish the story had not been broken up.

When the notes specify rearrangement I have been led, out of curiosity, to see what the rearrangements are. In themselves they are usually slight: the beginning of a sentence altered by two or three words for the sake of a transition; or a paragraph transposed or inserted into the middle of another paragraph, in a slightly different context. It is occasionally disconcerting to find that items follow one another sometimes with no white space or printer's symbol to warn the reader that the source has shifted. In two instances material from the journal is misdated. Passages are sometimes identified not by a phrase taken from the text, as is customary, but by the subject under consideration, with the result that identification becomes uncertain. And a note like "Except as noted, the remainder of this chapter, mostly written between 1932 and 1937, comes from Antaeus, JOAP" ["Journal of a Poet," the title given to the selections from the journal that were published in the New Yorker], and the LB papers" is perhaps a bit slapdash. More serious than any of these things, however, is that the journal has been tightened up, made continually "relevant" to a theme that the editor is interested in presenting. The result is that the natural and always mysterious and, in the case of a poet, important association of ideas has been tampered with. For example, in the book the statement

The poet represses the outright narrative of his life. He absorbs it, along with life itself. The repressed becomes the poem. Actually, I have written down my experiences in the closest detail. But the rough and vulgar facts are not there.

stands by itself with a printer's decoration separating it from the preceding material. In the journal it is part of an entry that begins "Terrible dreams!" and goes on to describe a morning of wind and rain, the tail end of a hurricane. And the paragraph in question is followed by a sentence from Chekhov: "And all things are forgiven and it would be strange not to forgive." It seems to me that there has been a loss, intellectually and emotionally.

A case for editing can always be made, but the simple truth is that you cannot rearrange any writer's work without in some way altering the effect, and if it is a writer of the first quality, is it yours to rearrange, morally speaking? On the other hand, would any publisher have been willing to publish, in the year 1980, a small volume of the fragmented and not very voluminous journal of a first-rate but never wildly popular poet? The answer to this question, I am afraid, is no.

In a chronology at the beginning of the book, and by means of entries here and there, some if not all of the rough and vulgar facts of Louise Bogan's life are made known. She was born in Livermore Falls, Maine, in 1897. Her father found it hard to make a living, and moved his family from one ugly decaying Massachusetts mill town to another. They lived sometimes in a house of their own, more often in shabby hotels and boardinghouses. It was a world teetering on the edge of nightmare. Of her mother she says,

Secrecy was bound up in her nature. She could not go from one room to another without the intense purpose that must cover itself with stealth. She closed the door as though she had said good-bye to me and to truth and to the lamp she had cleaned that morning and to the table soon to be laid for supper…. When she stood in front of the mirror adjusting her veil, it could mean she was going to church or downtown, but it could also be that she was going to the city, to her other world; it could mean trouble.

After witnessing a violent scene between her mother and father that she was too young to understand, she was gathered up in her mother's arms and when she woke the next morning she and her mother and another woman were in a wooden summerhouse on a lawn in front of a house she had never seen before. Once her mother was gone for weeks and they had no idea where she was or with whom. "A terrible, unhappy, lost, spoiled, bad-tempered child. A tender, contrite woman, with, somewhere in her blood, the rake's recklessness, the baffled artist's despair" is her summing up of this central figure of her childhood. And again, speaking of her mother:

I never truly feared her. Her tenderness was the other side of her terror. Perhaps, by this time, I had already become what I was for half my life: the semblance of a girl, in which some desires and illusions had been early assassinated: shot dead.

She was lucky in her schooling, and quick to educate herself. She began writing poetry in her early teens. After a year at Boston University she was offered a scholarship at Radcliffe and instead of taking it she married Curt Alexander, a corporal in the Army. He was, by her own description, a beautiful man and she was in love with him, but she also wanted to escape from her mother. When her husband was transferred to the Canal Zone she followed him, four months pregnant and so seasick when she arrived that she was taken off the boat on a stretcher. The unchanging tropical landscape struck her as hostile, and the marriage was a mistake. ("All we had in common was sex. Nothing to talk about. We played cards.") She left him twice, the second time permanently, and he died at 32. She supported herself and her infant daughter by workings as a clerk in Brentano's and then as an assistant in various branches of the New York Public Library. Marianne Moore was working in one of them, but shyness prevented the younger woman from introducing herself. In 1922 Harriet Monroe took five of her poems for Poetry, and she went abroad on her widow's pension, to study the piano in Vienna. Her first published criticism was a review of D. H. Lawrence's "Birds, Beasts, and Flowers" for The New Republic, two years later. That same year her first book of poems was published by Robert M. McBride and Company. She married the poet Raymond Holden in 1925, and in 1931 had her first breakdown. ("I refused to fall apart, so I had to be taken apart, like a watch.") In 1933 she got a Guggenheim fellowship and went abroad for several months. While she was gone, her husband had an affair, which she found out about and could not forgive. She continued to live with him for a few months and then left him, though she was still deeply in love with him. According to John Hall Wheelock, who was her editor at Scribner's and her friend, the poet was damaged as well as the woman. She wrote very few poems from then until the very end of her life and even that recovery amounted to a handful of marvelous poems, not an outpouring. She supported herself by reviewing, by spells of teaching here and there, and by public readings. She had a lifelong fear that the squalor of her childhood would overtake her in old age. It did not. She was given many awards and honors. In 1965 she had a third breakdown, and recovered, and on the 4th of February, 1970, died alone in her apartment on West 169th Street, almost in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge.

It is a life equally full of accomplishment and suffering. The suffering was of a particularly terrible kind, but madness did not prevail. "It is not possible," she said,

for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life…. These are the subjects that the poet must speak of nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.