Claude Fredericks

Claude Fredericks (October 14, 1923 – January 11, 2013) was an American poet, playwright, printer, writer, and teacher. He was a professor of literature at Bennington College in Vermont for more than 30 years, from 1961 to 1993.
In the late 1940s Fredericks founded The Banyan Press, which for decades issued hand-set limited editions by writers such as Gertrude Stein, John Berryman, and James Merrill. The Journal of Claude Fredericks, a personal diary that is unprecedented in its length, continuity, detail, and candor, has been published in several volumes. More than 50,000 manuscript pages are held by the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California.
As a teacher at Bennington, Fredericks's students included the novelist Donna Tartt, who modeled a character on Fredericks in The Secret History (1993) and who dedicated The Goldfinch (2013), winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, to Fredericks. Other students included: novelist Bret Easton Ellis, poets Anne Waldman and Kathleen Norris, Roger Kimball, editor and publisher of The New Criterion, Thomas Matthews, editor of The Wine Spectator, activist Andrea Dworkin, and philanthropist Yasmin Aga Khan. Colleagues of Fredericks at Bennington included: novelists Bernard Malamud, Arturo Vivante, and Shirley Jackson, poet Howard Nemerov, literary critics Stanley Edgar Hyman, Kenneth Burke, and Camille Paglia, art critic Lawrence Alloway, composers Marc Blitzstein, Henry Brant, and Peter Golub, painters Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, and sculptor Anthony Caro.

Fredericks was born in Springfield, Missouri, in 1923. A precocious and lonely child, he spent much of his time reading books and writing in the diary he began when he was eight years old. In these early diaries, he often wrote of the isolation he felt growing up in the Ozarks. Early on, he caught glimpses of a larger world—one in which he wanted to be a part—at the weekly Sunday afternoon picture shows he attended with his mother, and also from plays and symphony concerts, broadcast on the radio, from New York and elsewhere. His childhood in Missouri was also punctuated by several trips he took with his mother to New York, the Caribbean, Mexico—and to Europe before the onset of World War Two.

In 1941, at seventeen, he entered Harvard College, where he studied Greek with John Huston Finley, Jr., Sanskrit with Walter Eugene Clark, and Oriental Art with Langdon Warner, and became a friend of, among others: May Sarton, John Simon, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Alan Rich, Paul Doguereau, and Miss Fanny Peabody Mason. Though his time at Harvard was formative in several important ways—as several recently published volumes of his Journal from this period attest—the strictures he encountered there, academic and otherwise, proved to be intolerable and, after a year and a half, he left college. He would later confess, not quite accurately, that he spent most of his time at Harvard writing love poems, attending concerts and plays, and writing at length in his journal.

In 1944, he moved to New York, settled into a large, empty room at 35 East 65th Street, and began to study on his own. He continued to write his journal, as well as stories and poems—but also, during these first years in New York, several radio plays and a short novel, The Wedding.

It was during this time that Fredericks decided to print books by hand. As the young writer had always had a great passion for writing and for books, printing seemed to him to be an activity to which this passion could be directed, as well as a way for a very private writer to make a living without having to worry about trying to get published. In 1946, he worked for a short time at Anaïs Nin’s Gemor Press, learning some of the rudiments of printing.

In 1947, he started a press of his own—in a basement butcher-shop on East 29th Street—and named it The Banyan Press, after the Oriental tree that re-roots itself from its own branches. Almost at once, in his early twenties, Fredericks gained a distinguished reputation. He printed books and broadsides that are in themselves small works of art, often stunning in their simplicity and elegance. He printed books off and on for close to fifty years, and today they are much sought after by those who love fine printing—as well as by collectors and by rare book dealers.

Fredericks is perhaps better known to the world at large for his printing than for his writing. In the January 1979 issue of Fine Print, he summarized his intentions as a printer:

to expunge from the idea of craftsmanship much that is precious, self-asserting, and merely silly, and to get free of all such ideas of 'fine printing', 'art', and 'design'; to print—by hand of course—the classics of our literature with integrity, simplicity, and skill, and with the best materials available; to make new and immediate those texts that endure but that in the passage of time inevitably grow tarnished and deserve in every new generation to be translated and to be printed still again. This means, of course, conceiving them anew in the language of one’s own time—but with neither eccentricity, self-expressiveness, nor a radical break with whatever subtle tradition is present—not designing them, but letting their beauty arise inevitably and uniquely from the flawless skill of true craftsmanship, from the very making of the book itself.

The complete printing of Fredericks is far-ranging and consists of usually unpublished work, printed by hand in limited editions, by well-known writers such as Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Richard Eberhart, Stephen Spender, Osbert Sitwell, André Gide, Florine Stettheimer, James Merrill, Robert Duncan, John Berryman, Thomas Merton, Bernard Malamud, Charles Simic, as well as works by John Donne, Thomas Traherne, William Blake, Meister Eckhart, Francis of Assisi, and other writers from earlier centuries. Many university libraries and public libraries, including The Rare Book Room of The New York Public Library, have extensive collections of the large output that Fredericks produced over his 50 years as a printer. Complete runs are at The Fales Library at New York University and also at The Research Institute of The Getty Center in Los Angeles. There was a large exhibition of Fredericks’s entire production on display at The Fales Library in 1985. In his introduction to the exhibition, Frank Walker, Curator at The Fales, wrote: “The Banyan Press is one of the finest of 20th Century small presses in the classic purity of its design, the quality of its execution, and the excellence of the work it chose to publish...."

