Fear of Flying: Robert Lowell and Travel

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2005 by Gray, Jeffrey

Telescoped in this way, perhaps these travels of Lowell's last three years seem more extraordinary than they were; certainly they were epiphenomenal to the heartbreak that partly caused them. At any rate, the cumulative effect was devastating. The damage is as visible in the poems written on the east-west Atlantic axis as it is in the north-south poems. In order briefly to link these two axes, consider a poem written before the Caroline Blackwood period, "Flight in the Rain," from Notebook, which conflates a past north-south flight with a present east-west flight. It is a poem of travel trauma that did not survive the sifting process into the subsequent books:

*Why does he say, I'm not afraid of flying?

*His imagination has lost the word for dying.

*It must be worse, if you have imagination . . .

That night: the wing-tilt, air-bounce upright, lighted

Long Island mainstreets flashed like dice on the window;

the raindrop, gut troutlines wriggling on the window;

the landings, not landing; the long low flight at snailspace

exhausting a world of suburban similars . . .

The sick stomach says, You were. Says, Pray

this mismanaged life incorrigible. . . .

Prayer lives longer than God-God, the déjà vù,

He sees the sparrow fall, heard years from here

in Rio, one propeller clunking off,

our Deo Gracias on the puking runway. (Notebook 1-14)

The memory evoked by Lowell's flight is that of an earlier, equally turbulent landing at Rio, when passengers said a prayer of thanks as the plane, one prop dead, hit "the puking runway." Because of this pairing of present and past, we have "landings, not landing," the memory of multiple, reverberating traumas. The déjà vu is this recognition, God's recognition, of an ominous parallelism. God, the micro-manager, according to Christian tradition, counts the hairs of our heads and knows when every sparrow falls. This sparrow, the plane, had fallen-in Lowell's sense of "falling"-before, and now would again, or so the "sick stomach" says. The poet is less concerned with what lies out the window-the Long Island suburban streets flashing by-than with the nausea that speak to him of mortality.

This poem of flight is more specific than most of the poems of vulnerability that spread out from Notebook into History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin. Indeed, its explicit depiction of the physical and spiritual nausea of air travel is well to bear in mind as we look at the east-west travel poetry of the latter volume.

The travel theme is largely submerged during the poems of householding and hospitals that occupy the bulk of The Dolphin. But the six-poem sequence "Leaving America for England" introduces a subliminal charge that ignites in the longer sequence "Flight to New York." The former sequence of six poems begins, in "America," with a reference to "My lifelong taste for reworking the same water-" (1), reminding one of "the old Atlantic still" and "the same Atlantic" that he contemplated in earlier poems. This first poem of the sequence emphasizes sameness, stasis, unwillingness to experience anew. He is content with