The publication recently of the letters between Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell and their circle, entitled “The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979”, turns a reader’s attention to both their time and his poetry. What comes across from the letters is that for all their passion and spontaneity, they are extremely mannered, the two people living up to their reputations as intellectuals of the age by existing on the tetterhooks of their perceptions, ever trying to squeeze out an insight or put a point so freshly that they will be complemented by posterity for their sensitivities. This is clear, for example, in a letter to Elizabeth Hardwick from 1970 in which Lowell is just making chitchat rather than talking about their finances or about emotional relationships, and so gives away a lot about how his mind works.
Dearest Lizzie:
A little before I set off for Essex. The Mermaid reading was as good as I could make it and went over. Somehow, it is a show I can stage too easily. But why shouldn’t it give the satisfaction of a well-played tennis game? I don’t [know] what that would be, just a very occasional ace serve. I guess, reading gives more satisfaction than tennis. But who could face it daily, or weakly. I’m through for this year.
Lowell is in this letter comparing a poetry reading to a tennis game in a rather offhand way so as to be both self-deprecating and somehow still above it all. The image is to be savored and so to separate the author from the subject matter he is discussing. That makes his tone somewhat arch, the same thing that I noticed to be the style of “The New Yorker” at the time, which meant someone would ask for a Martini as the thing to do in a cartoon where a mushroom cloud was emerging out the window from the Manhattan skyline. Being sophisticated was an end in itself.
This posturing is understandable in the age of which Hardwick and Lowell were a part (he much more egregious in this role than she or her friends like Elizabeth Bishop and Mary McCarthy) because being intellectual, which means being familiar with and contributing to the canon of great literature, still stood for something, when such luminaries didn’t have to be social scientists (like Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Milton Friedman) to capture public attention, just as in the decade before it was physicists like Robert Oppenheimer who had a clear entree into public discourse. The role of public intellectual, a title not yet in being, was earned, by literary people, by the titlists having either their own distinctively deep personalities or because they had been able to catch hold of the spirit of their age, and that is what both Hardwick and Lowell were trying to do. It was the quest of the time at least for people of their sort. But what stands out today is the sheer pretentiousness of that quest, as if there is heroism in simply perfecting one’s own perceptions, their individualism making some people stand out because other people are oppressed by a banal and anti-spiritual culture.
Reclaiming the flavor of that time allows for putting Lowell’s poetry in its proper place, which is as extremely self-indulgent, and an end of poetry rather than a new inspiration for it. Notice that, in general, Lowell writes about himself, transmuting even the most delicate matter of his personal history into poetry, and thereby making it art and so eternal. That was also true of Sylvia Plath and of W. H. Auden though less so of the prior generation’s Wallace Stevens, who had a subject matter, which was the metaphysical composition of life to be gleaned from the surfaces of life. It is also very far from the World War I poets who wrote about the real miseries of war.
“For the Union Dead” is one of Lowell’s signature poems, widely anthologized and praised, Helen Vendler, for one, giving it her usual careful and terse reading, unpacking its mood, its images, its symbols and its themes, and I would not wish to add to what she says but rather to put the poem in the context of the self-indulgence that was the trademark of the poetry and so much of the prose of the time. Think of Norman Mailer and Bob Dylan, both feeling sorry for themselves, Mailer for never realizing his self-announced talent, a promise based on his rather conventional “The Naked and the Dead”, which is remarkable more for its sex scenes back home than for anything he has to say about war, where he is limited to the idea that those who have it rough (like the Japanese soldiers) will be more vicious adversaries, something not true in that the adversaries in Europe were the most able soldiers as well as the most civilized peoples in the world. Indeed. Mailer would move on, and sex would become his major topic, even if I think his reportage on the Sixty Eight Democratic Convention is the best thing he ever did, even though it was also self-indulgent, the writer taking time off from reporting on politics to comment on Lowell, whom he had met in the men’s room, wondering how Lowell feels about so many people knowing about his hospitalizations for mental illness. Mailer and Lowell can’t help but write about themselves.
Here is “For the Union Dead” in full.
For the Union Dead
"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.
On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .
Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."
The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
A word about the imagery. Lowell invokes fish in an aquarium, which is an image of the controlled and pointless life that is known to every five year old who stares into his home aquarium. Lowell cites dinosaur steam shovels so as to show that people are digging into the past and that dinosaurs are animal things, just like fish, but I don’t remember the first time I heard of a steam shovel referred to as a dinosaur, what with its gaping jaws and long neck. And “finned cars” are another cliche in that it was common in the Fifties and Sixties to refer to the grandiose decorations on American automobiles of the time as a sign of the vulgarity and pointlessness of consumerism. Is this all he can do to contrast with the magnificence of the sacrifices of Shaw and his men?
