4.
From Life Studies to Day by Day:
Robert Lowell's Rendezvous with Memory
as an “Imaginative Reconstruction”
Shanjida Khatun Boksh*
Shahed Ahmed**
Abstract: Memory steers Robert Lowell's obsessive nature of selfinterpretation—a Freudian therapeutic project—that governed most of his
oeuvre. But rather than the therapeutic, a project of psychotherapy taken upon
doctor's advice, Lowell's artistic purpose dominates most of his compositions of
returns and reconstructions. Lowell introduced his Selected Poems by admitting
that there are important differences between the poetic identity and the poet's
personal identity: “My verse autobiography sometimes fictionalizes plot and
particular” (vii). Memory here is a shaping power of the poet's artistic
imagination incessantly reconstructed in the present. This imaginative
reconstruction of memory, a recent appraisal, deviates from traditional selfanalysis and assists to form an artistic poetic identity that guides his work to a
coherent whole. This paper examines how the reconstructive process of memory is
worked out through Life Studies (1959) to Day by Day (1977), the two ground
breaking poetic works that watermarked the most creative part of Lowell's career,
and explores how it helps create “an aesthetic effect.”
Keywords: Memory, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography, Poetic Identity.
The art of recall is not so much defended as its accuser is challenged to find
anything wrong with it. At a public reading of the “Epilogue”, Lowell once talked
of the troubled distinction between memory and imagination: “I'm not sure of that
distinction. But obviously a poem has to be more than just memory. Yet memory
we're told is the mother of the muses—memory is genius, really … but you have to
do something with it” (A Reading: Robert Lowell). This seems to indicate that
Lowell's lifelong interest is in transforming memories into art. Jeffrey Gray
assures the integrity of art while writing autobiographical poems in “Memory and
Imagination in Day by Day” saying that the “poet and reader realize that memory
never did exist apart from imagination, and that paralysis of art by fact was a fear,
never a reality” (Axelrod 232). Lowell, in his Paris Review interview with
Frederick Seidel, makes it clear when he says that “the illusion of 'reality' in a
'confessional' poem is an aesthetic effect.” The power aimed at in these poems is
“the result not of accuracy but the illusion of accuracy, the result of arrangement
and invention” (Bidart 997). Lowell explains the fictional attributes of his poems
saying,
The poems in Life Studies are not always factually true. There's a
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good deal of tinkering with fact. You leave out a lot, and
emphasize this and not that. Your actual experience is a complete
flux. I've invented facts and changed things, and the whole
balance of the poem was something invented. So there's a lot of
artistry, I hope, in the poems. Yet there's this thing: if a poem is
autobiographical—and this is true of any kind of
autobiographical writing and historical writing—you want the
reader to say, this is true. In something like Macaulay's History of
England, you think you're really getting William III. That's as
good as a good plot in a novel. And so there was always
that standard of truth which you wouldn't ordinarily have in
poetry—the reader was to believe he was getting the real Robert
Lowell. (Collected Prose 246)
What fascinates in these sentences is the forthrightness with which
Lowell treats the sensation that the autobiographical or historical writer aims at,
“this is true” as “an aesthetic effect”—as possessing power because the writing
gives the reader the illusion that it is true. Lowell's observation creates the problem
in expression through which the original materials are transformed into work of
art. It demonstrates his newly flourished literary principle at work. He employs the
recent notion of the autobiographical act as a process of fiction making, the
conviction that the materials of the past are formed by memory to supply the
demands of the present consciousness.
Recent autobiographers, however, no longer acknowledge Rousseau's
conception of autobiographical fact as an unmediated reconstruction of a
comprehensible past: “I have resolved to an enterprise which has no precedent,
and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my
kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be
myself” (17). Fictions are occupied in the autobiographical work, and the self is
essentially a fictive construction in a process of self-creation. Recent views on
memory also seem to refute St. Augustine's concept of memory as a repository in
which all experiences can be stored, altered, and enriched by the process of
remembering.
And I come to the fields and spacious palaces of memory, where lie the
treasure of innumerable images of all kinds of things that have been brought in by
the senses. There too are our thoughts stored up … and there too is everything else
that has been brought in and deposited and has not yet been swallowed up and
buried in forgetfulness. When I am in this treasure house, I ask for whatever I like
to be brought out to me, and then some things are produced at once, some things
take longer and have, as it were, to be fetched from a more remote part of the store.
(10.8) Augustine continues to elaborate on his definition of memory when he
contemplates over time in Book 11:
It is now, however, perfectly clear that neither the future nor the past
are in existence, and that it is incorrect to say that there are three
times—past, present, and future. Though one might perhaps say:
There are three times—a present of things past, a present of things
present, and a present of things future. (11.20)
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According to Augustine, the present time of things past is memory; the present
time of things present is sight; the present time of things future is expectation.
