Terrible that old life of decency
without unseemly intimacy
or quarrels, when the unemancipated woman
still had her Freudian papa and maids!
Yet the decorum of Life Studies is continuous with that old life even as it reveals its disintegration, its inadequate hauteur in the face of locked razors, mad soldiers and electric chairs. This decorum, the book's technical mastery and its drive towards impersonality are as much part of Lowell's birthright as his patronymic. As an artist, he was the proper Bostonian with his back to a wall of tradition. His poetic art, however self-willed it might on occasion be, could never escape from the demand that it be more than self-indulgence. There had to be something surgical in the incisions he made, something professional and public-spirited. The whole thing was a test, of himself and of the resources of poetry, and in Life Studies those resources proved to be capable of taking new strains, in both the musical and the stressful sense of that word. Lowell did not innocently lisp in numbers. Innocence was not
something he set much store by, anyhow, either in himself or in others, and his whole oeuvre is remarkably free of the sigh for lost Eden. Everything begins outside the garden, in the learning process, in sweat and application. No lisps. The voice has broken by the time it speaks. It has been to school, literally as well as figuratively. Lowell's first style, it should not be forgotten, was formed in the English Departments of Kenyon College, Vanderbilt College and Louisiana State University. His mentors, true enough, were poets and knew poetry inside out, yet they were equally and more famously teachers, New Critics driven by a passion to pluck out the last secret of any poem by unearthing, if necessary, its seventh ambiguity. No wonder, then, that Lowell, in a late poem, wryly and accurately likened his early work to the seven-walled fortress of Troy, where meaning lay immured behind rings of highly wrought art. But at least that meant that he wrote, in the words of F. W. Dupee, 'as if poetry were still a major art and not merely a venerable pastime'. Among a strenuous and brilliant generation of poet-critics, praying to be obsessed by writing and having their prayers answered, Lowell not only strove to hold his own by mastering the classical, English, European and American poetic canons; he also strove to outstrip the level best of his peers by swerves that were all his own: doctrinal, ancestral, political. Doctrinal, when he converted to the Roman Catholic Church and betrayed not just a faith but a civic solidarity. Ancestral, when he invoked his dynastic right derived from the Winslows and the Lowells and presumed to rebuke the President. Political, when he went to gaol as a conscientious objector in 1943, having nevertheless volunteered (without response) for the Navy and the Army in the previous year.
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 fulfillment 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 composing 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 respon-
sibility and would lead not to prison but to death. It was as if Man-delstam 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 wou
ld 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 gaol—in the same way as Mandelstam's airy liberation was earned at an even more awful price. Gaol 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 sections of the language orchestra are 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-wdiale'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.
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
FINDERS KEEPERS
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" ' (page 197), 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 Elizabethan sense—cunning; yet only a sensibility with a core of volcanic individual genius could have overcome his own
Lowell's Command / 2 2 9
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.
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Jacket design by Susan Mitchell Author photograph by Andrew Brucker
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lected prose, 1971-2001
Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001 Page 23
