Tag Archives for Robert Lowell

Que pourrais-je répondre à cette âme pieuse?

Reading Lowell today, some of his poems reminded me of Baudelaire, and specifically, his excellent early-ish poem Mother Marie Therese, which put me in mind of this Baudelaire poem. Clicking on this link, you can find various translations of it (including one by Lowell), which all have their faults but, together, will give you a decent sense of the poem, if you can’t read French. And now enjoy:

Charles Baudelaire: La servante au grand coeur dont vous étiez jalouse

La servante au grand coeur dont vous étiez jalouse,
Et qui dort son sommeil sous une humble pelouse,
Nous devrions pourtant lui porter quelques fleurs.
Les morts, les pauvres morts, ont de grandes douleurs,
Et quand Octobre souffle, émondeur des vieux arbres,
Son vent mélancolique à l’entour de leurs marbres,
Certe, ils doivent trouver les vivants bien ingrats,
À dormir, comme ils font, chaudement dans leurs draps,
Tandis que, dévorés de noires songeries,
Sans compagnon de lit, sans bonnes causeries,
Vieux squelettes gelés travaillés par le ver,
Ils sentent s’égoutter les neiges de l’hiver
Et le siècle couler, sans qu’amis ni famille
Remplacent les lambeaux qui pendent à leur grille.
Lorsque la bûche siffle et chante, si le soir
Calme, dans le fauteuil je la voyais s’asseoir,
Si, par une nuit bleue et froide de décembre,
Je la trouvais tapie en un coin de ma chambre,
Grave, et venant du fond de son lit éternel
Couver l’enfant grandi de son oeil maternel,
Que pourrais-je répondre à cette âme pieuse,
Voyant tomber des pleurs de sa paupière creuse?

Pascal’s infinite, perfect, fearful sphere

From Lowell’s Notebook 1967-68, which I am trying to finish a paper on, this poem

Robert Lowell: Mania: 1958

Remember standing with me in the dark,
Ann Adden? In the wild house? Everything –
I mad, you mad for me? And brought my ring,
that twelve-carat lunk of gold there . . . my Joan of Arc,
undeviating then from the true mark –
robust, ah taciturn! Remember our playing
Marian Anderson in Mozart’s Shepherd King,
Il Re Pastore there? O Hammerheaded Shark,
the Rainbow Salmon of the World, your hand
a rose – not there, a week earlier! We stand. . . .
We ski-walked the eggshell at the Mittersill,
Pascal’s infinite, perfect, fearful sphere –
the border nowhere, your center everywhere. . . .
And if I forget you, Ann, may my right hand . . .

Master, mammoth mumbler

Robert Lowell: Ford Madox Ford

The lobbed ball plops, then dribbles to the cup….
(a birdie Fordie!) But it nearly killed
the ministers. Lloyd George was holding up
the flag. He gabbled, “Hop-toad. hop-toad, hop-toad!
Hueffer has used a niblick on the green;
it’s filthy art, Sir, filthy art!”
You answered, “What is art to me and thee?
Will a blacksmith teach a midwife how to bear?”
That cut the puffing statesman down to size,
Ford. You said, “Otherwise,
I would have been general of a division.” Ah Ford!
Was it warm the sport of kings, that your Good Soldier,
the best French novel in the language, taught
those Georgian Whig magnificoes at Oxford,
at Oxford decimated on the Somme?
Ford, five times black-balled for promotion,
then mustard gassed voiceless some seven miles
behind the lines at Nancy or Belleau Wood:
you emerged in your “worn uniform,
gilt dragons on the revers of the tunic,”
a Jonah – O divorced, divorced
from the whale-fat of post-war London! Boomed,
cut, plucked and booted! In Providence, New York …
marrying, blowing…nearly dying
at Boulder, when the altitude
pressed the world on your heart,
and your audience, almost football-size,
shrank to a dozen, while you stood
mumbling, with fish-blue-eyes,
and mouth pushed out
fish-fashion, as if you gagged for air….
Sandman! Your face, a childish O. The sun
is pernod-yellow and it gilds the heirs
of all the ages there on Washington
and Stuyvesant, your Lilliputian squares,
where writing turned your pockets inside out.
But master, mammoth mumbler, tell me why
the bales of your left-over novels buy
less than a bandage for your gouty foot.
Wheel-horse, O unforgetting elephant,
I hear you huffing at your old Brevoort,
Timon and Falstaff, while you heap the board
for publishers. Fiction! I’m selling short
your lies that made the great your equals. Ford,
you were a kind man and you died in want.

