SIMPSON
IMPRINT IN HUMANITIES
The humanities endowment
by Sharon Hanley Simpson and
Barclay Simpson honors
MURIEL CARTER HANLEY
whose intellect and sensitivity
have enriched the many lives
that she has touched.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of
the Simpson Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of
California Press Foundation, which was established by a major
gift from Barclay and Sharon Simpson.
A Poet’s Revolution
A Poet’s Revolution
The Life of Denise Levertov
Donna Krolik Hollenberg
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
©2013 by The Regents of the University of California
Grateful acknowledgment for permission to reproduce material is made to the
Denise Levertov Literary Trust and co-trustees Paul A. Lacy and Valerie Trueblood
Rapport.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hollenberg, Donna Krolik.
A poet’s revolution : the life of Denise Levertov / Donna Krolik Hollenberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-27246-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
eISBN 9780520954786
1. Levertov, Denise, 1923–1997. 2. Poets, American—20th century—Biography.
3. Jewish Christians—Biography. 4. Levertov, Denise, 1923–1997.—Political and
social views. I. Title.
PS3562.E8876Z674 2013
811’.54—dc23
[B]
2012025828
Manufactured in the United States of America
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and
sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland
Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked,
processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is
acid-free and EcoLogo certified.
To the memory of Howard Fussiner
What is the revolution I’m driven
to name, to live in?
Denise Levertov, from “Staying Alive”
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Prologue
PART ONE. LISTENING TO DISTANT GUNS
(1923–1948)
1. “The Walls of the Garden, the First Light”: Beginnings (1923–1933)
2. “When Anna Screamed”: Levertov’s Response to Nazi Oppression (1933–
1939)
3. The Double Image: Apprenticeship during World War II (1939–1946)
4. “Recoveries”: Abortion, Adventure, and Marriage (1947–1948)
PART TWO. A COMMON GROUND
(1949–1966)
5. “Dancing Edgeways”: Coming of Age as a Poet in the New World (1949–
1955)
6. “The True Artist”: Levertov’s Engagement with Tradition (1954–1960)
7. “The Poem Ascends”: Taking a Position (1960–1963)
8. “To Speak of Sorrow”: Levertov’s Emergence as a Social Poet (1963–1966)
PART THREE. LIFE AT WAR
(1966–1974)
9. “Revolution or Death”: Living in the Movement (1966–1970)
10. “The Freeing of the Dust”: The Revolution Hits Home (1970–1974)
PART FOUR. SLEEPERS AWAKE
(1975–1988)
11. “A Woman Alone”: Beginning Again (1975–1981)
12. “The Task”: Social Protest and Liberation Theology (1982–1988)
PART FIVE. RESETTLING
(1989–1997)
13. “Of Shadow and Flame”: The Re-cognition of Identity (1989–1992)
14. “Beauty Growls from the Fertile Dark”: Facing Death (1992–1997)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Paul Philip Levertoff, London, ca. 1930
2. Denise Levertov at one and a half years old
3. Olga Levertoff with dolls
4. Betty Mitchell, June Mitchell, Audrey White, and David Mitchell, summer
1939
5. Stephen and Olive Peet, London, 1948
6. Norman Potter, ca. 1940s
7. Mitchell Goodman and Denise Levertov, Paris, 1948
8. Denise Levertov, southern Europe, early 1950s
9. Howard Fussiner and Barbara Bank Fussiner, 1963
10. Denise Levertov and Nikolai Goodman, ca. 1968–1970
11. Richard Edelman, Cochituate Park, summer 1973
12. Beatrice Levertoff
13. Swan in Falling Snow, photograph
14. Guemes Island Sunrise, photograph
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A great many people have contributed to this book. I could not have written it
without the generosity and trust of members of Denise Levertov’s family: Nikolai
Goodman and his partner, Emily Cartwright; Nefertiti; Howard Goodman; the late
Sandra Gregor; Richard Strudwick; Iris Granville-Levers; and Julia and Francesca
Levertoff. They graciously shared their memories and granted unlimited access to
family papers.
