Excerpt from Lowell’s notebook, January 1973 Credit 48
By 1976, his friend Esther Brooks observed, “this totally American man, whose poetic inspiration seemed wrenched from New England granite, could no longer resist, in all its various meanings, the tug of home.” He had come through much and endured much; as always, he had taken his experience into words. “I hope,” he said, not long before he died, “there has been increase of beauty, wisdom, tragedy, and all the blessings of this consuming chance.”
Living through pain was necessary; it could not be avoided. Pallas Athena, the daughter of Zeus, had made this clear to Odysseus:
I willed it, planned it so
when you set out for home—and to tell you all
the trials you must suffer in your palace…
Endure them all. You must. You have no choice.
“In silence,” she added, “you must bear a world of pain.”
—
Elizabeth Hardwick, Frank Bidart, and other friends observed an increasing vulnerability in Lowell toward the end of his life, one that was accompanied by a growing tenderness. The pain he had known during madness and from the wreckage of his marriage took its toll but gave a measure more of compassion. “He suddenly looked so much older, tired, beaten,” said Kathleen Spivack. “There was a tenderness to him, outspoken, that had not been there before.” His “erratic aloofness” was gone, she said. He was “troubled and tired.” Peter Levi said about Lowell’s recurring bouts of madness what several did: his suffering had made him more human and open.
Blood smells of iron, wrote Adam Nicolson. The smell from a broken face of iron-bearing rock has the smell of blood, “one of deep antiquity, a release into the nostrils of elements in the rock which have not been volatile since the rock was made.” Sharp-drawn blood, like suffering in the mind, sets loose ancient elements that could be used in art. They could be used in life. Heartbreak was sharp-drawn blood.
The word “heartbreak” was real for Lowell; heartbreak had come to him through his mental suffering and, more recently, the disintegration of his marriage to a woman he deeply loved. It was a critical presence in his late writing. “Heartbreak” was a word he used with sympathy and admiration. He asked Helen Vendler once, “Why don’t they ever say what I’d like them to say?…That I’m heartbreaking.” She and he agreed that he was. Lowell described Randall Jarrell as the “most heartbreaking” poet of his generation, wrote of “broken-hearted lions” in a poem for George Santayana; he characterized John Berryman’s poem “Opus Posthumous” as “heartbreaking” in its look on life and death.
Heartbreak was human; it created an opening in the armor to let in others. It made one vulnerable; it taught. Most tellingly, perhaps, heartbreak was the element of a different kind of poetry. Grey Gowrie relates that he asked Lowell who were his favorite poets. “I expected him to choose Eliot, whom he loved and who was his publisher. ‘Oh Hardy and Ezra,’ he replied, ‘because of the heartbreak.’ ”
Lowell, when he came back to America in October 1976, seemed to be a more compassionate man, said Esther Brooks. “Looking back now one could almost say that his mind had begun to heal itself just as his heart had begun to fail him. Gone was the breezy egotism. He seemed not only in touch with his own feelings but with the feelings of those whom he had caused to suffer so very much. A delicacy of judgment returned along with humility, and compassion replaced once again the rather offhand insensitivity of past years.”
Lowell told Brooks that he planned to stay in America. “America and teaching at Harvard are my life’s water,” he told her. “I don’t want to divide what’s left of my life between two continents and two cultures.” He had been away from America and New England, “the pioneer going into the wilderness.” It was clear to everyone who knew him: he wanted to be home.
“Keep Ithaka always in your mind,” wrote the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy. “Arriving there is what you are destined for.” Know what the journey can give you, he said. The journey is meant for adventure and learning, summer dawns and new ports. It is the gift of experience and imagination. “Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey,” Cavafy wrote. “Without her you wouldn’t have set out.” But at some point Ithaca has nothing left to give.
“In the midst of life we are in death,” it says in the Book of Common Prayer. All die. We are given life for a while but not for long. We are given love and desire, words, grief, hope and laughter, music, but not for long. We forfeit our place to others. The memento mori of the painters—the rose, the skull, the bubble—the miniature human figures of Regency England, half flesh and fine clothed, half skeleton, were then and remain reminders of the claim of death. Depression, attached as it is to mania, is a memento mori of its own kind. It feels of death; at times it creates a longing for it.
Lowell’s recurring mania and depression brought with them a dark philosophy and a sharp sense of mortality. His imagination, moving so often and intensely in historical times, made the reality of death inescapable. Death took poet, tyrant, lover, and king alike; Lowell’s eyes moved instinctively to the final dates carved into the marble stones of graveyards. He spoke often about age and death. “I miss the long roll of years ahead of me,” Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop. Although it had been a lovely summer, he said a few months later, “when I look inside it’s sad and acid: age, death of friends, aging of everything in sight.” Increasingly the topics of death and decay and his regret for things done and left undone filled his letters to friends. “The things that cannot be done twice!” he wrote to Bishop.
