A Journey with Robert Lax Commonweal's designer recalls meeting Robert Lax and publishing his poetry

...A kindly editor at Sheed & Ward suggested I see two brilliant young men, Edward Rice and Robert Lax, who had just started a new Catholic picture magazine, Jubilee...

...The elements of his art are the elements of the created world: the sea and the men and the animals and the light...

...With Lax it is necessary to put aside the very notion of interpretation, the expectation-so basic to us that it is barely recognizable as a strategy-that an author's art will by its nature be linear and syllogistic...

...He makes very little use of metaphor, and much of his work is almost devoid of imagery as well...

...Like Merton, Lax converted to Catholicism as a young man and-although it would be hard to describe him as a "Catholic poet" in the sense that one applies this term to Hopkins, Claudel, or even David Jones-his early verse, like Merton's, clearly shows the power that the church held over his imagination...

...In Lax's work Christianity does not intrude itself as either a social or a cultural force, and since (in literary terms) this is practically the only existence it has been granted in our day, it is likely that we may overlook it altogether...

...The austerity of this style is not merely verbal: the visual arrangement of the lines into "ladders" of verse serves to highlight the elements contained therein, as if to impress their importance upon us...

...It has been enacted obscurely and quietly in a variety of out-of-the-way locales, but it has continued and continues to this day...

...Even the "interior" sequences of Port City, such as the magnificent final passage in which Lax declares that all indeed was real all had history and a name (as though the moment had been rapt beyond itself and was eternal while it moved in time) i saw each object then in its relation (to a timeless being) and my heart sang (but kept its deepest peace) are offered almost as an aside, and are kept so clearly distinct from the main body of the work that they seem almost to arise from some other source than the events and people that comprise the poem...

...Lax is a poet who does not wish to surprise...

...Deeply influenced by the powerful waves of artistic expression coming from Europe-the work of Gill, Rouault, Waugh, Greene, Mauriac, Bernanos-I was intent on bringing Catholic art and graphics into the American mainstream...

...This reticence of tone is typical, quite distinctive, and central to his work...

...They find their origin elsewhere...

...Like every artist he makes his use of them, but unlike most he acknowledges that they do not belong to him...

...This insistence upon patience, upon attention to trivialities is not an incidental element of design, for simplicity-its centrality as a human virtue and the necessity of its cultivation-is at the heart of Lax's achievement as a poet and a man...

...Lax's work generally takes the form either of transparent narratives-such as Port City-that do not attempt to disguise themselves as anything other than verse chronicles of actual events or opaque abstractions-Sea & Sky- that give no external display of personality whatsoever...

...I offered to print some small chap books of his poetry...

...Lax and Rice had surrounded themselves with talents like photographer Charles Harbutt and writers Richard Gilman and Ned O'Gorman* To my amazement, they actually com* missioned my work (and paid for it...

...emil antonucci Emil Antonucci is Commonweal's designer...

...Over the next twenty-five years, we went on to produce almost thirty publications (never again as luxuriously as The Circus of the Sun% For me it was a golden opportunity to work in total freedom, visually interpreting magnificent poems...

...Here, too, the contrast with Merton is of some note...

...The example of Robert Lax is bound to prove unsettling to anyone whose sensibilities have been formed along these lines, because his approach is frankly antithetical to such an elevation of personality...

...In the world of Robert Lax, cause and effect are murky concepts, hardly nonexistent but not ubiquitous and somehow beside the point in the end...

...Lax, with his usual grave modesty, let me see his poetry...

...the voice belongs to Lax, who stands not so much in the guise of a creator as of a witness...

...Here we are given not the voice of God but the vision of him...

...Indeed, his own response is itself either invisible to us or is offered with a reticence that makes few demands upon our credibility...

...The concrete poems are the best illustration of this: something as abstract as red red blue blue yellow yellow is obviously not attempting to work against the reader's sentiment, and cannot operate against the reader's intelligence as well...

...We were so commercially challenged that checks paying for the books went uncashed-we had neglected to open a bank account...

...I have never again experienced that feeling of trust and oneness of artistic intent Lax's work has gone on to receive the appreciation it deserves in Europe, but never here...

...toward that city and singing that city's song it is about as rhetorical as he will get, but even the rhetoric here encloses simple descriptive elements-the "song of the city," which is, after all, what Lax composes...