I am also deeply grateful to Denise Levertov’s many friends, who shared
memories, letters, interviews, photos, and conversation. In Australia, Ian Reid. In
Canada, the late Margaret Avison and David Bromige. In England, David Mitchell,
David Hass, Dannie Abse, Sally Potter, the late Stephen Peet, Stanley Robertson,
and the late Herbert H. Lockwood. In France, Jean Joubert and Maureen Smith.
In Ireland, Catherine Boylan. In Italy, Jehanne Marchesi. In Mexico, Maria del
Carman Abascal de Perea and Dr. Alfredo Jimenez Orozco. In the United States,
Steven Guttman, Stanley Karnow, Mark Linenthal, Barbara Fussiner, the late
Howard Fussiner, Saul Fussiner, Albert Kresch, the late Robert Creeley, Eavan
Boland, Seymour Gresser, Galway Kinnell, Adrienne Rich, Eugene Smithberg, the
late John Bicknell, the late Ted Enslin, Albert Gelpi, Barbara C. Gelpi, the late
Grace Paley, Estelle Leontieff, Kathryn Maldonado, Kathleen Fraser, Paul Lacey,
Jerome and Diane Rothenberg, Mark Pawlak, Phyllis Kutt, Richard Edelman,
Richard Lourie, Paul Lauter, Henry Braun, Elizabeth Kuhlman, David Shaddock,
Toby Furash, Isak Lindenaur, Judy Katz-Levine, Linda Falstein, Jean Stewart, Suzy
Groden, Marge Piercy, X. J. Kennedy, Mike True, Sam Hammil, the late Jon Lipsky,
Liebe Coolidge, Sam Green, Virginia Barrett, Carlene Carrasco Laughlin, Emily
Warn, Jan Wallace, Mark Jenkins, Mary Randlett, Lou Oma Durand, Sister Jane
Comerford, Valerie Trueblood, Karen Henry, David Ferry, Beth Frost, the late
Michael Mazur, and Colleen McEllroy. Still others offered hospitality and moral
support. They include Michele Sullivan, Barbara Celone, Gerry Wilkie, and Dr.
Jerome Gans.
I am fortunate to have had excellent research assistance at Stanford University
from Christy Smith, Lauren Caldwell, Maia Goodman, Amanda Thaete, Elspeth
Olson, and Megan Rowe. This assistance was supported by a series of grants from
the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. I am also grateful to my
colleagues Lynn Bloom, Ann Charters, and Jonathan Hufstader, for reading parts
of the book along the way, and to my children, Ilana Hollenberg and David
Hollenberg, who helped with both research and reading. My husband, Leonard M.
Rubin, accompanied me to many interviews, read drafts of the manuscript, was
my interpreter in Mexico, and provided constant, invaluable perspective and
support.
I have benefited from the guidance of curators and librarians in the United
States, Canada, England, and Australia. I would like to thank, in particular,
Maggie Kimball and Polly Armstrong at Stanford University, as well as all the
good-humored staff in Special Collections there. I have also drawn on the
manuscript collections of the Henry and Albert W. Berg Collection at the New
York Public Library; the Washington University Libraries; the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas; the Thomas Dodd
Research Center at the University of Connecticut; the Trustees of Lambeth Palace
Library; the archives of the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association
of New York City; the Poetry Collection of the University of Buffalo Libraries;
Special Collections at the University of Victoria Library; the Young Research
Library at University of California, Los Angeles; the Houghton and Schlesinger
Libraries at Harvard University; the Center for Archival Collections at Bowling
Green State University; Special Collections at the University of Vermont; Special
Collections at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; the
University of California, San Diego Libraries; Special Collections at the University
of Kentucky Libraries; the Beinecke Library at Yale University; Special Collections
at the University of Toronto Library; Special Collections at Flinders University
Library; and the Swarthmore Peace Collection.
