Robert Lowell: A Biography (41 page)

Thompson, an expert on traditional prosody, then describes the technical “shock”
Life
Studies
also carries and is acute on how “The metrical form … works indirectly, even negatively” in these
seemingly
“free” poems; he draws on his long friendship with the poet to analyze the difference between a conventional “sense of history” (i.e., “glory of the past, misery of the present”) and Lowell’s unique way of living in the past: “the great past, Revolutionary America, the Renaissance, Rome, is all contemporary to him. He moves among its great figures at ease with his peers. For him the sense of declining glory is a permanent human feeling, not the special curse of our own time.” And, in his conclusion, Thompson offers a
verdict
that, for all its generosity, amounts almost to a challenge;
certainly
, there is something daunting in its implied view of Lowell’s possibilities—and duties?

Partisan
and
Kenyon
published their reviews of
Life
Studies
in their Summer 1959 issues. The
Hudson
Review
’s contribution
appeared
three months later, even though the editor, Joseph Bennett, had picked himself as the reviewer of the book. Bennett’s piece was brief and savage:

Bennett goes on to sneer at the aristocratic Bostonians who in Lowell’s book “romp through town mansions, country estates,
seaside
villas” and at the snobbishness that “we” find in Lowell’s
accounts
of the McLean Hospital and West Street Jail: “we visit an insane asylum for Porcellian members; our jail in New York
reminds
us of the soccer court at St. Mark’s School.” There is no hint throughout the review that
Life
Studies
might be anything other than “a collection of lazily recollected and somewhat snobbish memoirs, principally of the poet’s own wealthy and aristocratic family.”

In other reviews there were negative rumblings here and there; Thorn Gunn in the
Yale
Review
objected to “trivial
autobiographical
details, rambling and without unity” and to an overall “flatness” in the writing,
49
and M. L. Rosenthal in the
Nation
let it be known that his “first impression while reading
Life
Studies
was that it is impure art, magnificently stated but unpleasantly egocentric—somehow resembling the triumph of the skunks over the garbage cans,” but by the end of his review was sufficiently won over to proclaim that “
Life
Studies
brings to culmination one line of
development
in our poetry of the utmost importance.”
50
(Rosenthal was later to expand this review into an influential essay—called “The Poetry of Confession”—which claimed
Life
Studies
to be “an
outgrowth
of the social criticism that has marked almost the whole sweep of poetry in this century. Thus, Lowell’s poems carry the burden of the age within them.”) Daniel Hoffman in the
Sewanee
Review
believed the book to be “transitional…. The protagonist in Mr. Lowell’s poems appears to be undergoing a regeneration, perhaps only just begun.”
51

Hoffman’s review echoed a number of the other minor notices that greeted
Life
Studies
on its appearance in May 1959. As Thorn Gunn sardonically remarked: “The attitude of most critics I have seen is: this is not what we are used to from Lowell so let us play it safe by saying that it
may
lead to great poetry.” It is not known how many of these notices Lowell saw at the time. On May 19,1959, he was writing to Edmund Wilson from Bowditch Hall at McLean’s: “I’ve been conditioning here for about a month, and feel swimming….”
52
Lowell’s second breakdown within a year had coincided with the publication of his revolutionary new book. The only review we know for certain that he saw was, ironically enough, in a letter from Allen Tate—written to McLean’s on May 8: “you will be alright very soon…. your book is magnificent. All will be well.”
53

On his release from McLean’s in June 1959 Lowell was once again pressed to engage in “uninterrupted psycho-therapy.” As always, he agreed; but as Elizabeth Hardwick recalls, the agreement didn’t mean that he expected it to do much good:

Throughout the summer, Lowell obediently repeated the previous year’s routine: commuting to Castine to be with his wife and
daughter
while keeping up his teaching and his therapy in Boston. He wrote one poem during 1959—“The Drinker,” a rather meandering study in loneliness, or desertedness. It strives for a repellent
accuracy
on the rituals of the hangover (although truly hardened
drinkers
might find something quaint in the notion of “before-
breakfast
”—their italics!—“cigarettes”):