When Lowell recalls the portrait of Mordecai Myers in “91 Revere Street,” his
thought of memory seems to resemble Augustine's notion in that he highlights the
“rocklike” permanence of memory which endures “all the distortions of fantasy,
all the blank befogging of forgetfulness.”
Major Mordecai Myers' portrait has been mislaid past finding, but
out of my memories I often come on it in the setting of our Revere
Street house, a setting now fixed in the mind, where it survives all the
distortions of fantasy, all the blank befogging of forgetfulness.
There, the vast number of remembered things remains rocklike. Each
is in its place; each has its function, its history, its drama. There, all is
preserved by that motherly care that one either ignored or resented in
his youth. The things and their owners come back urgent with life and
meaning—because finished, they are endurable and perfect. (Life
Studies 12-13)
Allan Johnston explicates the “rocklike” stability of memory in Life Studies as the
way of mythologizing Lowell's experience of the familial and the private. “This
mythologizing”, he says, “requires an objectification of experience through
setting off from the events that constitute self, thereby making them 'rocklike',
'urgent with life and meaning', and 'endurable and perfect'” (74). Affirming that the
process cancels the “flux of experience”, he points out Lowell's different uses of
memory, between Life Studies and his subsequent work. He continues to describe
Life Studies as “presenting 'solid' or 'fixed' account of the past”, and contrasts his
observation in Day by Day, “[b]y the time of the poems in Day by Day, the past
changes more than the present” (73).
Recent demonstrations of memory, however, tend to refute the
Augustinian concept of permanent memory. Daniel L. Schacter explains the idea
that “our memories are always constructed” while construing that we compose our
autobiographies from pieces of experiences, prearranged in anagrams, which alter
by the passage of time (Schacter 93). F. C. Bartlett also opposes Augustine's
thought of “memory traces” preserved mechanically in the mind and recreated at
will. He considers memory as “an imaginative reconstruction, or construction,
built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized
past reactions or experience” where the mind may remember and reconstruct what
ought to have been in the past rather than what really was (Bartlett 213). It occurs,
as Bartlett explains, due to the subject's organisational scheme which depends
largely on the amalgamation of present experience with that of the past.As a result,
the rememberer's mind time and again recalls what he desired to conceive rather
than what he really conceived.
Robert Lowell knew well his “bondages to the past,” and he appreciated
and acknowledged the importance of memory—the process of remembering—in
his own life. He uses the past most frequently in his poems as a means of
understanding the present. Marjorie Perloff reflects her views on Life Studies
saying that “the typical lyric begins in a moment of crisis in the present, moves
backward into a closely related past, and then returns to the present with renewed
insight;” and what is true of Life Studies is true of Lowell's whole career (106).
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Lowell acknowledged that the past cannot be pinned down, as identified by
Bartlett, that “personal history always changes, an experience of the past acquires
new contextual experience with the advance of personal history. A present
experience reveals something about the past that was hitherto unknown” (Leavy
117). Lowell's preoccupation with memory places him with William Wordsworth
who had taken the same predilection to explore the individual past with the
intention of better understanding of the present. Richard J. Onorato, writing on
Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey” at the beginning of his discussion of The Prelude,
in an assertion that is applicable to the long work, suggests that “this tendency to
move away from the present moment towards feelings and thoughts that are
deeper and prior to it can also be seen as expressive of strong and unrealized
preconscious wishes that bear upon the present occasion while remaining apart
from and at variance with Wordsworth's apparent conscious intentions” (45). Of
course, unlike Lowell, Wordsworth predates Freud by a hundred years and hence
writes with no conscious awareness of the existence of the unconscious.
However, a poet who traces back or rolls back his life along the road of
its development must necessarily be writing autobiography, and indeed, Lowell
himself described his Selected Poems as “autobiography … a small-scale
Prelude,” with the caution that the poems do not tell a story of “the growth of a
poet's mind” (“After Enjoying” 113). Roy Pascal, in Design and Truth in
Autobiography, confirms the therapeutic nature of that elusive genre when he
describes it as “an interplay, a collusion, between past and present; its significance
is indeed more the revelation of present situation than the uncovering of the past”
(11). The agent of this “uncovering of the past” is, of course, memory, and James
Olney describes its function:
It is through the operation of memory, which draws all the significant
past up into the focus of the present, that the auto biographer and the
poet succeed in ununiversalizing their experience and their meaning.
Each of them discovers, in fact, by looking through the glass of
memory, a meaning in his experience which was not there before and
which exists now only as a present creation. (263)
A psychoanalyst would approve Olney's formulation; in
psychoanalysis, it is precisely “by looking through the glass of memory” that one
is enabled to find “a meaning in his experience which was not there before.” Philip
Rieff paraphrases Freud's definition of psychological illness as “the failure to
become emancipated from one's past” (49), and only through memory can we
connect what Otto Fenichel calls the “disturbing residues of the past” to our
present feelings and reactions (28). Rieff pinpoints the “peculiar and central
place” of memory in psychoanalysis: “It is constraining, since by remembering
our bondages to the past we appreciate their enormity; but it is also, Freud
believed, liberating, since by remembering we understand the terrors and
pleasures of the past and move towards mastering them” (Rieff 334).
