With the recent discovery of seven letters in an attic in Litchard, Massachusetts, we are able to significantly advance the scholarship concerning the early relationship between the author Robinson Day (who wrote the seven letters) and the poet Mary Irwin (who received them and, it appears, secreted them in a shoe box, which was in turn placed inside a hatbox and stored on a high shelf in the attic of her mother’s house in Litchard). Day and Irwin, of course, were involved for more than six years (from 1955 to 1961), four of them as husband and wife, and their life together has been well documented, particularly the final phase, when Day was consumed by his monograph on the poetry of Ernest Norris and Irwin, deep within what she would later call her “decade of working hard not to work,” was beginning a love affair with the playwright Christopher Padilla. Prior to their marriage, the relationship between Day and Irwin was primarily an epistolary one. They met while studying abroad in London in 1947, at which time they struck up a platonic friendship, as both were linked to other partners: Day to Lucille Danning, whom he would marry in 1948, and Irwin to Andrew McClennan, whom she would marry in 1949. Those unions were short-lived. Day’s problems with alcohol, which have been written about at great length, most notably by the author himself in Decoy Parties, hastened the demise of his marriage to Danning, while Irwin and McClennan’s union ended when McClennan was murdered in January 1950 by an intruder in the lobby of his tennis club in San Martin, California.
