Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
Blossoms on our Saucer Magnolia ignite
For their feverish five days white….
Last night I held your hands,
Petite
,
Subtlest of all God’s creatures, still pure nerve,
Still purer nerve than I,
Who, hand on glass
And heart in mouth,
Outdrank the Rahvs once in the heat
Of Greenwich Village, and sat at your feet—
Too boiled and shy
And poker-faced to make a pass,
While the shrill verve
Of your invective scorched the solid South.
On warm spring night [
sic
] though, we can hear the outcry,
If our windows are open wide,
I can hear the South End,
The razor’s edge
Of Boston’s negro culture. They as we
Refine past culture’s possibility,
Fear homocide [
sic
],
Grow horny with alcohol, take the pledge …
At forty why pretend
It’s just the others, not ourselves, who die?
And now you turn your back,
Sleepless, you hold
Your pillow to your hollows like a child,
And once again,
The merciless Racinian
tirade
Breaks like the Atlantic on my head:
“It’s the injustice … you are so unjust.
There’s nothing accommodating, nice or kind—
But
What
can
I
do
for
you?
What can I do for you,
Shambling into our bed at two
With all the monotonous sourness of your lust,
A tusked heart, an alcoholic’s mind,
And blind, blind, blind
Drunk! Have pity! My worst evil
Is living at your level.
My mind
Moves like a water-spider….
The legs stick and break in your slough.
Why prolong our excruciation now?
What is your purpose? Each night now I tie
Ten dollar
30
The draft version ends here, but the line finally (in “To Speak of Woe …”) reads:
Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh….
The last poem in
Life
Studies
—“Skunk Hour”—shows the poet free-lancing out on one of his nocturnal car rides. It is the most nakedly desperate piece in the book, and Lowell called it “the
anchor
poem of the sequence.” “Skunk Hour” was the first of the
Life
Studies
poems to be finished: after his tour of the West Coast in March 1957 Lowell “began writing lines in a new style,” but
No poem … got finished and soon I left off and tried to forget the whole headache. Suddenly, in August, I was struck by the sadness of writing nothing, and having nothing to write, of having, at least, no language. When I began writing “Skunk Hour,” I felt that most of what I knew about writing was a hindrance.
31
He began the poem in mid-August 1957 and completed it in a month. It was modeled, he said, on Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Armadillo.” Both poems “use short line stanzas, start with drifting description and end with a single animal.”
32
The “drifting description” in the first four stanzas of “Skunk Hour” is of an ailing Maine sea town. The inhabitants are either anachronistic or nouveau-absurd: “our summer millionaire, / who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean / catalogue”; “our fairy
decorator
.” According to Hardwick, all these people “were living, more or less as he sees them, in Castine that summer. The details, not the feeling, were rather alarmingly precise, I thought. But fortunately it was not read in town for some time, and then only by ‘people like us.’”
33
Perhaps because of the way the poem develops, explicators have been overeager to make these opening descriptive lines more weighty and sinister than they really are—in truth, they are meant as lightish social comedy: “I try to give a tone of tolerance, humor, and randomness to the sad prospect.” As Lowell said, “all comes alive in Stanzas V and VI”:
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town….
My mind’s not right.
A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love….” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat….
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—
… This is the dark night. I hoped my readers would remember John of the Cross’s poem. My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan and agnostical. An Existential night. Somewhere in my mind was a passage from Sartre or Camus about reaching some point of final darkness where the one free act is suicide.
34
The closing image of the mother skunk risking all to feed her “column of kittens” is meant as ambiguous affirmation—the skunk
family are to be seen as a “healthy, joyful apparition—despite their diet and smell, they are natural power.”
35
The poet who feels lower than a skunk finds both comedy and renewal in the beasts’
quixotically
defiant march up Main Street. They are scavengers but could never be “Republicans.” The skunks are both touching and funny, and, as much as anything else, it is Lowell’s wit, his delight in the barbarous and the absurd, that rescues him from “final darkness.” Read like this, the poem does indeed “anchor” a sequence that has asked, time and again, and in the worst of circumstances: “What use is my sense of humor?”
*
Apart from Allen Tate’s “dissenting opinion,” the response of
Lowell’s
friends to the manuscript of
Life
Studies
had been enthusiastic, and in November 1958 Lowell was particularly gratified to get a view of the finished book from William Carlos Williams, a view that (although rather confused in its expression—Williams was already a sick man) must have eased any lingering fears that the Williams influence was unassimilated:
36
Dear Cal,
Floss has just finished reading me your terrible wonderful poems. You have lost nothing of your art, in fact you have piled accomplishment upon accomplishment until there is nothing to be said to you in rebuttle [
sic
] of your devastating statements or the way you have uttered them. I’m trying to be not rhetorical but to approach the man you are with all defenses down.
Either this has to be a long letter hinging [
sic
] growth in your sheer mastery of your skill in English composition or a heartbreaking
statement
of the human situation which has posessed [
sic
] you for the last ten years. To be a successful artist means a victory in the first place and then over the world you inhabit. Poverty as in the case of the painters
Cezanne
and Van Gogh—It was a mistake to bring that in here but I am merely stalling for words. You have nothing to do with that. Your problem was the English language. Your use of the words is aristocratic—sometimes you use rhyme—but thank goodness less and less
frequently
and that is an improvement, you speak more to us, more directly when you do not have to descend to it, your language gains in
seriousness
and ability in your choice of words when you abandon rhyme completely. I’m just fumbling around knowing I have much to say to you but without release.