After his mother's death in 1954, Lowell's doctors suggested as a
therapeutic measure that he write down what he could remember of his childhood;
so Lowell began writing a series of prose reminiscences which would eventually
become the basis for Life Studies. Of course Lowell is not the first poet to seek
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relief from “hurt nerves” through his art, and philosophers, psychoanalysts, and
literary critics have joined in explaining how, in Ernst Kris's words, “[a]esthetic
creation … may be looked on as a type of problem solving behaviour” (251).
Meredith Skura elaborates:[A] nalysts still start with a theory about fiction based
on one particular view of human existence—Freud's view that man must cope with
wishes (and fears) in a world that denies them relief…. Every fiction we make … is
a more nourishing substitute for reality, an alternative world in which we work out
our quarrel with the “reality principle.” (62)
Writing to Peter Taylor, whose autobiographical story “1939” had just
been published, Lowell revealed how complicated was the mix of psychotherapy
and artistic ambition.I have been trying to do the same sort of thing myself with
scenes from my childhood with my grandfather, old Aunt Sarah, Cousin Belle, etc.
I want to invent and forget a lot but at the same time have the historian's wonderful
advantage—the reader must always be forced to say “This is tops, but even if it
weren't, it's true.” (Hamilton 222) The offhand admission “to invent and forget”
suggests the exploring and reconstructing process of the distorting properties of
Lowell's memory that continuously gives his poems new meanings in the present.
Indeed, Lowell's poetic material is less a return to the past to remember
what happened in search of time lost or to a familiar location to restore the person
the subject had been when there previously, than a discursive and symbolic
narrative of now created as the speaking “I” revises conscious and unconscious
matter in his present perspective. So the metaphorical act of returning becomes
essentially a transformative re-visioning that seeks to redefine the poet's
contemporary relationships to deceased relatives, old loves, old haunts and old
friends and to his preceding poetry and earlier poetic identities. Recalling and
imagining are both voluntary and involuntary, conjoint creative activities which
support the poet's representation, or making out to be, of that past to fit into the
narrative, or “plot.” Plot and plotting are general terms the mature Lowell uses
frequently to cover his reformulations of the meaning of his poetic life, and to
signal his constructions in the present moment of writing which justifies the poet
he wants to be today. There is vivid power and precise realistic detail in all
Lowell's poetic remembering which helps to create his rhetoric of perfect recall,
but in his poetic practice he never separates transformation through present insight
from the repetition through memory of a partial past as it might have been. So it
can confidently be read “I want to make/ something imagined, not recalled”—the
alternative ways of making poems that “Epilogue” (Day by Day 127) presents as
an antithesis—as memorable poetic phrasing, rather than the firm basis of new
artistic principles. We can turn, instead, to the engaging late epigram, “from year
to year things remembered from the past change more than the present”, to
summarise the way the poetry mingles the imagined with the remembered, as the
poet exercises his prerogative to create and revise meanings in mythic tales of
himself (“After Enjoying” 113). He may distrust the memory for its inaccuracies,
but the point is not so much that his “true” and “real” past has disappeared, but that
his past exists in muddled form. It has been assimilated in an imagination that
inevitably transforms it in the present and briefly transfixes it there when he
writes.
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“Phillips House Revisited”, in the second of the three sections of the
consolatory third part “Day by Day” of Day by Day, is a searching illustration of
the similarities and differences between recollection and repetition and the
multiply shifting nature of living which many poems, and versions of the same
poem, articulate—past with present, still points within a turning world, “actual
fact” with revision of “fact”, what is reported and what is imagined, returning, and
moving forward. The first half of the thirty-two line poem reconnects the speaker
to one of his familial points of origin through a physical return to a private,
expensive, elite division of the Massachusetts General Hospital where he joins
again his dead grandfather after vast silence created by the gap of time.
A weak clamor like ice giving…
Something sinister and comforting
in this return after forty years' arrears
to death and Phillips House…
this irreverent absence of pain,
less than the ordinary that daily irks—
except I cannot entirely get my breath,
as if I were muffled in snow,
our winter's inverted gray sky
of frozen slush,
its usual luminous lack of warmth.
This room was brighter then
when grandfather filled it,
brilliant for his occasion
with his tallness, reddish tan and pain. (Day by Day 87)
Recollection sustains but does not falsify (“sinister and comforting”).
