It was in this act of conscientious objection that doctrine, ancestry and politics fused themselves in one commanding stroke and Lowell succeeded in uniting the aesthetic instinct with the obligation to witness morally and significantly in the public realm. Moreover, with what William Meredith once called his ‘crooked brilliance’, Lowell had combined political dissent with psychic liberation; the refusal of the draft was an affront to his family, another strike in the war of individuation and disengagement which he had so forcefully initiated when he flattened his father with one rebellious blow during his first year at Harvard in the late 1930s. Altogether, the refusal to enlist arose from some deep magma and had an igneous personal scald to it. It may have been the manic statement of a ‘fire-breathing CO’ but it did burn with a powerful disdainful rhetoric of election and recrimination.
President Roosevelt was first of all morally wrong-footed in Lowell’s covering letter – ‘You will understand how painful such a decision is for an American whose family traditions, like your own, have always found their fulfilment in maintaining … our country’s freedom and honor.’ Then, in the public statement called ‘Declaration of Personal Responsibility’, the whole of American democracy was arraigned because of its Machiavellian contempt for the laws of justice and charity between nations. In its determination to wage a war ‘without quarter or principles, to the permanent destruction of Germany and Japan’, the United States was allying itself with ‘the demagoguery and herd hypnosis of the totalitarian tyrannies’ and had criminalized the good patriotic war begun in response to aggression in 1941. The usual summaries of this document tend to focus on Lowell’s outrage at the Allies’ immense indifference to the lives of civilians when they bombed Hamburg and the Ruhr; the main drift, as I understand it, is to accuse the United States of becoming like the tyrannies which it set out to oppose. Therefore, the statement concludes:
after long deliberation on my responsibilities to myself, my country, and my ancestors who played responsible parts in its making, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot honorably participate in a war whose prosecution, as far as I can judge, constitutes a betrayal of my country.
Not unexpectedly, one detects here something of the note of a speech from the dock. Yet even granting that the profile is carefully posed for chivalric effect and that there is a certain strut to the moral carriage of the rhetoric, Lowell does achieve a credible and dignified withdrawal of assent. He is not unlike Yeats, on the first night of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, rebuking the audience of the Abbey Theatre for disgracing themselves ‘again’ – which meant, of course, that they had thereby disgraced him. In each case, the habit of command was something which issued from the poet’s caste. Admittedly, neither Yeats nor Lowell came from a family immediately involved in government or public affairs, but they nevertheless carried with them a sense of responsibility for their country, their culture and the future of both.
It was entirely characteristic of Lowell to have manoeuvred himself into a position where he could speak with superior force. It was rarely, with him, a case of ‘Let this cup pass’, but rather a matter of ‘How can I get my hands on the cup’. Between the stylistic ardour of his early poems and such thoroughly plotted and savoured moments as the draft refusal, there is a discernible connection. It has to do with the determination to force an issue by pressure of will, by the plotting instinct which he would ultimately castigate in himself because it meant he ended up ‘not avoiding injury to others’ or to himself; it had to do, in other words, with the tactical, critical revising side of his nature. Lowell was always one to call out the opposition, to send the duelling note: there was an imperious strain even in his desire to embrace the role of witness. Yet the desire was authentic and his conscientious objection can bear comparison with a corresponding instance of collision between individual moral conscience and the demands of the historical moment in the life of Osip Mandelstam.
Mandelstam, of course, lived in a tyranny and Lowell lived in a democracy. That is literally a vital distinction. Nevertheless, I think it is illuminating to set the crisis faced by Lowell in 1943 beside the crisis faced by the Russian poet in the early 1930s. At that time, after five years of poetic silence during which he had tried to make some inner accommodation with the Soviet system, Mandelstam had done something quite uncharacteristic. He had written his one and only poem of direct political comment, a set of couplets contemptuous of Stalin; and he compounded the crime by com posing another document of immense rage and therapeutic force called ‘Fourth Prose’. Both were self-cleansing acts and tragic preparations. Even though they dared not present themselves as public statements like Lowell’s ‘Declaration of Personal Responsibility’, poem and prose were fatal declarations of that very responsibility and would lead not to prison but to death. It was as if Mandelstam were cutting the hair off his own neck in a gesture that signified his readiness for the guillotine; yet this was the only way in which his true voice and being could utter themselves, the only way in which his self-justification could occur. After this moment, the hedonism and jubilation of purely lyric creation developed an intrinsically moral dimension. The poet’s double responsibility to tell a truth as well as to make a thing would henceforth be singly discharged in the formal achievement of the individual poem.
It would be an exaggeration and a presumption to equate Lowell’s gesture with Mandelstam’s sacrifice; yet I would suggest that Lowell’s justification of his specifically poetry-writing self was won by his protest and his experience of jail – in the same way as Mandelstam’s airy liberation was earned at an even more awful price. Jail set the maudit sign upon the brow of the blue-blooded boy. It made him the republic’s Villon rather than its Virgil. It permitted him to feel that the discharge of violent energy from the cauldron of his nature had a positive witnessing function, that by forging the right poetic sound he was forging a conscience for the times.
