by Ian Hamilton
This is from “91 Revere Street.” Reset in free verse (in “Commander Lowell”), with some details added and some others dropped, it reads:
whenever he left a job,
he bought a smarter car.
Father’s last employer
was Scudder, Stevens and Clark, Investment Advisors,
himself his only client.
While Mother dragged to bed alone,
read Menninger,
and grew more and more suspicious,
he grew defiant.
Night after night,
à la clarté déserte de sa lampe,
he slid his ivory Annapolis slide rule
across a pad of graphs—
piker speculations! In three years
he squandered sixty thousand dollars.
The line breaks here seem random, and there is none of the rhythmic or imagistic subtlety that marks the later free-verse poems in the book. It is worth remembering that when Lowell first thought of “versifying” his prose autobiography, his instinct was to do it in metrical couplets. Here, for example, is a draft of a sonnet about the family graveyard at Dunbarton, in which Lowell’s father is again to be found studying his graphs:
Four years have left Dunbarton much the same,
Mother, another stone, another name;
And you, earth’s orbit? You are things,
No you, no person. Ah, the king of kings,
Little Napoleon, whose bolting food
So caught your fancy, caught your horror stood
Blotting your minutes after Father died.
No bustle, bustle, bustle. Groom and bride
Lie cot by cot. Once more they feel the spark
Dive through the unnerved marrow of their dark,
A person breaking through his prison term,
Where now as then, relapsing, Oh a germ,
Studies his navel, graphs and charts and maps
Gentle to all, and loving none perhaps.27
It is small wonder that when Lowell made the decision to shift from this kind of mechanical regularity to the spacious relaxation of free verse, he was somewhat dazzled by his own boldness; for a period, at any rate, he was content simply to “take liberties,” to relish the sheer drasticness of what he’d done. The notion that free verse could be as intricate, dramatic and intense as anything he’d done before in meter seems not to have struck him until about halfway through the sequence of “family poems” in Life Studies. A letter to William Carlos Williams on February 19, 1958, is a bold and defensive statement to the archenemy of metrics that Lowell’s “conversion” would, after all, be incomplete:
In a month or so I’ll mail you another little group of my own stuff, God willing. I now have four or five things you haven’t seen. I wouldn’t like ever to completely give up meter; it’s wonderful opposition to wrench against and revise with. Yet now that I’ve joined you in unscanned verse, I am struck by how often the old classics get boxed up in their machinery, the sonority of the iambic pentameter line, the apparatus of logic and conceit and even set subjects. Still, the muscle is there in the classics, we re-read them with joy, and in a sense wherever a man has really worked his stuff outbraves time and novel methods. We would always rather read a good old sonneteer, such as Raleigh or Sidney than some merely competent modern fellow who is on the right track. The excellent speak to the excellent.28
That “we would rather read …” observation is a kind of scolding bluff, since Lowell knew very well that Williams might not rather read a Raleigh sonnet than some new effort “in the American grain.”
As it turns out, the inconsistency between the “early” and “late” poems of Life Studies does seem to have a point. The looser, more pedestrian “studies” are those in which the family is seen through the eyes of the child Lowell—“My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” “Dunbarton,” “Grandparents” and “Commander Lowell.” These are elegant and witty pieces, and have some piercing moments—the ending of the Uncle Devereux poem for example—but the tone throughout is benign, detached and utterly unhurried. And one would be hard pressed to insist that they need to be set out as verse, not prose; indeed, their merits are prose merits.
The change comes when Lowell begins to draw on his adult experience of family life, and death; when the poet cannot avoid moving to the center of his own poems. It may be that by this stage Lowell was more sure—technically—of what he was about; or it may be that the subject was no longer half invented and remote. Certainly, with “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms” and the poems that follow it, there is a noticeable tightening: alliterations and assonances seem more deliberate, more shrewd and menacing; the dramatic shifts more calculated, brutal. Here is Mr. Lowell once again, thirty years older now but still clutching his ivory slide rule:
Each morning at eight-thirty,
inattentive and beaming,
loaded with his “calc” and “trig” books,
his clipper ship statistics,
and his ivory slide rule,
Father stole off with the Chevie
to loaf in the Maritime Museum at Salem.
He called the curator
“the commander of the Swiss Navy.”
Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting.
His vision was still twenty-twenty.
After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,
his last words to Mother were:
“I feel awful.”
