by Ian Hamilton
Earlier on the same evening Mailer had had an exchange with Lowell at a cocktail party; they had sought each other’s company as the only fit company available and Lowell had praised Mailer: “You know, Norman … Elizabeth and I really think you’re the finest journalist in America.” Mailer knew that Lowell thought this, because the poet had written him a postcard once using almost the same words: but Mailer distrusted Lowell’s praise—he remembered that Lowell had told him privately how much he admired his, Mailer’s, first and only book of poems, but had never voiced the opinion in public when the book received a mauling from the critics. He had also noted that Lowell’s postcard calling him America’s best journalist had been timed to coincide with a review by Elizabeth Hardwick of An American Dream—a review, Mailer remembered, that had “done its best to disembowel the novel”:
Lowell’s card might have arrived with the best of motives, but its timing suggested to Mailer an exercise in neutralsmanship—neutralize the maximum of possible future risks. Mailer was not critically equipped for the task but there was always the distant danger that some bright and not unauthoritative voice, irked at Lowell’s enduring hegemony, might come along with a long lance and presume to tell America that posterity would judge Allen Ginsberg the greater poet.
Back at the meeting, though, Mailer found himself stirred into true admiration by Lowell’s reading of “Waking Early Sunday Morning” and also by his stylish handling of the audience: “We can’t hear you,” they shouted, “speak louder,” to which Lowell replied, “I’ll bellow, but it won’t do any good.”
He was not a splendid reader, merely decent to his own lines, and he read from that slouch, that personification of ivy climbing a column, he was even diffident, he looked a trifle helpless under the lights. Still, he made no effort to win the audience, seduce them, dominate them, bully them, amuse them, no, they were there for him, to please him, a sounding board for the plucked string of his poetic line, and so he endeared himself to them. They adored him—for his talent, his modesty, his superiority, his petulance, his weakness, his painful, almost stammering shyness, his noble strength—there was the string behind other strings…. Mailer discovered he was jealous. Not of the talent. Lowell’s talent was very large, but then Mailer was a bulldog about the value of his own talent. No, Mailer was jealous because he had worked for this audience, and Lowell without effort seemed to have stolen them.
On the day after the reading, Mailer and Lowell, together with other notables like Dr. Spock and Noam Chomsky, led a march of about five hundred draft-resisters, sympathizers and media men to the steps of the Department of Justice. The idea had originally been for each of the notables to accompany a resister up the steps and stand beside him as he deposited his draft card in a bag. Lowell in particular had been repelled by this suggestion and had said to Mailer, “It seems … that they want us to be big buddy.” In the end it was decided that each of the notables would make a short speech in support of the demonstration. And here again Mailer was captivated by Lowell’s diffident, dignified performance:
In the middle of these speakers, Robert Lowell was called up. He had been leaning against a wall in his habitual slumped-over position, deep in revery at the side of the steps—and of course had been photographed as a figure of dejection—the call for him to say a few words caught him partly by surprise. He now held the portable hand microphone with a delicate lack of intimacy as if it were some valuable, huge, and rare tropical spider which he was obliged to examine but did not have to enjoy. “I was asked earlier today” he began in his fine stammering voice which gave the impression that life rushed at him like a series of hurdles and some he succeeded in jumping and some he did not, “I was asked earlier this afternoon by a reporter why I was not turning in my draft card,” Lowell said with the beginnings of a pilgrim’s passion, “and I did not tell him it was a stupid question, although I was tempted to. I thought he should have known that I am now too old to have a draft card, but that it makes no difference. When some of us pledge to counsel and aid and abet any young men who wish to turn in their cards, why then you may be certain we are aware of the possible consequences and do not try to hide behind the technicality of whether we literally have a draft card or not. So I’m now saying to the gentlemen of the press that unlike the authorities who are running this country, we are not searching for tricks, we try to think of ourselves as serious men, if the press, that is, can comprehend such an effort, and we will protest this war by every means available to our conscience and therefore not try to avoid whatever may arise in the way of retribution.”
It was said softly, on a current of intense indignation and Lowell had never looked more dignified nor more admirable. Each word seemed to come on a separate journey from the poet’s mind to his voice, along a winding route or through an exorbitant gate. Each word cost him much—Lowell’s fine grace was in the value words had for him, he seemed to emit a horror at the possibility of squandering them or leaving them abused, and political speeches had never seemed more difficult for him, and on the consequence, more necessary for statement.
So Mailer applauded when Lowell was done. And suddenly liked him enormously for his speech, and decided he liked him truly. Beneath all snobbery, affectations of weariness, literary logrollermanship, neutralsmanship, and whatever other fatal snob-infested baggage of the literary world was by now willy-nilly in the poet’s system, worked down intimately close to all his best and most careful traditions and standards, all flaws considered, Lowell was still a fine, good and admirable man, and Norman Mailer was happy to be linked in a cause with him.