Finally, at the University of California Press, I would like to thank my editor,
Rachel Berchten, for her steady encouragement, and Kim Hogeland, who helped
me with the manuscript’s final preparation. This book also benefited from the
careful work of my copyeditor, Emily Park, to whom I am very grateful.
Permission to quote from published works and unpublished material is granted
by the Denise Levertov Literary Trust, Paul A. Lacy and Valerie True-blood
Rapport, Co-trustees.
PROLOGUE
“Take responsibility for your words,” Denise Levertov admonished her students in
the late 1970s. She sat in her office in the erect posture of a ballet dancer, brown
eyes sparkling, curly hair unruly, speaking to her graduate poetry seminar about
Hopkins or Williams, or perhaps H. D. She chose her own words very carefully,
often pausing between them, sometimes even calling our attention to their
sounds: “Meeasure,” she said, mischievously drawing out the vowel sound in the
first syllable, “it rhymes with pleeasure.” Once, after class, when I showed her a
poem of my own that anticipated future changes in my life, she turned to me and
repeated the word revolution, trilling the r and flashing her gap-toothed smile in
conspiracy. “It’s from the Latin, revolvere,” she said, offering historical validation.
Many years passed before I understood the importance of that word to
Levertov. Not only did it connote political activism and momentous cultural
change, as in the Beatles’ song, but it also meant something more radical: a
reawakening of the spirit, of understanding, of empathy, and of the capacity for
transformation. This is what poetry achieves for both poet and reader. As
Levertov said in the late 1960s, responding to the political crises swirling around
her, “If I speak of revolution it is because I believe that only revolution can now
save that earthly life, that miracle of being, which poetry conserves and
celebrates.”1 The title of my biography, A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise
Levertov, reflects this range of meanings.
My book also attempts to portray Denise Levertov’s creative development.
“Who am I?” was an endlessly generative question for this poet. When she was
asked to contribute to a collection of self-portraits by writers in the early 1970s,
Levertov sent a paragraph she had written as a writing exercise with her students
titled “Incomplete Monstrous Self-Portrait.” 2 The prose was accompanied by a
drawing of the creatures she had described, and above the drawing she scrawled,
“It was beyond my capacity to depict the total monster, but please accept this
account of the parts instead.” In this paragraph, she defines herself as having the
traits of numerous creatures: In certain relationships she waddles “clumsily,” like
a swan on dry land; in others she frightens people, like a “violently affectionate
dog.” In her element, she can glide “regally,” like a dark-plumaged “waterbird,”
and in the past she has been a “chameleon,” differing in form and type depending
on her company. She concludes on a minor chord of astute capability linked with
fervid vulnerability: she “can carry burdens from forest to sea as sagaciously as
the elephant,” yet she “beat[s] on lit windows with the wistful passion of any
moth.”
Playful and high-spirited, this piece illuminates Levertov’s state of mind at the
time that it was written. To construe oneself as a “monster,” even in fun, is
revealing, to say the least. The early 1970s was a period of profound growth for
Levertov, a time of pain and guilt as well as of renewed artistic commitment. She
had just completed the poems in Relearning the Alphabet (1970), having emerged
as a social poet out of the protest movement during the Vietnam War. The title
poem is an exploration of the meanings of relationship, both with others and,
more deeply, with an estranged self that is newly recovered. Its context is
Levertov’s close connection with students at Berkeley and at MIT, who helped her
to “relearn the alphabet / relearn the world,” as she put it.3 When one considers
the romances and political activities in which she was engaged then, one can well
understand her feelings of self-division and monstrosity.