The robust Symbolist opacity of the first books probably derives at least in part from some such personally authenticated conviction about poetry’s rights and prerogatives. West Street Jail and the Danbury Correction Center provided the poet with a spiritual licence to withdraw from the language of the compromised tribe. From now on, the poetic task would be a matter of dense engagement with the medium itself. The percussion and brass section of the language orchestra is driven hard and, in a great set-piece like ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’, the string section hardly gets a look-in. Distraught woodwinds surge across the soundscape; untamed and inconsolable discords ride the blast. Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Rimbaud, Lycidas himself – resurrected as a language of turbulent sea-sound – all of them press in at the four corners of the page, taut-cheeked genii of storm, intent on blowing their power into the centre of an Eastern Seaboard chart. The reader is caught in a gale-force of expressionism and could be forgiven for thinking that Aeolus has it in for him personally. Here is, for example, Section V of the poem:
When the whale’s viscera go and the roll
Of its corruption overruns this world,
Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Woods Hole
And Martha’s Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword
Whistle and fall and sink into the fat?
In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat
The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,
The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,
The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears
The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,
And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags
And rips the sperm-whale’s midriff into rags,
Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,
Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers
Where the morning stars sing out together
And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers
The red flag hammered in the mast-head. Hide,
Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.
&nbs
p; It is thrilling to put out in these conditions, to feel what Yeats called ‘the stirring of the beast’, to come into the presence of sovereign diction and experience the tread of something metrical, conscious and implacable. To say that such poetry has designs upon us is about as understated as to say that Zeus introduced himself to Leda in fancy dress. ‘Take note, Hopkins,’ it cries. ‘Take note, Melville. And reader, take that!’ Yet to enter a poetic career at this pitch was to emulate Sam Goldwyn’s quest for the ultimate in movie excitement – something beginning with an earthquake and working up to a climax. It was to create a monotone of majesty which was bound to drown out the human note of the poet who had aspired to majesty in the first place. Lawrence had talked about the young poet putting his hand over his daimon’s mouth but Lowell actually handed the daimon a megaphone. Somehow the thing would have to be toned down or else the command established would quickly devolve into cacophony, something unmodulated and monomaniacal.
During the next decade, while a new style was readying itself, the shape of Lowell’s life was also being established. In spite of the cruel cycles of mania, maybe even because of them, Lowell wrote extraordinarily and achieved eminence. By the time of his marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick and his entry upon the New York scene, he was a consolidated literary phenomenon, with the Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Consultancy at the Library of Congress already behind him. One cannot ever be sure to what extent the crenellated mass of the early verse was a defence against the illness of his mind, or an emanation of it, but there is no doubting the strength of the work itself. What I want to focus upon now, however, is the not uncommon spectacle of a poet with just such a dear-won individual style facing into his forties and knowing that it will all have to be done again. Words by Anna Swir, whom I quoted in ‘from The Government of the Tongue’, are again apposite:
The goal of words in poetry is to grow up to the contents, yet that goal cannot ever be attained, for only a small part of the psychic energy which dwells in a poet incarnates itself in words. In fact, every poem has the right to ask for a new poetics … We could say in a paradoxical abbreviation that a writer has two tasks. The first – to create one’s own style. The second – to destroy one’s own style. The second is more difficult and takes more time.
Lowell did this second thing twice in his poetic life, and on each occasion knew what he was doing – which made it both more purposeful and more painstaking. When I say that he knew what he was doing, I don’t mean that he had a prearranged programme of what he wished to achieve, some poetic equivalent of the blueprint in a painting-by-numbers kit. It is rather that the critical, teaching side of his mind was so unremittingly active that his command as a poet was never without self-consciousness, without – in the good Elizabeth sense – cunning; yet only a sensibility with a core of volcanic individual genius could have overcome his own artfulness. He could easily have got himself jammed in a Parnassian impasse but instead, the epoch-making Life Studies appeared in 1959, when Lowell was forty-two. Anna Swir’s law was being proved for the first time in his career. He was later to recollect this period in a well-known account of his experience of reading his symbol-ridden, wilfully difficult early poems in California, to audiences accustomed to the loose-weave writing of the Beats. Already he had sensed ‘that most of what [he] knew about writing was a hindrance’, that his old work was ‘stiff, humorless and encumbered by its ponderous stylistic armor’.
I am not going to rehearse further the attributes of the masterful new poetry which broke from the tegument of his old rhetoric. The main point to insist on is its freedom from the anxiety to sound canonical, the way it no longer stakes its right to be heard on the invocation and assimilation of literary tradition. A phrase of Mandelstam’s will once again do critical service here, one taken from his prose work, Journey to Armenia, where he exclaims: ‘If I believe in the shadow of the oak and the steadfastness of speech articulation, how can I appreciate the present age?’