The drinker in the poem is a “beached whale” in whose
warm-hearted
blubber “barbed hooks fester”:

Hardwick had deliberately kept at a “certain distance” from
Lowell
during this latest illness. She had managed to patch together a degree of optimism during the calm last months of 1958, and—on the evidence of earlier attacks—had felt able to predict at least a
two-or
even three-year respite. She had set up a European trip for May and June of 1959: two weeks in London during May, then
Amsterdam
for a week, followed by a fortnight in Italy (Florence and Venice, mainly) and a final ten days or so in Paris. The Tates (Allen and his new wife, Isabella Gardner) and the Macauleys were in Europe, and arrangements had been made for Harriet to be left behind in Boston. On March 20, 1959, Hardwick had written the Macauleys in Paris:

Lowell’s collapse the following month seems therefore to have come without much advance warning or buildup—and certainly, this time, without a girl. He had, it is true, been “active” during March, visiting Randall Jarrell in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Peter Taylor in Columbus, Ohio, and on March 15 he had written a slightly too breezy letter to John Berryman (who, he had heard, was in the hospital, suffering from exhaustion):

But for Hardwick, the suddenness of the attack, its closeness to the one before (it was just over a year since Lowell had been discharged from McLean’s) raised new and wholly dreadful prospects. On June 1, she wrote, with some weariness, to Allen Tate:

During Lowell’s hospitalization at McLean’s a year earlier, in the spring of 1958, he had tried his hand at translation—not for the first time, since there are versions of Rimbaud, Valéry and Rilke in
Lord
Weary
’s
Castle.
On April 1, 1958, he had written to Jarrell: “While I was in hospital and nothing original came I tried a few translations, mostly from an Italian poet of Eliot’s generation, named Montale.”
6
From Montale he had moved on to Ungaretti and to Rilke. Later in the year, having been “shatteringly impressed” by Pasternak (who had won the Nobel Prize in 1958), he had “changed one of [his] courses just to read Russian—it was meant to be something precise like the New Critics as prose writers.”
7
And for the whole of 1959 he more or less gave up attempting to write anything “original.” He felt “drained of new poems,” and anything he did produce seemed “a dry repetitious version of something sufficiently and better said in Life Studies.”
8
On January 3, 1960, he wrote again to Jarrell, who was in a similar predicament:

The same note of “What next?” speechlessness is sounded in Lowell’s address on receiving the National Book Award for
Life
Studies.
10
He talks in this of two “competing” types of poetry—“a cooked and a raw”—and clearly has in mind the challenge that Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lawrence
Ferlinghetti
were then offering to the traditional or “academic” poets (of whom he, before
Life
Studies
,
would have been seen as a leading light). An anthology edited by Donald M. Allen called
The
New
American
Poetry
1945–60
had, for example, presented a clamorous riposte to the authority of the
New
Poets
of
England
and
America
collection put together two years earlier by Donald Hall, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson. By 1960 the battle lines were clearly drawn, and Lowell found himself in no-man’s-land: “There is a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry and a poetry of scandal.” Lowell’s “cooked” and “raw” definition became famous; this is how he
elaborated
it in a draft for his acceptance speech: “The cooked,
marvellously
expert and remote, seems constructed as a sort of mechanical or catnip mouse for graduate seminars; the raw, jerry-built and forensically deadly, seems often like an unscored libretto by some bearded but vegetarian Castro.”
11
And as for his own poetry: “When I finished
Life
Studies
I was left hanging on a question mark. I am still hanging there. I don’t know whether it is a death-rope or a life-line.”
12

Ironically, this bleak curriculum is printed in the program for the Boston Arts Festival, which was held in June 1960, in Boston’s Public Garden. Lowell had been asked to read a new poem at the festival, and since—as he said later—he could hardly have offered them “The Drinker” or even a version of Montale, he worked from January to June on a piece that is now thought of as a wholly triumphant answer to that “question mark.” “For the Union Dead” can be both studied and declaimed; it is learned (and has provoked more reams of exegesis than perhaps any other poem by Lowell),
but it also has vivid and personal ingredients—in the manner of
Life
Studies.
And without doubt it provided a life-line, or at any rate a way forward to the next phase of Lowell’s work.

