Where Have You Been? (11 page)

Perhaps one more caveat. The umami of Bishop isn't always the thing. You have to be in the mood for something that's mostly middle. She doesn't offer much to beginners and sophomores. She can seem touristic, evasive, wispy. She can seem small scale and unurgent (it's her word, I'm a little embarrassed to recall: “the pulse, / rapid but unurgent, of a motorboat”). It's a lasting puzzle that there aren't more poems (why not?), and that it's the letters that read more like a main of communication than the poems, however adorable and sinuous and unwilled these last are in their coming to being. In one letter to Lowell, she commends Anton Webern and writes about “that strange kind of modesty in almost everything contemporary one really likes—Kafka, say, or Marianne [Moore], or even Eliot and Klee and Kokoschka and Schwitters … Modesty, care,
space
, a sort of helplessness but determination at the same time.” Attractive though the idea of modesty is, especially modern modesty, sometimes you want something a little grander, more willed, less elliptical: Shostakovich or Beckmann or Sebastiao Salgado. I remember the time I first read Bishop's “The Armadillo,” excited because Lowell was said to have partly modeled his “Skunk Hour” on it, and thinking “What's this? Dystopic Beatrix Potter?” I still don't really know, and it's not a question that occurs to me with “Skunk Hour.”

 

ROBERT LOWELL

What can I tell you about Robert Lowell? “A shilling life will give you all the facts,” only the lives cost £20, and are most likely out of print. He was born Robert Traill Spence Lowell III (“Robert” and “Lowell” were the only words he could actually write—everything else he merely printed), in Boston in 1917, the son of a somewhat becalmed navy officer, who neither fought nor made it to admiral, Robert Lowell, and a high-strung mother, Charlotte Winslow. The dense-to-the-point-of-distracting prose memoir in
Life Studies
, “91 Revere Street,” has a visitor to the household leaving thoughtfully, saying: “I know why young Bob is an only child.”

Conventionality, privilege, and a slight Thomas Mann–ish sense of effeteness and foreboding, of being at the end of a declining line, characterize Lowell's background and youth. Art comes at the culmination of generations of public service and stainlessness—an ambassador, a president of Harvard, fully the equal of the Consular Buddenbrooks. Off to one side were poets like the Victorian beardie James Russell Lowell (it is his
Collected Poems
one sees in used-book shops everywhere) and Ezra Pound's Imagist acolyte, Amy Lowell. Family, upbringing are held down in the scales by an unequaled memory and vividness of presentation. I have a cassette of possibly Lowell's last reading, where he mutters, off the cuff: “Memory is genius, really…” Whether in “91 Revere Street” or the groundbreaking childhood poems of
Life Studies
, this is what one takes away as a reader:

To be a boy at Brimmer [his mainly-for-girls prep school] was to be small, denied, and weak. […] In unison our big girls sang “America”; back and forth our amazons tramped—their brows were wooden, their dress was black and white, and their columns followed standard-bearers holding up an American flag, the white flag of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the green flag of Brimmer. At basketball games against Miss Lee's or Miss Winsor's, it was our upper-school champions who rushed onto the floor, as feline and fateful in their pace as lions. This was our own immediate and daily spectacle; in comparison such masculine displays as trips to battle cruisers commanded by comrades of my father seemed eyewash—the Navy moved in a realm as ghostlike and removed from my life as the elfin acrobatics of Douglas Fairbanks or Peter Pan. I wished I were an older girl. I wrote Santa Claus for a field hockey stick.

The enfeeblement and compromise so wittily recounted here are turned into something more biological in the poem “Dunbarton”:

I borrowed Grandfather's cane

carved with the names and altitudes

of Norwegian mountains he had scaled—

more a weapon than a crutch.

I lanced it in the fauve ooze for newts.

In a tobacco tin after capture, the umber yellow mature newts

lost their leopard spots,

lay grounded as numb

as scrolls of candied grapefruit peel.

I saw myself as a young newt,

neurasthenic, scarlet

and wild in the wild coffee-colored water.

This is perhaps even more like García Márquez than Mann—the scene at the very end of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, where the last of the inbred Buendías has sprouted a tail—the counter-evolutionary, lapsed, retro-Napoleonic Lowell, a far cry, a sad falling-off from his grandfather's granite eminence.

