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The middle generation: the lives and poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell. - book reviews
National Review, March 27, 1987 by Jeffrey Meyers
The Middle Generation: The Lives and Poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell
by Bruce Bawer (Archon, 216 pp., $25)
BAWER'S UNEVEN first book, a literarystudy based on a dissertation and apparently completed in 1983, is less lively and sophisticated than his recent reviews in The New Criterion. He has noted the biographical similarities in a group of talented American poets who began to publish during World War II and "were erratic, driven to pathological excesses in behavior by an assortment of secret agonies. Profound pain filled much of their lives and informed much of their work.'
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All four poets were estrangedfrom their unmanly or absent fathers, and three of them had monster mothers who emotionally devoured their sons. When Schwartz told his mother that he was engaged, "she threatened suicide. At the wedding she collapsed and had to be carried up the synagogue steps.' Their serious problems with their parents led to tempestuous marriages, characterized by infidelity, alcoholism, violence, and mental breakdown. The poets shared the same torments and wrote about each other's agonies as if writing about their own. They felt they had to suffer in order to write and that only by suffering could they create poetry.
Bawer, much better on poetry thanbiography, makes forced comparisons to bind his group together. It is misleading to say that Berryman shared "to some degree' Whitman's sexual inclinations, for the former may possibly have been a repressed homosexual and the latter was an overt invert. And there is a great difference in emotional impact between the heart attack of Schwatz's father in a distant city and the suicide of Berryman's father outside his son's window. Jarrell, who had a stable existence and did not become mentally ill until the last year of his life, does not fit the pattern of Berryman's aberrant behavior.
Bawer assumes the friendship ofSchwartz and Jarrell, but never even mentions when they met. He describes the similarities but not the close interrelations of the four poets. They encouraged and criticized each other in interviews, letters, and reviews; even rewrote, adapted, and imitated each other's lines. They competed for jobs, grants, advances, loans, patrons, and awards, for readers, recognition, and praise, for success and security.
Bawer gives insufficient emphasis tothe mental illness that bound the poets together and seemed to stimulate their creative genius. For the constant anxiety, terror, and sense of doom intensified isolation and introspection, heightened the intellectual definance of the outcast poet who questions and challenges conventional ideas about morality, and encouraged him to control the potentially dangerous element in his character through the order and form of art.
When discussing the poetry, Bawerneither sees the characteristic ineptitude and bathos in Schwartz's "the supple recognition of the fullness and the/fatness and the roundness of ripeness,' nor substantiates his claim that Schwartz's "later poems speak as powerfully to our senses as his early poems speak to our minds.' He does not perceive that Jarrell's self-pity often seeps into his flat, prosaic poems; that both he and Schwartz are much better as critics than poets.
Bawer is too dependent on othercritics ("Arpin observes . . . Likewise, Atlas remarks'); indulges in simplistic Freudianism ("to a child, the strangling of a chicken can create the same emotional reverberations as the suicide of a father'); misses important allusions to Dante ("lake of fire'), Marx ("man is born in chains'), and Rilke ("change me, change me'); quotes but does not interpret Lowell's "Epilogue'; and offers inadequate readings of major poems: Jarrell's "Deutsch Durch Freud' and Lowell's "Skunk Hour.'
Bawer makes some shrewd observationson Jarrell's poems about a war he never saw and on Lowell's Mad Negro Soldier--more a Platonic idea than an actual man. The great strength of the book is Bawer's analysis of Eliot's pervasive influence on the early work of these four poets. In a fascinating passage, Bawer demonstrates how each of them wrote a poem that directly imitates a conceit in a work that Eliot particularly praised, John Donne's "A Valediction: Of Weeping.' Bawer convincingly shows that while the young poets borrowed Auden's diction and Yeats's form, they took nothing "which did not belong in a poem written according to Eliot's tenets.' Bawer also describes their successful efforts, in the later poems, to break away from Eliot's restrictive decree that "poetry is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.' Yearning for personal expression yet stifling it at every turn, they finally managed to free themselves from his repressive influence. In Dream Songs and Life Studies, Berryman and Lowell finally and forcefully allowed themselves to express their own feelings and beliefs.
COPYRIGHT 1987 National Review, Inc.
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