Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. - book reviews

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 17, 1994 | by Tom Clark

In 1947, Robert Lowell's second book of verse, Lord Weary's Castle, captured a Pulitzer Prize - the first of Lowell's unprecedented three Pulitzers for poetry. From then until his death at the age of 60, Lowell dominated the mainstream of American poetry like a great rock commanding a river. If it couldn't go through him, it had to go around him. Hulking, myopic, alcoholic and notoriously difficult in his intermittent manic phases, he was a force to be dealt with and never to be taken lightly.

Perhaps the most significant index of Lowell's importance is the depth of his influence. The direct impact was, of course, greatest on the apprentice verse makers he taught in academic stints at Iowa, Boston University, the New School and Harvard in the 1950s and sixties. Their roster reads like a lineup of the best-known establishment poets: Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice and Philip Levine are just a few of the names. "After the dry, etiolated language and attitudes of Eliot," Snodgrass recalls in a recent memoir, "we were starved for vigor. A Lowell poem seemed like some massive generator, steel-jacketed in formal metrics against the throb of rhetoric and imagery."

But for all the awards and accolades - his face on the cover of Time, his poetry in Newsweek - Lowell was never complacent about his work, as Paul Mariani shows in his exhaustive, detail-saturated new biography, Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (Norton, 514 pp). Perhaps the spur was his patrician family pedigree or the nagging self-doubt that came with it. At any rate, self-criticism drove Lowell relentlessly, keeping his poetry from stagnation. One gets the feeling from the biography that what kept his brilliant career from completely toppling off the rails, despite all his earnest efforts at self-destruction, was that self-critical sense.

By 1957, for example, when his Lord Weary's style was just reaching its apogee of influence, Lowell was already in the process of dismantling it, abandoning what he called "the theology and symbolism and verbal violence" in favor of the rambling, revealing confessional mode of Life Studies. His old poems, he confided to his friend and fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop - uncovering their correspondence is Mariani's principal scholarly contribution - made him feel "like an old outmoded battleship," and Life Studies, for all its thinly veiled reflections of personal pain, became is greatest triumph.

Suggesting that Lowell's literary stock has "suffered a decline" in the years following his death, Mariani (a poet himself, and previously the author of copious, authoritative biographies of William Carlos Williams and John Berryman) attempts to redress matters by restoring to the late poet his "proper name," bringing equal light to Lowell's relatively unregarded Vietnam-era public poems, his "poems of middle-age eros" and his "heartbreaking ... final elegies to his friends and to his own disrupted life." Still, this book is less a critical biography than an act of faith - and of great industry. Mariani's respect for his subject's work is patent but is to be taken more or less on trust, expressed in bursts of rhetorical enthusiasm rather than actually argued.

When it comes to Lowell's troubled private life, however, Mariani tends to withhold judgment. His factdrenched time line, thick with accumulation of data and quotation from letters, does not leave much to the imagination, yet at the same time discloses curiously little about its subject's inner workings. But perhaps Mariani is to be forgiven his discretion after all, on grounds that his story is so full of sensation as to need no underlining.

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV, the unwanted only son of a weak-willed Navy lieutenant and a domineering socialite, rebelled against a family that was staunchly Republican in politics and stiffly Episcopal in religion, and that traced its ancestral line back to the founding fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. At St. Mark's prep school, where his uncouth behavior earned him the nickname "Cal" (short for "Caliban" or "Caligula"), the youthful Lowell was moody, solitary and occasionally violent. But one of his teachers, Richard Eberhart, encouraged him to write poetry

Escalating problems with his parents - eventually he decked his father in a quarrel - led the troubled youth into psychoanalysis. And as Mariani recounts, analysis provided grounds for running off from Harvard to Tennessee and pitching a Sears, Roebuck tent on the front lawn of poet and critic Allen Tate. Cal enrolled in John Crowe Ransom's poetry classes at Vanderbilt, then followed Ransom to Louisiana State, haven of New Critics Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

Lowell brought his new spouse, novelist Jean Stafford, with him to Baton Rouge. Their intense, stormy, six-year drinking-bout of a marriage, exacerbated by his conversion to an entirely over-the-top strain of mystical Catholicism, supplies some of the most riveting, and distressing, reading in Mariani's book.