by Ian Hamilton
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
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?
The voice of Robert Lowell’s poetry has always had the authority of the extreme. No conflict is glossed over or rationalized by a system of ideas. His religion was always entirely eschatological; the world he describes, ancient or modern, is never influenced by religion but only threatened by it. It is as if he could bear to contemplate this world because he could momentarily expect its total destruction or total delivery.
Thus, the one thing this poet never worried about in his writing was how to go on living. This has given him great strength, which he still has. The new poems have abandoned the myths of eschatology and the masks of heroes, but the violence and guilt, the unalleviated seizure of experience, these remain. This is why, perhaps alone of living poets, he can bear for us the role of the great poet, the man who on a very large scale sees more, feels more, and speaks more bravely about it than we ourselves can do. He can speak now of the most desperate and sordid personal experience with full dignity. Nothing need be explained, accounted for, or moralized.47
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:
This book does little to add to Lowell’s standing as a poet. Lazy and anecdotal, it is more suited as an appendix to some snobbish society magazine, to Town and Country or Harper’s Bazaar, rather than as purposeful work.48
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,49and 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
Notes
1. Ms (Houghton Library).
2. Life Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964), pp. 81–82.
3. Near the Ocean (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967), p. 41.
4. Notebook 1967–68 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), p. 89.
5. Ann Adden to R.L., n.d.
(Houghton Library).
6. Elizabeth Hardwick to Harriet Winslow, January 2, 1958 (Houghton Library).
7. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair and Holly Clark, February 16, 1958.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Elizabeth Hardwick to Harriet Winslow, February 15, 1958 (Houghton Library).
11. Blair Clark to Charles P. Curtis, March 5, 1958.
12. Charles P. Curtis to Blair Clark, March 13, 1958.
13. R.L. to Ezra Pound, January 29, 1958 (Beinecke Library).
14. R.L. to Harriet Winslow, March 15, 1958 (Houghton Library).
15. R.L. to Peter Taylor, March 15, 1958.
16. Ibid.
17. R.L. to Harriet Winslow, March 15, 1958 (Houghton Library).
18. Elizabeth Hardwick to Harriet Winslow, March 2, 1958 (Houghton Library).
19. “Home After Three Months Away,” Life Studies, p. 83.
20. Seidel, Paris Review interview.
21. R.L. to Peter Taylor, February 12, 1956.
22. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1982).
23. Ibid.
24. Elizabeth Hardwick to Harriet Winslow, October 20, 1958 (Houghton Library).
25. Hugh B. Staples, Robert Lowell: The First Twenty Years (Faber & Faber, 1962), pp. 71–72.
26. Life Studies ms (Houghton Library).
27. Ibid.
28. R.L. to William Carlos Williams, February 19, 1958 (Beinecke Library).
29. R.L. to Hugh B. Staples, December 24, 1958.
30. Life Studies ms (Houghton Library).
31. R.L. on “Skunk Hour,” in The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic, ed. Anthony Ostroff (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), pp. 71–110.
32. Ibid.
33. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1982).
34. R.L. on “Skunk Hour,” in Ostroff (ed.), The Contemporary Poet …
35. R.L. to Hugh B. Staples, December 24, 1958.
36. William Carlos Williams to R.L., November 24, 1958 (Houghton Library).
37. Charles Monteith, interview with I.H. (1980).
38. A. Alvarez, “Something New in Verse,” Observer, April 12, 1959, p. 22. Reprinted in Beyond All This Fiddle (London: Allen Lane, 1968).
39. G. S. Fraser, “I, They, We,” New Statesman 57 (1959), 614–15.
40. Roy Fuller in London Magazine, no. 6 (August 1959), 68–73.
41. Frank Kermode, “Talent and More,” Spectator 300 (1959), 628.
42. Peter Dickinson, “More and More Poems,” Punch 246 (1959), 659.
43. Philip Larkin, “Collected Poems,” Manchester Guardian Weekly, May 21,1959, p. 10.
44. Richard Eberhart, “A Poet’s People,” New York Times Book Review, May 3, 1959, pp. 4 ff.
45. F. W. Dupee, “The Battle of Robert Lowell,” Partisan Review 26 (1959), 473–75. Reprinted in F. W. Dupee, The King of the Cats and Other Remarks on Writers and Writing (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965).
46. John Thompson, “Two Poets,” Kenyon Review 21 (1959), 482–90.
47. Ibid.
48. Joseph Bennett, “Two Americans, a Brahmin and the Bourgeoisie,” Hudson Review 12 (1959), 431–39.
49. Thorn Gunn, “Excellence and Variety,” Yale Review, 49 (1960), 295–395.
50. M. L. Rosenthal, “Poetry as Confession,” Nation 190 (1959), 154–55.
51. Daniel G. Hoffman, “Arrivals and Rebirths,” Sewanee Review 68 (1960), 118–37.
52. R.L. to Edmund Wilson, May 19, 1959 (Beinecke Library).
53. Allen Tate to R.L., May 8, 1959 (Houghton Library).
16
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:
Cal never cared anything about psychoanalysis—he went dutifully. It would be like going to mass because you’re told to; told that you’re going to be crazy all the time if you don’t.1
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”):
Stubbed before-breakfast cigarettes
burn bull’s-eyes on the bedside table;
a plastic tumbler of alka seltzer
champagnes in the bathroom.
The drinker in the poem is a “beached whale” in whose warm-hearted blubber “barbed hooks fester”:
His despair has the galvanized color
of the mop and water in the galvanized bucket.
Once she was close to him
as water to the dead metal.
He looks at her engagements inked on her calendar.
A list of indictments.
At the numbers in her thumbed black telephone book.
A quiver full of arrows.2
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:
I’m very excited about the trip, but very reluctant, nearly ill really to leave Harriet and very reluctant to be flying about everywhere, risking her orphanage, if there is such a word. I at last feel she’ll be all right here; it is more myself, my own missing her, and wanting to get back safely to her that bothers me.3
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):
I am just back from Greensboro, where Randall and [I] enjoyed (?) ourselves lamenting the times. It seems there’s been something curious twisted and against the grain about the world poets of our generation have had to live in. What troubles you and I, Ted Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Delmore, Randall—even Karl Shapiro—have had. I hope your exaustion [sic] is nothing very drastic; these knocks are almost a proof of intelligence and valor in us. However, all in all, each year grows better and gayer and more serious.4
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:
If only these things of Cal’s were simply distressing; they cause me and other people real suffering. And for what? I do not know the answer to the moral problems posed by a deranged person, but the dreadful fact is that in purely personal terms this deranged person does a lot of harm. I don’t know, Allen, what to do. This particular time I have kept at a certain distance from Cal, but he is terribly demanding and devouring. I feel a deep loyalty and commitment to him; and yet at the same time I don’t know exactly what sort of bearable status quo I can establish with him. In any case I told him I envied you and Belle, and I do: that made him very angry.5
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:
How goes the Goethe? And what’s happening to you? Flores German anthology just arrived in the mail, and I have read your bunch of translations with increased wonder.
I’m deep in translations and have only finished one poem of my own since last winter. I have to bend and bend to enjoy new English and American poems, but easily become pious and uncritical reading Pasternak and Montale. One wants a whole new deck of cards to play with, or at least new rules for the old ones. Maybe it’s the times, or maybe it’s being well in one’s forties, or maybe it’s all a private thing with me: but I feel wrung with altered views and standards—more than I can swallow. So many questions, one is almost speechless.9