Death and age, subjects that bear down on all, bore down on Lowell harder than most. “I wake up thinking I have perhaps twenty more years, that they are whizzing by,” Lowell wrote to Peter Taylor when he was in his early forties. After Theodore Roethke died he said, “It’s hard to get used to knowing that it’s not just the very remote and old that die, but someone who used to beat you at croquet a few months ago.” Not long after, he wrote to Bishop, “Oh, oh, oh, how time whirls us on! Do you realize that we have already outlived more than half the classic English poets.” Death is always on your mind once you hit fifty, he said. “Each season we get older—the sky, the ceiling, a little closer.” The ceiling, an important image to the poet who wrote so often of chairs and ladders and ascending to the moon, was closing in. “I still feel I can reach up and touch the ceiling of one’s end,” he wrote to Bishop in 1970.
Death and madness came more into his poetry. “Last Night” was published in 1973:
Is dying harder than being already dead?
I came to my first class without a textbook,
saw the watch I mailed my daughter didn’t run;
I opened an old closet door, and found myself
covered with quicklime, my face deliquescent…
by oversight still recognizable.
Thank God, I was the first to find myself.
Ah the swift vanishing of my older
generation—the deaths, suicide, madness
of Roethke, Berryman, Jarrell and Lowell.
In the same year Lowell wrote to Bishop, who expressed her discomfort about his frequent talk of age and death: “It’s the twinges of mortality, one’s length of life that keeps swimming into eyesight. It seems unbelievable that I’ve statistically lived so much much the largest division of my life.” He quoted a line he had translated from Pasternak, “To live a life is not to cross a field.” It was, he said, “poignant, but this is what is comforting. We cannot cross the field, only walk it…finishing or not finishing this or that along the way. An image of all this is watching children and stepchildren growing into their futures I cannot see, and all from forty to fifty-five years younger than I even while I live. A rich tangle of the unseen.” Thoughts of death and the unknowable future led him to a bleak accounting of his life and work:
I climb the ladder, knowing my last words,
no matter how unjust, no longer matter,
the black marks of my nights erased in b
lood—
wondering, “Why was it ever worth my while?”
Robert Schumann observed that a requiem Mass is the “thing one writes for oneself.” This is true of Lowell’s final book, Day by Day, and his final prose essay, “New England and Further.” The poems and essay are the endpoint of his thinking and experience, a culmination of his craft and philosophy. The deeper you get into Day by Day, believes James Atlas, “the more you realize—and he died just after it was finished—that he has written his own elegy.”
Although most critics do not rank Day by Day with Life Studies or Lord Weary’s Castle, the collection is an extraordinary poetic summing up, an elegy and reflection over a life and a life’s art. “What we want to say,” Lowell once said, “is the confusion and sadness and incoherence of the human condition.” These are the soul of his last book.
The threads of Lowell’s life come together in Day by Day: the disturbed childhood scarred by distant, judgmental, and uncomprehending parents; New England’s land and politics, her history and writers; friends and fellow poets and teachers; his marriages and love affairs; his daughter and son and stepdaughters; the madness that came, and left, but always came again; the struggle to make art from life; aging, suffering, death; the search for peace, for home.
These threads of his mind and experience were woven into his earlier work, of course, but they became more prominent in the books he wrote during the last ten years of his life. They are evident in a notebook he kept during 1973 that contains drafts and notes for many of the poems of Day by Day. This notebook was in Lowell’s briefcase at the time of his death, where it has remained. Robert Fitzgerald, who had dinner with Lowell at the Harvard Faculty Club in early 1977, remembers that Lowell opened his briefcase that evening and showed him the new poems that later would be published in his final book. (Elizabeth Hardwick found this notebook too upsetting to remove from Lowell’s briefcase even years after his death. “His briefcase which he carried with him always and somehow never lost is still sitting here in my study,” she wrote to Mary McCarthy. “Cigarettes, cigarette lighter, nail file, glasses still there. I sent the papers off to the estate long ago, but somehow I can’t take the other things out.”)
The notebook, dated 1973, is a red hardbound appointment diary that is eight by six inches. There is one page for each day of the year, perhaps a factor in the title of his book, Day by Day. (Or, the title may have a more classical basis. In the tenth book of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey, the phrase “Day by day we lingered” appears. The title is in any event appropriate for poems that were written for the day and moment.) Several of the pages of the book are blank; the rest are partially or entirely filled by Lowell’s near-illegible handwriting. Some entries are simply reminders of appointments for book readings and lectures, or trips abroad to Holland, Italy, Paris, or America. The dates correspond to what is known about his schedule at those times. There are teaching notes for books to be used in his Harvard classes and entries made for upcoming visits from Harriet, doctors’ appointments, school engagements for his stepdaughters, and lunch and dinner engagements in London, as well as pages devoted to a timeline of Caroline Blackwood’s life, a listing of the birth and death dates of friends and family, and a jotting down of Sheridan’s words and expressions. Most pages in the 1973 notebook, however, are fragments or drafts of poems, many of which were revised and subsequently included in Day by Day. They prefigure poems about ancestry, children, love and death, and madness.
