Where Have You Been? (13 page)

Lowell's reputation—and the poems I've brought up so far have, I suppose, comfirmed it—is for writing about and mythologizing himself. The word “confessional”—blind, involuntary, incontinent—doesn't begin to do justice to him. In 1959, when the critic M. L. Rosenthal coined it, it wasn't with any bad intention, but nowadays I can only hear it said with an implicit sneer. The “confessionalism,” I think, is ours, that of our present civilization, which likes its great figures on feet of clay instead of pedestals, and would rather dismiss something than attend to it. We have become almost incapable of reading something on its own terms: it's as though we took Baudelaire's “
Au Lecteur
” too seriously, “
Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!
” He would have been quite aghast. We strip away words and seek the underlying “reality”: What's the matter with us?

In any case, even muted, that version of Lowell is inadequate to him. The other two poems I have chosen to think about—believe me, it was no very strategic choice when I made it either—go outside. The first is an elegy—though as someone said, at bottom, an elegy is always for yourself. This one is called “Alfred Corning Clark,” and it's one of the best elegies I know:

You read the
New York Times

every day at recess, but in its dry

obituary, a list

of your wives, nothing is news,

except the ninety-five

thousand dollar engagement ring

you gave the sixth.

Poor rich boy,

you were unreasonably adult

at taking your time,

and died at forty-five.

Poor Al Clark,

behind your enlarged,

barely recognizable photograph,

I feel the pain.

You were alive. You are dead.

You wore bow-ties and dark

blue coats, and sucked

wintergreen or cinnamon lifesavers

to sweeten your breath.

There must be something—

some one to praise

your triumphant diffidence,

your refusal of exertion,

the intelligence

that pulsed in the sensitive,

pale concavities of your forehead.

You never worked,

and were third in the form.

I owe you something—

I was befogged,

and you were too bored,

quick and cool to laugh.

You are dear to me, Alfred;

our reluctant souls united

in our unconventional

illegal games of chess

on the St. Mark's quadrangle.

You usually won—

motionless

as a lizard in the sun.

Again, how limpid and straightforward and believable this is. I don't seem to recall any of the Lowell biographers or critics even bothering to check this man out: it's all here, and they took it all for gospel, and why not. This air of truthfulness seems to me a primary quality, in no way dependent on or subservient to the “actual truth,” whatever it may have been. This poem could perfectly well have been written in a way that made it unbelievable, unnecessary, or both—but you have to imagine that.

Wim Wenders said that films—fiction films, adventure films, Hollywood films—document the conditions of their own making. This poem, I think, does that. It begins with
The New York Times
, because that's where Lowell begins too: it's the messenger, it's what breaks the news to him of the death of—what to call him: not his friend, his classmate, his protector, his alter other! Lowell is clearly surprised, a little unsteady. We can't choose whom we write elegies about. (The motto, incidentally, of
The New York Times
is: “All the news that's fit to print.” Hence the rather acerbic “nothing is news.”)

This poem is a little drama of justification, of calling, perhaps even of attempting to refuse the call. It stutters in its little lines. It strains to swallow the vast sums and figures that arrive as the sort of advance guard of facts. It is only ever a step away from some terminal awkwardness or banality: “Poor rich boy,” the bathetic oxymoron; “Poor Al Clark,” the attempt at intimacy; “You were alive. You are dead,” with its sophomoric full stop; the medical overtone of “enlarged” and perhaps “pulsed”; the grisly equivocations of “lifesavers” and “motionless.” It's an anonymous, preppy, rather unprepossessing subject that Lowell struggles and struggles to possess. The poem can't get started, and it never flows, not even in the brilliant Tacitean phrasing of “your triumphant diffidence, / your refusal of exertion.” It isn't, I think, until “I owe you something” that there's an end to the false starts, and the irrelation. That's the point at which Lowell discovers that he has that place to stand from which Archimedes thought he could move worlds. And the culmination is when the poet finally possesses the subject sufficiently to risk a simile, not even perhaps a particularly wonderful one but expressive of economy, of death in life, of a kind of classification—and Lowell was always fond of slithery creatures: newts, turtles, snakes. Until then, we don't know how to place Clark; it's as though the poem has been asking itself all along, “What sort of creature are you/were you?”