Lowell was an unexceptional, even undistinguished schoolboy. At seventeen, he still wanted to be a footballer—he had the build for it, and the strength. Suddenly, massively, he switched his resources. The leader of a little group of three, he designated Frank Parker to be the painter, Blair Clark as the musician, and himself the poet. It's strange to think of him beginning like that—almost randomly, out of will and imagination—because he became a poet of feel and instinct, characterized by a subtlety and inwardness with words that I wouldn't have thought could be learned. The same expenditure of will characterizes him, for me, all through his twenties. He turned up to Robert Frost, with an English historical epic in couplets, and was told that it “lacked compression.” He left Harvard for Kenyon, a small college in Ohio, to sit at the feet of John Crowe Ransom. He drove down to Tennessee to be with Allen Tate; when he was told there was no room at the Tates' house, and he'd have to camp on the lawn, he ignored or overrode the ironical turn of speech, bought a tent, and stayed for weeks.

The early poems, once they were publishable, have that shrillness and mastery. Contemporaries awoke to their thunderclap iambs, their menacing ambiguities (“The Lord survives the rainbow of His will,” “This is the Black Widow, death”), their cold fusion of Boston and Sodom, Hiroshima and Judgment Day, their chattering alliteration, their heavily rhyming run-on lines, their disregard for ease and fluency, the word “and” (as I once put it in a review) usually the meat in a zeugma, their desperate, unlocatable religion, anywhere between Catholicism and Calvinism, their knell of an autodidact drummer applauding the end of the world. I came to them later and less willingly than I did to other, later Lowell. To appreciate them, one would have to be either powerfully religious, or else alive in the 1940s. I am moved and a little uncomprehending when I speak to my Australian poet friend Chris Wallace-Crabbe, who still seems to feel the impact of those first poems, and who can, for example, recite the very first poem of
Lord Weary's Castle
, the first trade book, “The Exile's Return”—which always struck me as a rather dusty piece—by heart. This is, by the way, a general truth in poetry: that even while you may not remember them, you are unlikely to move very far from your first impressions, and that your allegiance is probably determined by what you first read of someone.

I wish I could recover mine—my impressions. It would be like faith before fanaticism, or ritual; or the picture before many, many varnishings, because in some way reading is accretive, and you read the memory of your past readings, and nothing you reread is quite what it was when you first read it.

It was in the winter of 1976, after my first term as an undergraduate, that I borrowed a friend's copy of the omnibus edition of
Life Studies
and
For the Union Dead
, Lowell's two best-known books (1959 and 1964, respectively), and took it home with me to (then) Austria. Prose had attracted me as I think it attracts any aspiring writer—poetry in my view being a specialism, even a malformation—and then defeated me; the ability to write page after page in the same vein was beyond me, though I saw the need for it. I had begun to read quantities of poetry, rapidly, mostly at night, Yeats, Stevens, Pound. I don't know how I came upon Lowell, if it was my idea or my friend's, if I had read any before, in anthologies. Certainly, I knew nothing about him, said his name, Lowell, like vowel or towel, had no preconceptions, carried no baggage. As I say, I wish I knew what poems my reaction was based on, but whatever it was, it elicited the same response from me as Tony Harrison's poems drew from the wonderfully generous and impulsive Stephen Spender: “it seems to me I have been waiting a lifetime for this style”—which I think is the only accolade for a poet. More particularly—and this is absolutely at variance with my own predilections, and with the times, because people who went around reading and quoting such things tended to wind up at the stake in the ruthless and schismatic Cambridge of the '70s and '80s—these poems, whichever they were, struck me as, in the words of whatever French sage said it, “scriptible” even more than “lisible”—demanding to be read but, even more, to be written.

Most probably I was responding to a sort of synthesis of all of
Life Studies
, or to the atmosphere of the whole thing—especially the title sequence in Part IV—but almost at a peradventure, I have chosen two poems from that section, which covers the
Glanz und Elend
, the splendor and misery of three generations of Lowells and Winslows, from his infancy to the middle of his life, from the prime of his grandfather to his own hesitant and infirm middle age (in “Skunk Hour”). The first is “For Sale”:

Poor sheepish plaything,

organized with prodigal animosity,

lived in just a year—

my Father's cottage at Beverly Farms

was on the market the month he died.

