THE POET WHO FELL OFF THE MAP From Patmos, with the utmost

...It is important to understand this...

...Neither has he much in common with the many poor souls-from Paris to Patmos to Prague-who coddle their indolence abroad as expatriates...

...This was how I first visited him in 1991...

...Biography, to a large extent, is the explication of motive, and motives ought not to be guessed at too readily...

...He wrote for the New Yorker, Time, and Hollywood...

...Lax will tell you that he came to Patmos because there had been a picture of Saint John on the wall of his room in Marseilles...

...Rage would certainly have been an issue at hand: social and political turmoil such as that suffered during the Depression and prewar years does not, as a rule, lend much support to the growth of the inner life, but at Columbia Merton and Lax managed not only to avoid the most unlovable moral responses to "that low, dishonest decade," but also to find a circle of friends who felt as perversely thrilled by, and estranged from, the contemporary world as they did themselves...

...Those who have read Thomas Merton will know that Lax was part of Merton's Columbia circle: they will recall him as the shyest, quietest, and least self-conscious of Merton's overly articulate classmates, the one he describes in The Seven Storey Mountain as a "potential prophet, but without rage...

...Ostensibly, the idea was to establish some sort of hospice for the poor similar to Friendship House, where he had worked under the tutelage of its foundress, Catherine Doherty...

...It was another of the intimations by which he guided himself...

...A frequent contributor to Commonweal, he was one of the founders of Jubilee ("a magazine of the church and her people"), and served for many years as its "roving editor...

...Lax lives in Skala...

...farther below, the shabbier port town of Skala stretches out against the waterfront...

...Obscurity, in an elderly artist who has devoted a lifetime to his art, can indicate a good deal...

...When Lax avers that ihad been coming toward that city since the beginning of time i had been coming...

...But life, all life, becomes a narrative at some point, and a narrative needs to be told...

...As a poet he enjoys a considerably larger audience in Europe than in his native America, and even in Europe his status as a cult figure is obscure...

...Writers in general are loath to work out any equation of their lives, to supply a concordance that would match the elements of their experience to the form of their art, and who could ask otherwise...

...Lax is not a recluse...

...His main concern in leaving the States was to find someplace "quiet and inexpensive," and he finally settled on the Greek island of Patmos, where he lives today...

...Marseilles appears to have been a crucial force in this shift, and not simply through the happenstance of timing...

...He had told them that in Marseilles he hoped to write some poems and "get to know poor folks...

...Nowadays Patmos is neither quiet nor cheap, but when Lax arrived it hadn't even a proper harbor and could barely sustain one small hotel...

...When Lax made the decision to move abroad, he saw the city as a sinister zone...

...The fame that Merton was to achieve through his autobiography, his later writings as a Trappist monk and hermit, and the bizarre circumstances of his accidental death in Bangkok in 1968 have made his story familiar, if not widespread, among contemporary Americans...

...During the summer especially, there is a small gathering of them- writers, students, fiancees-most evenings at Lax's little house overlooking the bay...

...A simple response to a simple moment...

...Simple matters have formed the shape of Lax's life-a simplicity that is real enough to be disarming at first sight...

...there is the obscurity of the renegade, the pariah, and the failure...

...Whereas Merton found that his vocation as a Christian and a writer could only find expression within a world whose boundaries were drawn not merely by the church but by the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in the Kentucky hills, Lax has spent the better part of his life as rootless and expectant as a beggar...

...When Lax chose to leave America, then, it was not his idea to find someplace congenial but to return to someplace strange...

...As things turned out, he succeeded in a small way: he lived among the poor as a poor man himself and became the center of a small group that met haphazardly for meals in his room at the Hotel du Calais...

...The most important thing to come out of Lax's time in Marseilles was Port City, a long verse narrative of his experience there...

...THE POET WHO FELL OFF THE NAP Robert Lax on the island of Patmos James Uebbing Headers of Commonweal and Jubilee may remember the work of Robert Lax, but he is not generally known in the United States...

...He may be either or both, but these terms would need to be broken-in a good deal before they fit...

...Or, at least, a hermit...