One of several poems Lowell wrote for his friend, the great novelist Ford Madox Ford. This staggering one was published in Life Studies, and recently reprinted

Thoroughbred mental cases

Robert Lowell: Waking in the Blue

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My hearts grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)

What use is my sense of humour?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with a muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbert and ginger ale–
more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;
the hooded night lights bring out “Bobbie,”
Porcellian ’29,
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig–
redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.

These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.

In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)

After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.

On Andrei Voznesensky

Andrei Voznesensky is a difficult writer (…) yet he is particularly easy for us to like and admire. He comes to us with the careless gaiety of the twenties and Apollinaire, with a flippant magic, effervescent intensity, and imagination so boisterous and high-spirited that only a Russian could survive it. He says, “We do not burn to survive, but to step on the gas.” Voznesensky us not likely to burn out (…). When he looks at himself, I think he’s glad he is only life-size, or a bit smaller. Everywhere in his poetry is something fine-boned, fragile and sensible. With humor, with shrewd amazement, with rushes of defiance, he is able to be himself, a gift no one is born with, and which is only acquired by the most heroic patience and ingenuity. (…)

This is a hard time to be a poet, and in each country it is hard in different ways. It is almost impossible, even where this is permitted, to be directly political and remain inspired. Still the world presses in as never before, prodding, benumbing. We stand in a sort of international lull. Like a cat up a tree, we want to climb down without falling. It’s too much, we’ve lost our foothold. The other night, I found myself shaving. An impatient, just-lit cigarette was sighting me down from the soap-dish, and the bathroom door was ajar to catch messages from the world news roundup. It’s too much, it’s too tense. We want another human being. We want Andrei Voznesensky (…) to juggle us back to the real world for a moment.

I was reminded last night that Andrei Voznesensky had died last week (a horrible month so far; we lost Voznesensky and David Markson, as well), and I found this brilliant essay by Robert Lowell, a speech to introduce a reading by Andrei Voznesensky, written in the early 1960s. It is from Lowell’s Collected Prose, edited by Robert Giroux)

I was naked without my line-ends

I’m still in free verse, written in the blue period after sickness, when I felt I could do nothing else well. On the balance side and on the side of formality, I am told all my lines are lines. I do scores of revisions to make them so. I use iambics often loosened into anapests. I suppose definitions of words in the dictionary can be made to do this – anything can be scanned but not made into decisive lines. (…) How different prose is; sometimes the two mediums refuse to say the same things. I found this lately doing an obituary on Hannah Arendt. Without verse, without philosophy, I found it hard, I was naked without my line-ends.

– Robert Lowell (in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop (April 15, 1976), available in the magnificent, indispensable book Words in Air: The complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (eds. Travisano and Hamilton). You need to read it. You know you do.)

John, we used the language as if we made it

Robert Lowell: For John Berryman

I feel I know what you have worked through, you
know what I have worked through – these are words…
John, we used the language as if we made it.
Luck threw up the coin, and the plot swallowed,
monster yawning for its mess of pottage.
Ah privacy, as if you wished to mount
some rock by a mossy stream, and count the sheep –
fame that renews the soul, but not the heart.
The ebb tide flings up wonders: rivers, beer-cans,
linguini, bloodstreams; how merrily they gallop
to catch the ocean – Hopkins, Herbert, Thoreau,
born to die like the athletes at early forty –
Abraham lived with less expectancy,
heaven his friend, the earth his follower.

This is from Lowell’s enormous and perennially underrated long poem Notebook, more precisely, from the first permutation, Notebook 1967-68, which would morph into the 1970’s Notebook first and then split up into History and For Lizzie and Harriet. In the Collected Poems you’ll only find the latter two volumes. FSG has, however, just put out a new edition of Notebook 1967-68, with an introduction by Jonathan Galassi. Highly, highly recommended.

To remind you of ‘ow us gaffers used to talk

Tony Harrison: The Queen’s English

Last meal together, Leeds, the Queen’s Hotel
that grandish pile of swank in City Square
Too posh for me, he said (even though he dressed well)
if you wern’t wi’ me ah’d nivver dare!

