New Selected Poems

by Robert Lowell

  a Kraut DP, who kneels and bathes my eye.

  The boys who floored me, two black maniacs, try

  to pat my hands. Rounds, rounds! Why punch the clock?

  In Munich the zoo’s rubble fumes with cats;

  hoydens with air-guns prowl the Koenigsplatz,

  and pink the pigeons on the mustard spire.

  Who but my girl-friend set the town on fire?

  Cat-houses talk cold turkey to my guards;

  I found my Fräulein stitching outing shirts

  in the black forest of the colored wards—

  lieutenants squawked like chickens in her skirts.

  Her German language made my arteries harden—

  I’ve no annuity from the pay we blew.

  I chartered an aluminum canoe,

  I had her six times in the English Garden.

  Oh mama, mama, like a trolley-pole

  sparking at contact, her electric shock—

  the power-house!… The doctor calls our roll—

  no knives, no forks. We file before the clock,

  and fancy minnows, slaves of habit, shoot

  like starlight through their air-conditioned bowl.

  It’s time for feeding. Each subnormal boot-

  black heart is pulsing to its ant-egg dole.”

  91 Revere Street

  The account of him is platitudinous, worldly and fond, but he has no Christian name and is entitled merely Major M. Myers in my Cousin Cassie Mason Myers Julian-James’s privately printed Biographical Sketches: A Key to a Cabinet of Heirlooms in the Smithsonian Museum. The name-plate under his portrait used to spell out his name bravely enough: he was Mordecai Myers. The artist painted Major Myers in his sanguine War of 1812 uniform with epaulets, white breeches, and a scarlet frogged waistcoat. His right hand played with the sword “now to be seen in the Smithsonian cabinet of heirlooms.” The pose was routine and gallant. The full-lipped smile was good-humoredly pompous and embarrassed.

  Mordecai’s father, given neither name nor initial, is described with an air of hurried self-congratulation by Cousin Cassie as “a friend of the Reverend Ezra Styles, afterward President of Yale College.” As a very young man the son, Mordecai, studied military tactics under a French émigré, “the Bourbons’ celebrated Colonel De la Croix.” Later he was “matured” by six years’ practical experience in a New York militia regiment organized by Colonel Martin Van Buren. After “the successful engagement against the British at Chrysler’s Field, thirty shrapnel splinters were extracted from his shoulder.” During convalescence, he wooed and won Miss Charlotte Bailey, “thus proving himself a better man than his rivals, the united forces of Plattsburg.” He fathered ten children, sponsored an enlightened law exempting Quakers from military service in New York State, and died in 1870 at the age of ninety- four, “a Grand Old Man, who impressed strangers with the poise of his old-time manners.”

  Undoubtedly Major Mordecai had lived in a more ritualistic, gaudy, and animal world than twentieth-century Boston. There was something undecided, Mediterranean, versatile, almost double- faced about his bearing which suggested that, even to his contemporaries, he must have seemed gratuitously both ci-devant and parvenu. He was a dark man, a German Jew—no downright Yankee, but maybe such a fellow as Napoleon’s mad, pomaded son-of-an-innkeeper general, Junot, Duc D’Abrantes; a man like mad George III’s pomaded, disreputable son, “Prinny,” the Prince Regent. Or he was one of those Moorish-looking dons painted by his contemporary Goya—some leader of Spanish guerrillas against Bonaparte’s occupation, who fled to South America. Our Major’s suffering almond eye rested on his luxurious dawn-colored fingers ruffling an off-white glove.

  Bailey-Mason-Myers! Easy-going, Empire State patricians, these relatives of my Grandmother Lowell seemed to have given my father his character. For he likewise lacked that granite back- countriness which Grandfather Arthur Winslow attributed to his own ancestors, the iconoclastic, mulish Dunbarton New Hampshire Starks. On the joint Mason-Myers bookplate, there are two merry and naked mermaids—lovely, marshmallowy, boneless, Rubensesque butterballs, all burlesque-show bosoms and Flemish smiles. Their motto, malo frangere quam flectere, reads “I prefer to bend than to break.”

