Cultural Cohesion (5 page)

3

ROBERT LOWELL'S
MARBLE CHIPS

Of the three new books by Robert Lowell—all of them consisting, like their antecedent
Notebook
, of unrhymed sonnets—only
The Dolphin
contains entirely fresh material. It is dedicated to Lowell's new consort Caroline, and deals with the life they are now leading together.
For Lizzie and Harriet
deals exclusively with the life Lowell has left behind: it isolates and reworks those poems concerning his ex-wife and daughter which were earlier scattered through
Notebook
. The central and bulkiest volume of the current three,
History
, is an extensive reworking and thoroughgoing reordering of all the remaining poems in
Notebook
, with eighty extra ones mixed in.

When we consider that
Notebook
itself had two earlier versions before being published in Britain, it is clear that there is a great deal going on. If mere bustle were creativity, then later Lowell would be the most creative thing in modern poetry. Daunted, the critic is tempted to hand the whole problem directly to the scholar and get the work of collating done before any judgements are hazarded. Unfortunately judgement will not wait—not least because these recent works offer an invitation to scholarship to start up a whole new branch of its industry, an invitation which will be all too eagerly accepted if criticism neglects to mark out the proper, and reasonably discreet, size of the job. Lowell is a giant, but his perimeter is still visible: there is no need to think that he fills the sky.

In so far as it had one,
Notebook
's structure was rhapsodic—an adjective which, in its technical sense, we associate with the Homeric epic. As the poet stumbled in circles of crisis and collapse, digressions could occur in any direction, sub-sequences of the proliferating sonnets form around any theme. These sequences constituted rhapsodies, and it was easy to sense that the rhapsodies were intent on forming themselves into an epic. At that stage, the Lowell epic resembled John Berryman's
Dream Songs
: its digressions had shape, but there was no clear line of progress initiating them—no simple story for which they could serve as complications. The story was mixed in with them. All of human history was there, and Lowell's personal history was there too. Both kinds of history jumped about all over the place.

The new books have simplified everything, while simultaneously making a clalm to universality that takes the reader's breath away. “My old title,
Notebook
, was more accurate than I wished, i.e., my composition was jumbled,” writes the poet in a foreword. “I hope this jumble or jungle is cleared—that I have cut the waste marble from the figure.” Cutting away the marble until the figure is revealed is an idea that reminds us—and is probably meant to remind us—of Michelangelo. As we realize that not even these new books need bring the matter to an end, the idea that the figure need never fully emerge from the marble also reminds us of Michelangelo. Lowell seems intent on having us believe that he is embarked on a creative task which absolves his talent from wasting too much time polishing its own products. He does a lot to make this intention respectable, and we soon see, when reading
History
, that although thousands of details have been altered since
Notebook
, the changes that really matter are in the grand structure. It is at this point that we temporarily cease thinking of marble and start thinking about, say, iron filings.
Notebook
was a random scattering of them. In
History
a magnet has been moved below, and suddenly everything has been shaken into a startling linear shape.

As rearranged and augmented in
History
, the sonnets begin at the dawn of creation and run chronologically all the way to recent events in the life of the poet. We have often thought, with Lowell, that history was being incorporated into the self. Here is the thing proved, and the pretension would be insupportable if it were not carried out with such resource. The information which Lowell commands about all cultures in all ages found a ragged outlet in
Notebook
. Deployed along a simple line of time, it gains in impressiveness—gains just enough to offset the realization that it is Lowell's propensity for reading his own problems into anything at all which makes him so ranging a time traveller.
History
is the story of the world made intelligible in terms of one man's psychology. It is a neurotic work by definition. Nobody reasonable would ever think of starting it, and the moment Lowell begins to be reasonable is the moment he will stop. There is no good cause to assume, however, that Lowell any longer thinks it possible to be reasonable about history. Stephen Dedalus said history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. Raising the stakes, Lowell seems to believe that history is something you cannot appreciate without losing your sanity. This belief releases him into realms of artistic effect where reason would find it hard to go. That the same belief might bring inhibition, as well as release, is a separate issue.

Broadly,
History
's progression is first of all from Genesis through the Holy Land to the Mediterranean, ancient Greece and Rome, with diversions to Egypt at the appropriate moments. Medieval Europe then gives way to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, tipping over into the French Revolution. Through the complexities of the nineteenth century, strict chronological sequence is manfully adhered to, whether in painting, letters, music or ante- and post-bellum American politics. French symbolism sets the scene for the twentieth-century arts, while the First World War sets the tone for the modern politics of crisis and annihilation. The Russian Revolution throws forward its divisive shadow, which later on will split the New York intelligentsia. By this time Lowell's family history is active in all departments, and soon the poet himself arrives on stage. Everything that has happened since the dawn of humanity has tended to sound like something happening to Lowell. From here on this personal tone becomes intense, and those named—especially if they are artists—are mainly people the poet knows. By now, unquestionably, he is at the centre of events. But the book has already convinced us that all events, even the vast proportion of them that happened before he arrived in the world, are at the centre of him.

