David R. Slavitt, poet and critic with a side gig in soft pornography, dies at 90

Boston Globe

13 hours ago

The writer protested. He said he had a 'serious' novel, 'Rochelle, or, Virtue Rewarded,' coming out later that year, and didn't want to undermine it with something much lighter. Plus, he said, he was a highbrow author and translator of classical poetry, not a paperback hack.
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But the chance to try a new genre was too tempting. He hit on a solution: writing under a pseudonym, Henry Sutton.
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The result, 'The Exhibitionist,' about an actress and her rich father, appeared in 1967. Tame by today's standards, it was decried as near pornography. And it sold 4 million copies.
'It was every English major's dream,' Slavitt told The Boston Globe in 2006. 'I put my children through college and could continue to write poems and translate Ausonius, whom nobody has ever heard of.'
Mr. Slavitt, who died on May 17 at his home in Cambridge, was never one to be bound by genre or expectations -- a valuable instinct for someone as prodigious as he was, with more than 130 works, including books of poetry and fiction, plays, and translations. He also, in 2004, ran for the state Legislature as a Republican in the Democratic bastion of East Cambridge/Somerville.
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His wife, Janet Abrahm, confirmed his death.
The bulk of Mr. Slavitt's work occupied the loftiest reaches of high culture. He translated Virgil, Ovid, and Seneca, among many others. His poetry exhibited a mastery of traditional forms, though in a contemporary voice packed with wit and erudition.
'Though his stanza forms are often intricate, they never prevent, or even impede, the explorations of a mind that takes suggestions as they come, weaving them into the pattern,' wrote critic Henry Taylor in his book 'Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets' (1992).
Mr. Slavitt wrote the libretto for an opera about the welfare system, based on a film by documentarian Frederick Wiseman, a close friend, and a play, 'King Saul,' which debuted off-Broadway in 1967.
And he wrote several other novels, including the comic 'Anagrams' (1970), about a poet invited to speak at a literary festival where no one has read his work -- a dig at what he called the 'quality lit biz,' which he was both part of and felt slighted by, in its frequent ignorance of his work.
But the call of pulp fiction persisted. He wrote seven more novels as Henry Sutton, among them 'The Proposal' (1980), about swinger culture. More books followed under more pseudonyms -- he even borrowed the name of his first wife, Lynn Meyer, for a mystery novel, 'Paperback Thriller' (1975).
'The theory was that it would be nice to make some kind of distinction between the two kinds of work, and the two kinds of audiences,' he said in an interview with Terry Gross in 1978.
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As he told the Globe: 'When General Motors makes a cheap car they call it a Chevy, and when they make a good car, they call it a Cadillac. `The Exhibitionist' is not a book I would read had I not written it.'
Under his own name, he wrote a memoir of his unsuccessful 2004 run for the Massachusetts House of Representatives, 'Blue State Blues: How a Cranky Conservative Launched a Campaign and Found Himself the Liberal Candidate (and Still Lost)' (2006).
Not even death precludes more of Mr. Slavitt's titles from appearing, at least for now: His final book of poetry, 'Last Words,' is slated for publication in 2028.
'I do what entertains me,' he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996, adding that he was able to write so widely because 'I have an absolute absence of any kind of fear.'
David Rytman Slavitt was born on March 23, 1935, in White Plains, N.Y., the son of Samuel Slavitt, a lawyer, and Adele (Rytman) Slavitt, her husband's longtime secretary.
He was among the few Jewish students admitted at the time to Phillips Academy in Andover. He went on to study literature at Yale under the tutelage of another wide-ranging man of letters, Robert Penn Warren, and graduated in 1956.
The same year, he married Meyer; they divorced in 1977. He married Abrahm, a palliative care specialist, in 1978.
Along with her, he leaves three children from his first marriage, Evan Slavitt, Sarah Bryce, and Joshua Slavitt; nine grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
He taught occasionally at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland, Rutgers University, and the University of Pennsylvania, among other schools.
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His run in 2004 for the Massachusetts State House was quixotic, if not quite poetic. Mr. Slavitt tilted his run at incumbent Democrat Timothy Toomey in the then-still working class district straddling East Cambridge and Somerville. Mr. Slavitt ran as a 'Schwarzenegger Republican without the groping,' he told the Globe's Alex Beam.
When it was noted that the Globe had ignored his campaign memoir, he cheerfully replied, 'Well, they ignored the last 85 books as well.'
Material from Globe staff was included in this obituary.