"Josephine Jacobsen's mind is exquisite and urbane," wrote the Washington Post, "which is not to say that it has confined itself to salon conversation or academic discourse. ... Formal and fastidious, [she] meditates on death - oh, not because she herself is aging, nothing even faintly vulgar like that - because of her apprehension of our fleshly frailty."
A friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet William Meredith, called the late-blooming writer "post- cocious."
Jacobsen's friendships, too, started small and grew. Spires can't remember when she met the poet - probably at a reading, she says - and she recalls few grand events that propelled it.
"At first, [we met] in larger groups," says Spires, herself the author of five books of well regarded poetry. "She included me in a large circle of friends, including 10 or 15 women she had to lunches at the Hopkins Club. [Eventually], we started seeing each other one-on-one."
Jacobsen's work always reckoned with the big questions - she once called loss "the poet's motherlode," and ruminated on mortality from an early age - but she "had a gift for happiness," Spires once wrote, "and it spilled over to anyone fortunate enough to be in her orbit."
Jacobsen's longtime friend and secretary, Charlotte Blaylock, remembers her "loads of friends" and her entertaining, enlightened skills as a conversationalist. "It was a delight to listen in," Blaylock says.
Spires says that Jacobsen, unlike many in her field, was genuinely indifferent to public acclaim. "Josephine wrote because she had to," says Spires, who remembers her friend comparing poetry to a kind of surgery that brings one close to "an organ that is a life source."
Spires also admired the poet's sense of adventure. Jacobsen, a 1926 graduate of Roland Park Country School, started acting in the 1930s with the local drama troupe, Vagabond Players, and continued for years. She never tired of travel. (Even after she and Eric moved into Broadmead retirement home in Cockeysville, they continued summering in New Hampshire.)
A friendship begins
When the Jacobsens still lived in Homeland - not far from the home that Spires shares with her husband, writer Madison Smartt Bell - Spires visited her as a neighbor, sharing dry martinis, gossip and freewheeling conversation about marriage, family, mortality and art.
"No subject was off limits," Spires says. "Her directness could really startle you. I find friendships like that are rare." She calls Jacobsen, 44 years her senior, "the youngest person I knew."