Shortly after Lowell’s speech, Mailer was arrested for trying to cross the police line. Lowell and Macdonald allowed themselves to be turned back by the MP’s and later joined in a sit-down demonstration outside the West Wall of the Pentagon. There, Chomsky was seized by the police, but Lowell and Macdonald were ignored. “They left, unhurt,” writes Mailer, “and eventually went home, Lowell to begin a long poem a few days later (when next Mailer saw him a month later, 800 lines had already been written!).” When Lowell first read Mailer’s account of him, he was visiting his aunt Sarah in Manchester, Massachusetts. Hardwick remembers: “There we were, in the scenery, very proper Bostonian and so on, and Cal said to me, ‘You know, in Boston they think I’m Norman Mailer, and in New York they think I’m Robert Lowell.’”12
Where two or three were heaped together, or fifty,
mostly white-haired, or bald, or women … sadly
unfit to follow their dream, I sat in the sunset
shade of their Bastille, the Pentagon,
nursing leg-and arch-cramps, my cowardly
foolhardy heart; and heard, alas, more speeches,
though the words took heart now to show how weak
we were, and right. An MP sergeant kept
repeating, ‘March slowly through them. Don’t even brush
anyone sitting down.’ They tiptoed through us
in single file, and then their second wave
trampled us flat and back. Health to those who held,
health to the green steel head … to the kind hands
that helped me stagger to my feet, and flee.13
The “800 lines” that Mailer refers to were not, as he seems to have supposed, lines inspired by events outside the Pentagon. The mild, debunking piece above is one of two poems on the subject; in the other, Lowell also presents himself as rather comically inept and timid: “lovely to lock arms, to march absurdly locked / (unlocking to keep my wet glasses from slipping).” But it is certainly true that Lowell was producing lines at an extraordinary rate, and had been doing so since June of 1967. And they were all, like this one on the Pentagon sit-in, slack fourteen-liners—unrhymed, unmetrical, uneven. By Christmas, 1967, he had written over seventy such pieces and, during the following year, was composing at the average rate of four “sonnets” every week. After nearly two years of silence (if one leaves aside translations) he had become as profligate as Me
rrill Moore. Suddenly, everything could be “got into” poetry: headlines, domestic trivia, chance conversations, private anecdotes, as well as his continuing autobiographical obsessions. By the end of 1968 Lowell had written nearly four thousand publishable lines.
It is hard not to speculate about the “sources” of this new abundance. One influence, which Lowell has himself acknowledged, was John Berryman’s Dream Songs: seventy-seven of these had been published in 1964, and since then they had been appearing by the dozen—each song comprising eighteen (or sometimes nineteen) lines divided into three stanzas. Lowell found most of the songs sloppy, “not quite intelligible,” relentlessly indulgent—but he could also see that their cumulative power, their congested, worldly vigor, could only have been captured at the expense of that shaping carefulness over individual lines, individual stanza breaks, which, throughout his own career, Lowell had assumed to be art’s first, most nobly difficult requirement. Lowell had poured his whole self into lyrics that could be offered to the world as “finished”; he had made his personal predicaments stand as fit metaphors for the terrors of the globe. But, with Berryman’s example in mind, he could now see how much of random circumstance, how much of life’s haphazard, interesting flow, was by rule excluded from poems that held their own intensity and artifice in awe. This is how, in 1964, he had described Dream Songs:
The scene is contemporary and crowded with references to news items, world politics, travel, low-life, and Negro music…. The poem is written in sections of three six-line stanzas. There is little sequence, and sometimes a single section will explode into three or four separate parts. At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn’t trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections.
… Several of the best poems in this sequence are elegies to other writers. His elegies are eulogies. By their impertinent piety, by jumping from thought to thought, mood to mood, and by saying anything that comes into the author’s head, they are touching and nervously alive….
… All is risk and variety here. This great Pierrot’s universe is more tearful and funny than we can easily bear.14
Two other sprawling, catch-all epics had haunted Lowell for years: Williams’s Paterson and Ezra Pound’s Cantos. But he had never trusted himself to veer that far away from the formalist stringency he had learned from Tate and Ransom. Life Studies had marked the limits of his disobedience—thereafter he had gravitated back to rhyme and meter. What appealed, though, in the Berryman model was the illusion of structure: the predetermined sectioning. There was in Berryman a beguiling sense of being on parole: the freedom to break lines at will, to be prosy, talkative, discursive, jokey, and yet still have the constraint of being “boxed up” by the “machinery” of a repeated line count.
Other influencing factors can be thought of. The death of Randall Jarrell had removed the one critical voice that Lowell was in fear of—What will Randall think of this? had always been one of his first worries. It is possible that Jarrell might have found most of these new fourteen-liners slack, near-journalistic, or too much like casual diary jottings; they might have seemed to him too mumblingly unrhetorical, too self-indulgent. This is guessing; but there is a sense in which Lowell’s new surge of eloquence is also a surge of truancy from the idea of some absolute critical authority, a “breaking loose” from the requirement never to write badly.