There follow three more poems on Lowell’s parents’ deaths and then a transitional piece—“During Fever”—in which the poet, a father now himself, strains for a wise, forgiving view of his own background. Then we are immediately thrust forward into the orphaned present tense, with “Waking in the Blue” and “Home After Three Months Away.” We have moved from “those settled years of World War One” to the 1957 agonies of the family’s afflicted heir, from lazily chopped-up prose to a lyricism more delicately measured than anything in Lowell’s early meters. The matching of the poet’s maturity in free verse with the growing up of the child-hero of the family poems may not have been planned out, but its dramatic rightness does give credence to Lowell’s contention that “I see the ‘Life Studies’ sequence as one poem, at least in the first section. It really centers about my father and the parts are not meant to stand by themselves.”29
Section II of the “Life Studies” sequence has four poems—each of them bitingly personal but offering a broader view of Lowell’s life so far: in each he tries to face the crippling and destructive “side-effects” of his recurrent mental breakdowns. One consequence is that he no longer trusts his old intellectual vehemence and he knows that others trust it even less: his verbal brilliance they now associate with “the kingdom of the mad—its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye”; it frightens them. He knows too that when he was a “fire-breathing Catholic C.O.” and refused military service, he may well have been in the grip of energies that must now, if he is to live any sort of “normal life,” be “tranquillized.” It is no real comfort that his own prescribed inertia is mirrored in the self-serving complacency of Eisenhower’s America, that
even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is a “young Republican.”
But then what are “ideals” worth if they can only be pursued in mania? And what is a sane professor’s life in Boston worth if “excitement” or “enthusiasm” is always to be thought of as a symptom of destruction and collapse?
The first version of the poem “Man and Wife” was called “Holy Matrimony,” and it included an early draft of what was later to become the separate “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” (printed in Life Studies next to “Man and Wife”). Although uncompleted and unpolished, it provides a powerful insight into the “political” background of a poem in which references to “the Rahvs” (Philip Rahv was editor of Partisan Review during the most vehement period
of its history) and “the traditional South” have seemed to some critics overintimate or incidental. “Holy Matrimony” also makes it clear that the “old-fashioned tirade” referred to in “Man and Wife” is in fact the substance of the next poem in the book—“To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage”—although recast into the third person.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
Blossoms on our Saucer Magnolia ignite
For their feverish five days white….
Last night I held your hands, Petite,
Subtlest of all God’s creatures, still pure nerve,
Still purer nerve than I,
Who, hand on glass
And heart in mouth,
Outdrank the Rahvs once in the heat
Of Greenwich Village, and sat at your feet—
Too boiled and shy
And poker-faced to make a pass,
While the shrill verve
Of your invective scorched the solid South.
On warm spring night [sic] though, we can hear the outcry,
If our windows are open wide,
I can hear the South End,
The razor’s edge
Of Boston’s negro culture. They as we
Refine past culture’s possibility,
Fear homocide [sic],
Grow horny with alcohol, take the pledge …
At forty why pretend
It’s just the others, not ourselves, who die?
And now you turn your back,
Sleepless, you hold
Your pillow to your hollows like a child,
And once again,
The merciless Racinian tirade
Breaks like the Atlantic on my head:
“It’s the injustice … you are so unjust.
There’s nothing accommodating, nice or kind—
But What can I do for you? What can I do for you,
Shambling into our bed at two
With all the monotonous sourness of your lust,
A tusked heart, an alcoholic’s mind,
And blind, blind, blind
Drunk! Have pity! My worst evil
Is living at your level.
My mind
Moves like a water-spider….
The legs stick and break in your slough.
Why prolong our excruciation now?
What is your purpose? Each night now I tie
Ten dollar30
The draft version ends here, but the line finally (in “To Speak of Woe …”) reads:
Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh….
The last poem in Life Studies—“Skunk Hour”—shows the poet free-lancing out on one of his nocturnal car rides. It is the most nakedly desperate piece in the book, and Lowell called it “the anchor poem of the sequence.” “Skunk Hour” was the first of the Life Studies poems to be finished: after his tour of the West Coast in March 1957 Lowell “began writing lines in a new style,” but
No poem … got finished and soon I left off and tried to forget the whole headache. Suddenly, in August, I was struck by the sadness of writing nothing, and having nothing to write, of having, at least, no language. When I began writing “Skunk Hour,” I felt that most of what I knew about writing was a hindrance.31
He began the poem in mid-August 1957 and completed it in a month. It was modeled, he said, on Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Armadillo.” Both poems “use short line stanzas, start with drifting description and end with a single animal.”32
The “drifting description” in the first four stanzas of “Skunk Hour” is of an ailing Maine sea town. The inhabitants are either anachronistic or nouveau-absurd: “our summer millionaire, / who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean / catalogue”; “our fairy decorator.” According to Hardwick, all these people “were living, more or less as he sees them, in Castine that summer. The details, not the feeling, were rather alarmingly precise, I thought. But fortunately it was not read in town for some time, and then only by ‘people like us.’”33 Perhaps because of the way the poem develops, explicators have been overeager to make these opening descriptive lines more weighty and sinister than they really are—in truth, they are meant as lightish social comedy: “I try to give a tone of tolerance, humor, and randomness to the sad prospect.” As Lowell said, “all comes alive in Stanzas V and VI”:
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town….