Levertov’s whimsical paragraph also foreshadows lasting issues of selfdefinition. Just two years before she died, she published a collection of “memories
and suppositions” titled Tesserae (1995), referring to the small individual pieces
of glass or stone that make up a mosaic. This book is the closest Levertov came to
writing an autobiography. Although the playful sense of monstrosity is gone, the
self-division remains: she chose to present her life in vivid pieces rather than as a
coherent narrative. What are the implications of this choice? On the one hand, it
presents a unique opportunity: Levertov offers these rich, discrete materials and
the challenge is to discover and reveal the pattern implicit in them. On the other
hand, it serves as a reminder that a person’s selfhood is fluid and unstable,
dependent not only on social and political forces but also on shifting ways of
seeing and thinking. Not only does a biographer have the challenge of discerning
the relationship between public and private, official and secret selves. There is
also the challenge of considering the extent and manner in which views of the self,
as distinct from the biographical record, develop over the course of a life. My
ultimate objective is to observe the connections between life and work in a way
that illuminates the greatness of major poems, which are, after all, the most
important “facts” in a poet’s life.
These challenges coalesce and intensify in Levertov’s case when we consider
the implications of her various names throughout her life. These begin with her
first given name, Priscilla, which was dropped in early childhood. (Even her
mother stopped using it after Denise reached the age of two.) In one of her first
pieces of juvenilia, Levertov adopted the nom de plume “Tittles,” with which she
signed a charming, illustrated novel about an eleven-year-old heroine, which she
began at age twelve but never finished. She also signed this name on letters to
her mother, some of them also illustrated, well into early adulthood. In its
playfulness, “Tittles” is reminiscent of the “Incomplete Monstrous Self-Portrait”
above. That she used it in letters to her mother is appropriate because it was her
mother, from the very beginning, who encouraged Denise’s artistic and literary
gifts.
Another early nickname that Levertov used, first as a child in England and then
as an adult in the United States, was “Denny,” or “Den.” Neutral in gender
identification, it reminds one that, like many young girls and women of her period,
Levertov downplayed her femininity in relationships with friends, presenting
herself as a tomboy. Although she never signed her work with this nickname, she
did call attention to the lack of traditional female paradigms for an adventurous
life. As she put it in her poem “Relearning the Alphabet”:
In childhood dream-play I was always
the knight or the squire, not
the lady:
quester, petitioner, win or lose, not
she who was sought.
In Levertov’s case, this male identification is particularly poignant because her
most important female role model for a life of pilgrimage was her sister Olga, nine
years her elder, who was the troubled daughter of the family. In the 1950s,
Denise changed the spelling of her surname from “Levertoff,” which is how it
appears in her first book, The Double Image, published in England in 1946, to
“Levertov,” and it remained so for the rest of her life. She made this change in
order to distinguish herself from her sister, who had published her own first book,
Rage of Days, one year after the publication of The Double Image. Although
Denise had greatly admired Olga in her childhood, she disapproved of her sister’s
later behavior, and the two became estranged. In 1964, shortly after they
reestablished contact, Olga died prematurely. As we see in the moving poems
about Olga in The Sorrow Dance (1967), her death prompted Denise to
reevaluate her own roles in the family and in the world, and she later wished she
hadn’t changed her surname.
After Denise’s marriage to Mitchell Goodman in 1947, she often signed
business letters with her married name, “Denise Goodman” or “Denise Levertov
Goodman,” and she sometimes signed letters to friends “Denny Goodman.” Selfpossessed professional that she was (and she was always self-confident as a poet),
she still deferred in her private life to the conventions for married women of that
day. She stopped this practice sometime before she and Mitch divorced in 1975,
and she began to use her own name exclusively, reflecting the impact of the
women’s movement on women’s public presentations of themselves.
Beginning in the 1970s, Levertov increasingly referred to herself both in
private and public simply as “Denise,” or “Denise Levertov.” By this time she had
fully realized the legend implicit in her preferred middle name. In her 1967 essay
“The Sense of Pilgrimage,” she claimed Dionysus as her “name-patron,” a mythic
association that blends well with her father’s Hasidic forebears and her mother’s
Welsh ancestor, Angell Jones of Mold. 4 Dionysus is, of course, a savior-god
identified with festive, rustic worship. In one of the many myths associated with
him, he was a beautiful youth, torn to pieces by a bull and reincarnated as a
grapevine. His later hero incarnation, Orpheus, was the same sacrificial god, torn
to pieces by the Maenads.5 The agony implicit here is part of the paradigm for
Levertov’s ongoing spiritual revolution.
