Fear of Flying: Robert Lowell and Travel

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

"Die Gold Orangen"-the title alluding to Mignon's song Kennst du das Land in Goethe, (or to "Delfica," Nerval's imitation of it)-coheres through its entire fourteen lines by means of landscape description and the conventional reflection that everything described is past-"I see it; it's behind us, love, behind us-" (4). The sentiments are familiar and rhetorical: "What have I done with us, and what was done?" (9). But the poem is overtaken in its last five lines by yet another metaphor of height, of dropping, echoing the volcano and altitude sickness of "Mexico":

And the mountain, El Volcan, a climber of clouds?

The mule-man lost his footing in the cloud,

seed of the dragon coupled in that cave ....

The cliff drops; over it, the water drops,

and steams out the footprints that led us on. (10-14)

I have made much of "dropping" and "falling" in the travel poems of For the Union Dead and For Lizzie and Harnet. "Mexico" describes a vertiginous "cleavage dropping miles to the valley's body," and here, at the end of "Eight Months Later," "the cliff drops; over it, the water drops." Just as the speaker fears he has "lost [his] foothold on the map" in "Dropping South: Brazil," so here the mule-man has "lost his footing in the cloud." If a map is a tenuous place to gain a foothold, a cloud is even more so. Despite William Carlos Williams's "The Descent," the descent beckons only in the most terrifying way: as the cat cannot get down the ladder but stops, paralyzed, at the top, so here, tropical waterfalls have "steam [ed] out the footprints that led us on," preventing us from returning. It is not only one of several of Lowell's metaphors for the impossibility of turning around on a path-the theme of transience and unrecoverability that runs through the "Mexico" sequence; it is also one of the proliferating figures of height and dizziness, of the vulnerability of this queasy, disoriented traveler.

TURBULENCE: THE EAST-WEST Axis

Air travel is the norm in Lowell's poems as it has been in those of Derek Walcott, whom Lowell stopped to visit in Trinidad on the first South American trip. For Walcott, however, the plane is a metaphor not so much of psychic turbulence and insecurity as of privilege, a detached perspective, and the guilt associated with both. In both poets, "flight"-as in Walcott's "The Schooner Flight" or Lowell's "Flight to New York"-means running away as much as it means travel. Walcott, often viewing his islands from the plane window, uses these perspectives as opportunities to meditate on identity. Lowell selects an aisle seat. His travel poems, as we have already seen, do not concern places so much as they do inner conflicts, played out in historical or literary terms. The experience of travel, while it sensitizes, also enervates and disturbs.

Travelers often fall ill because the depletion caused by travel occurs below the threshold of consciousness. Certainly, Lowell's frequent travels by air toward the end of his life were ill-advised. Consider the movements of his last three years: he flew back to Boston from Mexico in 1974; two months later he flew to Spoleto, Italy, for the arts festival, back to Boston to teach, and then, following a collapse in 1975, to London for hospitalization. He returned to New York in 1976 for an opening of The Old Glory, flew to Boston again, after another severe attack, to stay with his third wife Caroline Blackwood, and then flew to England for Christmas and to work on the Eumenides. In January 1977 he returned to Boston, where, staying with Frank Bidart, he woke in the night with congestive heart failure and was rushed to the hospital. Later that month he flew to Dublin, returning to Cambridge after only ten days to give a reading at Harvard and then to Knoxville for a reading at the University of Tennessee. InJuIy, he and Elizabeth Hardwick flew to Moscow as part of the U. S. delegation to the Union of Soviet Writers. Next he flew back to Dublin to see Caroline and their son Sheridan, though his friend Blair Clark told him his going would be a "fatal mistake"; finally, after a frightening night locked up in the mansion at Castletown, Caroline having left, despondent, for London, he managed the trip to the London airport to catch his last plane to New York. In the taxi from Kennedy airport to West 67tn Street, he died of heart failure.