In the last poem, this is not in question: “Words for Muffin, a Guinea-Pig.” Muffin speaks. It's the unlikeliest of monologues, blending the creaturely with the “human, all-too human.” He speaks in the unrhymed fourteen-line “sonnet” form that Lowell wrote and rewrote from 1967 on, and with which he filled his late books,
Notebook
,
History
,
For Lizzie and Harriet
, and into which he threatened to convert practically all his previous production. These fourteen-line poems are somewhat controversial—they're Lowell's pendant to John Berryman's Dream Song form, the sort of baggy, omnivorous outline that would accept whatever he threw at it. It's the part of Lowell that I've ended up nearest to myself, as a reader. It's like nothing else. You feel no one has ever been through these hundreds of poems, they've never been mapped, it's “here be monsters” or left blank, and you slash your way through, finding marvelous lines that you never see again, and sometimes whole poems that brilliantly cohere and then disintegrate. “Words for Muffin” is one. The line by now is everything; you have the feeling everything Lowell writes comes out in line form. It has a kind of humility too; “somehow never wrote something to go back to,” Lowell writes in one of these poems, “Reading Myself,” and indeed he never—apart from “Quaker Graveyard” and one or two other early poems—wrote any big, stagey set pieces. “Why don't you lose yourself / and write a play about the fall of Japan,” he quotes the friendly/unfriendly suggestion of an ex-wife. He didn't, needless to say, but the
multum in parvo
of “Words for Muffin” makes it less of a loss:

Of late they leave the light on in my entry,

so I won't scare, though I never scare in the dark;

I bless this arrow that flies from wall to window …

five years and a nightlight given me to breathe—

Heidegger said spare time is ecstasy …

I am not scared, although my life was short;

my sickly breathing sounded like dry leather.

Mrs. Muffin!
It clicks. I had my day.

You'll paint me like Cromwell with all my warts:

small mop with a tumor and eyes too popped for thought.

I was a rhinoceros when jumped by my sons.

I ate and bred, and then I only ate,

my life zenithed in the Lyndon Johnson 'sixties …

this short pound God threw on the scales, found wanting.

Again, for all its jaunty improbability—the guinea pig that quotes Heidegger, refers to Oliver Cromwell and Lyndon Johnson, is public figure and private citizen, recognizes
Mrs. Muffin
, sees himself effortlessly and pitilessly and punningly (“this short pound,” “I ate and bred”), and even into the past tense (“I had my day”)—this is a piece of real utterance. Really, it's an aria. The existence and its perspectives are mapped out with tenderness and economy and extravagance to make an alert and compendious little drama. The more things are localized and precised and adapted, the more universality they acquire. It's an odd mixture of mortal dread and mildness—a sort of buffo version of the late poems of Heine, some of which Lowell had clunkily or clankingly translated in a book called
Imitations
. “Words for Muffin” has a tender, sleepy wisdom that I don't think you can find anywhere else in poetry.

What are my “provisional conclusions” (in Montale's phrase)? That he exemplarily converted life into literature. That the range of his effects—from the most oblique, almost hermetic, feint to the plain statement of fact, to the tenderly, brassily magniloquent (“Pity the planet, all joy gone / from this sweet volcanic cone”)—is unequaled. (Sometimes Lowell seems to be writing a wild interstitial English entirely his own, as with the formidably off-sounding “I lanced it in the fauve ooze for newts.” At the same time, the writing never loses its inherent plausibility; it never looks like Roget's, never proliferates into verbiage, never makes mere mud.) That in his refusal as a poet to be cowed or deflected or marginalized, he, though no sort of hero, was heroic. That he is unspeakably missed by his literature and his country, and that in his absence, literary and civic life have both deteriorated. It's not that he could have done anything to prevent it, but it remains strangely haunting to read him on “Doubt, the first American virtue,” or, in an astonishing Ciceronian letter addressed to
The New York Review of Books
, in the wake of the sentencing of Lieutenant Calley, the man responsible for the My Lai massacre:

A principle may kill more than an incident. I am sick with fresh impressions. Has no one the compassion to pass judgment on William Calley? His atrocity is cleared by the President, public, polls, rank and file of the right and left. He looks almost alive; like an old song, he stirs us with the gruff poignance of the professional young soldier. He too fought under television for our place in the sun. Why should the bait be eaten when the sharks swim free? I sense a coldness under the hysteria. Our nation looks up to heaven, and puts her armies above the law. No stumbling on the downward plunge from Hiroshima. Retribution is somewhere else and we are young.