...As unspecific as it is-and this is in many way typical of Lax-it can barely even work on the level of suggestion, since a color could suggest various and dissimilar things...

...was that he could not state his bliss: his love of the world and of all things, all persons in it...

...I had just spent my meager savings on a hand-printing press and some fonts of Gill's Perpetua...

...In 1958,1 received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation that enabled us to print a hardbound, limited edition of The Circus of the Sun and to establish our own publishing enterprise, Journeyman Press...

...In his autobiography, Mark Van Doren wrote of Lax that "his chief woe...

...There is a clear intent to Lax's simplicity, and if this is not understood the work itself will most likely come across as bland and noncommittal...

...The impressionistic sequences are just as straightforward: the stone quay and the sound of the waters nets stretched from the mast to the bow the silverbellied fish on racks and in baskets the blackhaired fisherwoman and her pale son wrinkled forehead and flashing smile Here the images are provided simply and direct, with few of the (real or implied) comparisons that a poetic voice will always contain...

...Even after Lax left to live in Greece, he would send batches of manuscripts and let me choose what to publish...

...Certainly this is borne out in his verse, and it will be apparent to anyone who has read Lax that Van Doren was able, with a clarity and directness that seem to be the special preserve of teachers, to touch upon the real drama that his old student had begun to enact...

...We have long since become used to a poetry and a literature that make small claims on the understanding, and it did not take the modernists to break our confidence in the ability of words to correspond with our interior and concrete realities in any exact way...

...Port City will suggest a great deal about its author, as will The Circus of the Sun, but in these works it is not possible to establish a strict equation of the author with the poet...

...It suggests an aesthetic sensibility somewhat at odds with the cult of the ego that still prevails among writers in our day and hints, in its lack of personality, at literary ambitions quite distinct from self-expression...

...It is in this respect that Lax must be acknowledged as a religious man, insofar as for him artistic creation is not a ransacking of the visible world or an assertion of some unfettered consciousness so much as it is a participation in a process that was already in motion long before he arrived on the scene...

...It is less apparent, however, that those who read and write poetry today feel that the present situation calls for any diminish-ment in the authority of the poet...

...It is the core of his work all the same, and as it provides the only coherent context in which Lax can be read, we ignore it at our peril...

...Read his poems...

...Each word is a heart beat echoing your own, each poem a bird flying home to where the sky meets the sea...

...He actually trusted me to design and illustrate his work with total freedom and confidence in my artistic judgment Heady stuff...

...Love made a sphere: all things grew within it...

...The usual interplay between life and art, by which much of what we consider poetic form is created, does not appear in evidence...

...This cannot be an accident of design...

...If anything, the cult of personality seems to flourish under the current circumstances, in which the assertion of the self and the self's desires have become nearly the whole object and soul of poetry...

...And perhaps they do...

...the sphere then encompassed beginnings and endings, beginning and end...

...Then, as now, poetry was not a cash cow, but every little bit went back into publishing Lax's poetry...

...For Lax, however, the doctrinal and aesthetic elements of Catholicism do not become a part of his craft: although there is an unmistakably religious framework surrounding such poems as "Jerusalem," for example, one would look through Lax in vain for something as overtly Catholic as the rhetoric and imagery of the English mystics (used to such good effect by Eliot in his Four Quartets) or the high-church nostalgia of the young Robert Lowell...

...This is not a minor difference of style, still less an accidental reflection of the poet's temperament...

...He continues to try...

...Lax is no less a spectator than we: the jugglers and the con men and the shrine of Notre Dame de la Garde are as unfamiliar to him as they are to us, and while he is far from indifferent to them there is no real attempt on his part to induce his response in his audience...

...In reality, almost everything that Lax has written since 1960 contains and forms a vast interior architecture that is itself as self-conscious and pointed as it is unobtrusive...

...Love had a compass whose whirling dance traced out a sphere of love in the void: in the center thereof rose a fountain...

...In The Circus of the Sun, Lax supplies a genealogy for the whole of his art when he improvises on the prologue of Saint John's Gospel: And in the beginning was love...

...Dt is thus, for many reasons, impossible to consider Lax in strictly literary terms-as one might with Wallace Stevens, say, or Geoffrey Hill...