I knew that he’d decided to die
not by the way he lingered at the bar
not by the look he’d give me with one good-eye
nor by the firmer handshake and the gruff ta-ra
But when he browsed the station bookstall sales
he picked up ‘Poems from the Yorkshire Dales’

‘ere tek this un wi’ yer to New York
to remind you of ‘ow us gaffers used to talk.
It’s up your street in’t it? ‘ahh buy yer that!

The broken lines go through me speeding South –

As t’doctor stopped to oppen woodland yet…
and
wi’ skill they puttin wuds reet i’ his mouth

This poem is by a poet I’m just trying to discover and sort out in my head. It’s quoted from the Selected Poems (Penguin), and is from the sequence School of Eloquence. (Addendum: I’ve no idea how to do it with the wordpress interface, but the last line should be slightly indented!)

Harrison in general is fascinating, but the poems in School of Eloquence are nothing short of stunning. In them, Harrison shows himself to be one of the select groups of extraordinary poets who have written a sequence of sonnet or sonnet-like poems, which is grafted to the poet’s own unique voice. John Berryman’s Dreamsongs or Robert Lowell’s Notebook (including the stunning revisions in History and For Lizzie and Harriet),Edwin Morgan’s Sonnets from Scotland, Ted Berrigan’s melodious Sonnets or even Geoffrey Hill’s incredible Mercian Hymns (though these are different in significant ways). I think that McHale’s project of discovering the postmodern long poem failed because he didn’t see or care about this pattern of songs that arose at roughly the same time. These are all flabbergasting achievements, although I haven’t read enough of Tony Harrison’s work to properly read and assess his work. But even from the little I have read, I can’t but recommend this excellent poet.

The custom that imprisons.

Robert Lowell: Five Hour Political Rally

A design of insects on the rug’s red acre,
one to each ten feet like the rich in graves;
the belly is like a big watermelon seed,
each head an empty pretzel, less head than mouth,
the wings are emblems, black as the ironwork
for a Goya balcony, lure and bar to love –
the darkeyed and protected Spanish girls
exhibited by the custom that imprisons.
Insects and statesmen grapple on the carpet;
all excel, as if each were the candidate;
all original or at least in person;
twenty first ballerinas are in the act.
Like insects they almost live on breath alone:
If you swallow me, I’ll swallow you.

This is from the odd and astonishing sequence of sonnets that make up Lowell’s History.

Something other than perfection

In 2003, FSG published the Collected Poems of Robert Lowell, and while there were great assessments of the book (Willard Spiegelman’s in The Kenyon Review, or Helen Vendler’s in The New Republic), there were also some less smart takes. One of the most harebrained ones was James Fenton’s in the NYRB (“The Return of Robert Lowell”). DeSales Harrison, one of the book’s editors, gave the right answer and an excellent assessment of Lowell’s work in his brief letter to the editor. This bit especially is extremely well put:

Fenton assumes that Lowell undertakes his revisions in the interest of a perfection that anyone would recognize. What Fenton does not consider is the way in which revision might strive toward something other than perfection in this narrow sense. The “comprehensive review and correction” that he proposes must perforce ignore or deny how much of Lowell’s power inheres in the refusal of correction, and in its insistence upon leaving exposed the work’s pentimenti. The surface of the text is in its essence erratic, torn, distorted, or—to use a word Fenton might intend differently—incorrigible. In its scrapings, smudges, patchings, and scars the poetry enacts the struggle between impulse and repentance, gesture and erasure—between, in short, the forces of making and unmaking.

A hyperthyroid injection

Now, to be thoroughly in act is human perfection; in other words, it is to be thoroughly made. According to Catholic theology, perfection demands a substantial transformation, which is called first sanctifying grace and then beatitude; it involves the mysterious co-working of grace and free will. To go into this question further would be a digression. What I want to emphasize is that for Hopkins life was a continuous substantial progress toward perfection. He believed this, he lived this, this is what he wrote. (…) Hopkins’s rhythms, even when he’s not writing sprung rhythm, have the effect of a hyperthyroid injection.

Robert Lowell on Gerard Manley Hopkins (“Hopkins’s Sanctity”, in his indispensable Collected Prose (ed. R. Giroux))

The Climacteric of his Want

Robert Lowell: “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage”

“The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms.Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor’s edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It’s the injustice . . . he is so unjust–
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick? Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant.”

an odd little poem, one of my favorite Lowell poems.