Superimposed upon the ceaseless linearity of time (“after forty years' arrears”,
“daily irks”), there is form, emphatic pattern, and linguistic circularity (“this
return”, “this room”, “absence of pain … tan and pain”) through which the lines
bind the present to the past after the time gap of the second paragraph break (“then/
when”), conferring a created shape while acknowledging that change cannot be
controlled (“I cannot entirely,” winter's “usual luminous lack of warmth”). Time
has passed and things have changed for a speaker who asserts continuity in the face
of loss and difference; his congestive heart condition does not entirely stop him
speaking (“I cannot entirely get my breath”), as it links him once again, in his
body's frailty and acute reminder of mutability, to the larger-than-life memory of
his forbear in the room (“then/ when grandfather filled it”), yet they remain
individuals with different values, the living “muffled,” the dead “brilliant.”
The imaginary reunion with the dying Grandfather Arthur Winslow also
enables the adult and dying “I” to re-establish contact with a youthful and
generative self as he brings four separate consciousness into the poem; past
patriarch and present patriarch, past “I” and present “I” are simultaneously
intertwined and independent when, five lines on from the citation, the speaker
reminds himself that the relative “could still magnetize the adolescent. I too am
passed my half-bottle ….” The importance of the connection between the fact of
the physical return and the creative act of revisiting “adolescent” memories and
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images of the grandfather becomes clear in the peaceful accord of the poem's
tender conclusion.
He needed more to live than I,
his foot could catch hold anywhere
and dynamite his way to the gold again—
for the world is generous to the opportune,
its constantly self-renewing teams of favourites.
(Day by Day 88)
What is presented as a factual return inspires a creative act of becoming in the
imagination, a self-transformative and affirmative return to his own past writing.
Lowell is prepared now, after thirty four years, to grant in verse his grandfather's
magnetism, admiring his passionate exploitation of the phenomenal world and
energetic pioneering spirit, as the poet claims his present view as a “selfrenewing” act. It may be assumed, the last two lines embrace the “I” since the
apparent self-deprecatory sense of the last verse paragraph is dissipated in
ambiguous syntax characteristic of Lowell, which leaves room for both “He” and
“I” to be the collective antecedent of “the opportune.”
“Phillips House Revisited” imaginatively revisits not only the building
but also his earliest, callous seeming, four elegiac-sequence poem to his
grandfather, “In Memory of Arthur Winslow”. That set's opening poem “Death
from Cancer,” a variant of which was initially published in 1943 (Sewanee Review
392), has this as the first of two clamorous stanzas that berates the dying and
bedridden relative.
This Easter, Arthur Winslow, less than dead,
Your people set you up in Phillip's House
To settle off your wrestling with the crab—
The claws drop flesh upon your yachting blouse
Until longshoreman Charon come and stab
Through your adjusted bed
And crush the crab. On Boston basin, shells
Hit water by the Union Boat Club wharf:
You ponder why the coxes' squeakings dwarf
The resurrexit dominus of all the bells.
(Lord Weary's Castle 19)
The patient is harassed and condemned for his spiritual poverty as he struggles
against relatives and cancer. The conflation of meanings into “crab” and “shells”
risks desecration of the grandfather in linguistic self-congratulation. There is skill
in connecting: incurable disease, astrological sign, oarsman's blunder, the patient's
emaciated hands and crab claws, carnivorous crustacean picking at live flesh, crab
shells, the mythic ferry for dead souls across the infernal Acheron, and
recreational crew boats on the River Charles. But the dexterity values mental and
verbal agility above human feeling. The congested literary allusions—for
instance, to Eliot's Prufrock (“I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling
across the floors of silent seas”), Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton—swamp sympathy
for the invalid and relegate him to a subject of lesser importance. He is abject and
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beneath mourning (“less than dead”) while the stanza piles onto his fatal
carcinoma the visual and aural pain of “coxes' squeakings” (a collocation which
looks and sounds agonizingly discomforted with itself), the ugliness in the mouth
of the wharf/ dwarf rhyme, and a dead language which the poem's undertaker's
voice is hard put to resurrect.
Yet instead of disowning what is at best, being charitable, baroquely
elaborate apprentice work by a poet magnetized by the sound of his own lenient
voice, Lowell gives intrusive eminence in the later poem to the literary fact that he
has revisited a much earlier poem and rewritten it (rather than create an entirely
new work), since he repeats the line end placing of “Phillips House” and “crab”
that create soft linguistic echoes within the structural similarity (of location and
subject) which links one poem to the other. We might feel that an implicit and
oblique connection is being made in the present between the fiercely committed
young man's verbal pyrotechnics and the brilliant grandfather of present
perception who could dynamite his way to the gold again. Furthermore, as Lowell
wrote “Phillips House Revisited” he chose to include “Death From Cancer” in
Selected Poems. It is impossible to say which, if either, of the two poems is closer
to the feelings Lowell experienced about Winslow around the time of his death in
1938.