The poem was the outcome of a cluster of coincidences: the coincidence of Lowell’s sense of his own barrenness and the arrival of a “commission” from the Boston Festival. The subject of Colonel Shaw and his Negro regiment had long fascinated Lowell: Shaw was linked by marriage to Lowell’s favorite ancestor, Beau Sabreur, and his suicidal mission had been celebrated in several poems,
including
one by James Russell Lowell. There was an additional prompting in the work Elizabeth Hardwick was doing at the time: she was preparing an edition of William James’s letters, and it was James who had delivered the oration at the unveiling of
Saint-Gaudens’s
memorial to Colonel Shaw:

Also, in October 1959 Lowell had become a member of the Tavern Club in Boston, and had dug out in the library there the text of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Harvard College in the War.” Both James and Holmes spoke resoundingly of duty, self-sacrifice, heroic action: the formula for what John Thompson called a “glory of the past, misery of the present” study of the Boston spirit was readily to hand. Civil War heroism is set beside the threat of nuclear war; municipal barbarism (the ruining of Boston Common to build underground garages) is set against the natural barbarism of “the dark downward and vegetating kingdom / of the fish and reptile”; the Abolitionist struggle is mocked by television images of “the drained faces of Negro school-children.” When he was a child, Lowell used to watch real fish in the Aquarium: but today

A melodramatic image, which recalls—in tone if not in meter—the poet-prophet of
Lord
Weary
’
s
Castle
, the exalted punisher of
Boston
’s ills. The difference is that Lowell now deals not in destruction but in decline, and he no longer pretends that God is on his side. “For the Union Dead” is an intricately organized poem, its chain of associated images seems fashioned with high cunning, and there is much subtlety in its manipulation of historical, personal and
current
political elements. If, in itself, it seems overdeliberate and
without
the energy and rhythmic grace of the best of the
Life
Studies
poems (Lowell called it “the most composed poem I’ve ever
written
”),
15
it is nonetheless his first step towards extending the
possibilities
of his self-centeredness: towards treating his own torments as metaphors of public, even global, ills. It also marks a sorrowing and sour final truce with Boston.

For a year or more, Lowell had been writing in letters: “We are awfully sick of Boston. The only unconventional people here are charming screwballs, who never finish a picture or publish a line. Then there are Cousins and Harvard professors. All very pleasant, but …”
16
And Hardwick, in the December 1959 issue of
Harper
’s
, had published an article on “Boston: A Lost Ideal,” which makes Lowell’s scorn seem almost wistful and genteel. On “proper
Bostonians
” she writes that “the town has always attracted men of quiet and timid and tasteful opinion, men interested in old families and things, in the charms of times recently past”:

But in any case the Boston New Englander—i.e., the Anglo-Saxon—is now pure anomaly: the town is governed by Irish and Italians, and governed rather badly. Hardwick writes of Boston’s “municipal civil backwardness,” its “feckless, ugly, municipal neglect.” The city has no night life—“In Boston the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality”—no Bohemian or café life. It
does
have the “brilliantly exciting Boston Arts Festival held in the Public Garden for two weeks in June,” it has Symphony Hall, lectures in nearby Cambridge, and so on; but the real action is “cozy,
Victorian and gossipy”: “The “nice little dinner party”—for this the Bostonian would sell his soul”:

By the time Lowell read his poem at the Boston Festival—to “an audience of thousands and encore after encore if that’s what they’re called when they’re poems”
17
—he had already accepted a Ford Foundation grant to “study opera” in New York; the poet William Meredith had been given a similar grant, and he recalls: