The Passions of Uxport

by Maxine Kumin

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399 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1968

About the author

Maxine Kumin's 17th poetry collection, published in the spring of 2010, is Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010. Her awards include the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes, the Poets’ Prize, and the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost Medals. A former US poet laureate, she and her husband lived on a farm in New Hampshire. Maxine Kumin died in 2014.

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first heard of The Passions of Uxport in Maggie Doherty's The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s , which explored the camaraderie of authors and artists Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton, Tillie Olsen, Barbara Swan, and Mariana Pineda during their participation in Radcliffe College's Institute for Independent Study program. Set in a fictionalized Boston suburb based on Newton, Kumin's novel is a character study focusing on two women in mixed Jewish-WASP marriages, together with their various family members, a mentally ill handyman, and an elderly Freudian psychoanalyst.

The Passions of Uxport received little notice when it was first published in 1968 and seems to have had only one other print run in 1975. Tillie Olsen was unimpressed by it and declined to provide a blurb, finding it another example of Kumin's tendency to "turn away from what is deepest" in her fiction, which in this case meant probing more into the "marriage friendship humancloseness" of her main characters. Kumin interpreted this as a judgement on her real-life friendship with Anne Sexton and things between her and Olsen subsequently cooled afterwards, never to recover. Doherty largely agrees with Olsen's assessment. The Passions of Uxport, she writes in The Equivalents, "is occasionally entertaining, but not especially insightful about either manners or mores." She further describes it as "often feel[ing] like light reading, despite Kumin's increasing interest in politics." Yet the hot-button issues of the tumultuous Civil Rights Era have little impact on these privileged white suburbanites, and Kumin ultimately lacked "the psychological acuity that characterizes the great novelist." Doherty does, however, praise the authenticity of the friendship between Kumin and Sexton's fictional avatars Hallie and Sukey, the latter of whom also struggles with the suicidal tendencies that eventually killed Sexton.

While I too noted a paucity of psychological depth, especially with regards to the death of nine-year-old Binky and Ernie's all-too-neat recovery from a violent outburst that led to a stay in a mental hospital, I was surprised at how engaging the story was otherwise. Like The Great Gatsby it has the feel of having been a very voguish "in the moment" book at the time it was written. The setting is among the educated elites of Boston and Philadelphia, a world Kumin knew well, and at times there is a tangible atmosphere reminiscent of clinking cocktail glasses between sharply dressed people in the most classically stylish Midcentury Modern interiors.

"It was the most incredible assortment. There were Eames chairs and Saarinen chairs and built-in settees of orange and yellow, alternating, you know, those nubby wools, and rugs woven by pleasant Laplanders. And the people were just as wild. An assortment, I mean. From department heads in herringbone suits to button-down pink shirts, and a lady sculptor in a green velveteen dress all spotted down the front from a thousand dinners, and a guy in an eye patch and desert boots, and an imagist poet in little torturers' gloves of maroon leather who never took them off, not even to stroke the lady sculptor's cheek. God! And the most marvelous stereotype of the new-school Negro novelist, all bearded and with those one-way dark glasses with the lenses silvered over and an enormous cigar, probably left over from Castro's Cuba. Or maybe just shipped in from, you know, smuggled. With rum."

I think The Passions of Uxport works as what publishers are now broadly calling "women's fiction": novels that focus on the domestic concerns and major life challenges of female characters in realistic contemporary settings. I would recommend it for people specifically interested in the late 1960s (the characters' insularity from the political upheaval is itself telling) or in the lives of Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton. It doesn't seem to be widely available in public libraries, but I was able to get a copy through ILL from an academic library.

Another review from The Neglected Books Page.