Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
A number of the
Life
Studies
poems had appeared in
Partisan
Review
earlier in the year (“Man and Wife,” “Memories of West Street and Lepke” and “Skunk Hour” formed a powerful trio in
PR
’s issue for Winter 1958—i.e., January 1958), and a further batch was due to appear in January 1959. The finished manuscript offered twenty-four poems and was divided into four sections. Section One has four poems in Lowell’s “old style,” poems written before he had begun work on his prose autobiography. Of these four, “Beyond the Alps” is the only one that seems really to “belong” in the book. It serves to “clear the ground,” not just stylistically but also
autobiographically
. If Lowell is about to abandon his old tricks, the poem suggests, it is because he no longer feels the fire and venom that sustained the hurtling iambic line; he has exhausted, and has become exhausted by, grand absolutes. In “Beyond the Alps” the old
Lowellian
ferocity, where it appears at all, is directed against what might be thought of as its source: the Catholic Church, which Lowell now berates for its temporal hypocrisies, its spiritual redundancy:
When the Vatican made Mary’s Assumption dogma,
the crowds at San Pietro screamed
Papa.
The Holy Father dropped his shaving glass,
and listened. His electric razor purred,
his pet canary chirped on his left hand.
The lights of science couldn’t hold a candle
to Mary risen—at one miraculous stroke,
angel-wing’d, gorgeous as a jungle bird!
But who believed this? Who could understand?
Pilgrims still kissed Saint Peter’s brazen sandal.
The Duce’s lynched, bare, booted skull still spoke.
God herded his people to the
coup
de
grâce
—
the costumed Switzers sloped their pikes to push,
O Pius, through the monstrous human crush.
There is a flicker of yearning in that beautifully placed “O Pius,” but it has little real-life consolatory usefulness.
The poem is about moving on, transition, the surrendering of large energies and aspirations—but a moving on to what? The poem’s final image is one of Lowell’s most perfect and impenetrable:
Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up
Like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.
It is entirely permissible to say of these extraordinary lines that
The black of Paris is in contrast to the pure whiteness of the Alps; it appears pagan, sinister, mysterious. He has returned to the twentieth century, Etruscan in its remoteness—a buried world.
25
This is as good an explication as any other, but the image continues to resist simple exegesis. And it can thus be taken as a kind of epigraph for a book which, in its bruised acknowledgment that poetry does indeed make “nothing happen,” will seek to be
refreshed
by a direct, almost wide-eyed attentiveness to objects, places, personal experience. The only “task” of Lowell’s new style will be to prove its own disconsolate and modest propositions; his one remaining faith, if one can call it that, is in the imaginable moral power of perfect speech. At worst, no one could say of
this
new book: “But who believed this? Who could understand?”
Part Two of
Life
Studies
is the prose essay “91 Revere Street”—a highly polished slice of Lowell’s autobiography. It centers on the poet’s childhood from 1925 to 1928, and casts Mr. Lowell as the main character: his resignation from the navy, his business humiliations, his sad and amiable willingness to let himself be dominated not only by his wife, his friends, his employers, but also by his own low-level self-delusion. It is a merciless exercise; sorrowing, resentful,
maliciously
amused. The unforgiving child now armed, and armored, with grown-up literary poise.
Lowell liked to think of his presentation of his father as “tender,” but only in the elegiac poems that appear in the fourth section of
Life
Studies
does pathos outweigh ridicule. And even here the
evidence
of Lowell’s drafts suggests that ridicule could as easily have been outweighed by something close to hatred:
“Still doing things the hard way, Feller?”
He’d tease me. Ten years later,
When I came home from Kenyon
College, an arm-chair
Agrarian
Quoting in Latin from the
Bucolics
And Pound’s
ABC
of
Economics
He used to turn a puking green
Reminding me how at fourteen
He mailed a monthly check from Annapolis to his mother.
26
This fourth section is arrived at by way of a group of chatty, affectionate pieces about literary figures: Ford Madox Ford, George Santayana, Delmore Schwartz and Hart Crane—a rather artificial yoking, this, of minor pieces with which Lowell had been tinkering for years. It is Part Four that actually bears the name “Life Studies”; and this is the section in which Lowell’s “new style” is
unequivocally
on display. The studies open with family portraits and
reminiscences
—versifications, in the main, of the more powerful of his prose vignettes. There are times when the “poetry” adds nothing to the prose. For example:
Almost immediately he bought a larger and more stylish house; he sold his ascetic stove-black Hudson and bought a plump brown Buick; later the Buick was exchanged for a high-toned, as-good-as-new Packard with a custom-designed royal blue and mahogany body. Without drama, his earnings more or less decreased from year to year.
This is from “91 Revere Street.” Reset in free verse (in “
Commander
Lowell”), with some details added and some others dropped, it reads:
whenever he left a job,
he bought a smarter car.
Father’s last employer
was Scudder, Stevens and Clark, Investment Advisors,
himself his only client.
While Mother dragged to bed alone,
read Menninger,
and grew more and more suspicious,
he grew defiant.
Night after night,
à
la
clarté
déserte
de
sa
lampe,
he slid his ivory Annapolis slide rule
across a pad of graphs—
piker speculations! In three years
he squandered sixty thousand dollars.
The line breaks here seem random, and there is none of the
rhythmic
or imagistic subtlety that marks the later free-verse poems in the book. It is worth remembering that when Lowell first thought of “versifying” his prose autobiography, his instinct was to do it in
metrical couplets. Here, for example, is a draft of a sonnet about the family graveyard at Dunbarton, in which Lowell’s father is again to be found studying his graphs:
Four years have left Dunbarton much the same,
Mother, another stone, another name;
And you, earth’s orbit? You are things,
No you, no person. Ah, the king of kings,
Little Napoleon, whose bolting food
So caught your fancy, caught your horror stood
Blotting your minutes after Father died.