Poetry has lost so much ground in the years since Lowell started out in it, it's easy to feel a somewhat preposterous sympathy for him. There is nothing at the end of the rainbow. In Lowell's “mid-century,” poetry still belonged in every well-stocked library and mind. There's really little reason to read it anymore—though apparently the queen manages a book a year. Poetry in America has declined to a civil war, a banal derby between two awful teams, and in Britain to a variety show (albeit, I suppose, a royal variety show). The last apotheosized poets are the generation of the 1910s and 1920s, Eliot and Frost and Stevens and Pound and Yeats and Bunting. They have had no successors, or the succession has not been allowed. Bishop or Lowell or Ashbery or O'Hara or Murray seem more like much-loved or eccentric or somewhat controversial deceased or elderly relatives than great poets-in-waiting. Ted Hughes already feels like a rumor. It's as though the human reef of literature was not considering any more applications, or the escalator had ground to a halt. To say that anyone who cares about poetry should read Lowell is not enough. (Can it be that they didn't know that, or haven't yet? Well, yes.) Anyone who cares about writing, or about art, or about life, should read Lowell. “Things changed to the names he gave them,” he wrote, “then lost their names.”

 

FREDERICK SEIDEL

Frederick Seidel has always been interested in taboos. Only no-nos need apply. Everything in him is sex, politics, religion, race, and class. A gentle giant of a black doorman remembered from childhood (“He wore a visored cap / With a high Gestapo peak / On his impenetrably black marble. / Waits out there in the sun to open the car door. // My noble Negro statue's name was Heinz, / My calmly grand George Washington”) is to him a full house by any other name.

From the beginning, Seidel was always a bogeyman, a
Bürgerschreck
, an
épateur—
a carnivore if not a cannibal in the blandly vegan compound of contemporary poetry. He is a purveyor of “
picong
,” a Trinidadian term, from the French “
piquant
,” meaning “sharp or cutting, where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener is sent reeling.” (This, as good a description of Seidel as inadvertence or serendipity can come up with, is from
The World Is What It Is
, Patrick French's outstanding biography of V. S. Naipaul, and what a lot the authors of
Ooga-Booga
and
A Bend in the River
have in common: both of them Insider Outsiders, traveling compulsively on all five continents [though, come to think of it, I don't recall Australia in either of them]; sharing an unspeakably deep attraction to a sort of eighteenth-century squirearchy that may or may not be England; a fascination with Africa, with Joseph Conrad, with Islam; both are students of the remorseless spread of global capital and culture, the Gulf Stream of development and the countervailing El Niño of terror; both are equally at ease in fiction and nonfiction, and in a blurring of both; and last and far from least, both exhibit, and are proud of, an insouciant erotomania. Surely Seidel, never a professional poet, never a reviewer, reciter, promoter, or teacher of poetry, could put his name to Naipaul's boast: “I have never had to work for hire; I made a vow at an early age never to work, never to become involved with people in that way. That has given me a freedom from people, from entanglements, from rivalries, from competition. I have no enemies, no rivals, no masters; I fear no one.” Both are barbed, solitary, aloof, alarming figures, becoming, if anything, less mellow with age and more like their intrinsic fossil selves, jagged and serviceable, “sharp and meek,” Seidel says somewhere—he does love his noses—“like the eyesight of the deaf.” Thomas Mann's term
Greisen-Avantgardismus
—meaning something like “the experimental progressivism occasionally found in the very old”—suggests itself. We as readers are uneasily privileged to witness their bold, inflammatory, defamatory gestures, gestures we know there will never be time or second thought or pusillanimousness to take back.) Typically, Seidel's splendid ketchup, piccalilli, and black
Poems
—its featly five hundred pages covering fifty years of writing—runs backward, to that beginning, to the slim volume
Final Solutions
, which shared its author's initials and was published to no little controversy in 1963 when Seidel was twenty-eight and reasonably fresh out of Harvard. Now
Final Solutions
stands at the end of
Poems, 1959–2009
, as if it was always going to be there.