The fragments of these poems, broken phrases and images, show Lowell looking back over his life and questioning the meaning of nearly everything. Death is a frequent topic. The fear of dying, he writes in his scattered impressions, “isn’t even that—it’s / Knowing that as the signs say we will die / A few years / The living hair and sinew of the body is there / To keep us alive—everything functions / Or is broken function—no tragedy for the / Soul, our purpose is obsolescence.” His notes deal with death, loss, home, and art. The images and mood of this 1973 notebook find their way into the poems of Day by Day: the melancholy looking back, the regrets, the death and madness ahead. The desire to return home.
Day by Day is shot through with death: “the hungry future, / the time when any illness is chronic, / and the years of discretion are spent on complaint— / until the wristwatch is taken from the wrist.” The poems give testament to Ecclesiastes, to the belief that the house of mourning is the house of all men. They are written in the shadow of Lowell’s mortality, at the edge of his nerves. They look back in regret on the damage done by life; on time, youth, and love passing; they cast back over a life at bay. It is impossible to restore the years that the locust has eaten, declares the Old Testament. This gets no argument from Lowell. His final poems are beautiful, heartbreaking, and deeply human.
Lowell laments in Day by Day that he cannot create as he once did, that he can only depict, only snap a photograph. The maker of patterns and phrases watches as the elements of his imagination fade and ideas and images elude him. The divide between the imagined and the literal seems to him impassable, or becoming so. “I’ve been thinking,” he wrote a year before he died, “that what happened is all we have to draw on, yet that isn’t art, isn’t of course enough for art….its riches of inharmonious material, its fragmented sharpness—the stuff of life with its artificial imposed limits.” He believed he was drawing from an empty well. He spoke to this in “Epilogue,” the last poem in the book:
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
The poem gives lie to Lowell’s lament. It is no snapshot; it is not paralyzed by fact. The yearning for art steals too like a tide across a map; it is a poem from both mind and heart; it is deeply imagined, not only recalled.
In Lowell’s final book, Helen Vendler writes, he is a poet of “disarming openness, exposing shame and uncertainty.” His poems “avoid the histrionic” and “acknowledge exhaustion; they expect death.” Lowell had been determined to write about time and age “without hysteria,” he wrote to Peter Taylor in 1975. The power would be in understatement and control. It was necessary, he told Bishop, “to hold a shield before one’s feelings and the reader.”
Day by Day, if less stunningly original than Life Studies and Lord Weary’s Castle, is more haunting and compassionate. It completes the arc of Lowell’s life and work in all its toughness, suffering, grandeur, and genius. Darkness, as he had said, was truth. It was not metaphor. His final book, argues Marjorie Perloff, was a renunciation of the “roles he played in his earlier work, judge, preacher, surveyor of history, connoisseur of chaos.” Life had been stripped to the bone. “Only when we read Day by Day as a Life Studies written 20 years later, by a poet who knows his career as a writer and his life as a man are about to end, does its beauty and pathos emerge,” observed the critic William Pritchard.
Lowell is valedictory in Day by Day. At times there is a sense of the darkly informed Virgil accompanying the reader across deep waters, preparing him for what the poet knows must come, not for what the reader hopes might come. There is sola
ce in not being alone in facing the worst and the final, but there is no backing away from the certainty that the worst and the final will come. Lowell offers no relief from the unavoidable, just a compass and stars for the tragedy that is the human condition. “Ask for no Orphean lute / To pluck life back,” he had written as a young poet in “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.” One may hope for relief from the pain but there is no answer to death. “I ask for a natural death,” he wrote, “no teeth on the ground, / no blood about the place…/ It’s not death I fear, / but unspecified, unlimited pain.”
In his translation of The Oresteia of Aeschylus, published after his death, Lowell again offered no spell or prayer to keep death at bay: “I have no hope. Crops rise and fall, / and summer follows on the heels of summer, / but when a man dies, and his black / blood falls at his feet, / no spell will sing him back.”
“Yet how much we carry away,” he wrote in his 1973 journal. “Before we are quiet in the carpenter’s vice.”
In the fall of 1976, shortly before he was to leave England to teach at Harvard, Lowell once again was hospitalized for mania. It was a damning reminder of the wreckage brought by his illness. He would always be sick, said Caroline Blackwood. His attacks were “destroying her.” Nobody could take it on, she told a friend. Life was crashing down on them both. Together and individually they were in dark straits. Blackwood was drinking heavily and depressed. He was desperate that his madness had returned. Their nights were ripped apart by tirades and accusations. Neither could handle the possibility of life continuing as it was. “The great circuit of the stars lies on jewellers’ velvet,” he wrote in a poem dedicated to Caroline; “be close enough to tell me when I will die— / what will love do not knowing it will die?”
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 41