Orpheus is also a poet and musician, instrumental in several founding myths of
poetry. Both qualities inform Levertov’s poem “A Tree Telling of Orpheus,” which
was first published in 1968 with drawings by the author. Taking the persona of a
tree who bears witness to an earth-shaking experience of the god, Levertov shows
here what poetry means to her (and potentially to all of us). She dramatizes its
power of transformation. The speaker is “wrenched from the earth root after
root” as she follows the lead of Orpheus’s music along with her “brothers,” the
other trees in the forest.6 In this, the most gestic of Levertov’s poems, the
speaker, as animated tree spirit, finesses the contradictions of gender identity,
becoming rapt in the “wars, passions, griefs” of humankind. This neutrality
enhances her freedom of movement as well as her courage, for she stumbles,
leaps, and winds in and out in an unrestrained dance that is ecstatic in its reach
and intensity.
Most important, after the presence of Orpheus fades, she and the others are
changed forever by the memory of their experience:
But what we have lived
comes back to us.
We see more.
.........................
The wind, the birds,
do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony, and the way we danced.
The music!
The splitting apart, the uprooting, although occasionally painful in the living,
was nevertheless necessary for the “poet in the world” that Levertov became. It
was also necessary for the future revolutions that characterized her later spiritual
struggles and transformations. Levertov grew from the precocious child who
signed her work “Tittles,” to the young “Denny Levertoff,” who sometimes found
femininity and family ties constraining, to the mature artist who transformed
monster into myth. She fully embraced the Dionysian associations of her given
name, Denise. In the lasting vitality it implies, revolution felt and remembered,
this process of growth is the key element of her life story.
PART ONE
Listening to Distant Guns (1923–1948)
1
“The walls of the garden, the first light”
Beginnings (1923–1933)
Ilford, Essex, with its two large parks, east and west of the River Roding, is
notable for its semirural setting, yet it is only fourteen kilometers northeast of
central London. A spirited six-year-old, Denise Levertov could easily walk the
three blocks from her home at 5 Mansfield Road to the gates of Valentines Park,
with its cultivated lawns and ample plea sure grounds. There, along the Long
Water canal, she could wander alone among the stately London plane trees she
grew to love and, seated in a leafy alcove, admire their reflection in the green
water. Or she could pause in the romantic rose garden and imagine a scarlet
bouquet gleaned from its pickings. Best of all, she could sit in a brick alcove at
Jacob’s Well and make a wish, poised in reverie before the clear water. (This
wishing well would inspire future poems.) If she wanted to play in a more ancient,
wilder landscape as she grew older, she could ride on her scooter farther, to
Wanstead Park, with its dense forest of firs and pines, its mysterious grotto, and
its larger ornamental waters. She could pretend to sail “grassy seas in the threemasted barque Emanuela” and undertake daring adventures with a friend.1 In
both parks there were hidden paths amid the hedges to stimulate her imagination
and old mansions to awaken a historical awareness. Accompanied by her older
sister, Olga, she could walk in the lush fields and farms beyond the town’s
borders, which were then easily accessible by foot, or travel deeper into the
countryside on the red double-decker, open-topped buses. Unencumbered by a
regular school day—she was homeschooled by her mother—Denise roamed this
landscape until age twelve and returned to it frequently thereafter in her work.
In “A Map of the Western Part of Essex in England,” a poem she wrote after
emigrating to the United States in 1947, Levertov adds depth and nuance to the
emotional importance of this region:
the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves,
Roding held my head above water when I thought it was
drowning me....
Wanstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry.2
Levertov’s birthplace provided a fundamental refuge from danger, an interest
in the past, and a lasting penchant for imaginative transformation. As a child,
Denise could not articulate the source of that danger, but she certainly intuited it,
for, in the poem above, she links herself with her parents, who were themselves
outsiders and immigrants in England. Estranged in a new environment, she now
understands their predicament in her childhood. A sense of hazardous alienation
lingers here, but Levertov does not dwell upon it. Rather, she reinforces a primary
kinship with the places and people she loves, and she invests her childhood home
with the remembered sweetness of a golden age: “the walls of the garden, the
first light.”
Priscilla Denise Levertoff was born at 9:15 A.M. on October 24, 1923, at 24
Lenox Gardens, in the town of Ilford, Essex. She was the youngest of three
daughters born to Beatrice Adelaide Levertoff, née Spooner-Jones, an artistic
Welsh school teacher, and the Reverend Paul Philip Levertoff, a scholarly Russian
Jew who had converted to Christianity and been ordained as a priest of the
Church of England. Her parents had met in 1910 in Constantinople, where her
mother was teaching in a secondary school run by the Scottish Church and her
father was lecturing as a visiting scholar. They were married in England, lived in
Warsaw and Leipzig before and during World War I, and settled in England soon
after the war ended. Their first child, Philippa, born in 1912, lived only six months
before dying of a respiratory ailment. She was buried in Leipzig, where in 1914
their second child, Olga Tatjana, was born. Nine years later, Denise arrived, the
only one in her family born in England.
Cultural heterogeneity and personal loss marked the lives of Levertov’s nuclear
family. Her parents (especially her father) were “exotic birds” in this ordinary
English thicket. They had endured religious persecution, expatriation, family
tragedy, and war, which could have crippled people with fewer intellectual and
spiritual resources. Downplaying their privation, Levertov lauded these resources:
not only were they all writers, her mother sang lieder and her sister was a fine
pianist, and Denise emphasized the impact of the household’s foreign atmosphere
upon her evolving identity. Even though she grew up with a passion for the trees,
churches, and wildflowers of rural England, she viewed herself as an outsider:
“Among Jews a Goy, among Gentiles . . . a Jew or at least a half-Jew . . . among
Anglo-Saxons a Celt; in Wales a Londoner . . . among school children a strange
exception.” This sense of anomaly continued into adulthood—Levertov often felt
English, or at least European, in the United States, where she was usually
considered American, and American in England—but it did not inhibit her artistic
development. Her family had given her such confidence that, though “often shy,”
she “experienced the sense of difference as an honor, as a part of knowing
(secretly) from an early age—perhaps by seven”—that she was “an artist-person
and had a destiny.”3
What were the attributes of the members of this family who invested the child
Denise with such inner strength, despite their own earlier suffering? What clues
to her future do we find in their backgrounds? A richly textured robe of family
legend envelops each of them.
• • •
Paul Philip Levertoff was a traditional patriarch. Both his perceptions of the world
and his emotional attitudes derived from the Russian Jewish shtetl in which he
was born and raised. In that world, as a boy of exceptional intellectual ability and
linguistic talent, he was devoted to the divinely decreed obligation to study
Scripture, a duty and a joy that offered “a means of escape from dark reality,”
whether it be domestic troubles or religious persecution.4 He also had a “bold
heart” and a rebellious personality. 5 As he grew into manhood, his theological
studies carried him beyond the Pale of Settlement, areas in Eastern Europe in
which Jews were allowed to live, and away from the mainstream of his people.
After he read the New Testament, he became convinced that Jesus was the
Messiah and embarked upon the project of reconciling the two faiths. For the rest
of his life, he considered himself a Jewish-Christian.