Poem of the Day (Lowell)

Robert Lowell: Waking in the Blue

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My hearts grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)

What use is my sense of humour?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with a muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbert and ginger ale–
more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;
the hooded night lights bring out “Bobbie,”
Porcellian ’29,
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig–
redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.

These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.

In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)

After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.

Pendragon: Norman Mailer’s “Armies of the Night”

Mailer, Norman (1994), The Armies of the Night, Plume
ISBN 0-452-27279-3

On October 21, 1967, 70.000 people traveled to Washington, DC to protest the Vietnam war. Speeches were given, and as many as 50.000 united to march to the Pentagon to voice their anger over an unjustified war. Among this crowd were found Americans of all stripes; the only thing they had in common was their outrage. The protests had been approved by the government, but with strict rules, among them a line marked by a rope. A few of those present wanted to commit civil disobedience and stepped over the line, only to be arrested; after the weekend, 681 persons had been arrested, some 100 persons were treated for injuries, due to the mounting aggression among the 200 US Marshals. A large number of famous people was present, among them Robert Lowell, possibly the most important American poet after WWII, eminent pediatrician Dr. Spock, major critic Dwight Macdonald and the renowned novelist Norman Mailer. Of these, only Mailer was arrested. The Armies of the Night is his attempt to make artistic and journalistic sense of that weekend and what it meant for the United States.

The book, published in 1968 and recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is subtitled “History as a Novel, The Novel as History”. It is one of his best known works, together with The Naked and the Dead and Executioner’s Song, and one of the few which are likely to endure, even as the others drop out of print. Published three years after Truman Capote’s groundbreaking In Cold Blood, and a year after Richard Brook’s movie adaption, it turns Capote’s device, the mixing of fact and fiction in the creation of the non-fiction novel, into a novelty act. Capote created the tools by using them: by writing what to all appearances read and worked like a novel, but basing it on well-known and widely publicized facts, he did not need to advertise his enterprise, it was clear as day. For Mailer, too, especially after the huge impact of Capote’s book, there was no need to flaunt the novelty of what he was doing. The fact that he used so self-important subtitles implies that, at least to an extent, he was commenting on In Cold Blood.

Capote used a journalistic point of view in choosing an apparently objective third person narrator. Capote never entered the novel as a character himself, at least not in an explicit fashion. In contrast to that, The Armies of the Night is, first of all, a paean to Norman Mailer. The book is separated into two sections, “History as a Novel” and “The Novel as History”. The first section, which is considerably longer than the first, is a novel the protagonist of which is Norman Mailer. It’s written in a third person subjective mode, following “Norman Mailer” through the weekend, with all his thoughts, drunk and sober. The novel starts with a party Thursday evening at “Washington’s scruffy Ambassador Theater”, where a few of the luminaries who were to take part in the march later, assemble and listen to speeches by various celebrities. We find Norman Mailer drunk, ogling the function of Master of Ceremonies, eying other guests jealously. What to say to the critic who is currently reviewing his latest novel Why are we in Vietnam?, how to best talk to the grand Lowell, how to find courteous enough words for a writer one despises, ephemeral issues like these.

Mailer the character is both grandiose and insecure. He bows to the superior capabilities of Lowell even as he looks down upon writers and readers he considers inferior to himself, not without being self-deprecating about the whole business:

Mailer, of course, was not without respect for Goodman. He thought Goodman had had an enormous influence in the colleges and much of it had been, from his own point of view, very much to the good. […] But, oh, the style! It set Mailer’s teeth on edge to read it; he was inclined to think that the body of students who followed Goodman must have something de-animalized to put up with the style or at least such was Mailer’s bigoted view.

More importantly for this novel, however, he uses the same voice in order to convey his political beliefs. It is fitting that we start with Mailer’s private confusions and beliefs, in order to have a pattern which will help us make sense of the rest of the novel. It may be an ode to Norman Mailer, but we the readers witness the creation of a political person. It’s not the private that’s become political: Norman Mailer the character is almost completely shorn of his private aspects, and the few left to him are imbued with political significance. It is this change that the narrator links to the ambiguous structure of this section (novel/history) of the book:

Of course if this were a novel, Mailer would spend the rest of the night with a lady. But it is history and so the Novelist is for once blissfully removed from any description of the hump-your-backs of sex.

