Where Have You Been?

by Michael Hofmann

  Most probably I was responding to a sort of synthesis of all of Life Studies, or to the atmosphere of the whole thing—especially the title sequence in Part IV—but almost at a peradventure, I have chosen two poems from that section, which covers the Glanz und Elend, the splendor and misery of three generations of Lowells and Winslows, from his infancy to the middle of his life, from the prime of his grandfather to his own hesitant and infirm middle age (in “Skunk Hour”). The first is “For Sale”:

  Poor sheepish plaything,

  organized with prodigal animosity,

  lived in just a year—

  my Father’s cottage at Beverly Farms

  was on the market the month he died.

  Empty, open, intimate,

  its town-house furniture

  had an on tiptoe air

  of waiting for the mover

  on the heels of the undertaker.

  Ready, afraid

  of living alone till eighty,

  Mother mooned in a window,

  as if she had stayed on a train

  one stop past her destination.

  This is so exemplary in its limpidity and declarativeness and straightforwardness, it is hard to know what to say about it. The language seems at once natural and adequate. It is immediately apprehensible and reads as though it had been written in one go, and yet has interest and balance to nourish it through many rereadings. It, and the poem before it, called “Father’s Bedroom,” I think are the two poems that William Carlos Williams—the great simpliste, I should like to call him—Lowell’s friend and the least likely of literary allies, particularly admired. Both are basically Imagist poems, but it is an Imagism enriched with psychological notes, with hardheadedness, with implication. “For Sale” is static, and yet it moves (in both senses); it is neutral but full of hurt and dread; it is palpable and factual, and yet the things in it would not have been perceptible to—could not have been said by—anyone else. It seems to be about a piece of real estate, but it’s actually more of a ghost story. The poem seems almost like a euphemism, so decorous, so impersonal, so well based in objectivity and fact—and yet is there anything in it that is not said? The worst-laid plans, it seems to say, go stray …

  Its organization is sturdy and foursquare: fifteen lines, three—grammatically correct—sentences of five lines apiece, the lines short but flexible, four to twelve syllables. They carry rather more stresses than one might expect: “poor sheepish plaything,” spondees, five stresses, aerated by unstressed syllables in the following line “organized with prodigal animosity,” a pattern that repeats itself throughout the poem: “lived in just a year” (four out of five stresses), “my Father’s cottage at Beverly Farms” (only five out of ten). This reassertion of heaviness lifting, almost in spite of itself, is like the moment in Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, about his mother, who killed herself, when Handke says why make words when all he feels like doing is repeatedly tapping the same key on his typewriter again and again. There is that heaviness in “Poor sheepish plaything,” the indifferent shuffling trudge through the ankle-deep consonants. As for the lightening, the consolation, that may be the consolation of articulacy, the way that each sentence is brought from appositional phrase (“Poor sheepish plaything,” “Empty, open, intimate,” “Ready, afraid / of living alone”) to action, is quickened (Heaney’s word) from noun to verb. However painful the action and the understanding of the poem may be, it still lightens the unbearable heaviness of “Poor sheepish plaything.”

  There is an integrity, a coherence, about “For Sale” that is one of the great virtues of Lowell’s poetry, a closeness—however manufactured—to speech. As I say, it reads as though it had been written in one go. And yet the poem, for all its plainness, has something pleasurably luxuriant—or even luxurious—about it too. One doesn’t doubt or disbelieve the vocabulary—it seems an absolutely natural vocabulary—nor is it exactly being flaunted, but there is something worth relishing in “mooned in a window”; in the melodious felicitous combinations of lines 1 or 6 or 11; in the play of heel and toe; in the phrase “prodigal animosity” (almost a transferred epithet, I think, the animosity of the prodigal, of the one who has gone forth, but suggesting also “prodigious animosity” or “prodigious animus”—a word that also means “soul,” the soul that is left mooning in a window).

  The luxury, the expressiveness, the ghostly skill of the poem are in large part the function of one part of speech: adjectives. Adjectives, we are told, are bad. Even such good teachers as Pound and Bunting are wary of them (“use either no ornament or good ornament,” says Pound). Hughes, we are told, was such a great poet because of his way with verbs. Lowell made the adjective salonfähig—respectable—in modern poetry (Adam Zagajewski performs the same service for the adverb). In the context of “For Sale,” this is what makes it such a maximalist poem, for all its Chinese economy. It contains nine adjectives, as well as two nouns as epithets and two past participles—almost one a line, or one word in five! The poem is slathered, stuck with adjectives, like an orange with cloves.

  An adjective, an adequate adjective, is a thought or a perception. Where—as often happens in Lowell—adjectives come in twos or threes, they are constellations, distinctive and collusive, radiant with outward meaning and human prediction, and held together by inscrutable inward gravitational bonds. “Ready, afraid / of living alone till eighty,” going and stopping, affirming and reluctant; “Empty, open, intimate,” three complementary views of a space, the three bears, if you like, from outside, from the threshold, from within. In both instances, the contrasting or evolving meanings are underscored by similarity of sounds.