‘The steadfastness of speech articulation’: it characterizes the dominant music of Lowell’s poetic prime, from Life Studies through For the Union Dead and Near the Ocean. But it also directs us to the very source of that music, in his conviction of the tongue’s right to speak freely and soundingly, and a further conviction of its capacity, if not to unveil reality, then significantly to enrich it. These books often tangle with a great heavy web of subject-matter, autobiographical, cultural and political, yet they are not primarily interested in commentary or opinion about such subject-matter. Nor are they primarily interested in building stanzas like warehouses to store it. Rather they are interested in how to make an event of it, how to project forms and energies in terms of it. They are not, of course, successful all the time, but when they do succeed, they rest their claims upon no authority other than the jurisdiction and vigour of their own artistic means.
The patrician repose of ‘middle Lowell’, the distance travelled from the anxious majesty of the early style, shows up significantly when we compare the protest Lowell made against his society’s waging of war in the 1940s with the one made against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. On this later occasion, his refusal of an invitation to President Johnson’s White House was done without much clamour or histrionics. It was no longer a case of the writer putting himself to the test by taking on the role of bard and scapegoat. It was now rather the President who was to be on the defensive. Poetry, in the figure of this silvered Brahmin from Boston, was calling upon policy to account for itself. Yet Lowell’s authority now resided in the mystery of his achieved art rather than in his ancestry or in the justice of any public controversy he might choose to initiate:
When I was telephoned last week and asked to read at the White House Festival of the Arts on June fourteenth, I am afraid I accepted somewhat rapidly and greedily. I thought of such an occasion as a purely artistic flourish, even though every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making subtle public commitments. After a week’s wondering, I have decided that I am conscience-bound to refuse your courteous invitation.
The books of Lowell’s middle years, like this grave and well-judged political protest, are wise to the world and wise about it. ‘For the Union Dead’ and ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’ are two of the finest public poems of our time but they do not address the world in order to correct it. They Lowellize it instead, make it ring, make it a surface against which the poet’s voice strikes, is caught and thereby either amplifies itself or glances off. Here it is, amplifying, at the conclusion of ‘Waking Early’:
Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war – until the end of time to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.
And here it is, in ‘Middle Age’, glancing off:
Father, forgive me
my injuries,
as I forgive
those I
have injured!
You never climbed
Mount Sion, yet left
dinosaur
death-steps on the crust,
where I must walk.
There will be more to say about this less assertive voice before we finish, but for the moment let us salute it as a good victory by Lowell over his ruling passion for sounding victorious, his temptation to raise the trumpet or let the left hand reinforce the right with a strongly affirmative or discordant bass. As he himself well knew, there was ‘an incomparable wandering voice’ within him which he often and habitually made the captive of what he also called his ‘maze of iron composition’.
Those phrases came from the lovely, limber final sonnet in Lowell’s book The Dolphin and form the last lines of the massive triptych composed in his fifties, comprising ultimately the three books called History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin. If I here skim over the mighty heave of th
is work, it is not because I miss Lowell’s command in the sound of its lines. On the contrary. These astonishingly, wilfully strong lines are too much under the sway of an imposed power. There is no doubt about the good artistic intentions of what he is doing, and no doubt about the foundry heat in which scores of the standard-mould, fourteen-line, unrhymed poem-ingots are being smelted and cast. To change the metaphor, one admires once again the spectacle of a poet taking the crowbar to a perfected style: these new, unmelodious, dumped-down forms are deliberate rebukes to the classical cadences of the volumes of the 1960s. Line by line, in local manifestations, the genius and sinuousness are still alive and well, but to confront the whole triptych is to confront a phalanx. I feel driven off the field of my reader’s freedom by the massive riveted façade, the armoured tread, the unconceding density of it all.
What I wish to dwell upon instead is the gentler, autumnal work in Lowell’s last collection, Day by Day. The effect of coming to it after the twelve-tone scale of these previous books is of moving from a works-floor ringing with the occasional treble beauty of that busy crowbar to a room full of canvases by, say, Bonnard. A roseate benevolence in the pigment, an unextinguished but ungreedy sensuality in the air, a warm-bloodedness at the centre or in the offing. The voice comes from pillow level rather than from a podium, indulgent but unfooled, schooled by mutuality but not yet schooled into mutuality, more inclined to wryness than pathos. It can cover a great distance in a single shift of tone or image or line. The typical effects are of ruminant talk (‘Marriage’ and ‘Last Walk’) or skewed proverbial wisdom (‘For Sheridan’) or a cross-cutting of these styles into each other (‘Ants’). All of this does come, as a character in one of the poems desires it to, ‘a little nearer / the language of the tribe’, but its primary purpose is neither to curry favour with the reader nor to keep in ideological step with writing in the American grain. The poems proceed by free association, as Helen Vendler has observed; they are as tousled, amiably importunate and comfortably unpredictable as lovers weaving through warm rooms at the end of a slightly erotic, slightly drunken party.
Finders Keepers Page 24
