Arts and Letters

O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall—
raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die.

Stop, back off. The salmon breaks
water, and now my body wakes
to feel the unpolluted joy
and criminal leisure of a boy—
no rainbow smashing a dry fly
in the white run is free as I,
here squatting like a dragon on
time's hoard before the day's begun!

What is art but an intense life? On Palm Sunday, two years ago, Robert Lowell attended eleven o'clock services at the Church of the Advent—High Church, Episcopal—on Brimmer Street, in Boston. During that part of the service when the congregation passes out through the front portal and across the porch, holding palm leaves aloft, and then moves in procession around the city block which the church occupies, he appeared to be elated, even transported, by the experience. He had been so affected by the beauties of the music and the High Mass inside the church that he had kept up a running commentary on all of it to the companion beside him. And once outside, he seemed almost equally affected by his surroundings. With jubilation almost, he surveyed and commented on the familiar neighborhood where he had spent much of his childhood with his parents and grandparents. At one point, in his exultation, he even tickled the ear of his Palm Sunday companion with his palm frond. No doubt he was already anticipating a guided walking tour of that neighborhood and of adjacent neighborhoods which he was going to give this companion of his when the service was concluded.

That Sunday morning, in the environs where he had once been an active, a playful, an incorrigibly prankish boy, it became irresistible to Lowell to do silly things like tickling his dignified companion's ear. And he somehow found it all so utterly delightful that he continued one way or another to persecute that dignified person until they were back in their pew in the great nave of the church. Yet once back in the pew, Robert Lowell was on his best behavior again, grave and serene, a model of sober propriety, praying, or doing his best to simulate a man at his prayers, responding to his religious environment, trying to embrace it, to comprehend it. And essentially this is how he must always be remembered, one moment playful to the point of violent provocation, the next in profound contemplation of the great mystery: What does life mean? What is it all about? Or, in retrospect and more accurately for him it is but one moment. As poet, as man, he approaches the great mystery playfully and seriously at the same time. From the very beginning or from the time when I first knew him in his late teens, he seemed determined that there should be no split in his approach to understanding profound matters. He was searching for a oneness in himself and a oneness in the world. He would not allow that any single kind of experience denied him the right and access to some opposite kind. He wanted to experience everything that it was humanly possible for him to experience. Even when he was a student, sitting in the dormer of his room at Kenyon College, contemplating life over a bottle of excruciatingly sweet blackberry wine with that same companion, he would say—and he had to be at least half a child still to say such a thing—would say, "When I'm out of college I'll go to New York for a time, become a Marxist, join the Party." And then he would say in the next breath, so to speak—actually in that dormer on another winter's day—would say, "Sometime after I've finished college I'll go to live in London for a while and learn how to dress." Already he wanted every kind of experience. Only he had not yet sorted out what kind he wanted most.

But even as an undergraduate he was not so naive about literature, about writing. He knew he was going to be a writer of course. I might even say that he knew he was going to be a poet of the first rank. And everyone near to him knew it. And the boy Lowell sitting in the dormer there at Douglas House knew that the writer and the man must be one. He recognized that, for him at least, there could not be a private person and a public person. The ear tickler and the man at prayers had to be one. And he had to understand how the public life related to the private. It had to be one. Years later he might be criticized for turning private letters into poems. But his doing so seems inevitable in the light of the inclination he had always had. He turned himself, of course, into his own fictional character with a certain amount of interplay always between the fictional character and the real. It was partly this concern of his that there be no distinction between what was public and private in his life that led him into the Roman Church in 1940 and that led him to take the stand he did as a conscientious objector in 1943. There was always something profoundly personal about his public stance. When his draft notice arrived, he wrote to President Roosevelt as a citizen writing to the president but also as a Lowell writing to a Roosevelt: "I very much regret that I must refuse the opportunity you offer me in your communication of August 6, 1943, for service in the Armed Forces." And the letter concludes: "You will understand how painful such a decision is for an American whose family traditions, like your own, have always found their fulfillment in maintaining, through responsible participation in both the civil and the military services, our country's freedom and honor."

The same spirit can be discerned in his efforts to support Eugene McCarthy in the 1960s and in his taking part in the march on the Pentagon. As a matter of fact, during that very period, if he were at the house of a friend, he was apt to take the most conservative position in any argument that developed. He wanted every experience. He even wanted to be allowed to take both sides of any argument. At the end of an evening, though, after he had led the forces of reaction against the doctrinaire liberals, he was likely to call his host aside, to make sure there was no misunderstanding, and say, "You know, of course, that when it comes to politics, I consider myself a liberal. In something as simple as politics, it's easy to know what you are."

He wanted to participate in every intellectual activity that it was conceivable he might. Moreover, he wanted to possess the experience. And once he had participated in something, he was never willing to give up his part in it—not even old opinions that no longer suited him. In a sense, he was a Roman Catholic till the end, and would say so, though he would also almost simultaneously declare that he was in no sense a believer. He would boast at times that he had never lost a friend. He never even wanted to give up a marriage entirely. He wanted his wife and children around him in an old fashioned household, and yet he wanted to be free and on the town. Who doesn't wish for all that, of course? But he would have both. He wanted it all so intensely that he became very sick at times. He was a New Englander and a Bostonian, and yet he was an outsider in New England and Boston. In a sense, he was. And in a sense he sometimes wanted to feel himself so. He was a New York liberal. He was a Southern Conservative. He was a Catholic. He was an Episcopalian. He was a Jew. When one heard that he was dead and how he had died in the back seat of a New York taxi cab, one could not help feeling that he had had everything, even the kind of death he had always said he wanted. That is, he had died quickly and without making too much trouble for anybody, though in this of course he got more than he had asked for or wanted. He was not yet ready to die. He had thought a great deal about how old he was, but he knew how young he was still.

