Alan Williamson: Looking back at Robert Lowell -- Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell by Paul Mariani / Robert Lowell's Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur by Richard Tillinghast

American Poetry Review, The, May 1995 by Williamson, Alan

A few years ago, I was involved in a class discussion about a poem by Sharon Olds, in which a childhood trauma--the speaker's sister urinating on her--was compared to Hitler's entry into Paris. Much was said about this poem, for and against. The one thing that was not said, until I said it, was that the poem was conventional; that it followed a way of understanding the personal and the public together made unforgetable by Sylvia Plath, but invented by Robert Lowell.

Mother travelled first-class in the hold;

her Risorgimento black and gold casket

was like Napoleon's at the Invalides...

Because the participants in this class were an unusually astute, well-read group of young poets, it got me to thinking about the forgetting of ancestors. How easy, and how human it is, in any art, to ignore the sources of the very things we do most automatically, so that our own work will strike us as more original. This happens, particularly, to those poets who have had the double-edged distinction of being considered the poet of the age. Tennyson is only beginning to recover from the drubbing he received in the high modernist period, though James Richardson has demonstrated how many unacknowledged Victorian echoes run through Eliot and Yeats. When I was young, Eliot himself was the whipping-boy, as poets rediscovered other ancestors, Frost, Stevens, Williams. Now it appears to be Lowell's turn.

As Richard Tillinghast observes, in his beautifully written, and on the whole judicious, reintroduction to Lowell for the general reader, Ian Hamilton's biography may bear some of the blame for the decline in Lowell's reputation. Like Lawrance Thompson's biography of Frost, Hamilton's has made many people who never set eyes on Lowell believe in a caricature only barely recognizable to the poet's friends--a sort of mad twentieth-century Lord Byron, constantly violent, drunk, self-promoting, womanizing....I don't think Hamilton intended to produce such an effect. I suspect, in fact, that his own personal history made him feel he could treat Lowell's madness with compassion, and so achieve a candor rare in first, or "authorized," biographies. The problem was that he simply got too interested in the madness, and that he was not respectful enough of the poet's intellectual life. By chapter 17, a year in which Lowell completed five or six of the central poems in For the Union Dead gets one page, some of the poems being dismissed as "listless and academic." The two flanking manic breakdowns, by contrast, get six pages. Finally, as Tillinghast justly observes, "the man's excesses and hospitalizations" are simply "easier to document than his private kindnesses, his table talk, his warmth and loyalty to friends....Lowell unfortunately had no Boswell."

Paul Mariani, who never met Lowell, cannot step into the role of Boswell. But one hopes that his careful and much more intellectually-focussed new biography will begin to correct the caricature. The breakdowns and scandals are there, but so is the comedy of "Cal" 's bumbling, oversized progress through the world, as his friends retold it: the adolescent Cal, blithely urinating on the front lawns of the very patrons he was trying to impress; the mad Cal, holding Allen Tate out a second-story window while reciting Tate's own "Ode to the Confederate Dead" in a bear's voice....

But, as Lowell gets older, such anecdotes appropriately recede. Mariani treats the breakdowns as what they were--sad interruptions in a life devoted to self-knowledge; to writing the best poems possible; and, increasingly, to using his prestige to become a voice of temperateness, but not of compromise, in American left-wing politics. There is, as Lowell's second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, observes, more than a little of the "heroic" in Lowell's endurance, his self-recoveries. (So it is particularly sad to see the New York Times still using such murky phrases as "self-betrayals," in its handling of Mariani's book. Lowell was betrayed by the chemistry of his brain, not by the conscious lapses from a moral ideal that such a phrase connotes.)

One aspect of Lowell's character that later readers seem to have particular trouble getting right is his ambition. Since his heyday, we have had twenty years of overpopulation, fifteen-minute stardom, ideological critiques of individualism in general and male individualism in particular. Lowell's who-are-the-best-poets, what-are-their-best-lines mentality has become so alien, that many of my contemporaries can only read it as careerism. In fact, it represented a profound conviction that "the good is the enemy of the best"; that it was only by asking such questions that one could break the shackles of poetic convention, write poems that would be memorable in every detail and every line. Tillinghast--who studied with Lowell, as I did--remembers Lowell, on a trip to Maine, asking him how he would describe everything, even an approaching viaduct. I can't imagine any living poet doing that; but one could certainly have a worse apprenticeship. "Lowell's ability to inspire a sense of artistic perfectionism, of the need to live and breathe poetry...was his priceless gift to younger writers."