  Mordecai Myers was my Grandmother Lowell’s grandfather. His life was tame and honorable. He was a leisured squire and merchant, a member of the state legislature, a mayor of Schenec- tady, a “president” of Kinderhook village. Disappointingly, his famous “blazing brown eye” seems in all things to have shunned the outrageous. After his death he was remembered soberly as a New York State gentleman, the friend and host of worldly men and politicians with Dutch names: De Witt Clinton, Vanderpoel, Hoes, and Schuyler. My mother was roused to warmth by the Major’s scarlet vest and exotic eye. She always insisted that he was the one properly dressed and dieted ancestor in the lot we had inherited from my father’s Cousin Cassie. Great-great-Grandfather Mordecai! Poor sheepdog in wolf’s clothing! In the anarchy of my adolescent war on my parents, I tried to make him a true wolf, the wandering Jew! Homo lupus homini!

  Major Mordecai Myers’ portrait has been mislaid past finding, but out of my memories I often come on it in the setting of our Revere Street house, a setting now fixed in the mind, where it survives all the distortions of fantasy, all the blank befogging of forgetfulness. There, the vast number of remembered things remains rocklike. Each is in its place, each has its function, its history, its drama. There, all is preserved by that motherly care that one either ignored or resented in his youth. The things and their owners come back urgent with life and meaning—because finished, they are endurable and perfect.

  * * *

  Cousin Cassie only became a close relation in 1922. In that year she died. After some unpleasantness between Mother and a co-heiress, Helen Bailey, the estate was divided. Mother used to return frozen and thrilled from her property disputes, and I, knowing nothing of the rights and wrongs, would half-perversely confuse Helen Bailey with Helen of Troy and harden my mind against the monotonous parti pris of Mother’s voice. Shortly after our move to Boston in 1924, a score of unwanted Myers portraits was delivered to our new house on Revere Street. These were later followed by “their dowry”—four moving vans groaning with heavy Edwardian furniture. My father began to receive his first quarterly payments from the Mason-Myers Julian-James Trust Fund, sums “not grand enough to corrupt us,” Mother explained, “but sufficient to prevent Daddy from being entirely at the mercy of his salary.” The Trust sufficed: our lives became tantalized with possibilities, and my father felt encouraged to take the risk—a small one in those boom years—of resigning from the Navy on the gamble of doubling his income in business.

  I was in the third grade and for the first time becoming a little more popular at school. I was afraid Father’s leaving the Navy would destroy my standing. I was a churlish, disloyal, romantic boy, and quite without hero worship for my father, whose actuality seemed so inferior to the photographs in uniform he once mailed to us from the Golden Gate. My real love, as Mother used to insist to all new visitors, was toy soldiers. For a few months at the flood tide of this infatuation, people were ciphers to me—valueless except as chances for increasing my armies of soldiers. Roger Crosby, a child in the second grade of my Brimmer Street School, had thousands—not mass-produced American stereotypes, but hand-painted solid lead soldiers made to order in Dijon, France. Roger’s father had a still more artistic and adult collection; its ranks—each man at least six inches tall—marched in glass cases under the eyes of recognizable replicas of mounted Napoleonic captains: Kléber, Marshal Ney, Murat, King of Naples. One delirious afternoon Mr. Crosby showed me his toys and was perhaps the first grownup to talk to me not as a child but as an equal when he discovered how feverishly I followed his anecdotes on uniforms and the evolution of tactical surprise. Afterwards, full of high thoughts, I ran up to Roger’s play room and hoodwinked him into believing that his own soldiers were “ballast turned out by central European sweatshops.”
He agreed I was being sweetly generous when I traded twenty-four worthless Jordan Marsh papier-mâché doughboys for whole companies of his gorgeous, imported Old Guards, Second Empire “redlegs,” and modern chasseurs d’Alpine with sky-blue berets. The haul was so huge that I had to take a child’s wheelbarrow to Roger’s house at the top of Pinckney Street. When I reached home with my last load, Mr. Crosby was talking with my father on our front steps. Roger’s soldiers were all returned; I had only the presence of mind to hide a single soldier, a peely-nosed black sepoy wearing a Shriner’s fez.

  Nothing consoled me for my loss, but I enjoyed being allowed to draw Father’s blunt dress sword, and I was proud of our Major Mordecai. I used to stand dangerously out in the middle of Revere Street in order to see through our windows and gloat on this portrait’s scarlet waistcoat blazing in the bare, Spartan whiteness of our den-parlor. Mordecai Myers lost his glory when I learned from my father that he was only a “major pro tem.” On a civilian, even a civilian soldier, the flamboyant waistcoat was stuffy and no more martial than officers’ costumes in our elementary school musicals.