In adulthood, Levertov saw this “bold heart,” the “certainty of wings” for the
soul, as the essence of her father’s personality. In her poem “Wings in the Pedlar’s
Pack,” and in her essay “The Sack Full of Wings,” she compares her father with
Marc Chagall, his contemporary. Both men saw, as children, “an old pedlar . . .
carrying a big sack over his shoulder,” trudging along the streets of Orsha, her
father’s hometown, or through the city of Vitebsk, Chagall’s birthplace, which he
made famous in his painting “Over Vitebsk.” This figure may allude to the
Christian, anti-Semitic image of the Wandering Jew, who, in medieval legend,
taunted Jesus en route to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth as
a beggar until the Second Coming. Paul Levertoff’s Hasidic beliefs, imbued with
the ardor of ecstasy inherited from his rabbinic ancestor, “the Rav of Northern
White Russia,” contravened this noxious stereotype. He knew that the pedlar’s
sack contained “wings which would enable people to fly like birds,” and he later
interpreted that knowledge to incorporate the Gospel of Jesus as the Messiah.6
Paul Philip Levertoff was born in Orsha, Belarus, a town south of Vitebsk on the
Dnieper River, to Saul and Judith Levertoff. 7 His birth date is unclear: one source
states October 12, 1875; another states October 14, 1878. He preferred the
latter. His birth name was not “Paul Philip,” a Christian name. In a letter in
Hebrew, his father, Saul Levertoff, employs the Hebrew-Yiddish name “Feivel,”
which was probably Paul’s given name. 8 His family were originally Sephardic Jews
who emigrated from Spain to Russia after the Spanish Inquisition and there
intermarried with other Jewish families noted for their piety and learning.9
According to family legend, he was a descendant of the founder of Chabad
Hasidism, Rabbi Schneur Zalman, who was his mother’s uncle.10 The family thus
had strong Hasidic roots, part of Paul’s heritage that he never rejected. He
cherished an inherited copy of his great-uncle’s central treatise, The Tanya.
Hasidism was one of two major social currents within Eastern European Jewry.
Founded by Rabbi Israel Ba’al Shem Tov (known as the Besht), Hasidism was a
popular communal mysticism that arose in Poland in the eighteenth century, and
despite bitter opposition by the traditional rabbinate, spread rapidly. 11 The Besht
“emphasized the importance of prayer and obedience to the Law above the study
of the Law,” where such study degenerated into mere intellectual exercise.
Contrary to classical Jewish philosophers, the Besht also taught that divine
providence extends not only to every individual but to every particular in the
inanimate world as well, a view not unlike that of the pantheism of the Romantic
poets whom Denise Levertov came to love. Further, “in the tradition of the
Kabbala, the Besht taught that the end of Divine worship is attachment to G-d
(devekuth), which is essentially a service of the heart rather than the mind.” Since
God cannot be understood rationally, it is by means of emotional commitment and
obedience to the divine will that the human being can come closest to his Creator.
Hence the Besht emphasized the “intention of the heart (kavannah) in the
performance of the Divine precepts. . . . Above all, the Besht endeavored to instill
the quality of joy into Divine ser vice.”12
Dancing and singing are intrinsic to Hasidic religious worship, with special
tunes for various occasions, such as the religious festival of Simhat Torah, which
celebrates the completion of reading the Pentateuch. Hasidim may also dance
after seeing their beloved rebbe face to face, honoring his leadership. Olga
Levertoff fondly remembered that, in her childhood, her father often rejoiced
upon reuniting after a separation from his family by dancing with her. In tune
with his childhood, he sang a Yiddish-inflected nonsense song—“Yachiderálum,
pûzele, mûzele”—in accompaniment.13 The Hasidim even dance in mourning, in
loving memory of the deceased. In this context, as in Levertov’s poem “In
Obedience,” written after she learned that her father “rose from his bed shortly
before his death to dance the Hasidic dance of praise,” dancing allows a free
expression of grief, which often includes guilt, and takes one beyond these
feelings.14 As Levertov wrote, “Let my dance / be mourning then, / now that I love
you too late.”15
Hasidism spread across political borders. By the nineteenth century, half of all
Eastern European Jews had joined its ranks, although different Hasidic groups
interpreted the principles of the Besht idiosyncratically. Schneur Zalman was
known for his intellectual enthusiasm. He insisted on the three pillars of “wisdom,
understanding, knowledge” (which in Hebrew form an anagram for Chabad), and
eventually became the leader of the Hasidim of Belarus. By the late nineteenth
century, when Paul Levertoff was born, the breach between the Hasidim and their
rabbinic opponents had been healed, and the Chabad branch had come to
represent the ultra-Orthodox position in Jewry.
