If I Were Going to Stay

Foreword

Two months before Jeanne died of cancer, in 2019, she made a list of things to be done after her death. Along with instructions to give books, jewelry and paintings to family and friends, was the request: Love poems -- Gather them, investigate self-publishing, share with friends and family.

I did not know of the list until after Jeanne died. No one, not even the four women in Jeanne's writing group of thirty years, knew that Jeanne wrote poetry.

The 78 poems in this book, remarkable for their emotional power, complex intelligence, and beauty of the words, are selected from 145 poems I found among Jeanne's papers and in her notebooks. The earliest of these is dated 1972, the latest 2016. Most are not dated. Some are typed, most are hand-written. Several, not included here, contain indecipherable words. The poems in this collection have been only lightly edited, for consistency of format. I have arranged them as best I could to reflect the course of Jeanne's life.

Jeanne wrote eight published books and many published articles and book chapters. Why then were the poems kept secret? There is an answer in the poems. Some express love, profound or light-hearted, and uncommon wisdom. But others express the loneliness of love sought but not found. Some tell of happy childhood times with her beloved maternal grandmother Bessie, her adoring uncle Bill, and friends from school. But others tell of an autocratic father, an unloving older sister, a lonely first marriage and a terrifying divorce.

Despite the torment never entirely gone, Jeanne made a remarkable decision -- to follow the path of love and kindness, so clear in these lines from The Heel of August . . . hoist up a skein of scars and love, hoist up the family bones heavy with anger, until they are luminous. Cure the blood with kindness, unrelenting gentleness . . .

Love and kindness, unrelenting gentleness -- but also a wild heart, a free spirit. You can see it in the poems and photographs of Jeanne in this volume.

When Jeanne had just turned ten, her father abruptly moved the family from the friendly Brooklyn neighborhood where she had been born to Rutherford, New Jersey, a place of big houses, oblivious neighbors, and little of interest for a young girl. Alone much of the time, she read widely in books from the local public library. At age 12, after the family had moved to another New Jersey town, Jeanne entered a Dominican college preparatory school where she was taught by educated women who introduced their students to literature, history and art and took them to museums, opera and theatre in the City.

In 1962, against the will of her father and almost penniless, Jeanne went to Paris. There she attended classes at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Sorbonne, perfected her French and married Robert Guillemin, an American painter with whom, in 1964, she had twin boys, Rob and John. They left Paris for the US later that year.

Jeanne and Robert separated in 1975 and divorced in 1979, by which time she had earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard, a doctorate from Brandeis, and had become Professor of Sociology at Boston College. For Jeanne, teaching was an opportunity to explore with her students topics in anthropology and sociology relevant to their lives and families, producing a different, deeply researched syllabus nearly every year. As a single mother, she was just able to support herself and two sons and send them to a quality boarding school.

Jeanne and I met in the summer of 1981, at a conference in Aspen, Colorado. We became close but did not marry until December 1986. We lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts with summers in Woods Hole on Cape Cod, where Jeanne created a lively salon of humanists and scientists, lovingly guided the lives of her two young granddaughters, Rob's daughters Claire and Julia, and created an undisturbed space for her writing.

We traveled often, to a favorite Bahamian island, to Greece, to England and France, where we had friends and where Jeanne conducted research in the British and French National Archives on the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal of 1946-1948, the subject of her book Hidden Atrocities, and to Russia to investigate an outbreak of Anthrax, described in her book Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak.

But why, although keeping her poems hidden while she lived, did Jeanne want them to be read after her death? Because she was a poet.

. . . I am a poet.

It's like God. I've denied it.

And life has denied it for me.

But nothing, absolutely

Nothing changes my soul or

Alters my sensibility.

Jeanne Guillemin, Cambridge, November 8, 1989

Matthew Meselson, Cambridge, August 2022