No bustle, bustle, bustle. Groom and bride
Lie cot by cot. Once more they feel the spark
Dive through the unnerved marrow of their dark,
A person breaking through his prison term,
Where now as then, relapsing, Oh a germ,
Studies his navel, graphs and charts and maps
Gentle to all, and loving none perhaps.
27
It is small wonder that when Lowell made the decision to shift from this kind of mechanical regularity to the spacious relaxation of free verse, he was somewhat dazzled by his own boldness; for a period, at any rate, he was content simply to “take liberties,” to relish the sheer drasticness of what he’d done. The notion that free verse could be as intricate, dramatic and intense as anything he’d done before in meter seems not to have struck him until about halfway through the sequence of “family poems” in
Life
Studies.
A letter to William Carlos Williams on February 19, 1958, is a bold and defensive
statement
to the archenemy of metrics that Lowell’s “conversion” would, after all, be incomplete:
In a month or so I’ll mail you another little group of my own stuff, God willing. I now have four or five things you haven’t seen. I wouldn’t like ever to completely give up meter; it’s wonderful opposition to wrench against and revise with. Yet now that I’ve joined you in unscanned verse, I am struck by how often the old classics get boxed up in their
machinery
, the sonority of the iambic pentameter line, the apparatus of logic and conceit and even set subjects. Still, the muscle is there in the classics, we re-read them with joy, and in a sense wherever a man has really worked his stuff outbraves time and novel methods. We would always rather read a good old sonneteer, such as Raleigh or Sidney than some
merely competent modern fellow who is on the right track. The
excellent
speak to the excellent.
28
That “
we
would rather read …” observation is a kind of scolding bluff, since Lowell knew very well that Williams might
not
rather read a Raleigh sonnet than some new effort “in the American grain.”
As it turns out, the inconsistency between the “early” and “late” poems of
Life
Studies
does seem to have a point. The looser, more pedestrian “studies” are those in which the family is seen through the eyes of the child Lowell—“My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” “Dunbarton,” “Grandparents” and “
Commander
Lowell.” These are elegant and witty pieces, and have some piercing moments—the ending of the Uncle Devereux poem for example—but the tone throughout is benign, detached and utterly unhurried. And one would be hard pressed to insist that they
need
to be set out as verse, not prose; indeed, their merits are prose merits.
The change comes when Lowell begins to draw on his adult experience of family life, and death; when the poet cannot avoid moving to the center of his own poems. It may be that by this stage Lowell was more sure—technically—of what he was about; or it may be that the subject was no longer half invented and remote. Certainly, with “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms” and the poems that follow it, there is a noticeable tightening: alliterations and
assonances
seem more deliberate, more shrewd and menacing; the
dramatic
shifts more calculated, brutal. Here is Mr. Lowell once again, thirty years older now but still clutching his ivory slide rule:
Each morning at eight-thirty,
inattentive and beaming,
loaded with his “calc” and “trig” books,
his clipper ship statistics,
and his ivory slide rule,
Father stole off with the
Chevie
to loaf in the Maritime Museum at Salem.
He called the curator
“the commander of the Swiss Navy.”
Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting.
His vision was still twenty-twenty.
After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,
his last words to Mother were:
“I feel awful.”
There follow three more poems on Lowell’s parents’ deaths and then a transitional piece—“During Fever”—in which the poet, a father now himself, strains for a wise, forgiving view of his own background. Then we are immediately thrust forward into the
orphaned
present tense, with “Waking in the Blue” and “Home After Three Months Away.” We have moved from “those settled years of World War One” to the 1957 agonies of the family’s afflicted heir, from lazily chopped-up prose to a lyricism more delicately measured than anything in Lowell’s early meters. The matching of the poet’s maturity in free verse with the growing up of the child-hero of the family poems may not have been planned out, but its dramatic rightness does give credence to Lowell’s contention that “I see the ‘Life Studies’ sequence as one poem, at least in the first section. It really centers about my father and the parts are not meant to stand by themselves.”
29
Section II of the “Life Studies” sequence has four poems—each of them bitingly personal but offering a broader view of Lowell’s life so far: in each he tries to face the crippling and destructive “
side-effects
” of his recurrent mental breakdowns. One consequence is that he no longer trusts his old intellectual vehemence and he knows that others trust it even less: his verbal brilliance they now associate with “the kingdom of the mad—its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye”; it frightens them. He knows too that when he was a “
fire-breathing
Catholic C.O.” and refused military service, he may well have been in the grip of energies that must now, if he is to live any sort of “normal life,” be “tranquillized.” It is no real comfort that his own prescribed inertia is mirrored in the self-serving
complacency
of Eisenhower’s America, that
even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is a “young Republican.”
But then what are “ideals” worth if they can only be pursued in mania? And what is a sane professor’s life in Boston worth if “
excitement
”
or “enthusiasm” is always to be thought of as a symptom of destruction and collapse?
The first version of the poem “Man and Wife” was called “Holy Matrimony,” and it included an early draft of what was later to become the separate “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” (printed in
Life
Studies
next to “Man and Wife”). Although
uncompleted
and unpolished, it provides a powerful insight into the “political” background of a poem in which references to “the Rahvs” (Philip Rahv was editor of
Partisan
Review
during the most vehement period of
its
history) and “the traditional South” have seemed to some critics overintimate or incidental. “Holy
Matrimony
” also makes it clear that the “old-fashioned tirade” referred to in “Man and Wife” is in fact the substance of the next poem in the book—“To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage”—although recast into the third person.