My mind’s not right.
A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love….” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat….
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—
… This is the dark night. I hoped my readers would remember John of the Cross’s poem. My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan and agnostical. An Existential night. Somewhere in my mind was a passage from Sartre or Camus about reaching some point of final darkness where the one free act is suicide.34
The closing image of the mother skunk risking all to feed her “column of kittens” is meant as ambiguous affirmation—the skunk family are to be seen as a “healthy, joyful apparition—despite their diet and smell, they are natural power.”35 The poet who feels lower than a skunk finds both comedy and renewal in the beasts’ quixotically defiant march up Main Street. They are scavengers but could never be “Republicans.” The skunks are both touching and funny, and, as much as anything else, it is Lowell’s wit, his delight in the barbarous and the absurd, that rescues him from “final darkness.” Read like this, the poem does indeed “anchor” a sequence that has asked, time and again, and in the worst of circumstances: “What use is my sense of humor?”
*
Apart from Allen Tate’s “dissenting opinion,” the response of Lowell’s friends to the manuscript of Life Studies had been enthusiastic, and in November 1958 Lowell was particularly gratified to get a view of the finished book from William Carlos Williams, a view that (although rather confused in its expression—Williams was already a sick man) must have eased any lingering fears that the Williams influence was unassimilated:36
Dear Cal,
Floss has just finished reading me your terrible wonderful poems. You have lost nothing of your art, in fact you have piled accomplishment upon accomplishment until there is nothing to be said to you in rebuttle [sic] of your devastating statements or the way you have uttered them. I’m trying to be not rhetorical but to approach the man you are with all defenses down.
Either this has to be a long letter hinging [sic] growth in your sheer mastery of your skill in English composition or a heartbreaking statement of the human situation which has posessed [sic] you for the last ten years. To be a successful artist means a victory in the first place and then over the world you inhabit. Poverty as in the case of the painters Cezanne and Van Gogh—It was a mistake to bring that in here but I am merely stalling for words. You have nothing to do with that. Your problem was the English language. Your use of the words is aristocratic—sometimes you use rhyme—but thank goodness less and less frequently and that is an improvement, you speak more to us, more directly when you do not have to descend to it, your language gains in seriousness and ability in your choice of words when you abandon rhyme completely. I’m just fumbling around knowing I have much to say to you but without release.
The book must have caused you some difficulty to write. There is no lying permitted to a man who writes that way.
(Next day)
I couldn’t go on. The book took too much out of me which I don’t have any more to give. It’s very impressive but I couldn’t read it again. The one short lyric is really beautiful [probably “For Sale”], finished and beautiful.
Do you want me to return the manuscript, otherwise I’ll keep it in my file
s—for some one of my literary executors to discover for himself and wonder at.
Keep well, Dear Cal
Bill
Oddly enough, Life Studies, the most “American” of Lowell’s books, made its first appearance in Britain, in April 1959. Faber and Faber wanted to enter it for selection by the newly formed Poetry Book Society, and to qualify, the English edition had to be a “first edition.” Charles Monteith of Faber recalls:
we went ahead as fast as we could, which is why “91 Revere Street” isn’t in it—we never even saw it until it appeared in the American edition—and I got page proofs ready in time and submitted them to the Poetry Book Society, and the upshot of all this was that it wasn’t even recommended. The choice that time was The Wreck of the Magyar, by Patricia Beer.37
Apart from a review in the Observer by A. Alvarez which heralded “Something New in Verse,”38 and more cautious tributes by G. S. Fraser in the New Statesman (“accomplished … interesting and touchingly ‘human’”)39 and Roy Fuller in the London Maga zine,40 the British reviews were fairly tepid. Frank Kermode’s piece in the Spectator spoke of “a poet so sure of his powers that he does not recognise the danger of lapsing into superior doggerel when he too luxuriously controls it,”41 and someone called Peter Dickinson in Punch announced that “few of the poems are in themselves memorable.”42 But perhaps the British review that would have mattered most to Lowell was by Philip Larkin in the Manchester Guardian. Larkin had already been in respectful correspondence with Lowell, and “respectful” is perhaps the best word to apply to his verdict on Life Studies; the family poems he describes as “curious, hurried, off-hand vignettes, seeming too personal to be practised, yet none the less accurate and original,” and of the whole book he writes:
In spite of their tension, these poems have a lightness and almost flippant humour not common in Mr Lowell’s previous work, matched with a quicker attention to feeling which personally I welcome. If these qualities are products of the stresses recorded in the final few poems of this book, Mr Lowell will not have endured in vain.43