Central among the private things that have become political is religion. The Christian religion, especially, is offered as a key to understanding the American experience, both the visionary strength of the American people and its bigotries. These two sides become obvious when Mailer, at the end of the first section, launches a grandiose speech, invoking the former, but is getting browbeaten by the latter, when the newspaper reporting on it follows a quote up with the simple sentence “Mailer is a Jew”.

The narrator tells us this:

Lowell is of a good weight, not too heavy, not too light, but the hollows speak of the great Puritan gloom in which the country was founded – man was simply not good enough for God.

It is, as in many religions, not finding God which he extols, but the search for God. Consequently, in his own speech, it is that part he stresses, by invoking the Arthurian legend:

“I think of Saturday, and that March and do you know, fellow carriers of the holy unendurable grail, for the first time in my life I don’t know whether I have the piss or the shit scared out of me the most. […] We’re going to try to stick it up the government’s ass,” he shouted, “right into the sphincter of the pentagon. […] Will reporters please get every word accurately,” he called out dryly to warm the chill. But humor may have been too late. The New Yorker did not have strictures against the use of sh*t for nothing […] Mailer looked to his right to see Macdonald approaching, a book in his hands, arms at his side, a sorrowing look of concern in his face. “Norman,” said Macdonald quietly, “I can’t possibly follow you after all this.”

The following here is but Macdonald’s comment upon Mailer’s drunk capabilities as Master of Ceremonies, but it is significant in more respect than one. In a novel that treats a march of multitudes, united under one concern, one conviction, it is a sound idea to look for leaders and followers. The speakers, Lowell, Macdonald, Spock and others, are the coterie at the round table but who is Arthur? Following Mailer’s adventures what we notice first of all is the lack of a firm direction, the decided lack of leaders. Mailer, who, after all, is predestined to be a leader, due to the weight of his name and reputation, stumbles through this weekend. We see him attending the march, listening to the speakers, admiring Lowell, above all, walking with others to the steps of the Pentagon. He is among those who cross the line, partly by accident, partly by a belief in the importance of the American vision, the importance of civil disobedience. If this sounds vague and confused, it is because Mailer the character is. He is unabashedly racist and believes in the civil rights movement, he is a lefty and a conservative, he likes and abhors violence, he is for and against the Vietnam war. It is these beliefs, contradictory though they may be, which guide him.

Mailer is not a leader, nor is he a historian. The writer does not use Mailer the character as a means to depict that weekend. This is “history as a novel”, after all, and we are thrust into the narrow head of Mailer. He barely understands what happens, and when he is arrested, we leave the march with him, as we follow him into a van and then further into prison. He, again, is led there, as are others, not by a single leader, but both by his decisions on the steps of the pentagon and by the decisions of the marshals in place. The “history as a novel” never returns to the march. We have to wait for the second section to commence in order for us to learn more about the march. That second section is taut. It does not start or end with the speakers, Mailer makes but rarely an appearance in this section. It tells a different story of the march, it speaks of the organization of it, of quarrels and discussions among the marchers, it tells of the acts of civil disobedience, it speaks of the morning of the march and the evening of it. We learn that as the allotted time is up, the marshals gather the remaining protesters. Not just crossing a line, but staying, as well, turns out to be an act of disobedience.

At first I was somewhat puzzled that this piece of journalism deserves the label “the novel as history”, until I remembered the missing Arthur. It is the American people who are Arthur, it’s the American people who both lead the march and quell the disobedience. “There is something loose in American life”, the narrator maintained in the first section, pointing both to the fact that “[o]ne did not have to look for who would work in the concentration camps and the liquidation centers”, i.e. the authoritarian amongst Americans, and to the fact that rebellion, too, is ingrained in the Americans. This is not a spectacular insight, seeing as Mailer is merely pointing to one of the basic dichotomies structuring all modern societies. It is this last fact, however, that Mailer needs us to understand, in order to understand under whose orders the “Armies of the Night” march. Thus, Mailer manages to provide a fascinatingly full and emotional portrait of that weekend. It’s not Gonzo journalism, Mailer does not have the ability to write this. The book is too cerebral, too ‘cultured’, too forced, to go down that road. But what Mailer achieved here is unique. The non-fiction novel has a long history, but none of its proponents could have written this. It is one-of-a-kind, it depicts a time and a society’s state with remarkable assurance and precision. I would not have expected the writer of The Naked and the Dead to pull off something like this.

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