This leaves a broad platform to satisfy the quandary of the readers
whether the later work imposes new attitudes on old ones through the imaginative
reconstruction of memory or attempts to ensure a more precise and powerful
realization of what was originally felt. The conflicting characterizations of Arthur
Winslow, however, can live together in a plausible poetic relationship with each
other on the commonsense assumption that distance has lent enchantment in 1977
to the 1943 view and courteously rebukes the earlier, harsher opinion. Lowell feels
it would be wrong to misrepresent the immature poet he once was by replacing
some of his earliest works just because he no longer agrees with the view of the
past it offers. His impulse to return and revise when completed in the spirit here
proclaims unity of identity with a young poetic self, even as it acknowledges and
emphasizes differences from the present mind which creates.
The older poet, moreover, admits that time has passed and people have
changed as he uses memories of loss to articulate what was incoherent when he
wrote the earlier poem. Lowell's revision respects original attitudes even as it
serves the new ones in poetry free from earlier animosities. In 1928, Eliot spoke
out for “the borrowing of writers from themselves,” a form of creativity he long
held in high regard, as did William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats.
To our mind, the most important point that Mr. Allen makes is the
borrowing of writers from themselves. The debt of every poet to his
predecessors and contemporaries is a scent eagerly sniffed and
followed by every critic; but the debts of poets to their own earlier
work are apt to be overlooked. Yet any intelligent psychologist
ought to see at once that any poet, even the greatest, will tend to use
his own impressions over and over again. It is by no means a matter
of poverty of imagination. (“Poets' Borrowing” Times Literary
Supplement)
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Eliot's dictum finds its expression through Lowell's friend, Stanley Kunitz, who
once said that Lowell was “a revisionist by nature … forever tinkering with his old
lives, rewriting his own poems, revamping his syntax and periodically reordering
his existence” (Kunitz 34). For Lowell, the poet's identity relies on his ability to
tell and shape, in the “complete flux” of his “actual experience,” a coherent story
that is both intelligible and acceptable as “truth” (“a good plot”, “the real Robert
Lowell”) since his readers expect that (Collected Prose 246). It is not “poverty of
imagination” but the power of imagination that envisions that experience and
keeps open to flux, and maintains an unrelenting grasp on the realities of
communicating with others.
Lowell employs this principle of unity between his earliest and latest
selves to other selves in between. Different acts of revision at different levels of
composition in other poems in “Part Three II” of Day by Day invite readers to
return to “Part Two” and “Part Four I” of Life Studies, as the poet takes a second
look at his biggest critical and popular success, to test his powers and to confirm
the integrity, reach, depth and continuity of the authorial self. “Grass Fires”, for
example, placed immediately before “Phillips House Revisited”, rekindles
memories celebrated in Life Studies of the worlds shared between the child Lowell
and the fit and active Winslow, as well as the present Lowell and his ancestry, and
the poet in his forties and in his sixties. It begins:
In the realistic memory
the memorable must be forgone;
it never matters,
except in front of our eyes.
I made it a warming,
a cure that stabilized nothing.
We cannot recast the faulty drama,
play the child,
unable to align
his toppling, elephantine script,
the hieroglyphic letters
he sent home. (Day by Day 85)
In its matter-of-fact tone the first paragraph aims for the aphoristic about the
complex dialectical and paradoxical relationship between vision and revision, for
what the bodily eye no longer sees is displaced, then replaced by the second sight
of the mind's vision; while the next paragraph reminds the writer of the selfimposed difficulties of trying to write his own story. The metaphor of his
“elephantine script,/ the hieroglyphic letters” tells us of the hard labour that goes
into probing the past for suitable matter, and then slowly shaping it into something
different that is the new work of art. The recent (1977) grass fire started to flush
rabbits from holes is sparked from childhood memories (a “realistic memory”
from around 1923) that the adult poet had written down in poetry published in
1959 of “the family graveyard in Dunbarton.”
Grandfather and I
raked leaves from our dead forebears,
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defied the dank weather
with “dragon” bonfires. (Life Studies 66)
The poem presents some moments that evoke the closeness of their relationship:
the drive to Dunbarton with his grandfather, their ritualistic service for the
ancestors, and lightening a bonfire. The early-childhood (Oedipal) homosexuality
in the autobiographical speaker has manifested itself in the explicitly feminine
position taken by the adoring young Lowell toward his grandfather in these
closing lines:
In the mornings I cuddled like a paramour
in my Grandfather's bed,
while he scouted about the chattering greenwood stove.
(Life Studies 67)
Although the child's perception predominates throughout the poem, the adult's
consciousness intrudes into the lines. Lowell's fantasy of the ideal father,
encouraged by his mother's own fantasy for a husband, would eventually be
transferred, in part, to Lowell's grandfather. This is consistent with Erikson's
contention that a boy's “male ideal is rarely attached to his father,” but “is usually
an uncle or a friend of the family, if not his grandfather, as presented to him (often
unconsciously) by his mother” (312). Indeed, this strategic alliance with his
grandfather helps him to keep his parents at bay: Lowell calls himself his
grandfather's “son” and “paramour,” and his martially tinged lament in
“Grandparents” shows up his different attitude toward his parents: Grandpa! Have
me, hold me, cherish me (Life Studies 69)! The anguished cry receives belated
comfort from “Grass Fires” in “My grandfather towered above me,/ 'You damned
little fool,'/ nothing to quote, but for him original.” The earlier poem with the boy
Lowell and the grandfather as subjects is a pretext to which the later returns, both
literally so and metaphorically, as a means of demonstrating the development and
continuity of the poet's subjectivity and his creativity (“from our dead forebears”).
