Cultural Cohesion (6 page)

“Baudelaire 2. Recollection” was called “Meditation” in
Imitations
and is thus a revision of a version of “Recueillement.” It is interesting to see that
va cueillir des remords
now means “accumulating remorse” rather than the previous and unfathomable “fights off anguish.” Minor satisfactions like that can be clung to while the reader totals “Baudelaire 1. The Abyss” and “Baudelaire 2. Recollection” and glumly reconciles himself to the fact that that's his lot on Baudelaire—two revamped imitations.

Rimbaud does better. Five sonnets. But all five turn out to have been in a sequence of eight versions printed in
Imitations
. “Rimbaud 1. Bohemia” was called “On the Road” and is a version of “Ma Bohème”; “Rimbaud 2. A Knowing Girl” was called “A Knowing Girl” and is a version of “La Maline”; “Rimbaud 3. Sleeper in the Valley” was more expansively called “The Sleeper in the Valley” and is a version of “Le Dormeur du Val”; “Rimbaud 4. The Evil” was less expansively called “Evil” and is a version of “Le Mal”; “Rimbaud 5. Napoleon after Sedan” was called “Napoleon after Sedan,” is a version of “Rages de Césars,” and was the only one of the five to have made an intermediary appearance in
Notebook
, where it was called “Rimbaud and Napoleon III.” With this last poem, then, we have three separate texts to help send us cross-eyed, but if we can concentrate long enough we will see a characteristic change. The
Imitations
version is shaped like the original and confines itself to the original's material, plus a few scraps of interpolated elucidatory matter (where Rimbaud just said “Compère” Lowell tactfully adds some explanatory horses) and of course the inevitable intensifying of the verbs. The
Notebook
version is no longer readily identifiable as an imitation: the stanza breaks have been eliminated, the first four lines are a piece of scene setting which have nothing to do with the original, and Robespierre's name has been introduced, answering a question—“quel nom sur ses lèvres muettes/Tressaille?”—which Rimbaud had left unanswered. The
History
version gets the fidgets, throwing out Compère but leaving the horses. By this time, you would need to be pretty thoroughly acquainted with Rimbaud if you were to spot the poem as anything but neat Lowell.

Of the other Rimbaud poems, “La Maline” is now closer to the way Rimbaud wrote it than the
Imitations
version, but Lowell's “Ma Bohème” misses by just as far as it used to, though in a different way:

A minor alteration to a major aberration: the repetition is not in Rimbaud and does nothing for his meaning whichever way Lowell puts it.

Material which had its starting point in
Imitations
can be changed to any extent from slightly to drastically on its way to a fourteen-line living-space in
History
. Lowell's version of “L'Infinito” is squeezed by three lines but is otherwise the poem we have come to recognize as probably the least sympathetic translation of Leopardi ever committed. “Hugo at Théophile Gautier's Grave” is a rearrangement of an
Imitations
version of Hugo's “À Théophile Gautier” which had already cut the original by more than half. “Sappho to a Girl” was in
Notebook
as just “Sappho,” and is a mosaic of bits and pieces which can be seen in
Imitations
still mounted in their original settings—i.e., versions of the poem to the bride Anactoria (No. 141 in
The Oxford Book of Greek Verse
) and that tiny, lovely poem to Night (No. 156) which contains the line about the Pleiads. In his
Imitations
version Lowell left the Pleiads out. In the
Notebook
version they were still out. In the
History
version he put them back in. The card player, who is in all three versions, seems not to belong to Sappho, but could conceivably belong to Cézanne.

Imitations
, however, is not the only source of workable stone.
Notebook/History
is Lowell's Renaissance and like the Renaissance in Rome it doesn't question its right to use all the monuments of the ancient city as a quarry.
History
's “Horace: Pardon for a Friend” started life, at twice the length, as a version of Horace's
Odes
II, 7, in
Near the Ocean
. In the same collection first appeared “Juvenal's Prayer,” which at that stage constituted the last nineteen lines of a version of Juvenal's 10th Satire. And to return briefly to Cleopatra, “Nunc est bibendum, Cleopatra's Death” is (as the title this time allows) another imitation, or at least a fragment of one—Horace's
Odes
I, 37, which in
Near the Ocean
can be found imitated in full.