Empty, open, intimate,

its town-house furniture

had an on tiptoe air

of waiting for the mover

on the heels of the undertaker.

Ready, afraid

of living alone till eighty,

Mother mooned in a window,

as if she had stayed on a train

one stop past her destination.

This is so exemplary in its limpidity and declarativeness and straightforwardness, it is hard to know what to say about it. The language seems at once natural and adequate. It is immediately apprehensible and reads as though it had been written in one go, and yet has interest and balance to nourish it through many rereadings. It, and the poem before it, called “Father's Bedroom,” I think are the two poems that William Carlos Williams—the great
simpliste
, I should like to call him—Lowell's friend and the least likely of literary allies, particularly admired. Both are basically Imagist poems, but it is an Imagism enriched with psychological notes, with hardheadedness, with implication. “For Sale” is static, and yet it moves (in both senses); it is neutral but full of hurt and dread; it is palpable and factual, and yet the things in it would not have been perceptible to—could not have been said by—anyone else. It seems to be about a piece of real estate, but it's actually more of a ghost story. The poem seems almost like a euphemism, so decorous, so impersonal, so well based in objectivity and fact—and yet is there anything in it that is
not
said? The worst-laid plans, it seems to say, go stray …

Its organization is sturdy and foursquare: fifteen lines, three—grammatically correct—sentences of five lines apiece, the lines short but flexible, four to twelve syllables. They carry rather more stresses than one might expect: “poor sheepish plaything,” spondees, five stresses, aerated by unstressed syllables in the following line “organized with prodigal animosity,” a pattern that repeats itself throughout the poem: “lived in just a year” (four out of five stresses), “my Father's cottage at Beverly Farms” (only five out of ten). This reassertion of heaviness lifting, almost in spite of itself, is like the moment in Peter Handke's
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
, about his mother, who killed herself, when Handke says why make words when all he feels like doing is repeatedly tapping the same key on his typewriter again and again. There is that heaviness in “Poor sheepish plaything,” the indifferent shuffling trudge through the ankle-deep consonants. As for the lightening, the consolation, that may be the consolation of articulacy, the way that each sentence is brought from appositional phrase (“Poor sheepish plaything,” “Empty, open, intimate,” “Ready, afraid / of living alone”) to action, is quickened (Heaney's word) from noun to verb. However painful the action and the understanding of the poem may be, it still lightens the unbearable heaviness of “Poor sheepish plaything.”

There is an integrity, a coherence, about “For Sale” that is one of the great virtues of Lowell's poetry, a closeness—however manufactured—to speech. As I say, it reads as though it had been written in one go. And yet the poem, for all its plainness, has something pleasurably luxuriant—or even luxurious—about it too. One doesn't doubt or disbelieve the vocabulary—it seems an absolutely natural vocabulary—nor is it exactly being flaunted, but there is something worth relishing in “mooned in a window”; in the melodious felicitous combinations of lines 1 or 6 or 11; in the play of heel and toe; in the phrase “prodigal animosity” (almost a transferred epithet, I think, the animosity
of
the prodigal, of the one who has gone forth, but suggesting also “prodigious animosity” or “prodigious animus”—a word that also means “soul,” the soul that is left mooning in a window).

The luxury, the expressiveness, the ghostly skill of the poem are in large part the function of one part of speech: adjectives. Adjectives, we are told, are bad. Even such good teachers as Pound and Bunting are wary of them (“use either no ornament or good ornament,” says Pound). Hughes, we are told, was such a great poet because of his way with verbs. Lowell made the adjective
salonfähig
—respectable—in modern poetry (Adam Zagajewski performs the same service for the adverb). In the context of “For Sale,” this is what makes it such a maximalist poem, for all its Chinese economy. It contains nine adjectives, as well as two nouns as epithets and two past participles—almost one a line, or one word in five! The poem is slathered, stuck with adjectives, like an orange with cloves.