The return to the pretext has reconstructed the old memory giving it a fresh start in
the relationship with the grandfather that is carried forward by the adult speaker in
new reminiscences.
Similarly, “Homecoming” (Day by Day), rewritten from “Returning”
(For the Union Dead), published ten years previously, dramatizes the futility of
seeking simple correlations between the elusive experiences that may have been
lived and the subsequent recovery of them. The character who returns to the
surroundings of his youth with the triumphant opening conviction “What was
it…,” sure that the past is already coming to the present as he speaks, finds there
are some things he cannot perpetuate when his second and third phrase tumble
over the first, abruptly bringing him up against the reality that “the boys in my old
gang/ are senior partners. They start up/ bald like baby birds.” In fact, his
memories have changed since the time of the writing of “Returning.” The “you”
whom he meets “in the hour of credulity” is purely secular here; there is no
suggestion of God or Catholicism, but rather a girl who shares “the nights we made
it/ on our Vesuvio martinis/ with no vermouth but vodka/ to sweeten the dry gin.”
He comes to think of his experience of the present as “things gone wrong” when he
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feels a sharp awareness of loss, a decline in fertility and health, searching for what
he can no longer have. Lowell, as usual, plays with the notion of the instability of
memory, the way remembered objects seem to change shape with the passage of
time. This sense of loss is an echo of his prior acceptance of the unpleasant truth, “I
return then, but not to what I wanted” (“Searchings 1” Notebook 35).Fertility is not
to the forward,
[…]
Sometimes
I catch my mind
circling for you with glazed eye—
my lost love hunting
your lost face. (Day by Day 11)
He has come home, but he cannot find what he is seeking, cannot reclaim the past:
“it's a town for the young,/ they break themselves against the surf./ No dog knows
my smell.” “Memories of West Street and Lepke” (Life Studies) returns to join the
“vacancy” between an early self which a later self no longer sustains, but still
respects. The opening of the poem seems to be a direct depiction of the genuine
daily life of Robert Lowell. Beginning the poem with the illusion of a commentary
on the actual life of the poet himself allows Lowell to lay the foundation for
regression into a half-invented past, without compromising the appearance of
truth, in order to explore a simulated personal history in relationship to the larger
political and social movements of the time. This poem mingles the imagined with
the remembered, as Lowell exercises his prerogative to create and revise
meanings. In fact, the poem helps Lowell to create a mythic tale of himself—a tale
based on a significant real life gesture, of a romantic figure who, though closely
identified through the Lowell-dynasty with the ruling establishment, comes to
mean much more to “the average American” than any remote figurehead.
These are the tranquillized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a Negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair. (Life Studies 86)
Lowell's use of “manic” invites the readings that his “Declaration of Personal
Responsibility” was written while he was under the influence of madness, even
though neither Hamilton's nor Mariani's biography provides any evidence that
Lowell experienced the characteristic signs of mania at that time. In addition,
Lowell was not, strictly speaking, a C.O., because C.O. status was a legal
definition that meant a person refused, for reasons of conscience, to serve in any
war and was eligible for alternative service in civilian public service camps. And
finally, one would hardly call Lowell's politely formal letter a “telling off” of the
president. An American whose family traditions, like your own, have always
found their fulfilment in maintaining, through responsible participation in both the
civil and the military services, our country's freedom and honor.
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I have the honor, Sir, to inscribe
myself, with sincerest loyalty and
espect, your fellow-citizen,
Robert Traill Spence Lowell, jr.(Collected Prose 368)
The association of mania and Lowell's war refusal, in a subtle descriptive context,
suggest a contented caress attained at some cost to richness of feeling and
recollection. At the same time, it creates a vacancy between the poet and the
persona and engages imagination to play in the plot. The placement of seemingly
personal details within the poem creates verisimilitude and “inject new life” into
the poem (Yezzi 17-19), allowing Lowell's commentary to possess an air of
authority and authenticity.
Besides, Lowell's psychic and literary drama of rebellion bears
significance in exploring visions through the “glass of memory” (Olney 263).
Lowell's return time and again to a dramatic example of personal aggression and
brutality—a son's violent assault on his father's head—relates directly to the
concerns he weighed when he came to revise much of his work. The violent
subject matter gave him trouble over a long period; treatments of it appears in
different forms through his published poetry in a long lasting process of
cannibalisation covering thirty-three years. The biographical information we have
now might suggest that his writing difficulties originated in the struggle to
distance himself from and give symbolic significance to (or “fictionalise”) the
literal incident when the nineteen-year-old Lowell punched his father down.