The Levertoff family was prosperous. Despite pervasive anti-Semitism, the czar
had awarded Paul’s father, Saul, the status of “Hereditary Honorable Citizen,” a
classification that customarily applied to influential or very wealthy
townspeople.16 He is listed in one source as a “sometime Principle of Theological
College, Poltava.” 17 The Levertoff family claimed relationships by marriage to
several wealthy Jewish business families in Saint Petersburg, including the
Poliakoffs (bankers) and the Günsbergs, who acquired titles. Saul Levertoff read
and spoke Russian as well as Yiddish and Hebrew, and he was a good
mathematician. He was acquainted with the local Christian intelligentsia, with
whom he conversed, and as Levertov wrote in her unpublished “Notes on Family,”
“Most unusual for a pious Jew, he seems to have read some Russian literature—
Tolstoy for one.”18 Thus, he probably was receptive to the ideas of the Haskalah, a
second important Jewish movement in Eastern Europe.
About the same time as Hasidism was born in Poland, the Haskalah originated
in Germany. The followers of this movement, the Maskilim, encouraged Jews “to
abandon their exclusiveness and acquire the knowledge, manners, and
aspirations” of their national homelands.19 They emphasized the study of biblical
Hebrew and of the poetical, scientific, and critical parts of Hebrew literature,
rather than the Talmud, and they opposed the superstition they associated with
Hasidism. In turn, they were denounced as destructive heretics in Russian Jewish
communities, where they were accused of hastening assimilation. By the midnineteenth century, when the Russian government began to introduce secular
education among the Jews, the tide turned toward the Maskilim, and at the end of
the century, all the new movements in the modern era grew out of the Haskalah.
Jewish nationalism, and even Orthodoxy, adopted elements of its legacy.20
Both Hasidism and Haskalah existed in the context of the greatest threat to the
Jewish world, a particularly virulent wave of anti-Semitism that pervaded Russia’s
political factions after Jews began to live outside the Pale of Settlement. Among
the radical Left, Jews were portrayed as “Western urban foreigners who live at
the expense of the Russian people.” Among conservatives, Jews represented “the
West, introducing modernism into Russia . . . and undermining the old order.”
Ironically, the reforms of Czar Alexander II exacerbated this situation, as Jews
were granted new economic powers. According to the anti-Semitic press, which
the government encouraged, the “Jewish exploiting leaseholder of the old type,
who served the Polish aristocracy,” was now the “new Jewish capitalist,” who
inflicted damage in his modern metamorphosis. The Jews of Russia were deeply
disillusioned by these sentiments, but they could not stop their escalation. The
pogroms that broke out in 1881, after Czar Alexander was killed, were a virulent
culmination. Further, under the rule of the next two czars, Russian nationalism
identified itself with the Russian Church, and religious persecution continued to
assume brutal and anti-Semitic forms.21
This was the turbulent, dangerous world into which Paul Levertoff was born
and from which he extricated himself. Not surprisingly, he seemed to have few
childhood memories. Typical of Orthodox Jews, he was one of many children. He
spoke with emotion of one “little sister . . . who died at an early age,” Levertov
recalled in “Notes for Nikolai.” Later, after Paul’s own first child died in infancy,
his wife, Beatrice, thought his deep depression revived this earlier loss. Paul also
remembered that one “much older sister . . . had gone to study medicine in
Zurich,” which Denise interpreted as meaning that she must have been among