Eileen Simpson

Eileen Simpson (1918 – October 21, 2002) was an American writer and psychotherapist. Her 1982 book Poets in their Youth records her life with first husband John Berryman and his circle of poets, including Delmore Schwartz and Robert Lowell. In 1984 she was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in General Nonfiction.

Early life Born Eileen Patricia Mulligan in New York City, Simpson’s mother died when she was a small child and she and her sister were placed in a Catholic orphanage. Neglected by the nuns, she almost died of tuberculosis and, after their father died, she and her sister were sent by relatives to a preventorium in New Jersey. She struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia, a condition later identified by Berryman.

Simpson met Berryman at a New Year's party in New York in 1941, soon after her graduation from Hunter College, and they were married the following year at St. Patrick's Cathedral. The couple moved to Beacon Hill, and Berryman found work lecturing at Harvard, and later Princeton. Berryman, like other poets of his generation, would continue to earn his living through academic postings. Simpson meanwhile supported his poetry practice first with secretarial positions, and later, as a psychology student, with work at a Princeton clinic.

Poets in Their Youth Simpson's eleven years of marriage to Berryman were turbulent. As Berryman struggled as an artist, Simpson supported him practically and emotionally, even as his personal problems and behavior worsened. Simpson remained an astute and sympathetic observer of Berryman, his poet and writer colleagues, and their wives and families, including Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and R.P. Blackmur, all of whom appear in Poets in Their Youth.

Simpson's Times obituary concludes that "madness and despondency were the principal motifs of her life" with Berryman and his circle. After 11 years of marriage, she writes: "The job of net-holder had exhausted me."

Still, as the Washington Post reviewer Jonathan Yardley noted, it was a union characterized by "much happiness", and Simpson's enduring love and affection for Berryman, and the poets and poets' wives of their circle, are principal strengths of her memoir: a "cleareyed compassion... is characteristic of 'Poets in Their Youth,' which never sensationalizes these brilliant but wildly erratic young men, only seeks to understand them." Lee Siegel, reviewing its reissue in the New York Times, ascribes to the memoir "an almost uncanny clemency and a kind of cerulean objectivity", calling it "both a memorial to the men Simpson admired and an admonitory epitaph on lives lived at often false and ugly odds with their own aspirations toward truth and beauty." Orphans, Real and Imaginary. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987. Late Love: A Celebration of Marriage After 50. Peter Davison/Houghton Mifflin, 1994.