Relationships with both parents were understandably ruptured for a time, but
healing began with the prodigal's departure from the family home to live with the
Tates, and to start his life as a poet full-time (Hamilton 27-43). Despite a later
apology, Lowell apparently could not forget the blow, coupling it in his mind with
the “invisible/ coronary” (Notebook 37 and 68; History 114) which ultimately
killed his father. “The father would forgive the son, but it was the forgiveness itself
which would rankle the son so much. Things would change,” with the passage of
time, but what “would not change was the guilt sticking like a burr long after Cal's
father was gone, long after Cal himself became a father, even after he was older
than his own father had been when he'd hit him” (Mariani 57). Lowell's first
treatment of this archetypal act of rebellion turns up in the apocalyptic violence
and allegorical gloom of “Leviathan” in Land of Unlikeness and later, he included
some of it and printed in “Rebellion” (Lord Weary's Castle). It's crucial act of
rebellion, apparently so well matched to an open, confessional treatment, is here
presented in a fuzzy dreamlike manner: Hugh Staples, who was writing before
biographical issue and other manuscript versions of “Rebellion” that clarify our
knowledge of the event, identifies the poem as “an enigmatic nightmare-vision of
patricide” which is “an expression of psychological hostility towards the fatherfigure as a symbol of authority” (Staples 17). Staples's account holds the tone of
the poem: it is not the private confession of a personal act of revolt but rather a
stylistic arrangement of archetypal rebellion.
There was rebellion, father, when the mock
French windows slammed and you hove backward,rammed
Into your heirlooms, screens, a glass-cased clock,
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The highboy quaking to its toes. You damne
My arm that cast your house upon your head
And broke the chimney flintlock on your skull.
(Lord Weary's Castle 29)
This is a world of evasive points of view, without moral accounting. We might
stretch to read the poem as a multiple metaphor of the American Revolutions,
political and prosodic to establish independence from Britain (“Rebellion,” “your
house,” “flintlock”), and the psychic and literary dramas of rebellion against the
past by the present generation. It took eighteen years for Lowell to return to the
theme in his own compositions; “Middle Age” in For the Union Dead hints at
violence against a father—explicit as archetypical patricide in “Rebellion” (“But
the world spread/ When the clubbed flintlock broke my father's brain”)—in the
middle two of four paragraphs, but in quite another tone which exchanges a
nervous levity for the hollow gravity of “Rebellion.”
At forty-five,
what next, what next?
At every corner,
I meet my father,
my age, still alive.
Father, forgive me
my injuries,
as I forgive
those I
have injured! (FUD 7)
The association between feeling and writing is less uncertain than before, but
remains precarious and unsettling. Not “father” but “Father” in the abstract raises
one puzzling question if he is the Father which art in Heaven, a remembered Father
confessor, or someone else.
Most importantly, Lowell's meanings are obscure in his poetry about the
son/father topic up to this point, but when he returns to it in Notebook 1967-68 he
has a broader purpose than the revision of one poem. The Notebook series places
the filial rebellion material in wider literary contexts which aim to typify the
general relevance to heredity and environment of the son through the content of a
number of individual poems and the selection and arrangement of those poems. In
Notebook 1967-68 seven poems in one linear sequence—eight in the 1970
Notebook, when Lowell added a heavily revised version of “Rebellion”—are
separated typographically and entitled “Charles River” to link the relationships
within it. This sequence provides a plot closely related to what Williamson says is
a major thematic interest in Lowell's later poetry: to explore forms of human
integrity lost in historical “progress.”
Like Freud, Lowell is concerned with the cost of civilization to
instinctual satisfaction and even instinctual awareness; with the nature
of the almost universal human sense of discontent and incompleteness,
the possibilities and the illusions of a remedy. He is obsessed with
outbursts of aggression and brutality, with their relation to civilized
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structures and/ or to man's fundamental, biologically evolved nature;
and with the question of whether this essential nature permanently
precludes any realization of man's moral ideal of himself. (Williamson
2-3)
Williamson's sweeping generalisation is only partially valid; he wrote before For
Lizzie and Harriet, Dolphin and Day by Day were published, all of which call into
question the extent to which Lowell remained “obsessed” with such violence.
“Charles River” (with its successors) suggests that he return to a familiar idea to
work through a relation between an incident of barbaric personal brutality, and in
Williamson's phrase, a “civilized structure,” to check and regulate representation
of the youthful excess. The prominence of the Oedipus myth in Freudian thought
is one structuring device that makes a plausible whole of different expression of
the unconscious, and hence of personal identity. It might have been this in mind
that Lowell invested such care and thought in creating and revising these poems
and their contexts, to configure and reconfigure the experience of violent incident
into the unity of something resembling the oedipal plot set out in Life Studies,
where the separate identity of the character telling it is put to the test and
challenged for the sake of the question “Who am I?”—as a speaking subject
separate from parents, as an acting subject, as the bearer of a selective family
history, as a poetic self entering also into moral relationships with others.