And still they come, racing out of the past to find their new home.
History
's “Caligula 2” is part of a much longer Caligula in
For the Union Dead
. And from as far back as
Lord Weary's Castle
, “In the Cage” is an acknowledged reworking, with the attention now turning from the observed to the observer. But other material from the same early period is less easily spotted. The sonnet “Charles V by Titian,” for example, was called “Charles the Fifth and the Peasant” in
Lord Weary's Castle
, where it was subtitled “After Valéry” and appeared to be a version of his “César” in which almost every property, Titian included, was an interpolation.
History
's “Dante 3. Buonconte” goes back to a poem in
Lord Weary's Castle
called “The Soldier,” which was modelled on the Buonconte da Montefeltro episode in
Purgatorio
V. Here we have a clear case of the way Lowell's wide learning has matured with the years: he nowadays quietly and correctly renders
la croce
as Buonconte's hands folded on his chest, rather than as a crucifix—a subtly rich textual point of the kind which Lowell at his best is brilliantly equipped to bring out. Restored from an unwieldy third person to the direct first person of the original, this poem is easily the best of those devoted to Dante: “Dante 4. Paolo and Francesca” is a copybook example of how Lowell's irrepressible extremism of language is unable to match the flow of lyrical Italian—and unabashed lyricism is a good half of Francesca's self-deluding personality. Lowell takes Francesca's side against the oppressors of her flesh. If it has occurred to him that Dante didn't, he doesn't say so. In the Dante rhapsody as a whole, we are able to see that below the uniform intensity of Lowell's language there is a uniform intensity of psychology—a certain monotony of feeling. Dante's love for Beatrice is presented rather as if the relationship between work and love bore strong resemblances to that same relationship in the life of Robert Lowell. Could Lowell find means, we wonder, to convey the fact that with Dante the consuming, disabling passion was just as likely to be for philosophy as for sex?

For all the examples cited above, elementary sleuthing suffices to trace the origins—either the title gives a clue or else the poem is more or less intact and can't fail to jog the reader's memory. But it's doubtful if the cannibalizing process stops there, and at this stage it's probably safer to assume that Lowell regards none of his earlier work, whether imitative or original, as exempt from requisitioning and a reconstruction ranging from mild to violent. For example, in a
History
poem called “The Spartan Dead at Thermopylae” the lines about Leonidas are lifted straight from the
Imitations
version of Rilke's “Die Tauben.” Pretty well untraceable, if these lines weren't original Lowell then, they are now.

Lowell's discovery of a linear historical structure for
History
has opened the way to a poet's dream—the simple line allowing infinite complication. The sudden insatiable demand for material has sent him raiding back over all his past poetry—not necessarily just the translations—in a search for stuff that fits. A great deal does. On the other hand, isn't there something Procrustean about carving up all that past work into fourteen-line chunks? To get back to Michelangelo and the marble, it's as if Michelangelo were to pick up a power saw and slice through everything from the Madonna of the Stairs to the Rondinini Pietà at a height of fourteen inches.

Whatever Procrustes might have thought, trimming things to fit an arbitrary frame is not a discipline. And without its rhyme-schemes, the sonnet is an arbitrary frame. There are many times in
Notebook/History
when the reader thrills to the impact of an idea achieving a formal measure almost in spite of itself:

The singing power of the mimesis, the clashing couplings of the shunting assonance, the muscle of the enjambement: if there were a single sonnet wholly assembled with such care then one would not even have to set oneself to learn it—it would teach itself. But fragments are the most we get. Lowell's later method might allow some parts of his talent free play but it allows his technique only child's play. “I want words meat-hooked from the living steer,” he writes in the course of rebuking Valéry for preferring six passable lines to one inspired one. He gets what he wants: meat-hooked words and inspired lines. But what one misses, and goes on missing until it aches, is form.

