Rage, jealousy, vengefulness, mordant humor, self-regard and self-loathing: these emotions and more roiled Djerassi's heart when, in 1983, the woman he loved and had lived with for six years left him for a younger man. So powerful were these emotions, and so determined was he to win this literary woman back on her own turf, that he found himself, for the first time in his life, writing poetry. From the depths of his desire for revenge bubbled forth "this volcanic poetic eruption," as many as thirty or forty poems in the space of months, "confessional, self-pitying, even narcissistic," he writes. And she did eventually come back. Diane Middlebrook, Djerassi's muse and "the great love of my life," became his third wife in 1985, their marriage lasting until her death in 2007.
The poems remained private for decades, but as a way to cope with her absence in death, Djerassi has now edited and collected them into a dual-language volume published this spring as A Diary of a Year of Pique 1983-84 (2012; Haymon Verlag, distributed in the U.S. by University of Wisconsin Press), which casts a retrospective elegiac veil over poems brimming with the heady emotions of lived life, passions constrained into language. The poems narrate a hinge year, a time of turning and change, leading not only to the return of his beloved but to a self-transformation: this is the moment when Djerassi put his life as a chemist behind him and adopted the life of a writer. Then came the short fiction, novels, and plays which have flowed prolifically from him ever since.
The poems seethe, cajole, curse, reject, invite, reflect. He skewers his rival, baldly paints his own portrait, and his suffering both idealizes and rawly debunks love, sometimes within a single poem. Even when revealing his love in all her human imperfections ("Not truly beautiful: / hips: a touch too high;/ breasts: full, but now a touch too droopy"), still goddess-like "she glidingly strides or stridingly glides." He, a Vulcan deformed by his intense jealousy, throws over his unfaithful Venus "the golden net" first of his affluence and later of his poetry.
The book bodies forth the elegance not only of his muse, "an avis rarissima," but also of its polymathic creator. Presented in English and German on facing pages, the volume's pages are lightly seasoned with French and Italian, allude to Ovidian myths of transformation, and pay tribute to the poet Wallace Stevens and the painter Paul Klee, whose self-portrait furnishes pitch-perfect cover art. Many of these themes converge in the poem "Vocalissima," addressed to Stevens (the subject of Middlebrook's dissertation) and invoking the great poet's aid as Djerassi strives to remake himself in Stevens's image:
... a master of chemical mutations,
Whose alchemy touched millions,
Could not transform her,
Nor transform himself.
Vocalissime! Speak it!
How does a modern alchemist
Transmute himself
Into a Vocalissimus?
This volume functions as both a supplement to Djerassi's literary output and as an introduction to it, relating its genesis. Appealing to all readers will be the utterly human self-probing of a mind in crisis, compelled to review its first sixty years-- its triumphs and humiliations, its significant gains and profound losses--and from these roiling, foamy waters to emerge, whole and wholly changed.
--A.B.