The predestined instinctual violence in “Leviathan” is recalled faintly in
sonnet 2, but revised and reduced in significance, within a youth who received
“hard knocks to school a lifetime; yet I went on swiping/ small things.” The
scarcity of initial capitals in this sonnet's lines helps to merge this figure of
Woman, and the unspecified guilt she prompts, with the woman who is the catalyst
for the filial assault mentioned in each of sonnets 3, 4 and 5 (“you, his outraged
daughter”). The shift in moral responsibility in these three poems is evident in the
prosaic starkness with which they speak of the violence—“I knocked him down,”
“I do not know how to unsay I knocked you down,” “I struck my
father”—contrasting with the earlier evasion—“My arm that cast your house upon
your head” and “forgive me/ my injuries.”
The need to work through that painful memory, perhaps to absolve him
from the conflict and the guilt similarly exists in sonnet five. Referring to the dates,
respectively, of the incident in the preceding poem, the death of his father, and the
death of his mother, the poet wonders:5
If the clock had stopped in 1936
for them, or again in '50 and '54—
they are not dead, and not until death parts us,
will I stop sucking my blood from their hurt.
They say, “I had my life when I was young.”
They must have…dying young in middle-age:
yet often the old grow still more beautiful,
watering out the hours, biting back their tears,
as the white of the moon streams in on them unshaded;
and woman too, the tanning rose, their ebb,
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neither a medical, nor agricultural problem.
I struck my father; later my apology
hardly scratched the surface of his invisible
coronary…never to be effaced. (Notebook 66-70)
The first four jumbled lines, with the conditional expression never resolved, reveal
the degree to which the poet's act of aggression against his father has become
associated in his mind with the deaths of both parents. His life and theirs, his pain
and theirs will be entwined until his own death releases them all—a continuous
urge for liberation, as believed by Freud, by mastering the painful incident of
past—suggests the perpetual process of revision. The words, “I struck my father,”
more formal than the purely eloquent “I knocked him down” of sonnet three, show
an endeavour by the poet to imbue the act with significance, perhaps to admit it
formally and thereby forgive himself.
Too easy and too direct connections between Lowell's art and life—the
opposing force of New Criticism that guided the young poet of Lord Weary's
Castle (1946)—create a romantic haze that makes it difficult to see the art clearly
in his confessional poetry from Life Studies to Day by Day. In fact, Lowell's artistic
imagination longs to “invent and forget” while being preoccupied with past
experiences that forms the background of his autobiographical poems. The motion
of tracing back provides functional links between the relentless use of memory to
recover the past that is the narrative source of so much poetry of Lowell, and the
poet's practice of reclaiming past work to reinvigorate his creativity in revising it.
Both the returns show Lowell's predilection to revise and reconstruct while giving
new insight to past experience, establishing the instability of memory, revealing
an awareness of loss, uniting his poetic identity, and most importantly,
establishing the “peculiar and central place” of memory in psychoanalysis.
Referring to Lowell as “the best American poet born in the twentieth century,”
renowned present-day poet and critic Adam Kirsch thus rightly contends in his
The Wounded Surgeon that “what unites all of Lowell's work … is something
deeper than autobiography.” He further adds, “It is the artistic personality that is
revealed in [Lowell's] rhythms and his metaphors, his language and his thought.
Even when he seems most directly confessional, it is Lowell's artistry—which is
also to say, his artificiality—that makes him a great poet” (2). In fact, what gives
the poems of Life Studies and Day by Day their enduring value is not their honesty
about Lowell's personal past, but their artistic form that basically stands on the
“imaginative reconstruction” of memory. The poet's experiences are not simply
revealed but shaped, through rhetoric and rhythm and tone, into works of art.
Introducing “Epilogue,” Lowell recalled Randall Jarrell's poem “The
Lost World,” of which Jarrell's brother had said that it wasn't a poem at all, because
“it was something remembered, not imagined.” T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems
and Plays of T.S. Eliot (London, 1969), 15. In Paradise Lost “sad Acheron of
sorrow, black and deep.” Homer then Virgil makes it the principal river of Hades;
Charon appears in Aeneid 6. The river encircles Dante's Hell across which the
souls of the dead must be ferried by Charon in Inferno Canto III 46-56. The book
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has over 150 pages of unrhymed sonnets. During the six years Lowell published
poems only in this form. Lowell leaves sequences untitled in History, but uses
titles in the two Selected Poems, where the poems are discussed are included in
“Nineteen Thirties,” Selected Poems 179-92 and Selected Poems Revised 185-98.
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*Associate Professor, department of English Shahjalal University
of Science & Technology.
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