Another element—but to be thought of with the utmost caution—was the effect of the drug lithium, which Lowell had begun taking in the spring of 1967. There is evidence that Lowell believed he had finally been “cured” by lithium. Certainly, by Christmas, 1967, he knew that he had escaped his annual breakdown and was writing to friends praising his new medication. Allen Tate wrote to him in February 1968: “The best news in your letter is the new pill you are taking. It’s not at all so late! You have twenty years ahead, if not more. That you missed this last December is a wonderful thing.”15 And the novelist Richard Stern has a journal entry dated December 27, 1968, in which he describes a visit to Lowell in Chicago:
He is sitting in bed in socks, a blue pocket-buttoned shirt, loose tie. Poems, the new “fourteen-liners” are spread and piled on the red quilt. Cal reads ten or twelve of them aloud. The last is about an odd Christmas tree of artificial roses which his daughter was “too unconventional to buy.” There were many “annotations”; Harriet calls these “footmarks.” He’d written the Christmas tree poem the night before. Since June, he’s written seventy-four of them. It was after he’d started the lithium treatments. He went in to shave and came out every now and then, face half-mooned with cream. He showed me the bottle of lithium capsules. Another medical gift from Copenhagen. Had I heard what his trouble was? “Salt deficiency.” This had been the first year in eighteen he hadn’t had an attack. There’d been fourteen or fifteen of them over the past eighteen years. Frightful humiliation and waste. He’d been all set to taxi up to Riverdale five times a week at $50 a session, plus (of course) taxi fare. Now it was a capsule a day and once-a-week therapy. His face seemed smoother, the weight of distress-attacks and anticipation both gone.16
Certainly, there is a low-keyed agreeableness in most of the new sonnets: a passivity, or receptivity. There is also a slackening of grandeur and ferocity in the way he views his own obsessions, a new willingness to accord near-equal status to whatever happens to have happened. Many of the sonnets are recognizably by Robert Lowell; they employ his verbal tricks—his triple adjectives, his gnomic oxymorons—and they are frequently dense with obscure details from his autobiography. And yet there is something glazed and foreign in their manner of address, as if they sense an audience too far-off, too blurred to be worth striving for. Or is this fanciful? It would be safer, maybe, to conjecture that the important “side effect” of Lowell’s lithium treatment was in how it seemed to him: in that sense of “it is all so late” which Tate replies to in his letter. Lowell’s fourteen-liners are, without doubt, hungry for content, as if they had been starved for years. As Lowell later said, “Accident threw up subjects, and the plot swallowed them—famished for human chances.”
In December 1967 Lowell and Hardwick visited Caracas, Venezuela, to attend a Congress for Cultural Freedom conference along with Jason Epstein, Jules Feiffer and Lillian Hellman, and in January 1968 Lowell visited the Jesuit priest Ivan Illich’s Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico. It was around this time that Illich was lecturing America on the dire consequences of her “innate … compulsion to do good.” “I was speaking mainly,” he said, “to resisters engaged in organizing the March on the Pentagon. I wanted to share with them a profound fear: the fear that the end of the war in Vietnam would permit hawks and doves to unite in a destructive war on poverty in the Third World.”17 As Robert Silvers recalls, Lowell had been much impressed by Illich, whose essays had been appearing regularly in the New York Review:
Cal seemed fascinated by his vision of a society that would be stripped of the unnecessary, where a lot of the professional institutions that dominate life—in education, in medicine—would be demystified and their functions taken over by austere communities in which people would cooperate in devising more rational arrangements. At Cuernavaca Illich had a language school, where people were said to learn Spanish quickly by using tapes, and a “center for documentation.” He described training local people who would collect information on a host of subjects such as development, technology and medicine and publish it in booklets sold to libraries all over the world. He was a tall, thin, cosmopolitan Yugoslav with an intense energy and charm—practically cinematic; a priest who would say he was theologically conservative but set against the false priesthood of modern secular professionalism in the advanced countries, whether communist or capitalist. Cal seemed delighted, in his skeptical way, by the man’s unexpected ideas and qualities.18
Lowell’s sequence
of sonnets “Mexico”19 suggests that he found others in Cuernavaca rather less impressive; one sonnet describes a visit to “the monastery of Emmaus” at Cuernavaca, where the monks seem to have gone “into” psychoanalysis:
A Papal Commission camped on them two years,
ruling analysis cannot be compulsory,
their cool Belgian prior was heretical, a fairy….
We couldn’t find the corpse removed by helicopter;
the cells were empty, but the art still sold;
lay-neurotics peeped out at you like deer,
barbwired in spotless whitewashed cabins, named
Sigmund and Karl…. They live the life of monks,
one revelation healing the ravage of the other.
Most of the “Mexico” sonnets, however, are love poems—and these have a candor and clear-sightedness which Lowell has never before allowed himself when writing of his “affairs”; for the first time, the “girl” has a real dramatic presence:
The difficulties, the impossibilities,
stand out: I, fifty, humbled with the years’ gold garbage,
dead laurel grizzling my back like spines of hay;
you, some sweet, uncertain age, say twenty-seven,
unballasted by honor or deception….
The insisted-on “impossibility” of the relationship provides the theme; he, middle-aged, the famous poet, the husband and father with a complicated life back home; she the innocent, the creature of nature, the near-child: “—how can I love you more, / short of turning into a criminal?”
Sounds of a popping bonfire; no, a colleague’s