  * * *

  In 1924 people still lived in cities. Late that summer, we bought the 91 Revere Street house, looking out on an unbuttoned part of Beacon Hill bounded by the North End slums, though reassuringly only four blocks away from my Grandfather Winslow’s brown pillared house at 18 Chestnut Street. In the decades preceding and following the First World War, old Yankee families had upset expectation by regaining this section of the Hill from the vanguards of the lace-curtain Irish. This was bracing news for my parents in that topsy-turvy era when the Republican Party and what were called “people of the right sort” were no longer dominant in city elections. Still, even in the palmy, laissez-faire ’20s, Revere Street refused to be a straightforward, immutable residential fact. From one end to the other, houses kept being sanded down, repainted, or abandoned to the flaking of decay. Houses, changing hands, changed their language and nationality. A few doors to our south the householders spoke “Beacon Hill British” or the flat nay nay of the Boston Brahmin. The parents of the children a few doors north spoke mostly in Italian.

  My mother felt a horrified giddiness about the adventure of our address. She once said, “We are barely perched on the outer rim of the hub of decency.” We were less than fifty yards from Louisburg Square, the cynosure of old historic Boston’s plain-spoken, cold roast elite—the Hub of the Hub of the Universe. Fifty yards!

  As a naval ensign, Father had done postgraduate work at Harvard. He had also done postgraduate work at M.I.T., preferred the purely scientific college, and condescended to both. In 1924, however, his tone began to change; he now began to speak warmly of Harvard as his second alma mater. We went to football games at the Harvard Stadium, and one had the feeling that our lives were now being lived in the brutal, fashionable expectancy of the stadium: we had so many downs, so many minutes, and so many yards to go for a winning touchdown. It was just such a winning financial and social advance that my parents promised themselves would follow Father’s resignation from the Navy and his acceptance of a sensible job offered him at the Cambridge branch of Lever Brothers’ Soap.

  The advance was never to come. Father resigned from the service in 1927, but he never had a civilian career; he instead had merely twenty-two years of the civilian life. Almost immediately he bought a larger and more stylish house; he sold his ascetic, stove-black Hudson and bought a plump brown Buick; later the Buick was exchanged for a high-toned, as-good-as-new Packard with a custom-designed royal blue and mahogany body. Without drama, his earnings more or less decreased from year to year.

  But so long as we were on Revere Street, Father tried to come to terms with it and must have often wondered whether he on the whole liked or disliked the neighborhood’s lack of side. He was still at this time rather truculently democratic in what might be described as an upper middle-class, naval, and Masonic fashion. He was a mumbler. His opinions were almost morbidly hesitant, but he considered himself a matter-of-fact man of science and had an unspoiled faith in the superior efficiency of northern nations. He modeled his allegiances and humor on the cockney imperialism of Rudyard Kipling’s swearing Tommies, who did their job. Autochthonous Boston snobs, such as the Winslows or members of Mother’s reading club, were alarmed by the brassy callousness of our naval visitors, who labeled the Italians they met on Revere Street as “grade-A” and “grade-B wops.” The Revere Street “grade-B’s” were Sicilian Catholics and peddled crummy second- hand furniture on Cambridge Street, not far from the site of Great-great-Grandfather Charles Lowell’s disused West Church, praised in an old family folder as “a haven from the Sodom and Gomorrah of Trinitarian orthodoxy and the tyranny of the letter.” Revere Street “grade-A’s,” good North Italians, sold fancy groceries and Colonial heirlooms in their shops near the Public Garden. Still other Italians were Father’s familiars; they sold him bootleg Scotch and vino rosso in teacups.

  The outside of our Revere Street house was a flat red brick surface unvaried by the slightest suggestion of purple panes, delicate bay, or triangular window-cornice—a sheer wall formed by the seamless conjunction of four inseparable façades, all of the same commercial and purgatorial design. Though placed in the heart of Old Boston, it was ageless and artless, an epitome of those “leveler” qualities Mother found most grueling about the naval service. 91 Revere Street was mass-produced, regulation-issue, and yet struck Boston society as stupidly out of the ordinary, like those white elephants—a mother-of-pearl scout knife or a tea-kettle barometer—which my father used to pick up on sale at an Army- Navy store.

