Life Studies: Robert Lowell

To read Life Studies fifty-one years after its initial publication is to wade into the myths of Robert Lowell, whose reputation seems to teeter-totter wildly according to critic, year, and the mode of Lowell’s aesthetic. His maniacally formalist early years? His middle period, of which Life Studies is the locus? Or the Lowell of later years, aged author of Day by Day and The Dolphin, the latter volume of which his long time friend Elizabeth Bishop wrote him that she couldn’t approve of his manipulation and public exposure of source materials such as personal letters from friends and ex-lovers?

The last sentence hints at some of my problematic understanding of Robert Lowell. As long as I’ve read poetry, I’ve been drawn to select poems of Lowell’s such as “The Quaker Graveyard of Nantuckett” from Lord Weary’s Castle, as well as “Memories of West St. and Lepke” and “Skunk Hour” from Life Studies. But rather than simply sitting down and reading one of Lowell’s volumes, I read all around him. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton, and chunks of Lowell’s selected poems. My understanding of Robert Lowell as a poor husband and desperate father, as a son who obsessed over his weak-willed father and overbearing mother, and as a trust fund college student who ingratiated himself with the last vestiges of the Vanderbilt Fugitives and then the New Critical movement—all of these overshadowed my understanding of Robert Lowell as a poet. I was peeking behind the curtain to see how the tricks worked before I let myself be dazzled by the show.

And I do find Life Studies slightly dazzling. The arrangement of the volume is powerful, showing Lowell’s transformation from his early style to the reckless (“violent” it’s typically described as), yet still concise free verse he was moving into. And the autobiographical work, starting from when Lowell was a boy on his grandfather’s farm, and presenting New England high society in all its flawed, snobbish glory, until after Lowell’s parents were dead and gone (Memorialized in poems such as “Father’s Bedroom”, “For Sale”, and “Sailing Home from Rapallo”) and he had a wife and daughter of his own. Darker moments in Lowell’s adult life, such as his manic breakdown and incarceration in a mental hospital are also recorded in poems such as “Waking in the Blue” and “Home After Three Months Away.”

Life Studies is organized into four major sections. Part I contains four poems that don’t exactly fit into the volume’s overall narrative arc, except in their capacity to show a transformation from Lowell’s earlier style. “Beyond the Alps” is a longish poem based on his travels in Europe, and is somewhat difficult to follow because of its compact, vatic writing, evidenced by the final two beautiful though cryptic lines, “Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up/like killer kings on an Etruscan Cup.”

The second section is a long (approximately forty pages) prose essay entitled “91 Revere St.” and contains reminiscences from Lowell’s Boston childhood. I suppose in its function to provide preparation and foreground to the biographical poems to come, the section works, but I question its inherent artistic value. It comes off as a slightly indulgent piece of catharsis, and the majority of the essay is spent painting a portrait of a patriarch Lowell would have us believe was spineless, and out of place wherever he was—“a fish out of water,” he calls him. I never completely bought it, Lowell was too adamantly against his father to be believed, and his mother, though portrayed as flawed, seemed idealized at times. In addition, most of the material contained within “91 Revere St.” was presented in the fourth section, though in lineated form.

The third section is mostly poems about about other poets, the strongest of which is “Words for Hart Crane”, which is powerful both as an elegy for Hart Crane, and an indictment of the academic poetry community: “Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,/ must lay his heart out for my bed and board.” Striking. And the fact that I don’t like Hart Crane, and that I find a poem like this by Lowell slightly hypocritical (The man was on more than his fair share of awards committees, and partook in a fair amount of “buddyism” himself) is all the more testament to its power to move and to challenge the artist.

The final section, which is actually broken into two subsections, is titled “Life Studies.” The first section begins with the long poem, “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” and is about Lowell’s childhood memories, and ends with his return from the mental hospital, “Home After Three Months Away.” The second subsection begins with the poem, “Memories of West St. and Lepke”, and I’m not sure why. It seems like this poem, as well as the three following it, which are also biographical, should have been a part of one sequence. I suspect Lowell sequestered them only because he didn’t want to end the first subsection with a single, out of place poem, “Skunk Hour,” which doesn’t thematically fit with earlier poems, and he also didn’t want to put the poem by itself. I think he should have just tacked “Skunk Hour” on the end of the first sequence, it wouldn’t have disrupted his thematic arc, and it would have been a nice bookend to “Beyond the Alps.” Or, perhaps a better option would have been to put “Skunk Hour” on the end of the section about poets, and then end the entire book with that section. That way all the autobiographical pieces would flow together, and the book wouldn’t end on a note that might be interpreted by some as self-indulgent.

I’ve already discussed some of the stylistic transformations Lowell underwent in this volume, mainly from that of a severe formalist to an autobiographical writer of free-verse, but there’s a specific trick Lowell developed in this period that I find fascinating, in that it violates some basic premises of good writing, but still works—namely, his habit of piling adjectives on top of one another, typically in groupings of three or four, such as in “Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow”:

Like my Grandfather, the décor
was manly, comfortable,
overbearing, disproportioned.

This example actually works better than other times Lowell uses this trick, because he’s making an overt comparison between his grandfather and his grandfather’s décor—to prove it’s true, he’s going to list them. It still sounds nice in other places, and it has some technical purpose in slowing the reader down, and painting a picture with quick, broad strokes—it just mars the flow, or the feeling of the whole poem being one perfect unit, with each component intrinsic and indistinguishable from the whole. He uses this strategy most famously in “Memories of West St. and Lepke” in two places—at the end of the third stanza:

He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

and also in the fourth to describe Czar Lepke of Murder Incorporated:

Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,

Finally, I’m not quite sure what to say about the label Life Studies is often given as an early proponent of Confessionalism. It’s easy to see the similarities between Life Studies and Snodgrass's“Heart’s Needle”, but these manifestations of Confessionalism don’t resemble the works of later poets more often associated with this school such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I suppose I’ll buy the label in poems such as “Waking in the Blue” and “Memories of West St, and Lepke”, but in many of his autobiographical poems, Lowell is only the observer, and doesn’t mention himself. In longer poems such as, “Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereaux Winslow,” and “Beyond the Alps”, Lowell’s presence all but disappears, and his work is so strikingly different from that of neo-confessionalists such as Sharon Olds that I wonder whether they really can be grouped in the same school at all. Lowell truly does seem to be studying, in the sense of examining, searching for meaning, whereas later poets seemed more intent on exploiting their lives for the sake of a handful of poems.