On the day of his funeral, approximately two months ago now, at the same Church of the Advent, in Boston, one could not help thinking of course of that Palm Sunday and finally of the walking tour on which he was the guide afterward. The streets had been all but empty that Sunday, and so we had walked down the middle of those narrow streets or wandered back and forth from sidewalk to sidewalk, peering up at street numbers on Pinckney Street, Revere Street, Brimmer Street, where his parents and his Winslow grandparents had lived at various times, even hiking off finally to the house on Marlborough Street where his parents had been living when I visited him during our college years. In one of his letters written during the fifties he said, "Lizzy and I are now living on Marlborough Street, only a few doors from where you lost the car key in the snow." And he stopped to look at that other house too, that Sunday, the one where, bringing Elizabeth with him, he had tried unsuccessfully to become a Bostonian again. His return to Boston had seemed to work for a while. One of his letters written in November of 1955 says: "We're having a good fall, and feel very lordly and pretentious in our new Boston house. It's just exactly a block from the one I grew up in. It's not really little, and not at all unpretentious, and we despise everyone whose nerve for cities has failed, all country people, all suburbanites, and all people who live in apartments." He was clearly in high spirits and loved playing that lordly role for the duration of that letter.

What I came gradually to understand on our Palm Sunday pilgrimage, especially after he had stood looking at first one house and then another, was that for him it was no mere memory bath (that's his phrase) but a primarily literary experience, just as much for him as it was for me, as much as it would have been for any other companion or spectator. At some point he had come to terms with his fictional character, his public self, and achieved the oneness he had wanted. I told him then what my impression was. I quoted to him a sentence from The Lesson of the Master: "What's art but an intense life?"

During the past two months the press has been full of brilliant examinations and appraisals of Lowell's achievement as a poet—and most of them composed by better hands and heads than mine for such a task. And so I make no apology for stringing together these conversations and anecdotes and remarks as my tribute to him. I know it is what he would have wanted from me. He used to say to me that no Southerner was capable of abstract thought and that I should stick to story telling. I think he loved a good anecdote better than almost anything else. Among the letters of his that I have been going through in recent weeks, there is one that gives an account of his taking Randall Jarrell to call on Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, in 1948. It was written from the Cosmos Club, in Washington, when Lowell was Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. "Dear old Sub [that's me]: You owe me a letter; but I know your time is valuable [that's his not too light irony]. Well, the old man [that's Jarrell. He was four years older than we were] the old man is on his way home to you, in Greensboro, with not so many adventures in Washington. An evening with Dwight MacDonald during which he was more than usual genial—We'd said goodbye to MacDonald and separated about ten feet when Randall began doing gigantic ballet leaps in the air, giggling…. The reading of the war-poems (Jarrell's) went quite well, but Mr. Steele had rather expected autobiographical comments from Jarrell about (war) buddies, etc. 'How did the reading go?' (I asked Mr. Steele). 'Oh, pretty well,' he said. 'Of course, I didn't tell Mr. Jarrell that they'd have gone better with someone else reading.' Anyway, now we come to Jarrell and Pound. There they sat, big as life and queer as hell, Pound rather the more conventional. (I said to Pound) 'How have you been?' Pound: 'Rather languid.' Squinting at Randall, scrolled up in the exposed chair, 'Let me study the animal before I map out a program for him'…. Long economico-political monologue (follows from Pound). Then finally he says, 'But I must give a vignette. Lowell likes anecdotes some of the time.' And Randall says: 'What do you mean some of the time?' Then a rambling story from Pound about Wyndham Lewis looking at cave paintings and saying 'They're fakes. Just Picasso.' (Finally Pound says) 'You see, the valuable thing is to knock different kinds of minds against each other.'… Randall, in a scrolled up sphinx tone says: 'And what was the value of Lewis's observation?' I think they thought of each other as unboring eccentrics, etcetera.'' That is the end of the letter.

I believe Lowell was about as good a correspondent as you will find in our generation—especially during the last years. He sometimes wrote me two or three times a week. I suppose he was often lonely in England. He said, "England is a better country to live in than America—more comfortable and pleasant generally. But I am still more comfortable with Americans than with Englishmen." When he and I parted company after college he said, "You write me long letters often, and I'll come long distances to see you." It turned out quite the reverse, for the most part. He wrote often, and I travelled great distances to hear him talk. We did a lot of visiting back and forth. Our visits were just like being at Kenyon again, in a way. A big part of the time was spent reading—reading aloud. It is something he did with all of his close friends, I suppose. The first thing he ever read aloud to me was The Education of Henry Adams. He liked especially to read to me the passage about Rooney Lee. But mostly we read poetry—or he did. It was established early that he would do the reading. At Kenyon, we decided to make our own anthology of English poetry, beginning with the Metaphysical poets. He made all the selections, really. Over the years any close friend of his heard him read a lot of poetry, including his own. Whenever there was a reunion with an old friend, he would read all of his new work as well as poems by the old poets, the dead poets, that he had rediscovered and been in communion with, so to speak, since the last meeting. And he would always talk with great intensity about what he was writing then. What is art but an intense life?

I was last with him in London two years ago next month. At his and Caroline's place in Redcliffe Square he read aloud, and we talked away the better part of the five days. On the final afternoon he asked me if I remembered William Cory's "Heraclitus." I said I did, but only vaguely. He said, "Look at it and tell me the best line in it." That was his way. I read aloud the first phrases my eye fell on: "How often you and I / Had tired the sun with talking." "That's it," he said with delight. When I got back to my hotel I found that I had memorized the two stanzas that make up the poem:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian Guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.