Fear of Flying: Robert Lowell and Travel

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

feeding our minds . . . the mind which is also flesh. (10-14)

That the "girl" (later a "poor child") is presented as simple, inartistic, and nonverbal maybe connected to the poet's claim, in Wordsworthian fashion, to "fall back [. . .] on honest speech," a claim about which Lowell, in prizing imagination over "fact," was ordinarily suspicious.13 But here we must compare the Notebook version, since the vertigo entailed in the project of speaking honestly has been elided from For Lizzie and Harriet; in the earlier version (as in the version printed in Collected Poems), "altitude" and "falling" back on honest speech are connected. The idiom of "falling back on," in the sense of relying upon, is conflated with the frightening sense of "falling" or "falling backward," echoed in "Dropping South: Brazil," where the traveler is "falling, falling, bent, intense," having lost his bearings, his textual "foothold on the map." Thus, in Notebook: "we'd charged / so far beyond our courage-altitudes, / then the falling [...] falling back on honest speech [. . .]" (Notebook 10-12).

"Mexico" began with the phrase "The difficulties, the impossibilities [. . .] ," followed by what seems the object of those terms: "I, fifty [...] you, some sweet uncertain age, say, twenty-seven [. . .]" (LH 1, 2-4). But other "difficulties" and "impossibilities" are at stake: getting the mind to clear, to focus and compose is certainly one of them. While this small "notebook" sequence traces a short period in time, it reaches back with nostalgia as well as forward with anxiety. "Mexico" provides a matrix and set of reference points within which to continue composing around the concerns that animate all Lowell's poetry of this period, irrespective of place: what the past demands of us; how we are to treat others; and what to do with life and life's "notes." The "impossibilities" and "difficulties" concern the latter-poesis-as much as anything else.

The two sonnets that form a coda to the "Mexico" sequence, together titled "Eight Months Later" (individually titled "Eight Months Later" and "Die Gold Orangen"), represent moments of retrospect and nostalgia for the poet's Mexico days and for "[t]he flower I took away" (LH1). The memory draws on the imagery of the ninth "Mexico" poem: "we burned the grass, the grass still fumes" (3) as the poet compares himself first to Lucifer, who "sank to sleep on the tumuli of Lilith" (6) and then to God. His dissatisfaction with "home"-"Midsummer Manhattan," where "everything is stacked [. . .] half Europe / in half a mile" (9-12)-leads to familiar travel sentiments.

The invocation of "Mexico" gives rise to the double question "Mexico? Where is Mexico?"-as much a questioning of the subject's own mental processes as a recognition that "Mexico" is not recoverable. The cat climbs the ladder without trepidation since it does not look back; coming down is another matter.

The ladder metaphor works in several ways. The vertigo is disorienting; the rungs look fragile, incapable of support; one doubts one's capacity to negotiate the passage. Moreover, the lost time and the lover are irretrievable. The alternate metaphor from the fifth sonnet, "The stream will not flow back to hand," shows this ongoing concern. But with the ladder figure, the element of height is crucial. What causes the fear is not that one cannot go back, since, if the road were lateral, one could try, but that the only direction is down. Again, the speaker's anxiety and enervation concern the chasm below. The way up is by climbing, the way down is by falling.