  Three poems later in Life Studies, you encounter “Waking in the Blue,” longer, better known, more anthologized, more typical. The subject by now has moved from parents and grandparents to Lowell himself. It is the first of a little minigroup, “Waking in the Blue,” “Home After Three Months Away,” “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” that shows prismatic views of the poet against the background of three different institutions: mental hospital, what Jonathan Raban nicely dubbed “the slovenly freedom of university teaching,” and prison—the reduced term of three months that Lowell did as a conscientious objector in 1943–1944. “Waking in the Blue” is hospital:

  The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,

  rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head

  propped on The Meaning of Meaning.

  He catwalks down our corridor.

  Azure day

  makes my agonized blue window bleaker.

  Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.

  Absence! My heart grows tense

  as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.

  (This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)

  What use is my sense of humor?

  I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,

  once a Harvard all-American fullback,

  (if such were possible!)

  still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,

  as he soaks, a ramrod

  with the muscles of a seal

  in his long tub,

  vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.

  A kingly granite profile in a crimson golf-cap,

  worn all day, all night,

  he thinks only of his figure,

  of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale—

  more cut off from words than a seal.

  This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;

  the hooded night lights bring out “Bobbie,”

  Porcellian ’29,

  a replica of Louis XVI

  without the wig—

  redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,

  as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit

  and horses at chairs.

  These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.

  In between the limits of day,

  hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
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  and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle

  of the Roman Catholic attendants.

  (There are no Mayflower

  screwballs in the Catholic Church.)

  After a hearty New England breakfast,

  I weigh two hundred pounds

  this morning. Cock of the walk,

  I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey

  before the metal shaving mirrors,

  and see the shaky future grow familiar

  in the pinched, indigenous faces

  of these thoroughbred mental cases,

  twice my age and half my weight.

  We are all old-timers,

  each of us holds a locked razor.

  Perhaps as with “For Sale,” one’s immediate reaction is: How can there be anything the matter with someone, if they express themselves so insightfully, with so much wit and joy? What is defective or deficient here? It’s a pervasive, almost an all-pervading question with Lowell, and it’s one of the things I grappled with—in my head, mind, never on paper—in my unwritten PhD on him a few years later. A poem begins: “I want you to see me when I have one head / again, not many, like a bunch of grapes.” It’s drastic and unforgettable, and partly for those reasons you’re unwilling to entertain the possibility even that some sort of human hydra wrote the lines in front of you. Elsewhere, there’s talk of “the kingdom of the mad— / its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye.” But when is this tailored speech ever hackneyed, and where is there a glimmer of homicide? Lowell wrote out of a condition called bipolar disorder or manic depression. From the mid-1950s, say, he suffered a manic attack pretty much annually. Typically, there’s a fantastic description of it in the late book The Dolphin. The scene, as in “Waking in the Blue,” is a bathroom:

  I feel my old infection, it comes once yearly:

  lowered good humor, then an ominous

  rise of irritable enthusiasm …

  Three dolphins bear our little toilet-stand,

  the grin of the eyes rebukes the scowl of the lips,

  they are crazy with the thirst. I soak,

  examining and then examining

  what I really have against myself.

  Perhaps the word “crazy” stands out; if not, then perhaps “thirst” and “soak,” or the “ominous / rise of irritable enthusiasm,” or the Calvinist / Jesuitical “examining and then examining.” That’s it, anyway. I find it actually far more deeply present in Lowell’s life than in his poetry and think it affected those around him—his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, his exceptionally devoted friends—far more than it did himself, though how is one to say that? It puts me in mind of a line from Montale: “Too many lives are needed to make one.” From the mid-’60s, Lowell was prescribed lithium, which made it a little easier perhaps to control the symptoms. He was upset and bemused by the disproportionate effect of what he termed the “lack of a little salt in the brain.”

  I don’t think there is very much for the clinician in Lowell’s published poems. The drafts, yes, they are wildly, disturbingly different. Chapter 15 of Ian Hamilton’s life of Robert Lowell begins with a frightening draft of “Waking in the Blue,” called “To Ann Adden (Written during the first week of my voluntary stay at McLean’s Mental Hospital)”—the fully circumstantial titling of a Romantic epistle—and including such lines as:

  Ann, what use is my ability

  for shooting the bull,

  far from your Valkyrie body,

  your gold-brown hair,

  your robust uprightness—you, brisk

  yet discrete [sic] in your conversation!

  II

  (a week later)

  The night-attendant, a B.U. student,

  rouses his cobwebby eyes

  propped on his Social Relations text-book,

  prowls drowsily down our corridor …

  Soon, soon the solitude of Allah, azure day-break,

  will make my agonized window bleaker.

  What greater glory than recapturing the moment of glory

  in miseria?

  . . . .

  Your salmon lioness face is dawn.

  It feels thoroughly mean to quote as much as this, and thoroughly improbable that anything worth anything could come of such writing. Here, unquestionably, is the kingdom of the mad with its hackneyed speech and all the rest of it. It feels strange, too, to propose that mere cutting could not just restore something to sanity but also find purpose and control and expressiveness in it. It’s at this point, perhaps, that one might return to Lowell’s beginnings in will and imagination. (Not the worst aspect of “To Ann Adden” is the way that the footballer seems to have returned!) But for that desire to create himself, or to create, at any rate, something, he might not have been able to retrieve anything at all from such—to use his word—maunderings.

  In the published poem, Ann Adden, a “psychiatric fieldworker” from Bennington, is gone, and so too is the operatic exaltation that came with her. (Both, it seems, were a function of the manic phase of Lowell’s disorder.) Instead, there is a canniness and craftiness and dryness and confinement—a boundedness and mildness that you could never imagine in the original draft, even where the alterations themselves are pretty tiny. Not the “cobwebby eyes” but “the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head,” an almost maternal note of solicitude. Not the “Social Relations text-book,” dry and theoretical, but the rich joke on The Meaning of Meaning. Not “prowls drowsily down our corridor” but “catwalks down our corridor”—a marine ease and fitness in the verb. Not “make my agonized window bleaker” but “makes my agonized blue window bleaker,” an almost unsayable blurt, the “bleaker” yearning to be “blacker.”

  Without the encumbrance of Ann, “massive, tawny, playful, lythe,” the zany second person (the person of ode, and of poetry), the poem inhabits the comfortable third person of fiction. The “I” slips easily into the role of the little-account, lateral observer–cum–narrator figure, à la Moby-Dick or Gatsby, and leaves the stage open for the main protagonists, the “characters,” Stanley and “Bobbie.” (“Bobbie,” of course, is not a million miles away from “Bobby,” as Lowell appears elsewhere in Life Studies, in his mother’s voice.) From this point on, what is interesting is the externality of the description of “these thoroughbred mental cases” and residual speculation on the speaker, or the person of the poet, if you prefer. Here is a poem about the mind in which, after the first four lines, the mind doesn’t appear! A poem from which the reader takes blue, plumbing, sherbet, sperm whale, weight. A poem, it seems, of narcissistic self-regard and vanity, of weights and measures, of appurtenances and accoutrements. A sort of locker-room way back to health, golf caps, nudity, diet. Everything that’s proposed here is physical, it’s the sort of self-absorption—Mann again—of the sanatorium, of The Magic Mountain this time, with the Lowell figure like a sort of Hans Castorp, a visitor threatened with going native. The display of, as it were, rude health, is an effort to deny that there’s anything wrong upstairs: the atmosphere is prankish, eccentric, overspecified.

  “Waking in the Blue” isn’t a tidy poem, with its ragged verse paragraphs, its sporadic full rhymes, its unkempt imagery. But it is precisely such looseness that allows it to accommodate so much realism. There are two main strands of imagery, one maritime and the other monumental: reading the poem puts one in mind, maybe, of a sort of Rushmore-by-the-sea. But plenty of things are not accommodated within this, and also, it doesn’t seem in the least conniving or purposive. (One trusts poet and poem the more.) Scanning it, one picks up: catwalks, azure, harpoon, sunk, soaks, seal, sperm whale, crew haircuts, Mayflower, and the turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey. On the monumental side, or perhaps more exactly, there where stone meets king, we have: propped, petrified, Victorian, kingly granite profile, seal (in the other sense, the royal seal, the keeper of the royal seal), Porcellian (if one allows porcelain, China shepherdesses and the like), wig, swashbuckles, ossified, Catholic, and maybe thoro
ughbred. Combining the two strands, one can perhaps come up with a sense of joining the crew of a ship, either voluntarily or press-ganged; stiffening—petrified, ossified—and movement or loss of movement—maunder, tense, ramrod, granite, strut, locked—are also thematized. The “mare’s nest” has an overtone of the Medusa—also a word for jellyfish—suggesting a way the two types of imagery might be combined, in some sort of home for failed, Andromeda-less (Ann Adden–less?!), ossified or petrified Perseuses: “These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.”

  The speaker in “Waking in the Blue” perhaps agonizes—his word—over whether or not to belong. The poem begins, like Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” with an awakening: out of fantasy into reality, from a personal unconscious into a shared conscious. The word “our” appears as early as line 4. “We” and “us” bring the poem to its conclusion. Lowell tries to fix his identity with recourse to other institutions, like B.U. and Harvard, to the sophomore, or “wise fool”, to “Bobbie,” and the “Mayflower screwballs”—the Lowells and Winslows were among the earliest American settlers. At the same time, he worries about the wisdom of throwing in his lot with these particular people—“more cut off from words than a seal”—not surprisingly. Unease is repeatedly signaled by the fishiness, the not-quite-rightness of things: “if such were possible,” “vaguely urinous,” the “crimson golf-cap,” “without the wig,” and the brilliantly suspicious “slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle” of the “attendants.” By the end, harrowingly, and again as in Kafka, the speaker has got himself adopted; “Bobbie” and Stanley are like monstrous parental figures, and Lowell is their son, half their age and twice their weight. The thoroughbred mental case is shut, if not “locked,” and the future is settled and looks “familiar”—almost familial. The poem is at its saddest when it is most in agreement: “After a hearty New England breakfast, / I weigh two hundred pounds / this morning.” It’s like acceptance, or promotion. Making the grade. The locked razor is the badge of office, the scepter of this establishment.