The Middle Generation
Bawer, Bruce
Iis no wonder many people find the personal histories of the poets Bruce Bawer calls "the Middle Generation" more engrossing than their writings. The pain-filled lives and untimely deaths of...
...Unlike certain other young critics of the neoconservative persuasion, Bawer doesn't let politics dictate his literary views...
...Bawer traces symptoms of these "turbulent childhoods" into "alienated adulthoods...
...Schwartz falls prey to this logic...
...Born during the decade preceding the First World War, all lacked healthy relationships with their dads...
...Twin symptoms of a single malady," he calls them...
...But in the case of these poets, tawdry melodrama threatens to submerge their literary output altogether...
...Lowell's father was technically present, but as a henpecked sap he more or less fit the pattern...
...Bawer makes a convincing case that the group's obsessive devotion to T. S. Eliot was a way of replacing their missing fathers...
...SE Washington, DC 20003 THE MIDDLE GENERATION: THE LIVES AND POETRY OF DELMORE SCHWARTZ, RANDALL JARRELL, JOHN BERRYMAN AND ROBERT LOWELL Bruce Bawer/Archon Books/$25.00 Jacob Weisberg THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 49...
...The bizarre, self-destructive behavior of the Middle Generation poets was not extraneous to their poetry, he argues, but part and parcel of it...
...Once we learn about the mental and physical maladies that afflicted Schwartz et al., we necessarily devalue their work...
...Most importantly, Bawer communicates a genuine passion for the poetry of Schwartz, Lowell, Jarrell, and Berryman...
...Undeserved though their sufferings may have been, these poets seem to have struggled- in vain against their pathetic destinies...
...But Bawer's generalizations about the "generic life" all four shared begin to wear thin by the time he arrives at the poems they wrote during the 1950s...
...For the Middle Generation, Eliot stood as a distant, intellectual patriarch who commanded unflinching respect as he dictated rules for verse and criticism...
...The pain-filled lives and untimely deaths of Schwartz, Jarrell, Berryman, and Lowell follow the narrative structure of the book of Job, without the happy ending...
...And although Robert Lowell's Life Studies violates Eliot's critical precepts of the 1910s and '20s, Bawer doesn't convince me that Lowell was ever a true discipleof Eliot in the sense Schwartz and Berryman were...
...Following Eliot's essays, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "The Metaphysical Poets," Berryman, Schwartz, and Jarrell wrote poems that were impersonal, erudite, and metaphysically ingenious...
...Rather than further satisfying our prurient interest in the demise of the poets, Bawer reconnects their lives to their work...
...Although seldom daring or brilliant, Bawer's analysis is consistently careful and readable...
...But if we read Schwartz's late verse without foreknowledge of his lunacy, it appears beautifully fluid and nearly cogent...
...Bawer analyzes the middle and late careers of Berryman, Schwartz, Jarell, and Lowell with considerable acumen...
...Reading Haffenden's Berryman, Hamilton's Lowell, Atlas's Schwartz, and Eileen Simpson's Poets in their Youth, we watch horrified (but enthralled) as the sensitive souls fall prey to alcoholism, insomnia, drug addiction, obsessive religiosity, and divorce...
...He's capable of appreciating a work even when he disagrees with its author...
...Not coincidentally, all developed unhealthy love-hate relationships with their mothers...
...After World War II (by which time each of the Middle Generation poets was headed toward madness) they repudiated Eliot...
...The experience of split families sent the poets looking for intellectual father figures, too...
...None of the Middle Generation poets slept soundly or maintained a happy relationship with a woman...
...James Atlas's superb biography of Delmore Jacob Weisberg, a former reporter-researcher at the New Republiq will be studying at Oxford University this fall...
...Always, the story ends with a lurid slide into madness, suicide, or both...
...How, we ask, could anyone so stewed and nutty write cogently...
...There is nothing unhealthy about being fascinated by the personal lives of literary and historical figures...
...The poets came of age considering Eliot the sole arbiter of poetic style and content...
...And obey him they did...
...These absent fathers instilled feelings of resentment, hatred, and guilt in the young poets...
...But this evolution did not take the form of religious conversion in all cases...
...Three of them lost their fathers at very early ages: Jarrell's and Schwartz's skipped town while Berry-man's killed himself...
...According to his view, it is miraculous that any of Schwartz's late writing coheres...
...By considering the writings of the poets in the context of their life histories, Bawer does justice, to both...
...Atlas tends to view Schwartz's late, erratic poetry as a symptom of pharmaceutically induced psychosis...
...T hese four writers lived strangely parallel lives...
...They began to write in a far more confessional vein, and developed new affinities with the United States and the poetry of their North American forebears...
...C ertainly all of their poetic voices became less "Eliotic...
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...Bawer's relentless application of the generational formula also forces him to neglect female poets such as Jean Stafford and Elizabeth Bishop, whose work might illuminate that of their male contemporaries in a fresh way...
...To make one last complaint, Bawer lacks confidence in his own assertions, too often deferring to elder critics...
...Bawer is convincing in his analysis of how Schwartz's early poems, such as the oft-anthologized "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave," exemplify an "Eliotic" rather than a "personal" sensibility...
...But such humility is always refreshing from a writer for the New Criterion and The American Spectator...
...His study has the great virtue of expressing his own fondness and renewing our interest in these brilliant and troubled writers...
...Although Schwartz broke with Eliot in an outspoken way, he retained his old obsession in a mutated form...
...Schwartz in particular stood so in awe of Great Tom that he couldn't even bear to meet Eliot's brother...
...iii TRIMOUNT BITUMINOUS PRODUCTS CO...
...Arriving on the heels of these tell-all biographies and memoirs, Bruce Bawer's first book does an admirable thing...
...To meet Old Possum himself would have been like shaking hands with the Lord...
...He traces Auden's influence on Jarrell, and Yeats's on Berryman, line by line...
...As Bawer writes of John Berryman: "Had he been 'cured' of one of these symptoms, he would almost certainly have been 'cured' of the other...
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Vol. 20 • April 1987 • No. 4