  The walls of Father’s minute Revere Street den-parlor were bare and white. His bookshelves were bare and white. The den’s one adornment was a ten-tube home-assembled battery radio set, whose loudspeaker had the shape and color of a Mexican sombrero. The radio’s specialty was getting programs from Australia and New Zealand in the early hours of the morning.

  My father’s favorite piece of den furniture was his oak and “rhinoceros hide” armchair. It was ostentatiously a masculine, or rather a bachelor’s, chair. It had a notched, adjustable back; it was black, cracked, hacked, scratched, splintered, gouged, initialed, gunpowder-charred and tumbler-ringed. It looked like pale tobacco leaves laid on dark tobacco leaves. I doubt if Father, a considerate man, was responsible for any of the marring. The chair dated from his plebe days at the Naval Academy, and had been bought from a shady, shadowy, roaring character, midshipman “Beauty” Burford. Father loved each disfigured inch.

  * * *

  My father had been born two months after his own father’s death. At each stage of his life, he was to be forlornly fatherless. He was a deep boy brought up entirely by a mild widowed mother and an intense widowed grandmother. When he was fourteen and a half, he became a deep young midshipman. By the time he graduated from Annapolis, he had a high sense of abstract form, which he beclouded with his humor. He had reached, perhaps, his final mental possibilities. He was deep—not with profundity, but with the dumb depth of one who trusted in statistics and was dubious of personal experience. In his forties, Father’s soul went underground: as a civilian he kept his high sense of form, his humor, his accuracy, but this accuracy was henceforth unimportant, recreational, hors de combat. His debunking grew myopic; his shyness grew evasive; he argued with a fumbling languor. In the twenty-two years Father lived after he resigned from the Navy, he never again deserted Boston and never became Bostonian. He survived to drift from job to job, to be displaced, to be grimly and literally that old cliché, a fish out of water. He gasped and wheezed with impotent optimism, took on new ideals with each new job, never ingeniously enjoyed his leisure, never even hid his head in the sand.

  Mother hated the Navy, hated naval society, naval pay, and the trip-hammer rote of settling and unsettling a house every other year when Father was transferred to a new station or ship. She had been married nine or ten years and still suspected that her husband was savorless
, unmasterful, merely considerate. Unmasterful—Father’s specialized efficiency lacked utterly the flattering bossiness she so counted on from her father, my Grandfather Winslow. It was not Father’s absence on sea-duty that mattered; it was the eroding necessity of moving with him, of keeping in step. When he was far away on the Pacific, she had her friends, her parents, a house to herself—Boston! Fully conscious of her uniqueness and normality she basked in the refreshing stimulation of dreams in which she imagined Father as suitably sublimed. She used to describe such a sublime man to me over tea and English muffins. He was Siegfried carried lifeless through the shining air by Brunnhilde to Valhalla, and accompanied by the throb of my Great Aunt Sarah playing his leitmotif in the released manner taught her by the Abbé Liszt. Or Mother’s hero dove through the grottoes of the Rhine and slaughtered the homicidal and vulgar dragon coiled about the golden hoard. Mother seemed almost light-headed when she retold the romance of Sarah Bernhardt in L’Aiglon, the Eaglet, the weakling! She would speak the word weakling with such amused vehemence that I formed a grandiose and false image of L’Aiglon’s Father, the big Napoleon: he was a strong man who scratched under his paunchy little white vest a torso all hair, muscle, and manliness. Instead of the dreams, Mother now had the insipid fatigue of keeping house. Instead of the Eagle, she had a twentieth-century naval commander interested in steam, radio, and “the fellows.” To avoid naval yards, steam, and “the fellows,” Mother had impulsively bought the squalid, impractical Revere Street house. Her marriage daily forced her to squander her subconsciously hoarded energies.

  * * *

  “Weelawaugh, we-ee-eeelawaugh, weelawaugh,” shrilled Mother’s high voice. “But-and, but-and, but-and!” Father’s low mumble would drone in answer. Though I couldn’t be sure that I had caught the meaning of the words, I followed the sounds as though they were a movie. I felt drenched in my parents’ passions.