The book must have caused you some difficulty to write. There is no lying permitted to a man who writes that way.
(Next day)
I couldn’t go on. The book took too much out of me which I don’t have any more to give. It’s very impressive but I couldn’t read it again. The one short lyric is really beautiful [probably “For Sale”], finished and beautiful.
Do you want me to return the manuscript, otherwise I’ll keep it in my files—for some one of my literary executors to discover for himself and wonder at.
Keep well, Dear Cal
Bill
Oddly enough,
Life
Studies
, the most “American” of Lowell’s books, made its first appearance in Britain, in April 1959. Faber and Faber wanted to enter it for selection by the newly formed Poetry Book Society, and to qualify, the English edition had to be a “first edition.” Charles Monteith of Faber recalls:
we went ahead as fast as we could, which is why “91 Revere Street” isn’t in it—we never even saw it until it appeared in the American edition—and I got page proofs ready in time and submitted them to the Poetry Book Society, and the upshot of all this was that it wasn’t even
recommended.
The choice that time was
The
Wreck
of
the
Magyar
,
by Patricia Beer.
37
Apart from a review in the
Observer
by A. Alvarez which
heralded
“Something New in Verse,”
38
and more cautious tributes by G. S. Fraser in the
New
Statesman
(“accomplished … interesting and touchingly ‘human’”)
39
and Roy Fuller in the
London
Maga
zine
,
40
the British reviews were fairly tepid. Frank Kermode’s piece in the
Spectator
spoke of “a poet so sure of his powers that he does not recognise the danger of lapsing into superior doggerel when he too luxuriously controls it,”
41
and someone called Peter Dickinson in
Punch
announced that “few of the poems are in themselves
memorable
.”
42
But perhaps the British review that would have mattered most to Lowell was by Philip Larkin in the
Manchester
Guardian.
Larkin had already been in respectful correspondence with Lowell, and “respectful” is perhaps the best word to apply to his verdict on
Life
Studies;
the family poems he describes as “curious, hurried, off-hand vignettes, seeming too personal to be practised, yet none the less accurate and original,” and of the whole book he writes:
In spite of their tension, these poems have a lightness and almost flippant humour not common in Mr Lowell’s previous work, matched with a quicker attention to feeling which personally I welcome. If these
qualities
are products of the stresses recorded in the final few poems of this book, Mr Lowell will not have endured in vain.
43
The American reviews began to appear in May 1959. Richard Eberhart led the way in the
New
York
Times
Book
Review.
Uncertain about Lowell’s new style, its “prosaic quality,” Eberhart nonetheless elected to go overboard:
Lowell’s poems have a lasting tensile strength. They are made of finer blood, thrown together in a violence of imaginative reality controlled by sensitive knowledge of linguistics and cognitive nuances…. Savagery and sophistication meet in a style that is original, the Lowell idiom.
44
But as usual, the important judgments came in the quarterlies. F. W. Dupee in
Partisan
Review
rather regretted the abandonment of Lowell’s old heroic stance: “He wrote as if poetry were still a major art and not merely a venerable pastime which ought to be
perpetuated
.” On the other hand, though, these new works had none of the “contagion of violence, the excess of willful effort” that forced so many of the early poems to “run riot.” Lowell was now seeking the “causes” of his “tragic imagination”; his “dark day in Boston” now produced “more humor and quizzical tenderness than fierce wit.” There was, though, in
Life
Studies
something “inconclusive”:
Where, Henry James would inquire, is your denouement? Still, the poems add up to something like the effectiveness of
Mauberley
,
Pound’s sequence of scenes and portraits from London life. They represent, perhaps, major poetry pulling in its horns and putting on big spectacles and studying how to survive. The once militantly tragic poet, who warred bitterly on himself, is pictured on the jacket of
Life
Studies
wearing big spectacles.
45
The
Kenyon
reviewer was John Thompson, the friend who on two occasions—in Chicago in 1949 and in Cincinnati in 1954—had faced the “kingdom of the mad” and helped to drag Lowell “home alive.”
His review was by far the most intense and perceptive piece to be written on
Life
Studies
and, indeed, still stands as one of the most intelligent and heartfelt estimates of Lowell’s gifts. Thompson
begins
by announcing that these new poems are “a shock” and then takes on the not simple task of trying to define the difference
between
their
shockingness and that of those “adventures in sensation” that can be found in “dozens of current novels and memoirs”:
in these poems there are depths of the self that in life are not ordinarily acknowledged and in literature are usually figured in disguise.
Traditionally
, between the persona of the creation and the person of the creator a certain distance exists, and this has been so even for lyric poets and their utterances, habitually inclined to the first person as they are. Devices of fiction or concealment large or small accomplish this
estrangement
…. Robert Lowell’s new poems show that this distance between persona and poem is not, after all, important to art, but has been a reflection of the way our culture conceived character. This conception seems to be dwindling now to a mere propriety. And for these poems, the question of propriety no longer exists. They have made a conquest; what they have won is a major expansion of the territory of poetry.
46