Now for Lowell’s themes. There was a time when poets tried to write about something important that was outside themselves. Milton toyed with writing about the founding of Pennsylvania but then went really big and wrote about Adam and Eve and the entire plan for Creation. T. S. Eliot did not do much narrative verse but his poems did address the nature of the human condition. For his part, Lowell in “On the Union Dead” is writing about himself rather than about the Civil War. He is musing on how Boston has become a cultural vacuum even in sight of the monument to Colonel Shaw. It is also a physical wasteland because the Aquarium has been boarded up. Now Lowell is just mistaken about what had happened in Boston, which was sociological rather than cultural. Boston was subject to the urban blight that had taken over so many cities in the country during the Seventies and from which most of those cities have long recovered. The reason for the urban blight was the deindustrialization that set in when factories located in cities were no longer needed, manufacturing and processing moving to Europe and the Orient after Japan and Europe recovered from the Second World War. It can also be attributed to the movement north of large parts of the Black community and that stands in ironic juxtaposition to the sacrifices of the Civil War, a more important contrast than that supplied by white politicians or American consumerism. How much deeper the irony if Lowell had compared the real bravery of Shaw’s Black Regiment giving up their lives so as to establish a glorious military reputation for their race to the mock bravery of young black men and boys engaged in thievery and vandalism. But Lowell’s rather pedestrian Liberal politics would not allow him to address real social difficulties and so he focussed on a “cultural malaise” (that term not yet invented) because that perception came readily to his mind, as it had to other poets, like W. H. Auden in “September 1, 1939”, where the poet’s personal woes get wrapped up with the woes of the world, as if both sides of the War shared the malaise, when it wasn’t a malaise at all, but jus.t the takeover by evil of a very civilized nation that had brought the world to this cataclysmic moment.
Here is another poem of Lowell’s that would seem to be a success, as that is judged by its inclusions in numerous anthologies, and yet suffers from the same defects as “For the union Dead”: cliched imagery and a softness of thought.
Home After Three Months Away
Gone now the baby's nurse,
a lioness who ruled the roost
and made the Mother cry.
She used to tie
gobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze--
three months they hung like soggy toast
on our eight foot magnolia tree,
and helped the English sparrows
weather a Boston winter.
Three months, three months!
Is Richard now himself again?
Dimpled with exaltation,
my daughter holds her levee in the tub.
Our noses rub,
each of us pats a stringy lock of hair--
they tell me nothing's gone.
Though I am forty-one,
not forty now, the time I put away
was child's play. After thirteen weeks
my child still dabs her cheeks
to start me shaving. When
we dress her in her sky-blue corduroy,
she changes to a boy,
and floats my shaving brush
and washcloth in the flush. . . .
Dearest I cannot loiter here
in lather like a polar bear.
Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil.
Three stories down below,
a choreman tends our coffin's length of soil,
and seven horizontal tulips blow.
Just twelve months ago,
these flowers were pedigreed
imported Dutchmen; now no one need
distinguish them from weed.
Bushed by the late spring snow,
they cannot meet
another year's snowballing enervation.
I keep no rank nor station.
Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.
Here the images are of a nurse who is like a “lioness”, which would apply to any caretaker of babies, and the image at the center of the poem is of a baby in its bath. The poem leaves as an unspoken irony the fact that Lowell was away for those three months for treatment at a mental hospital. For a “confessional” poem, there is not much confession. He says in his last two lines that he has “no rank, nor station”, which is an insight, in that he is, when sane, just a normal person, not beset by fantasies that either elevate or diminish him. Lowell also presents the idea that being cured has the price of making you a diminished soul. But he does not explain these insights or go into what it was like at the hospital. Rather, the poem deflects all its energy onto the baby and Lowell doesn’t have much to say about that creature. This poem is a deflection from emotions he would rather not describe just as “For the Union Dead” was a deflection onto consumerism of an invocation of emotions surrounding the accomplishment of Colonel Shaw and his men. Could Lowell not have found a way to make their courage visible to us, rather than layered within modern day Boston? Allusiveness is a strong technique only if replaces a raw consideration of the emotions of the past-- whether wartime bravery or mental illness-- with something stronger.
So what has changed between Lowell in his time and now? Certainly the poetry hasn’t changed, and so it isn’t that Lowell’s images have not aged well. The images of, let us say, the Metaphysical Poets, have not gone stale over the centuries. And it is not enough to say that the culture has moved on, finding pretentious what was once found to be insightful. That is too general. Rather, it is the critic who notices, out of his or her own resources, that Lowell’s ironic stance is evasive rather than profound, that it skews away from rather than illuminates his subject matter. Lowell is lachrymose in that he bewails suffering without looking at the suffering. How could anyone have ever read him otherwise? But that is the mystery of all criticism, which is that it finds things that no one noticed before in texts that have been with us for millennia and not just those that are a few generations old, as are Lowell’s. The poet does the poet’s work and the critic does the critic’s work, part of which is to notice how much of his time Lowell and his circle were, caught up (not entrapped) by the preoccupations and posturing of their time, few artists emerging on the other side as having written for the ages.