...At Friendship House, Lax had become famous for his inability to wash floors with the right end of a mop, and in Marseilles he spent several days in a hotel before he realized that it was, in fact, a brothel...

...It is not my intention here to provide a biography of Robert Lax...

...Born in Olean, a town in western New York State, he stayed on in Manhattan for James Uebbing is a critic and writer, and editor of the forthcoming Love Had a Compass: Journals & Poetry (Grove Press...

...Ad Reinhardt, Edward Rice, Robert Giroux, and John Berryman are the best-known of these today...

...Merton and Lax, almost from the start, were the closest...

...The obscurity of those, like Lax, who have simply chosen to be obscure is always to some degree a provocation, a story that calls attention to itself but allows few lessons to be drawn...

...In 1951 Lax trav-eled there by a roundabout course and spent some months or years-accounts vary-living among the layabouts and drifters of the old port...

...Just beneath its ramparts, the old hill town of Chora looks down across the entire island...

...Quite a number of people visit Patmos to visit Lax...

...Lax is a different case altogether...

...Lax wrote continuously from his college days on, but it is too simple to say of him that he has always been a writer...

...His verse had impressed me with its strangeness and restraint, and among my own friends at Columbia stories circulated, some fifty years past Lax's tenure, of the unknown poet who had fallen off the edge of the map somewhere in the Aegean...

...Marseilles itself is a case in point...

...He lived in that room (in a cheap hotel) for months, and in the evening the very last rays of the sun would highlight this portrayal of the Apostle, busily writing in the cave of the Apocalypse...

...There is the obscurity of the timid and the obscurity of the self-assured...

...It is a rocky place, mountainous and extremely dry...

...That is the job of their writing alone...

...This essay is excerpted from the introduction to that volume...

...However vague the pattern of his life may appear, it cannot be missed entirely...

...He eventually left America altogether in the late 1950s and has returned only infrequently and briefly...

...For the most part, however, Marseilles was an exercise in solitude rather than charity...

...he also went on the road with a circus, taught philosophy, coached boxers (without ever having boxed), and lived at Friendship House in Harlem...

...The arch humor of his earlier verse-the Fables, for example, which had relied heavily on word play and comedy-was giving way to something quieter and less accessible, works whose center of gravity was more deeply internal and extremely subtle...

...The monastery still dominates the island phys-ically and imparts a peculiar tone to the place...

...It was an eminently practical scheme that, unsurprisingly, came to little...

...At thirty-six Lax had become used to roundabout courses, as had his friends, who knew better than to search out his plans too carefully...

...The most distinctive features of Lax's style-the short lines of verse arranged in long columns, the deadpan narration, the highly abstract imagery-begin to take shape around this time...

...The fuga mundi that carried him from America to Marseilles to Greece took place just as Lax was developing and settling into a newer and far more mature poetic voice, and there is every indication that what carried him abroad was not so much ennui or wanderlust as a profound inner need that he did not fully understand himself...

...All the more so because Lax himself would be the last to insist upon it...

...Port City, like The Circus of the Sun, is a poem of impressions and declamations: it exemplifies the metaphorical restraint to be found in most of Lax's work, the unwillingness to use words as allusions or indicators...

...Perhaps this was what Lax himself had hoped for: certainly it would appear to have been precisely what he needed...

...some years after he left Columbia, but then began a long period of wandering, moving to New London, to North Carolina, to California, and Canada...

...Nearer to Turkey than to the Greek mainland, it is remote but far from desolate and has been a center of pilgrimage at least since the eleventh century, when the Monastery of Saint John was built hard by the cave where the Beloved Disciple, "in exile for the Word of God," wrote his Revelations...

...Poets tend to generate rumors and fantasies, and with Lax these generally reduced themselves to a kind of consensus that the man was a saint...

...The solitary nature of his present life abroad, and the apparent restlessness of the years that led up to it, could suggest a good deal about him- from self-indulgence to outright misanthropy-that would be at once misleading and beside the point...

...He had visited it years before while still a student and claims to have been so unnerved by the place- specifically, by a dark cafe near the railway station whose silent customers seemed ghoulish and malign to him in the evening shadows-that he turned and left within hours of his arrival...