Still, within the limits he has now set for it—the liberating limits, as he sees them—Lowell's talent is still operating, and still majestic. There are times when nothing has happened except language yet you must helplessly concede that the vitality of his language is unique:

And there are times when the language subsides into nothing special, but the visualizing faculty reveals itself for the hundredth time as a profound gift:

What an idea! But in all the vast expanse of
Notebook/History
there are not many times when both things come together, and none at all when a poem sustains itself in the way to which Lowell once made us accustomed. There is no doubt that Lowell has abandoned his old course deliberately. Nor is there any doubt that he has opened up for himself an acreage of subject matter which could never have been reached in the old way. But we still have to decide if what we are being given is poetry or something else. Of some comfort here is that Lowell appears to be still undecided himself.

Setting aside the decisive alteration of structure which turned the circularity of
Notebook
into the linear stride of
History
, all the minor changes seem to have been made with the fidgeting lack of direction that you might expect from a writer who somehow feels compelled to refurbish the deliberately formless. Most of the attention has been expended on points of language: it's too late by now to go back to fourteen passable lines, but apparently there is still hope of drumming up the odd inspired one. All too frequently, the striving for intensity results in a further, incomprehensible compression of an idea already tightened to the limit. In the
Notebook
version of “In the Forties I”:

Whereas the
History
version has:

Without a knowledge of the first version, it would be hard to guess what the second might mean: the idea of the red paint has become familiar to Lowell, and he has got rid of it without pausing to reflect that we will have trouble following the idea unless it is spelled out to some extent. Scores of these changes for the worse could be adduced. Other changes are simply neutral. In
Notebook
's “Harriet 2,” the fly is like a plane gunning potato bugs. Appearing again in the sonnet “Summer, 2” in
For Lizzie and Harriet
, the fly is like a plane dusting apple orchards. The second version is perhaps preferable for its verb being the more easily appreciated, but on the other hand potato bugs have more verve than apple orchards. It's a toss-up.

Another kind of change is incontestably for the better. In
History
Robert Frost's voice is “musical and raw” rather than, as in
Notebook
, “musical, raw and raw.” One had always wondered why the repetition was there, and now one finds that Lowell had been wondering the same thing. In
Notebook
Frost was supposed to have inscribed a volume “Robert Lowell from Robert Frost, his friend in the art.” In
History
this becomes “For Robert from Robert, his friend in the art.” Much chummier. Was Lowell, for modesty's sake, misquoting the first time? Or is he, for immodesty's sake, misquoting now? It is impossible to tell, but grappling with the implications of these minor shifts is one of the involving things about reading all these books together.

The comparison between
Notebook
and
History
could go on for ever, and probably will. Discovering that the
Notebook
poem for Louis MacNeice is reproduced in
History
with one of its lines doubled and another line dropped—a really thunderous printer's error—one wonders distractedly if anybody else knows. Does Lowell know? It's large territory to become familiar with, even for him. Finally one decides that getting familiar with it is as far as appreciation can go. To recognize details is possible; but there is small hope of remembering the whole thing. Like Berryman's
Dream Songs
, Lowell's
Notebook/History/For Lizzie and Harriet
defeats memory. Perhaps
The Dolphin
is heading back to the way things were, but on examination it starts yielding the kind of names—Hölderlin, Manet—which make us think that most of it is fated to end up in the next version of
History
. In
The Dolphin
the only human, unhistoried, unsignificant voice occurs in the quoted parts of Lizzie's letters. If Lowell wrote them, he should write more. But there isn't much point in saying “should.” The outstanding American poet is engaged in writing his version of the poem that Pound, Williams and Berryman have each already attempted—The Big One. Lowell thinks he is chipping away the marble to get at the statue. It's more likely that he is trying to build a statue out of marble chips. Who cares about history, if poetry gets thrown away? Perhaps he does. And anyway the poetry was his to throw.