History
is a long haul through places, things and, preeminently, names. Helen, Achilles, Cassandra, Orestes, Clytemnestra, Alexander, Hannibal, Horace, Juvenal, Dante, Villon, Anne Boleyn, Cranach, Charles V, Marlowe, Mary Stuart, Rembrandt, Milton, Pepys, Bishop Berkeley, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, Beethoven, Goethe, Leo­pardi, Schubert, Heine, Thoreau, Henry Adams, George Eliot, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Lady Cynthia Asquith, Rilke, George Grosz, Hardy, Al Capone, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Tate, Randall Jarrell, John Crowe Ransom, F. O. Mattheissen, Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, MacNeice, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Stalin, Harpo Marx, Che Guevara, Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, Adrienne Rich, Mary McCarthy, Eugene McCarthy, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, De Gaulle, Lévi-Strauss, R. P. Blackmur, Stanley Kunitz, Elizabeth Bishop, I. A. Richards, John Berryman, Robert Lowell and many more: a cast of thousands. The range they cover, and the pertinent information Lowell is able to adduce when treating each one—these things are little short of astonishing. But they were already startling in
Notebook
. What makes these qualities doubly impressive now is the new effect of faces succeeding faces in due order. Leaving, of course, a thousand gaps—gaps which the poet seems understandably keen to set about filling.

Lizzle and Harriet's retributive presence in
Notebook
has been eliminated from
History
and given a book of its own.
The Dolphin
likewise enshrines a portion of Lowell's experience which is plainly not going to be allowed to overbalance the future of
History
. It is possible to suggest, given the dispersal of foci represented by these three volumes, that Lowell's “confessional” poetry is no longer his main thing. The
History
book now embodies his chief effort, and in relation to this effort the ordinary people inhabiting his life don't make the weight.
History
is full of public names, rather than private ones: public names united not so much by prestige as in their undoubted puissance in shaping, exemplifying or glorifying historic moments. In
History
Lowell, alone, joins the great.

And the number of the great grows all the time. Instructive, in this respect, to take a close look at the
History
poem called “Cleopatra Topless,” one of a short sequence of poems concerning her. Where have we seen it before? Was it in
Notebook
? But in
Notebook
it is untraceable in the list of contents. Where was it, then? The answer is that the poem is in
Notebook
but is called simply “Topless” and has nothing to do with Cleopatra. In the
Notebook
poem she's just a girl in a nightclub:

To convert her into Cleopatra, it is only necessary to get rid of the inappropriate Renoir and Titian, filling the space with a line or so about what men desire. Throughout
History
the reader is continually faced with material which has apparently been dragged in to fill a specific chronological spot. Nor does this material necessarily have its starting point in
Notebook
: the fact that it appears in that volume, if it does appear, doesn't preclude its having begun its life in an earlier, and often far earlier, Lowell collection. For example, a version of Valéry's “Hélène” is in
Imitations
, with the inspiration for it credited to Valéry. By the time it arrives in
History
, it is credited to no one but Lowell. It is true that the drive of the verse has been weakened with over-explanatory adjectives:

But this is incidental. As we can see abundantly in other places, Lowell's minor adjustments are just as likely to impart point as detract from it. Fundamentally important, however, is the way the imitation has been saddled with extraneous properties (Agamemnon, Ulysses) in order to bolster it for the significance it is being asked to provide in its new slot. Though making regular appearances in the early sections of
History
, Agamemnon and Ulysses are nowhere mentioned in Valéry's poem. But then, the poem is no longer Valéry's: in
History
the source is uncredited.

Trusting to the itch of memory and ransacking the library shelves in order to scratch it, the reader soon learns that Lowell has been cannibalizing his earlier works of translation and imitation—cutting them up into fourteen-line lengths and introducing them with small ceremony first of all into
Notebook
and later, on the grand scale, into
History
. Usually the provenance of the newly installed sonnet is left unmentioned. There are exceptions to this: the “Le Cygne” of
Notebook
, which the gullible might have attributed to Lowell, has a better chance of being traceable to its origins now that it is called “Mallarmé I. Swan.” It is in fact the second of the “Plusieurs Sonnets” in
Poésies
and is called—after its first line—“Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui.” In
Notebook
Lowell had “blind” for
vivace
, an inscrutable boldness which in
History
has been softened to “alive.” Other improvements in the new version are less welcome: “the horror of the ice that ties his wings” is a reversal of Mallarmé's sense, which in the
Notebook
version had been got right. Mallarmé is saying that the swan
accepts
the ice. Here Lowell seems to have been improving his first version without reference to the original. On the other hand, he has now substituted “wings” for “feet” and thereby humbly returned much closer to
plumage
. The key phrase,
l'exil inutile
, which is ringingly present in the
Notebook
version, is now strangely absent. Anyone who attempts to trace poems back through
Notebook
to their sources in foreign literatures is fated to be involved in these niggling questions at all times. But at least, with such a clear signpost of a title, there is a hint that this particular poem
has
such a history. In many cases even this tenuous condition does not obtain.

When a bright young American scholar produces a properly indexed Variorum Lowell—preferably with a full concordance—it will be easier to speak with confidence about what appears in
History
that is not in
Notebook
. A good few poems appear in both with different titles, and it is difficult for even the keenest student to hold the entire mass of material clearly in his mind. But if
History
's “Baudelaire 1. The Abyss” is not in
Notebook
, it was in
Imitations
, where it was billed as a version of “Le Gouffre.” There, it reduced Baudelaire's fourteen lines to thirteen. Now it is back to being a sonnet again, and the
Etres
are now rendered as “being” instead of “form,” which one takes to be a net gain. One is less sure that the poem's provenance would be so recognizable if it were not for the memory of the
Imitations
version. The question keeps on cropping up—are we supposed to know that such material started out in another poet's mind, or are we supposed to accept it as somehow being all Lowell's? Is it perhaps that Lowell is putting himself forward as the representative of all past poets? It should be understood that one is not questioning Lowell's right to employ allusion, or to embody within his own work a unity of culture which he feels to be otherwise lost. The ethics are not the problem; the aesthetics are. Because none of these poems carries the same weight, when presented as ordinary Lowell, as it does when its history is clearly seen to be still surrounding it.