Fear of Flying: Robert Lowell and Travel

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

After attending a second and less catastrophic "Congress of Cultural Freedom" in Caracas, in December of 1967, where he met Ivan Illich, Lowell flew to Cuernavaca to visit Father Illich's Center for Intercultural Development. There he met and became romantically involved with one of Illich's assistants, 22-year-old Mary Keelan, an Irishwoman employed by the Monastery of Emmaus. He wrote the sonnet sequence "Mexico" as a result of this affair, including it first in Notebook 1967-68, then in Notebook, and finally, in the version discussed here, in For Lizzie and Harriet10 "Mexico" is the first poetic sequence where extended travel provides a matrix for Lowell's narratives of vulnerability. The poet folds his ongoing personal concerns into notes on local history, customs, flora and fauna that exist chiefly in order to nourish those concerns and give them shape.

"Mexico" is also an instructive example of the way in which travel functions as a mode of composition. It would be next to impossible to puzzle out the hundreds of changes Lowell made, with Frank Bidart's help, in the poems and parts of poems that they moved, filtered, and re-grouped from Notebook 1967-68, to Notebook, and then to For Lizzie and Harriet, History, and The Dolphin. Some of the changes are miniscule, but many are large and structural. The process took the form of shuttling the historical poems-on Verlaine, DeGaulle, Stalin, Che Guevara, and many others-into the book History and away from the "personal" books For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin. While the original "Mexico" sequence in Notebook 1967-68 and Notebook had twelve poems, the entire sequence is dropped from History, and of the ten "Mexico" poems appearing in For Lizzie and Harriet, several are made up of recombined parts of earlier poems.11

On the whole, the Mexican sonnets seem part of the "wastemarble" that Lowell had intended to cut from Notebook but that nonetheless found its way into subsequentvolumes. But-bracketing, if possible, the question of aesthetic value-"Mexico" exemplifies the kind of poem and the kind of combinatory process of composition that the poet was developing out of his travels. The poems of "Mexico" may be unevocative of that country-Mexico is mere backdrop, as Octavio Paz noted with disappointment-but they were probably never intended to be "place" poems like those of D.H. Lawrence or even those of Bishop. They are, as was "Dropping South: Brazil," principally concerned with the centrifugal and fragmenting psychological processes within the speaker. While all of the ten sonnets of the "Mexico" sequence are "love" poems, I will address only those that bear on the anxieties associated with geographical displacement, poems whose "love" interest stands in vexed relation to that displacement.

The first six lines of the first poem deal with familiar material, the ageing and famous poet-"fifty, humbled [...]/ dead laurel grizzling my back [. . .] ," beside his new, young lover, "some sweet, uncertain age, say twenty-seven" (2-3, 4)-before a version of Mexico makes its entrance: