More than a pinch of salt

William Scammell

ROBERT LOWELL: COLLECTED PROSE edited and introduced by Robert Giroux

Faber, £17.50

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . . What an age of strenuous brilliance Lowell lived through and perso- nified. He had the heroic generation of American poets — Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Moore — as immediate forebears and counsellors, with Ransom, Tate, Penn Warren to help concentrate his mind; I. A. Richards, Winters, Blackmur, Brooks, Rahv, Hardwick and the whole galaxy of New Critics to teach him, if he needed teaching, the nuclear physics of numbers; Berryman, Roethke, Jarrell, Bishop, Auden, Hecht, Wilbur as friends and contemporaries; Plath, Sexton, Gins- berg, Rich and many more springing up ,behind, not to mention the novelists, essayists, short story writers, editors and gadflies who live on and around the literary circuit. If ever there was a golden age of American letters this was surely it, from the end of the ghastly Great War to the end of that other one in Vietnam. New York succeeded London and Paris as the world's most exciting city; Croesus moved to Wall Street, Augustus to Washington; culture flourished in the vortex of a super-power going critical with success. (The compari- son with Russia, which began the century with a similarly wondrous collection of artists, makes for melancholy reflection, since it was stampeded into tyrannous failure and foreclosure, trading Bely and Babel for Gorky, Mandelstam and his pleiad for the barbarous darkness of the party hack.) This useful and extremely readable com- pilation brings together reviews, essays, interviews and autobiographical pieces on the poet's family, a source of irritable inspiration — especially Mother and Father, locked in a genteel death-grip — he worried away at productively for 20 years and more. I am not sure that he ever did get to see them straight. Though '91 Revere Street', the prose memoir he in- serted into the middle of Life Studies, was much admired, I think his instinct to convert his autobiography into poems was sound, for his prose is always on the edge of aphorism and summation, impatient to get up on stilts, where a true prose writer would build by careful accumulation. This impatience is clearly visible in a series of short appraisals of great American writers called 'New England and Further', which ranges from Cotton Mather to Eliot. On Emily Dickinson: 'The ladder she climbed points to godless eternity; its rungs were carved from Scripture'. On Henry James:

Except for Eliot, none of our critics has his reckless urbanity, assurance. Two Jameses: one is Proust's tender, idealised narrator yearning for truth, kindness, eternity; the other is Baron Charlus, a whale in society, overhearing behind the scenes and conspir- ing. Oh, mountainous Henry James!

On Frost:

A lifetime ago, a morality ago, my mother warned me off the moderns, Eliot and Tate, and, as a curative, misquoted Robert Frost, thought to be understandable to everyone, even to herself, to be healthy, wise, and no nihilist to the middle class. My personal and critical love of Frost survived this recom- mendation of everything I hated.

On Santayana:

During the Second World War he said, 'I don't know what is going on in Italy, I have been living with Dickens in the eternal.' When the Blue Sisters entreated him to have an audience with the Pope, he said, 'I don't care to meet celebrities.'

On Eliot:

The Waste Land is sex gone haywire — trembling incapacities, disgust, and the brute compulsion to seduction. The women are stronger than the men, women one can touch and smell, flirting, hard to get, , . . He wrote little more than Housman, yet every- thing he wrote seems longer than it is. . . . Eliot was abused as no other man, either American or British.

These are all charming, vivacious sketches, but a bit hit-and-miss, like a draughtsman tearing off profiles after dinner.

Like Philip Larkin, Lowell was only an occasional reviewer, but a perceptive and generous one, who mixes anecdote with analysis in engaging proportions. By the standards of his competitive milieu, there is hardly an unkind word in the book — which contrasts with the later Auden, who, according to one of Brodsky's essays in Less Than One, said of Lowell 'I don't like men who leave behind them a smoking trail of weeping women.' A case of the pot calling the kettle black, perhaps, com- pounded by rivalry of a sort that is notably absent from this collection (though not, it may be, from Lowell's own conversation). As one would expect, he also has wise things to say about his craft:

In the working out of a poem, I look for two things: a commanding, deadly effectiveness in the arrangement, and something that breathes and pauses and grunts and is rough and unpredictable to assure me that the journey is honest.

And: 'Almost the whole problem of writ- ing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel, and that takes an awful lot of manoeuvering.' Of his two great critical friends he says: I can see and hear Ransom and Jarrell now,

seated on one sofa, as though on one love seat, the sacred texts open on their laps, one fifty, the other just out of college, and each expounding to the other's deaf ears his own inspired and irreconcilable interpretation. That rapid, loving, definitive sentence is typical of Lowell at his best, bringing it all back home, as Dylan would say. Dylan doesn't escape him either: 'Bob Dylan is alloy; he is true folk and fake folk, and has a Caruso voice.'

Two of the most interesting finds are an unfinished piece called 'Art and Evil', from the mid-Fifties, and an essay on his own 'manic seizure' or 'pathological enthu- siasm' from the same period. He describes his mania as 'swaddling clothes. . . a sort of immense bandage of grace and amber- gris for my hurt nerves'; and once lamented to his friend and editor Robert Giroux the tardy discovery of a new drug, lithium carbonate. 'It's terrible, Bob, to think that all I've suffered, and all the suffering I've caused, might have arisen from the lack of a little salt in my brain.' This reminds me, in a roundabout way, of Eliot's senior-citizen reduction of The Waste Land to 'a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life . . . a piece of rhythmical grumbling.' In neither case does the formula fit or explain the antecedetit phenomenon. Lowell func- tioned, and malfunctioned, on a great deal more than wonky chemistry.

One item the editor has overlooked, or excluded, is the BBC interview with A.

Alvarez, reprinted in Chapter Seven of Under Pressure (Penguin 1965), which is highly relevant to the 'Waking Early Sun- day Morning' period. Lowell says there: I always think there are two great symbolic figures that stand behind American ambition and idealism and culture. One is Milton's Lucifer and the other is Captain Ahab. These two sublime ambitions that are doomed. . . . What one finds wrong with American culture is the monotony of the sublime.

And: Art is always done with both your hands in America. The artist finds new life in it and almost sheds his other life.'