Fredericks moved to a beautiful Greek Revival farmhouse in Pawlet, Vermont in 1948 and, for the greater part of the next decade, in addition to spending a great deal of time printing at his press and writing in his journal, he also began to write plays. Over the course of the next thirty years Fredericks wrote more than a dozen plays, many of them performed in New York and elsewhere, as well as several other plays that remain unfinished. His three most successful plays were performed off-Broadway in the Fifties and Sixties. Julian Beck and Judith Malina at The Living Theatre produced Fredericks’s The Idiot King in 1954, and in 1961 The Artists Theatre, directed by Herbert Machiz and John Bernard Myers, produced Fredericks’s On Circe’s Island and A Summer Ghost. In 1965, A Summer Ghost appeared in the first volume of New American Plays, edited by Robert Corrigan, and The Bennington Review included On Circe’s Island in its issue for the winter of 1969. The Idiot King was not published, however, until 2012, when it finally appeared, alongside A Summer Ghost and On Circe’s Island, in a volume entitled, simply, Three Plays.

In 1961 Fredericks began to teach Greek, Italian, and Japanese literature at Bennington College, famous for the non-traditional, even radical, liberal-arts education it offered its students. His courses there—among them: Homer, Virgil & Dante, Poetic Idiom, Shakespeare, Japanese Novels, Theatrical Idiom, Religious Experience—were taught not in a classroom but usually in a living room in one of the old white clapboard student houses scattered about the Common were notable at the time. To him the books he taught from were living things which he had spent a whole lifetime reading, studying, and thinking about—he only taught works he loved—and he brought that love, heavy with the weight of his own personal grappling with the texts, to bear in every class he taught over the course of more than thirty years. Fredericks also taught tutorials, to one or to several students, usually held in his second-floor corner office in the Commons Building at Bennington. In these tutorials—in Greek, mostly, but in thesis tutorials as well— he would be able to cover in more detail, to concentrate more deeply, on a particular text, to answer a student’s questions more thoroughly, and to guide his or her study more completely than when he was making a presentation to a large class. To generations of students, and to many of his own colleagues, Claude Fredericks seemed to exemplify all that Bennington stood for. He left Bennington in 1993.

Above and beyond these accomplishments Fredericks’s greatest achievement is his Journal, a personal diary that is unprecedented in its length, continuity, detail, and candor. The Journal Of Claude Fredericks, begun in 1932 when he was eight years old, and written by him over the course of more than eighty years, up until a week before his death, is a document of some 65,000 pages in length, one of the longest personal narratives in the language. In his 2015 biography of the poet James Merrill (James Merrill: Life and Art, Knopf, 2015) Langdon Hammer at Yale, one of the trustees of The Claude Fredericks Foundation, writes: “...Over time The Journal would become a unique archival record and a massive literary work in its own right––a project of self-knowledge tirelessly pursued. It was purchased by the Getty Research Institute (at The Getty Center in Los Angeles) in 1988, at which point it consisted of more than 30 million words.” In a prospectus printed by The Stinehour Press in 1997, Fredericks described The Journal in this way:

It is a book that is peopled with literally thousands of people but documents a life often passed in monkish solitude. At times the journal is compulsively detailed about the merest minutiae of daily life but at other times consciously and with as much art as the writer at any given moment has at his command seeks to create the reality of an hour, an evening, a day. There is a good deal of actual narrative—that of the writer’s own life and also that of the lives of innumerable other people—but also a great deal of introspection that seeks to understand the narrative and what it says about the nature of life itself.

In 1995 Fredericks, with the collaboration of Marc Harrington, a former student at Bennington, began the vast project of editing this long journal for publication in its entirety and, since 2004, the first 4,000 pages have been published: The Journal of Claude Fredericks Volume One, Two, and Three (1932-1943). Volume Four (1944), which represents the next fifteen-hundred pages, ones that Fredericks was preparing in the months prior to his death, will be published as editing is completed. In 2005, Fredericks's Selected Poems was published. In the afterword to the book Fredericks wrote:

These cries and whispers—of loneliness and yearning and loss, of brief joy and long grieving, the trinkets and baubels that in most lives keep the baying hounds of desire and terror at bay—lead finally in the last of the poems in this book to the love that was always sought buy never found till then, to art and self-discipline learned only by long and patient striving that at last could begin to see things as they are, beyond being and emptiness both, to see at last whole what had been only a mass of glittering fragments catching for one momen the light. All these poems are glimpses one after the other into the life that the long journal that was written simultaneously with the poems but is only now at last in the process of being, volume by volume, published gives detail and context, and particularity. From the several thousand poems written over the course of more than 70 years but by and large unpublished until now a first selection of 141 poems has been made, ones written between 1941 and 2004. The original manuscripts of most of these poems, both drafts and revisions as well as final versions, ones sometimes existing only in the journal that is now being published or in letters that in time will be published, make up part of the archive of the papers of Claude Fredericks at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

In 1978, The Claude Fredericks Foundation was incorporated with the two-fold purpose of publishing the entire Journal and other of Fredericks's writings as well as preserving—as a museum, library, and retreat center—the writer’s house and land in Pawlet, Vermont.

Fredericks had a romantic relationship in the early 1950s with James Merrill. Merrill wrote about the relationship in his 1993 memoir, A Different Person.

Marc Harrington began living with Fredericks in 1995. The last 15,000 pages of The Journal Of Claude Fredericks is a detailed depiction of their intimate life together. They married in 2010. Harrington is the director of The Claude Fredericks Foundation.